My "Unique" Aesthetic is The Latest Basic Millennial Trend

Dark green velvet, in 2025? Groundbreaking.

The following photo is extremely recognizable to anyone who was sentient in 2021:

This aesthetic, of course, is now known as avant basic and was extremely popular with younger millennials and Gen Z in the years immediately after the worst of the covid pandemic. Assuming we didn’t develop airplane-meltdown psychosis, our trauma response was kitschy crochet vests and pillows shaped like the Hey Bear fruits.

I wrote all about how this aesthetic materialized in the fashion world and I think the drivers were largely the same. People were spending more time at home, but wanted to bring joy to those spaces. People wanted to be comfortable (hello House of Sunny knit co-ord sets) but also were finally being seen in public for the first time in months and didn’t want to wear an olive green utility jacket and boyfriend jeans for their first post-covid brunch. We leaned into comfort, but also color and personality.

But avant basic is now about as dated as the “Tuscan kitchen” boomer aesthetic (you see lots of this on Curb Your Enthusiasm early seasons) if not worse. Arguably you can bring back the Tuscan kitchen in a retro way, but avant basic has to wait decades before anyone will be comfortable bringing it back.

Anyway, I fell hard for avant basic in the early 2020s. Like everyone else, I thought it was fun, quirky, and unique to me. I “discovered” Lisa Says Gah and felt like the coolest girl on the planet, despite the fact that I was serving big kindergarten teacher energy.

After I “graduated” to a pastel Barbie/Polly-Pocket-core look in the mid-2020s, I decided to refine my aesthetic up a little bit—something I again, didn’t see as being dictated by the changing trends of the time but by my own personal journey with fashion and aesthetics. And a lot of this reinvention was based around a particular color that I thought I, personally, had unlocked: