Few voices in contemporary culture have been as influential, or as slyly self-aware, as Sean Monahan. A founding member of the conceptual art collective K-HOLE, Monahan helped define the early 2010s with the virally influential term normcore, a phrase that launched a thousand think pieces and cemented K-HOLE’s status as a cultural weathervane. Since then, Monahan has continued to shape the way we talk about taste, aesthetics, and identity through his writing, consulting, and ever-evolving musings on the internet.
We spoke with Sean about his latest coinage boom boom and how the Boom Boom Room at The Standard, High Line played muse. Along the way, Monahan unpacks the shifting relationship between fashion and politics, the yearning for structure in nightlife and style, and what comes after a decade defined by performative virtue. Insightful, irreverent, and never not plugged into the zeitgeist, Monahan reminds us that the future often begins as a joke among friends until it suddenly becomes the way we live.
Can you introduce yourself and share how you came to be known as a trend forecaster? Did the moniker find you, or was it something you actively pursued?
So, I first got into trend forecasting as part of a conceptual art project, which is an odd way to go about beginning a career. My college friends and I graduated into the Great Recession. We all had arts degrees from RISD and decided after seeing a cache of trend forecasting documents, that it would be interesting to make our own because, being pretentious art students, we thought, We know where culture is going.
We started what we called a trend forecasting group, which I'm not sure is really a thing. I don't know if anyone else has really used that moniker before, but it felt appropriate for the kind of art-collective-LARP-ing-as-a-business project that K-HOLE was. It became a lot more serious when we coined the term normcore that went hyper-viral. We went from doing small consulting projects, mostly for our peers, startups, or small fashion brands, to working with large corporations like MTV or Coach.
What's the daily life of a trend forecaster?
There's a certain amount of flânerie that goes with it, in that I have a pretty active social life; I go out pretty frequently, I travel a lot, I look at a lot of art, I look at a lot of fashion, I read the internet pretty voraciously. I also have a large network of people who work in a variety of creative fields who are really on the front lines of what's happening in culture. So, a lot of it is conversational with friends whose opinions I really trust.
How did the Boom Boom Room at The Standard, High Line inspire ‘boom boom’ the aesthetic?
It was the summer of 2023 I was in London, staying at The Standard there, and I was having dinner with my brother at Decimo and it occurred to me that the space felt very ‘boom boom’. The Standard’s brand identity is pretty sexy, sleazy, dim, low-light, party atmosphere and especially that space which has this 1920s via-Japan Art Deco aesthetic. The ‘boom boom’ inspiration for that was clearly my brain pinging around about the Boom Boom Room at The Standard in New York. I thought it was a kind of obnoxious but fun terminology to use, so I began beta-testing it on my friends, much to their chagrin.
Do you feel like ‘boom boom’ is rooted in New York City culture?
I think it is. That's where a lot of the references are starting. Although I would say, being in Paris this last fashion week really felt like the luxury houses came out of the gate with a really strong aesthetic perspective on how to do the dressing, how to do the look. But in terms of socializing, New York has always been a party city in a way that Paris and London, or Los Angeles for that matter, just aren't. So, I do think the New York vibe is very important to it.
It feels like the ‘boom boom’ aesthetic yearns for this reinstitution of boundaries between work and play and delineating places for different activities. Do you feel like that is going to motivate people to travel or go out in different ways?
Part of the ‘boom boom’ aesthetic is also about millennials trying to navigate what being adult means to them. Part of being an adult also means setting up boundaries between your work life and your play life, and also a perspective on play that distinguishes daytime from nighttime activities.
We've seen this renewed interest in golf and tennis, these high-WASP, Hamptons-y activities. I think part of the pleasure of those things is that they have a bit of a uniform associated with them. There's something pleasurable about giving into a predefined social structure that you can then play with the details of.
Having a variety of those different kinds of aesthetic expectations is one of the motivations behind the shift because during the 2010s we really had this terrible mass casualization. There was a certain point back when I lived in New York in 2017 where you would be on the subway, and you really couldn't tell if people were going to a nightclub or the gym or the office. The apotheosis of that was COVID where everyone was just literally, working from bed in sweatpants. So, this discovery of how a space can interact with the activity and how you're dressed is really people trying to figure out how to go out and exist in the world again.
You also said in one of your substack pieces that hipsters were defined by knowing what's most underground, normcore thrived on a blue checkmark from Instagram and not needing to have cultural clout because they could just get it from social media. Do you feel like now with hyper-specific, algorithm-driven social media the internet has cleaved so much that there aren't trends that are all encompassing in the same way that they used to be?
To a certain extent, yes, and to a certain extent, no. Part of my critique of the Tiktok trends is that they are more media trends than trend trends, i.e., that they get coverage. They're very fun to talk about. They auto-generate their own content, but then I don't know that I always see them in real life.
Let's say if the moment of hipster-dom was about having this secret subcultural knowledge and wanting to display that to people in an opaque way, and normcore was this avoidance of explaining what kind of secret knowledge you had, or maybe fueled by West Coast tech becoming elevated in its social position for the first time and there being a little bit of discomfort with traditional markers of power and status that a place like New York has.
If we have a replacement of that with the ‘boom boom’ aesthetic, it is a little bit of people wanting to be told what to do. We used to have style guides, especially for men, that would tell you what you could and couldn’t wear in certain places.
Patrick Bateman from American Psycho is clearly one of the inspirations — throughout the novel and the movie, there’s a recurring thread where his friends ask him for advice on what kind of suits to wear in different situations, how to pair fabrics and shoes, and so on. Part of what people are trying to feel out, is some of those guidelines, again, because perhaps it is also a bit of a reaction against the idea of “personal style”, which always gets pushed in certain ways, and then all of a sudden people start to realize that everyone's personal style looks the same. That was what happened to hipsters, and I think that's also what happened to hypebeasts, to a certain extent.
It feels like trends have proven to be somewhat inescapably cyclical. If woke preceded ‘boom boom’, what will succeed it?
We’re definitely in a conservative backlash moment, though what that actually means is still to be determined. Personally, I’ve tried not to follow the news too closely — it feels too crazy-making to try to track everything as it happens. We’re also still early in this administration, so it’s unclear what will ultimately be enacted. Following it all day-by-day on social media feels like a heavy mental load.
Politically, there’s a certain exhaustion with the performative Instagram activism that dominated the last decade. But I’m not exactly sure what that means for American politics moving forward. I do think fashion has something to do with politics, but, as I’ve said before, I don’t necessarily believe that wearing a suit or choosing loafers over sneakers is inherently political. That said, those choices can certainly carry political connotations.
There’s also something to the idea that vice signaling is replacing virtue signaling, but it’s important to remember that virtue signaling was about pretending to be virtuous, often without substance. Similarly, vice signaling carries an intentional irony. People are pretending to be soulless corporate raiders when in reality they’re 25-year-old guys with their first job out of college.
