When listening became looking: how music turned into an aesthetic

We’ve all heard of the infamous ‘Brat summer’, the rise of Harry Styles’ expressive fashion and Sabrina Carpenter’s pin-up, pop princess image. For students scrolling on TikTok in between seminars, refreshing Instagram in a lecture or debating an upcoming gig over a bowl of chips in Luther’s, the modern music scene rarely reaches us through headphones first, it arrives through our phones. 

An artist’s wardrobe, stage design, album cover, paparazzi photos and even font choice can matter almost as much as the music itself. Fans are no longer just following musicians; they are buying into visual, aesthetic worlds, begging the question: when did artists become brands instead of just songwriters?

Few artists do this better than Harry Styles. Since the launch of his solo career, Styles has turned his fashion into cultural currency. Pearls, sequins, feather boas, flared trousers and bold patterns have become the foundation of his aesthetic. His music matters, of course, but so does the visual world he has built for each album release, from the blue and pink pastels of Fine Line to the glitter and club energy of Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occassionally, making them recognisable for fans before they’ve even hit the play button. 

Over time, Styles’ recurring aesthetic choices have become shared amongst his audience, especially when a concert date is upcoming. Outfits are planned around his aesthetic as much as his music, with bright, fluorescent feather boas covering stadium floors, glitter and sparkles lighting up the nosebleeds and cowboy hats bobbing up and down throughout the crowd. 

I, myself, have found Styles’ aesthetic filtering into my own style: rings, colourful and fun nail designs and Adidas gazelles, or ‘satellite stompers’ as they are formally known within his fanbase, illustrating just how much fans rely upon an artist’s aesthetic as much as their latest album. 

On the other hand, Charli XCX’s aesthetic sits at the opposite end of polished pop branding. Her image thrives on club culture, messy eyeliner and low-rise Y2K pieces. Rather than feeling carefully constructed, it leans into the chaos of blurry flash photography, neon lighting and chaotic club nights, which, in an era of purity culture and the clean girl aesthetic, is refreshing to see. 

The album cover visuals have also taken on a life of its own through its colour branding, with its vivid neon green shade increasingly rebranded online as ‘brat green’. This shift says a lot about how deeply the aesthetic has embedded itself within online culture, particularly among Gen Z audiences, in which a colour has become shorthand for an entire musical era. What was once a normal, and relatively unpopular colour, has been reshaped into something both aesthetic and sought after within pop culture as well as being instantly associated with the world of Charli XCX, proof of just how quickly a branding decision can shift into an aesthetic and widely recognised online language. 

Brat has become so much more than a 2024 music release, with the terms ‘bratcore’ and ‘Brat summer’ taking on a life of their own beyond the album itself. It instead became something people could adopt onto their own social media feeds with pictures of night outs, white tank tops and stylish sunglasses, and pass it off as so ‘365 party girl’! I remember being in my bed at 3am after a night out during Freshers’ week, scrolling through songs to match my club photo Instagram story and instinctively choosing a track from Brat, not necessarily even because I particularly loved the album, but simply because it felt like it belonged to the aesthetic. 

Of course, there is a downside to this. If image and aesthetic matters so much, where does this leave talented musicians who feel less visually marketable? Has the music industry itself made visual branding a requirement? Does every album release require a mood board? 

Aesthetics themselves are not new things and date back to the era of musicians that came long before any form of social media. From David Bowie with his fiery red mullet and sequinned jumpsuits to Madonna’s lacy gloves and huge bows, style has always been a massive part of music. Except, in the modern age full of social media presence and obsessed with aesthetics, a musician’s visuals often travel faster than the music itself. What once helped define an artist’s backdrop in many ways has become the forefront to a piece of music, with outfits, colour palettes and even their branding font introducing them before listeners get the chance to press play. 

For students growing up online, this feels normal. Slang words surrounding aesthetics like ‘[..] core’, ‘vibe’ and ‘snatched’ circulate our everyday conversation and when this collides with the world of music, we are far more likely to discover our next favourite singer through TikTok edits, tour clips and scrolling on Pinterest for far too long. 

Because, in 2026, the biggest and most successful music scenes are no longer just made when the fans hear them, but when we recognise them. The songs still matter, but the aesthetic speaks first.