Chaotic Good: Is Whimsy the Vibe Shift That Can Save Us?
Words: Letty Cole
There appears to be some whimsy in the air. It’s in the comment section on TikTok, where women are sharing their whimsical habits for some light relief (one user says “m’lady” every time she walks past a mirror, another thanks candles before blowing them out). There’s whimsy on my Instagram feed, where a video shows a young yo-yo master performing alongside the alt-rock band Black Country New Road (“never before seen levels of whimsy”, one fan comments). There’s whimsy in all of the ballet pumps, polka dots and sailor coats I keep seeing at parties, which I heard Nymphet Alumni coin ‘whimsimod’ just this morning.
There’s whimsy in the surge of hobby clubs, like the literary or chess scenes that have come out of the woodwork. I myself run an amateur lecture night in a taxidermy-filled working men’s club, which qualifies itself. There’s whimsy in everyone’s recent obsession with medieval culture. There’s even whimsy, of sorts, in less outwardly romantic trends, like the swag revival or the quirked-up white boy.
It's always fun to watch old words find modern meaning for new generations. The word whimsy comes from a ‘whim’, a spontaneous action of some sort, but has since taken on a life of its own. According to its dictionary definition, whimsy, or the whimsical, is “playfully quaint or fanciful behaviour”, or even “something that is intended to be strange and humorous, but has little real meaning”. Yet with our use of ‘whimsy’ and ‘whimsical’ tripling since 2021, and rising by 30% this year alone (it was even a contender for The New York Times’ vibe of the year), we’re witnessing a shift in these definitions. Quite the opposite from the superficial ficklery it used to represent, whimsy today feels the opposite of shallow. We can reference the Google Trend data all we want, but, by design, whimsy is impossible to measure or quantify. Whimsy is driven by feeling, rather than logic. Against the backdrop of an optimised and lonely modern world, whimsy, with its random, fleeting, emotional and visually varied subjectivity, is a direct antidote to many of the woes that face culture today.
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“Whimsy is a sharp awareness of darkness and cruelty that contrasts with a steadfast focus on our essential goodness.”
It makes sense that whimsical attitudes should feel relevant at this point in the nostalgia loop. Whimsy is, after all, the sibling of twee, which first saw cultural prominence in the 1980s as a direct reaction to aggressiveness of the dominating punk scene, and later in the early 2010s, directly after the period we associate with the hedonistic sleaze aesthetics that have trended again in recent years. In his 2014 book Twee: the gentle revolution, New York Times contributor Marc Spitz explores what he calls “the first great cultural movement since Hip Hop”, describing twee as a value-based trend, one that prioritises, among other things “beauty over ugliness, a sharp awareness of darkness and cruelty that contrasts with a steadfast focus on our essential goodness, a lust for knowledge”, “the cultivation of passion projects” and “a tether to childhood and its associated innocence and lack of greed”; values that represent important counters to the irony and punk that had dominated similar circles directly before.
Today, in the wake of a high-nihilistic era, one laced with shitposting, doomscrolling, cores, bedrotting, edgelords and sleaze-fetishism, whimsy seems to be serving as a more chaos-oriented reboot of twee. One that embraces anti-algorithmised randomness but rejects blind irony, hedonism or depravity, and instead speaks to our desire to burrow out of the piles of faux-meaning and create something true. Whimsy can look like many things, but it is, at its core, really just the choice to honour the more positive cornerstones of human identity and feeling: wonder, comedy, pleasure, expression, curiosity, sentimentality, silliness. In this way, the spirit of whimsy is a direct counter to the disconnection and defrictioning promoted by capitalism (and to the hopeless paralysis we often feel at the grips of it), one that may be able to reorient us back to ourselves and to each other.
“Unlike twee, which carries instantly recognisable visual cues, the power of whimsy lies in its refusal to align itself with any particular aesthetic.”
We can see the new adoption of whimsy, both the word and the feeling, as a kind of vote of confidence for the real world: an extension of a society-wide re-enchantment which has already caused a re-embrace of spirituality, folklore and general grass-touching. It’s no coincidence that this is happening as IRL society finally reaches post-pandemic recovery. “Now that it’s a few years after Covid, the scenes are finally getting big enough again that we are shifting back to a discouragement of chronic onlineness. I think it’s starting to be seen as regressive and boring”, founder of Everyone is a Girl Esther Freider tells me. “There’s been an uptick in using social media documentation for what happens IRL, rather than the other way round”, shifting the definition of cool back to something that is “offline and spontaneous”.
As the real world feels more comfortable to be in again, it's as though we’re feeling ready to reject numbness in favour of feeling, to enjoy ourselves without the intention to self-destruct.
Unlike twee, which carries instantly recognisable visual cues, the power of whimsy lies in its refusal to align itself with any particular aesthetic. It is a vibe in the truest of senses, one that’s emotional subjectiveness renders it difficult to contain, difficult to reproduce, and, crucially, difficult to commodify. Of course, aesthetics can be whimsical if they stir a specific emotional response, like the fantastical nerdiness of the medieval reboot, the nostalgic eccentricity of the swag renaissance, or even the reimagined normcore movement, which eschews overt aesthetic signalling in favour of a more satisfying (and more magical) detail, memory and personalisation. But as soon as anyone tries to reproduce that authentic feeling, a la mainstreamed whimsical fashion trends like the TikTok favourite ‘whimsigoth’ or the new ‘whimsimod’, that whimsy quickly disappears and is replaced by its direct antithesis: ego, profit and dopamine-fuelled consumerism. Aesthetics that try to commodify whimsy are therefore simply kitsch, which ‘mimic its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics’ as modernist writer Hermann Broch defines. These bootlegs can only represent a collective desire for whimsy rather than its actualisation.
But while whimsy is an attitude, one that is more difficult to grasp than aesthetics, its impact on the real world promises to be far more concrete. In this video, TikToker Madison Wild makes the case for whimsy as a feeling that is dependent on our craving for human connection, as well as one that can create a sense of “childlike wonder that expands our authenticity”. In an increasingly optimised, homogenised and lonely society, where detail is being removed from public architecture, colour is disappearing from every day objects, and over 3 million people in the UK feel regularly lonely, whimsy feels like the re-discovery of a human necessity.
If we were to write a list of whimsical values, it would share with twee the same tendency towards nerdiness and passion, and the same hyper-awareness of darkness and light. But it would add to it an emphasis on novelty, connection, creativity, and art for art’s sake, cornerstones of human mental wellbeing that have been lost to modern society. Whimsy, with its ability to unlock some of our stifled humanity in all its nuance and silliness and transience, shows us a truth of feeling that can’t easily be accessed in the modern world, and the transformative ability of human expression to access those emotional realities.
