Do you Boom Boom? Or are you just Booming? Can Boomers Boom Boom or is it just for Zoomers? Can you Boom Doom? Hear me out: I’m getting to grips with the new vibe shift. In December, Sean Monahan, an American trend analyst, announced the arrival of the ‘Boom Boom’ aesthetic, which he described as a ‘pure expression of excess’ or ‘an Eighties archival look that is maximalist in its appetites’. He apparently came up with the term as he sat in London’s low-lit Decimo restaurant.
Monahan is taken fairly seriously when it comes to predicting cultural trends. In 2013 he coined the term ‘normcore’, which is defined by a conspicuous, intentional blankness; it is the converse of Boom Boom. Think trainers at work and blanket athleisure wear. Think crypto convict Sam Bankman-Fried wearing dirty T-shirts on conference calls. Think Dominic Cummings.
Now normcore is out, partly thanks to Donald Trump, although Monahan doesn’t believe Boom Boom belongs to any political creed. ‘It’s too reductive to say Trump voters are Boom Boom,’ he laughs down the phone from Paris. ‘People who voted for Trump don’t think of themselves as supervillains.’
What is certainly back, though, is power dressing. Structured double-breasted suits, loafers and ties are all in fashion, as seen at Miu Miu and Armani. At a Paris fashion week studio launch last week, the theme was 1980s power dressing staged in a retro Miami office. Hannah Rogers, the Times’s fashion editor, calls it ‘loadsamoney cosplay’.
Cultural output is following suit: Playboy is back in print; a remake of American Psycho featuring the most Boom Boom character of all, Patrick Bateman, is on the way; and Industry, the HBO hit series set in a London investment bank, has been renewed for a fourth season. Restaurants such as Cafe Francois in Borough Market have tried to recreate the look of The Wolf of Wall Street drinking holes, in a style known as ‘Gordon Deco’. A hyper-masculine, aggressively hierarchical and opulent aesthetic is taking over.
Gen Z, of course, has good reasons to cosplay maturity. For many twentysomethings, owning a house, having children and even turning up for an office job feels a far-off reality. The Boom Boom aesthetic encourages them to dress up in an attempt to, as Monahan puts it, ‘figure out what adulthood looks like’. Which may explain why the result resembles a strange kind of drag. It has also been interpreted as a form of resistance to the right. Look up the actor Drew Starkey at the Oscars, almost aping Trump, and you’ll see what I mean.
Dressing-up box aside, Gen Z are also venal. They are much more obsessed with money than their elders, which also explains the Boom Boom look. The progressive left is struggling to gain power on a platform of less: less meat, less money, less everything.
Boom Boom is obviously absurd, its alliterative consonants banging together like cymbals. But Monahan says that this is part of its appeal. Say it out loud and you will feel a little sleazy, a little villainous. Boom Boom captures the harsh bang of a stock exchange gavel, a champagne cork being popped when a deal is closed or a Boris Becker-esque tryst in a cupboard. Trump may not be responsible for Boom Boom, but he gave us permission to revel in it.
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