A Celebration of Nostalgia with Vaporwave and 80s Memphis

Welcome to my world of the Vaporwave illusion

 I wanted to let you all know that there is a ton of really cool Vaporwave and Yami Kawaii clothing on my Etsy store: BillingtonPix.Etsy.com. But also I want to make sure that I explain at least in a few words what is Vaporwave and how it has helped me to build out my design aesthetic.

I've always been the one who refuses to follow the trend. Whenever there is a new bestseller on the Amazon book list I will remain sceptical that is perhaps just because of good marketing. I actually prefer the classics when it comes to literature, which have been filtered out over time. When it comes to contemporary design, however, I am a little more adventurous. There will always be the design classics, such as Mid-Century Modern, Art Deco, Impressionism or Arts & Crafts. I've spent a lot of time immersing myself into MCM. For all the right reasons, I feel secure in its formulaic constraints. On my BillingtonPix.com website I have written quite a lot about it and its protagonists.

More recently I wrote a blog post about my love of Harajuku, and in particular the anti-hero of the movement: Yami Kawaii. I came to realise that just like my refusal to follow the trends in literature, I am also rather anarchistic when it comes to new design aesthetics.

Harajuku and its subset Yami Kawaii has been around for quite some time now. And Vaporwave was established around the 2010s. What I love so much about these movements is there rejection of the mainstream aesthetic. With Yami Kawaii, this sub culture rejects the pure cuteness bestowed by the Harajuku aesthetic, turning it on its head and turning the creepy into the cute. With its sibling aesthetic Menhera Kei, we again have an anti-hero taking the suffering of physical and mental health and turning it into something positive and beautiful. 

Likewise with Vaporwave and its siblings, Synthwave and Retrowave, we have a rejection of mainstream and a celebration of the imperfect. I realise now that it is the imperfect that appeals to me as a design aesthetic. Bringing out the flaws in order to celebrate them is rather poetic.

In my Etsy collection I attempt to draw on my own experience when it comes to physical and mental health. I am the first to reject soulless and so-called conventional beauty. The classical meaning of the word beautiful has never been something I can relate to. For me, beauty is in the imperfections rather than the perfect. Show me the glitches rather than the symmetry.  For this reason I am drawn to both Vaporwave and Yami Kawaii. 

Physical and Mental Health as an Aesthetic

I am a kidney transplant patient and have been particularly impacted by the pandemic. As a transplant patient I am immuno-suppressed and as such have been forced to continue my isolation when most other people have emerged from the lockdowns and forced social distancing. Being in crowds still fills me with dread. Yet I feel like I am missing out on life, enclosed in my own personal space.

As with anything with me, when disaster strikes the graphic design graphic finds its inspiration. I opened my BillingtonPix Etsy shop in 2020 (my own BillingtonPix.com website shortly before that). With my Etsy store, however, this has become personal to me as a enclave for my own mental health wellbeing. Here I have really focused on what helps me to express myself. In this niche of nostalgia, kawaii, mental health and retro style I have found my home.

The end result is a collection of designs that I have made into wearable athleisure clothing. They range from mens leggings (or meggings) to leggings for women, t-shirt dresses, sweatshirts and sweatpants. Also a few t-shirts. I guess the main aim of my Etsy store is to celebrate the nostalgia of the perfect world we all think existed prior to.... something, I guess, Whether that be prior to the pandemic, or simply back to our childhood, which for me was the 1980s,

Vaporwave as a Comfortable Nostalgia

Vaporwave fits perfectly into this nostalgia. I know I am faking my own memory when I pretend to myself that my past was perfect and wonderful, but I do it anyway. Full of 80s Memphis design, synthetic images and infinite patterns. Then I throw in a bit of Menhera Kei, which references my current pill regime, multiple injections, blood tests, bleeding and various pains and feeling tired constantly. This is my aesthetic.

80s Memphis and Me

80s Memphis is the ultimate nostalgia to me. As a child of the 1980s I grew up surrounded by geometric shapes, triangular patterns and two-dimensional objects. Formed in 1981 by Ettore Ettore Sottsass as a reaction against the formulaic approach of Mid-Century Modern, Memphis was deemed to be bad taste. However, during my childhood they were commercially very accessible and so our family home was filled with similar designs, whether as blue framed posters on my bedroom wall, my geometric wallpaper in red, white and blue, or the triangular patterns on my polyester sweaters. It is a nostalgia that I return to constantly in my graphic design. 

You might ask why I might want to leave behind the safety of the formulaic approach of MCM. For me it is all about the color, especially when applied to athleisure clothing such as leggings and meggings, which have traditionally been mostly black and dark colors. The ability to express ourselves however we wish is so important to me. It is one of the philosophies of my store. Real men wear meggings, especially colorful ones, because real men can express who they are. From an early age, despite my shyness and social isolation as a child, I have never been too shy not to wear expressive clothing. Perhaps this is cause and effect, who knows. Perhaps it is therapeutic in much the same way as Menhera Kei can be good for the soul. Perhaps it is the rebellious "anti-hero" in me, wanting to do the exact opposite of whatever I should be doing. Formula no longer applies and is replaced by emotion. We are humans and not robots and our clothing should reflect this.

What is the Retrowave Aesthetic?

With the entire Retrowave aesthetic I am able to lose myself into this mythical past that never existed. But what is Vaporwave exactly and what is Retrowave and Synthwave? For me, they represent partly dysfunctional urban settings on the one hand and a more optimistic dreamlike vision on the other.

With a synthetic sunset falling behind the Neoncore cityscape, full of brightly colored and sometimes broken signage, often in Japanese characters, with palm trees that look like some kind of Las Vegas Christmas we can read both positively and negatively into this, much in the same way as we can with Yami Kawaii and Menhera Kei. Here the cityscape is soulless, sometimes decaying and mundane in its subject. Yet its coloring, much like we get with 80s Memphis, lights up a negative and constraining connotation into something else. Whilst with 80s Memphis we usually see a large use of primary colors (perhaps becoming more subdued and less zany as we enter the 1990s interpretations) with Vaporwave we get the gradients of pinks, blue and teals. The neoncore lifts this more, providing an atmosphere that is both beautiful and eery. The glitches cut into this visual encapsulation to remind us that everything is fragile and temporary, whether it is the cityscape or an inside scene of a laundrette.

Vaporwave can be dark, and it can also be deliberately shallow and mundane as in the visual interpretation of elevator music. Alternatively, it can be dreamy, perhaps more suburban and safe. Here we see the skateboards, the dolphins, swimming pools, as well as the nostalgic references to classical statues and architecture. Yet Retrowave and Vaporwave are an interpretation of a past that perhaps never existed. It is a past circa Windows 1995 from a stylised 2010 point of view as a refuge of many a teenage "geek" in their suburban bedroom, exploring the fantasy world of video games, coded programs and enhancements to the original bitmaps of the 80s. Add in the Kidcore references of the My Little Pony, Tamagotchi and Nintendo 64 and their associated Japanese aesthetic and we have the perfect mix for a therapeutic re-interpretation of our 90s childhoods together with the Memphis aesthetic that came out of the 80s.

In a decade that followed the economic crash of 2008 it is perhaps not surprising that some might have wanted to seek refuge in a world of made-up 80s and 90s kitsch just as the Mid Century Modern movement sought the reassuring function over form in the Post War years. Now, as we move away from the Pandemic, will we continue to seek refuge in nostalgia, or will we once again lean more towards the formulaic for comfort?

For now, for me at least, I seek comfort in colour and nostalgia. With a sometimes fragile mental health I prefer my mind to wander when I'm designing, rather than obey the rules of traditional design. I wish to continue to go against the trends to make my world personal to me, whether that be in my choice of reading material, films or the clothes and designs that I wear.

Please do take a look at my Etsy store and let me know what you think. Do you identify with this aesthetic? Are you isolated by the Pandemic? Are you exploring ways of coping with your own Menhera Kei? What did you love about the 1980s? Let me know!