A friend of a friend has a new facial modification, some kind of glowing implant to make it look like a neon circuit board is beneath her skin. Also, she has a fake gash down her forehead: permanent prosthetics and tattooed color that mimic an always-open human wound. The wound, importantly, does not reveal metal or wires. The body mods encompass two diametrically opposed ideas occurring in one space, on one head. She is not simply cyborg—a cybernetic organism that is built from both living creature and robotic parts—but simultaneously animal and android, bleeding and bloodless. She (in photos) appears oblivious to the paradox I see. For this look, contradiction is inconsequential. The statement, whether intended or not, is about draining images and language of any fixed meaning.

Lauren says she goes to the library and reads old issues of Seventeen. We have always had the same problems, she reports, which means we have not solved them with the advice offered by magazines. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the beholder’s eye is another algorithm, imprinted with rules that later determine what it sees. In an alternate history devoid of popular culture, without the tracks of mass media to follow, human eyes could have continued to individualize, forever. Beauty would carry a meaning more like satisfaction or struggle, words more often associated with the personal than the universal. The diversification of beauty standards is being pushed by people onto corporations, but also by corporations onto people. One hopes to be seen as beautiful and the other hopes to be able to project beauty ideals to a diversified consumer base. If everyone gets what they want, no one does. McDonald’s is a sponsor of body-positivity panels and sporting events.

I can’t find the high-speed pop song “Gonna Have Fun,” performed by a group called Sirens, anywhere other than the movies Ghost World and Storytelling (both 2001). I assume it was produced for film, sarcastically, as an invented example of mainstream music’s emptiness—the antithesis of authenticity (a theme of each movie). The song itself has stuck with me, though. Its clipped pacing is a lot like some double-speed TikTok tracks of today. Plus, in each suburban context, the lyrics (“Gonna have fun, in the sun, ’cuz you’re the one, we’re gonna have fun”) are meant to sound unbearably shallow and so are imbued with the depth of bleakness. The characters complain about popular music throughout, stating at one point that a band is “so bad, it’s almost good” and that it’s “so bad it’s gone past good and back to bad again.” In Wilson, another movie based on a book by Daniel Clowes (author of Ghost World), a car radio plays Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” to protesting groans from a similarly cynical set of characters. The song is just as saccharine as “Gonna Have Fun,” but now the complaint feels more earnest because it is about a real-life pop hit, and something is lost. “I’m not usually this bitch,” I say to a friend, “but she dresses horribly. That, or I just don’t understand it.” I was confident, though, that I did understand this horrible outfit. A few days later, I saw a different girl wearing the same outfit components, exactly as I’d described them, and she looked incredible. Either she had pulled off the look better or I had become obsessed with my own initial reaction, transforming disgust into desire. This is the meaning of fashion, to me.

Natasha Stagg is a writer, brand consultant, and editor. She has published three books with Semiotext(e): Surveys (2016), Sleeveless (2019), and Artless (2023). She lives and works in New York City.

“Trends, 2021” appears in Artless: Stories 2019-2023, published this month by Semiotext(e), and available from the Metrograph Bookstore.