The words 'Indie Sleaze' have come to refer to a technically unnamed potential subculture surrounding a wide range of music and encompassing a blog, DJ and gig culture, most visible in terms of style from around 2005 to 2011. It's now iconic for its haphazardly thrown together outfits, 'It' girls - Alexa Chung, Cory Kennedy, Alice Glass - at the dawn of modern social media. While being predominantly music and lifestyle based, unlike traditional subcultures, Indie Sleaze doesn't 'own' a specific genre of music, nor does it have a specific sound. It's based mainly around Indie Rock, Electronica and Electropop, even Rap and elements of House, as well as a few specific subgenres. 'Bloghouse' is perhaps the most definitive encompasser of Indie Sleaze, which I can only describe easiest as 'music you can dance to, no matter how bad it sounds'.
'"Characterised by a low-fi, mash-up, Tumblr aesthetic, plenty of smeary kohl pencil, Ronnie Spector bed-head hairdos, and American Apparel standards as a counterpoint to charity shop finds, indie sleaze was a look immortalised in the high-contrast Polaroids and flash-lit photography that prevailed at the time. "I was never a real indie person - I liked Dr Dre - but I definitely appreciated the look and also the fact that the 'indie sleaze' uniform was so easy and cheap to assemble," Thomas tells Dazed. "All you needed was a vintage dress, slogan tee-shirt, a pair of Converse, Wayfarer sunglasses by Ray-Ban and you were away. The only expensive element would have been the haircuts."'
'These images capture a scene of people united by an enthusiasm for alternative music in, arguably, our last gasp of unfettered freedom before the ability to go on the lash undocumented was swept away by wilful oversharing and sponsored posts.'
'...an iPod full of Sebastien Tellier, Crystal Castles, Klaxons, Uffie and every MSTRKRFT remix under the sun. You name it, and I had the illegal MP3...'
Its cohesiveness lay in the fact that it was completely incohesive. Outfits were thrown together out of stuff laying on the floor. The most complicated the makeup ever got was sparkly eyeshadow applied with a finger. You'd slept in your eyeliner? Good. You hadn't brushed your hair? Even better. In that way it was similar to the Grunge culture of the 90s, although much more elitist. Rather than not caring about how you looked because you genuinely didn't care, the 'Indie Sleaze' look was much more reliant on the privilege of not needing to care. Although now called Indie Sleaze, at the time these people were referred to as Hipsters, before that term became associated with flannels and beards.
A lot of digital photographs with flash (Mark Hunter, 'The Cobrasnake' is perhaps one of the most iconic photographers of the 'Indie Sleaze' scene), a lot of weird layering, a lot of colour and pattern clashing, a lot of charity shop clothes, a lot of glitter and sequins, and a lot of wearing all your jewellery at once. What's that? You don't have a blog?! Umm...
'It was a combination of early pre-"influencer" social media, and the rise of independent music having more of a chance to appeal to specific groups of people due to the internet, allowing artists to release their work without needing to be signed to a label.'
'...it was "less about the exact sound and more about how you found it" as a subculture that revolved around the online discovery of catchy electronic music during a time when "rock music was getting boring" and "people were just really ready to dance."'
Why am I talking about it now? Young people are getting tired of the current state of music and media, and, like in 2008, we are charging headfirst into another recession. The typical 20-year trend cycle has been dangerously accelerated with the rise of internet aesthetics, most recently and most specifically on TikTok. TikTok's tried its hand in creating many 'styles' - 'Fairy Grunge', 'Clean Girl', 'Coquette' (which actually began on Tumblr in the mid-2010s as 'Nymphette', and revolved around dressing like a very exaggerated Dolores from Lolita. Tumblr banned the hashtag for obvious reasons and it was then watered down significantly and repurposed as 'Coquette' to work around censors). TikTok glorifies overconsumption and rapid and drastic alterations to ones wardrobe and style, and hyper-labels niche styles of dressing as certain 'aesthetics'. People are obsessed with being perceived a certain incredibly niche way. Apart from its obvious damage to the trend cycle, TikTok influencer's promotion of fast fashion brands like Shein, Zara and H&M is active support of child and underpaid labour - or, modern slavery. Not to mention that completely updating your wardrobe every time you decide you want to be something else just sends more and more of that fast fashion to landfill.
[Frequency of searches for 'Indie Sleaze' over the past 5 years, via Google Trends.]
'...it's no secret that the internet has sped up the cyclical nature of cultural trends, to the point where we've already seen the second coming of the mid-aughts' scene subculture. And according to Abascal, bloghouse itself also appears to be in the rebirth process via TikTok as "indie sleaze,"'
The speed of the current trend cycle makes this is both a fascinating and terrifying time for fashion. What's going to happen when we run out of time periods to try and recreate?
Celine and the so-called 'Age of Indieness' - Via The Face: '"indieness" reached its apex last night at a White Stripes soundtracked Winter 23 show inside LA's iconic Wiltern theatre. Featuring Sky Ferreira on the front row, a Strokes live performance at the afterparty, and a DJ set from Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince of The Kills, this was a world in which jeans were skinny, partings were centred, and sunglasses were only ever worn indoors. A run of hand-embroided, couture evening dresses closed the show. But it was indie that stole it - even finding space for a Libertines-esque Coldstream red jacket.'
Making any of this intentional completely defeats the purpose. Intentionally mismatching your clothes, intentionally looking like a mess. Celine's ultra-polished collection would never have committed to the pattern and colour clashing, bright neons and monogram sportswear. Obviously.
And while Soulwax and LCD Soundsystem are on tour, it's not like we're getting a major influx of new music that the 'Indie Sleaze Aesthetic' fits around. Many people don't even seem to know that it stemmed from music to begin with. The attempt to curate it into an aesthetic feels almost desperate. Why do we feel the urge to try and relive, through luxury fashion, an era that was hardly related to luxury fashion, an era that revolved mainly around underground gigs and small DJs, people just throwing on charity-shop and off the rack clothes and not caring how it actually looked because they weren't minutely curating every aspect of their social media personality to ensure they were portraying themselves in the coolest light they could.
A lot of the womenswear in the Celine collection isn't even visibly late-00s at first glance. None of it is a mess, which is how I'd describe the original scene in one word if I had to. It's just yet another example of luxury fashion co-opting a long-passed scene for nostalgia and money, completely missing the point of what it had that made it so original. Add it to the list. There is only so much nostalgia to profit off of.
The reality is, as much as people want to 'bring back indie sleaze!' or pillage old style tribes and subcultures for new 'aesthetics', where the original ethics are forgotten in favour of visuals, it will never let us relive the myspace era of technology. The way we use the internet to connect has drastically shifted since 2009, so much so that 'bringing back indie sleaze' is really impossible, because it relies on a wilful ignorance of TikTok and Instagram, the main apps for spreading visual content. What we now call Indie Sleaze didn't hinge on virtual engagement, or numbers; it was an age when social media was massively personal. A carefree, casual, effortless existence is not possible in the panopticon of modern social media. It will always be inauthentic. The past styles will come and go, stripped of meaning and purpose, but consumerism is forever.
It's hard to talk about what we would now call a subculture, but at the time wasn't really called anything at all. I first became interested in this via the Paper Magazine article on Bloghouse in 2021, because I was aware of the microgenre and liked to use it as background noise while I worked. I've watched the 'Indie Sleaze Aesthetic' explode in real time. If anything, it just makes me a bit sad. Everything has to be commodified to an unimaginable extent, everything has to become a style or an aesthetic. Nobody can just exist anymore. In 2009 there was no such thing as the 'Indie Sleaze Aesthetic', or even aesthetics in modern social media parlance. These images have captured and immortalised people just existing.
'in 2007, we just called it going out'
- Alexa Chung
Sources:
Alexa Chung for The Financial Times