In December, the trend forecaster Sean Monahan — best known for his role in putting the term normcore on the map in 2013 and for predicting the vibe shift of 2022 — announced the arrival of a new aesthetic: He called it boom boom. While the vibe shift was a return to the late-aughts looks now called indie sleaze, shaking elder millennials to their core, the new aesthetic, another “fetishization of the past,” he wrote, took up the in-your-face glamour and visible hierarchy of the 1980s and early ’90s. Think flashy cars, power suits à la American Psycho, tanning oil, furs, and the dark wood of uptown restaurants like Le Veau d’Or. Boom boom is looking like you’ve spent money for the sake of looking like you’ve spent money. Once again, Monahan’s proclamation felt upsettingly on point.
“There’s something sleazy about the simplicity of saying something is ‘very boom boom,’” he told me with a laugh about a month after hitting PUBLISH. (Monahan makes his pronouncements on his Substack newsletter, 8Ball.) “Also, it’s fun to say.” The term was also inspired by the Boom Boom Room, a golden-hued club at the tippy-top of the Meatpacking District’s Standard Hotel that opened in 2009 and was itself inspired by Windows on the World, the restaurant formerly perched at the top of the North Tower of the old World Trade Center. According to Roman and Williams, the Hollywood-adjacent architectural firm that designed the space, the club was supposed to feel “like a honey-covered Bentley.” In this context, boom boom brings to mind not only what might take place in the coat closet — it’s booming economies, Champagne corks flying, the “Boom! Nailed it!” of deals being closed.
As with his previous assessments, Monahan’s latest pertains to a very specific subset of people and is best enjoyed as an evocative suggestion. Its squishiness provokes lively group-chat debate and allows it a life of its own, beyond both Monahan’s control and the realms of clothing and design. “Is this boom boom,” texted one friend, sending me a video of Anne Hathaway dancing to “Anaconda” at a Versace runway show’s after-party last winter. “Yes,” I replied without hesitation.
Despite its pliable nature, by January I was seeing boom boom everywhere. During men’s Fashion Week in Paris, Saint Laurent designer Anthony Vaccarello sent models walking in a look he described as “respectable up top, dirty down below,” with a Wolf of Wall Street–esque blazer, tie, and trench worn over baggy leather pants and thigh-high boots. The same month, Armani released a “That’s So Armani” campaign, reminding the world that it had pioneered the broad-shouldered, loose-fitting power suits of the ’80s and ’90s, and for its show in Milan, Giorgio Armani seemingly turned to his own archives for inspiration, presenting a collection of hypermasculine leather jackets, wide tuxedo lapels, and boatneck sweaters fit for a superyacht.
As runway collections are conceived of months in advance, I wondered if boom boom, like Trump voters, had been right under our noses for a while, quietly gaining ground. Maybe the “mob wife” aesthetic was the writing on the wall. Or perhaps this turn to the ostentatious was the natural next step in style’s constant progress, following the comeback of J.Crew and its “old money” look and The Row’s beige choke hold on actually wealthy American women — turning up the volume on quiet luxury until it was no longer quiet and then really very loud. When Balenciaga sent out fake wads of cash as invites for its spring 2023 show, was that a warning sign? Or when Kim Kardashian was named GQ’s Tycoon of the Year and covered the December 2023 issue wearing an oversize suit and tie? As conventional wisdom goes, five years into a decade is when it really becomes a decade. So here we are: the 2020s. Succession teed it up. Now, Playboy is back in print and an American Psycho remake is on the way. It’s no longer gauche to be bougie and brash. Online retailer Ssense currently sells a $55 T-shirt that reads YOU’RE A SLAVE TO MONEY THEN YOU DIE. The purists here are the butt of the joke.
Monahan claims that participation in boom boom doesn’t reveal any political allegiance; it isn’t “owned by conservatives,” he told me. He thinks millennials of all political persuasions, after aging out of normcore with a stopover at “bourgeoisie normcore” (a more expensive version of the same), are trading in their sneakers for more grown-up signifiers in an “attempt to figure out what adulthood looks like.” Judging based on the number of men in my life who’ve recently ditched their Salomons for Paraboot derbys, all the corporate-themed party dress codes I’m receiving, and the thick stack of graphic T-shirts I’ve off-loaded at Beacon’s Closet this year, he may be right. And according to a recent report from the menswear retailer Mr Porter, searches for “workwear” on its website increased by 50 percent in the past year. Many Gen-Zers and millennials never had to dress up at work, let alone go to an actual office. They may be financially left out of adulthood, but they can at least look the part.
As much as it can seem like harmless, sexy fun to cosplay as the one percent in the face of economic uncertainty, I find it all a bit disconcerting. And not just because boom boom makes it harder to tell the difference between a nice man in a nice suit and a man who believes there are only two genders. (A few weeks ago, I found out that a guy I had a crush on drinks raw milk.) We’ve entered the days of real American oligarchy: An aesthetic that celebrates the shameless pursuit of a bag feels like nihilism at best — and complicity at worst. Our president is a would-be dictator with famously gilt taste; there’s not much room for a nuanced interpretation of an $898 brass Cult Gaia purse shaped like the Monopoly Man’s moneybag.
The fashion industry itself has been hit with a revanchist, conservative wave: The progressivism so proudly claimed in the wake of Trump’s first presidency — in the form of initiatives championing DEI, size inclusivity, gender fluidity, animal friendliness, and environmentalism — is rapidly being abandoned, replaced by a new Ozempic-fueled allegiance to skinniness, impossibly high prices and boutiques catering exclusively to the biggest of big spenders, and fast fashion packaged as “dupes” imitating luxury items. It’s also a masks-off moment for the people who profit from the trends: Bernard Arnault, the founder of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, which has majority stakes in the quiet-luxury brand Loro Piana and a number of others, attended the president’s inauguration in January with two of his children. The designer Adam Lippes, who previously dressed Jill Biden, outfitted Melania Trump for the occasion, shocking liberal followers. (In the week following, his company’s website reportedly saw the best sales in its history.)
In reality, the idea that you can adopt a style and not have it reflect on who you are is a farce. Whether we like it or not, when we dress, when we decorate, we join teams; we tell the world about ourselves. When taken at face value, boom boom reads as a thumbs-up to greed. While I may be attracted to it on an aesthetic level — I’d kill for the gold bedazzled Judith Leiber bag shaped like a 1980s mobile phone, which recently sold for $6,000 on the RealReal — I don’t want to be mistaken for someone who prioritizes their own bottom line over all else.
But luckily for us, fashion never stands still. We’re already seeing boom boom used and subverted by queer artists, including Chappell Roan, who in the cover photo for a new single, “The Giver,” wears what could essentially be considered boom-boom drag: a boxy suit and tie, her curly red hair in a slicked-back updo. It’s a hijacking of a conservative costume. “She gets the job DONE,” read a caption on Instagram announcing the release — a line that could have easily been featured in The Apprentice. At the Grammys, meanwhile, Doechii, who became the third woman ever to win Best Rap Artist, wore a cropped Thom Browne suit with comically large pannier trousers. (Browne has knowingly perverted menswear for years.)
These twists on boom boom may actually be the perfect critique of the Trump era, akin to the goofiness of David Byrne’s famously large suit in Stop Making Sense. We aren’t all Chappell and Doechii, but we have power too. With a little effort, we can blow up boom boom.