The unsettling chic is our modern aesthetic of ugliness

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This essay won an Honorable Mention at the Writer’s Digest 94th Annual Writing Competition in the category “Nonfiction Essay or Article.”

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I recently made a Pinterest account and the first board I created—a bit pretentiously titled Ésthetique Bizarre—ended up consisting of designs, scenes, and characters that are anything but conventionally beautiful. They are unusual. Some are weird. Some even disturbing. And yet, I still found them all very captivating. 

Why was I spending time meticulously curating these images that are not pretty? It made me pause. I then looked through my Instagram and realized this inspiration didn’t come out of nowhere. It was everywhere.

One of the accounts I follow is Fecal Matter, the moniker of Steven Raj Bhaskaran and Hannah Rose Dalton, whose designs, clothes, and makeup would probably be considered frightening by most people (their website shop, even if the idea scares you, is absolutely worth checking out).

Another one I follow is Salvia, a young Welsh artist who uses similar “extreme” techniques of creating otherworldly looks but also specializes in producing content that might look to some as body horror.

And then there is someone like Jaco Putker, who is far less extreme in his presentation but who produces equally bizarre content, often toying with images of centaurs, swines, and gloomy stills of the working class.

What was striking to me was that these niche multimedia artists were not the only ones who had been going against the longstanding standards of beauty. I thought about all the other people I follow who have influenced music, film, and fashion in recent years, and observed very quickly that this trend had permeated the mainstream quite some time ago. Even if we were not paying attention, we definitely witnessed many examples of this.

Lady Gaga showing up at YouTube Music Awards in 2013, wearing an Yves Saint Laurent black leather shirt and horrifying grills. Azealia Banks’ bizarre mouth-and-teeth eyes for the glossy cover of her single Yung Rapunxel that same year. Rosalía’s diabolic limbs as part of art direction for her 2022 album Motomami. The South London-native Klein crouching in darkness with white hair and bloodshot eyes for the eerie but stunning cover of her 2019 album Lifetime.

Quaint scenes of animal and human mutilation in the 2019 movie Midsommar. The beautiful women of the 2019 movie Atlantics possessed by spirits of the Senegalese men lost at sea. The already-formidable Till Lindemann glazed in honey for Zoo Magazine in 2015. The zombie-like Rick Genest modeling for Thierry Mugler. Grotesquely distorted, pastel-colored figures by the Japanese-Canadian artist Jesse Kanda on the promo poster for his 2017 exhibition in Tokyo.

There’s no other way to put it—all these images, videos, and scenes are unsettling. At the same time, I don’t think they can be called ugly. Somewhat sinister for sure, but glamorous in their own way as well. They are chic. Unsettling chic.

The obvious question to all this is: why is it happening? de Pressigny, writer for i-D, analyzed aspects of this phenomenon back in 2018 and interviewed Dr. Ruth Adams, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at King’s College London, who described the rise of this aesthetic as “[…] clearly a backlash against normative beauty standards, although the amount of labour involved is obviously no less.”

This labor-intensive movement is definitely not unprecedented. In the same article, de Pressigny points out that punks, goths, and emo kids have all rebelled against normative beauty standards as part of their own subcultural geneses, embracing ugly and weird as something to be proud of.

It’s an astute observation, and I would even add that the desire to distort the definitions of beauty and ugliness has been part of our culture for many centuries and decades, going from New York’s nightclubs with the outrageously glamorous Club Kids and the androgynous, extraterrestrial Grace Jones in the 1980s all the way back to 1850s, when the German philosopher Karl Rosenkranz published his seminal book on this topic, Aesthetic of Ugliness.

What I do think is unprecedented is how mainstream this desire has become. When I look back at my formative teenage years, mid to late aughts, celebrities strived for fit, sexy, clean, and pretty. Now we get to see a global pop-star like Billie Eilish go against all these currents and an influential magazine like Vogue feature extreme-beauty artists like Fecal Matter and Salvia. On the surface, this all can be interpreted as the mainstream finally revolting against beauty standards. But I think there is something more profound to it.

As Rosenkranz implies in Aesthetic of Ugliness, associating ugliness with negativity and evil is the society’s default approach. Yet, it is unwarranted. Ugliness stands on its own, it has its own positivity, and I would venture to say—it has its own appeal. And, what I think is happening is that the mainstream is finally finding its own ugliness attractive. That, I believe, is a result of two major changes over the last decade: the rise of “hyper” connection due to social media and the rise of public conversations about mental health.

What I mean by “hyper” connection is that we have accelerated how we connect and learn about each other. With platforms like Instagram and TikTok, it now just takes seconds to see what strangers are doing, what strangers are thinking, and how strangers are feeling. The widely held narrative so far has been that this microscopic surveillance of other people’s lives is toxic and dangerous.

I don’t disagree, but this wormhole created by social media has also allowed us to learn early on that there are other people like us out there. Other people who have the same insecurities. Other people who like the same weird things. Other people who are equally unadjusted. When we learn of others who share that same ugliness, we learn to accept it and we learn to love it.

Another global common denominator in the last decade has been the increasingly more transparent discussion of mental health. Just ten to fifteen years ago, issues like depression and anxiety were not something one could easily bring up in a casual conversation. To some extent, that was because they were dismissed as something frivolous but mostly because they were taboo, associated with the crazy and the unstable.

Today, we talk about them with incisive nuance, from “Big T” trauma and dissociation to major depressive disorder and substance-induced anxiety disorder. We are all starting to see that—what has now already become a catchphrase—it’s okay to not be okay. We all carry pain, we all have something dark and scary within us, and we are all employing strange, probably unhealthy coping mechanisms to survive. The ugliness that got you labeled as crazy and unstable back in the day is now so ordinary that people might think there is something wrong if you don’t have any issues.

Most interestingly, as a result of these major shifts in our cultural landscape, not only are we collectively starting to find our ugliness attractive, but what I see is that we are also creating space to elevate that ugliness. To make it glamorous. To bring in a new aesthetic to the front: the unsettling chic.

As with all cultural movements in the cyclical nature of our history, unsettling chic might fade away eventually. Maybe we transition at some point to a modern-age renaissance, glorifying bionic perfection and settling for nothing less. Maybe we evolve to a highly technologically advanced species and the concept of beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder; instead, it is a clearly formulated and reproducible artifact of a new science: beauty engineering.

But, at least for now, in this very human world that’s rife with imperfection and unpredictability, one thing is certain—we are all ugly in our own way. And how beautiful is that?

Cover photo of Rick Genest, courtesy of Joey L. Follow him on Instagram as well.