It seems that people have taken pride in being bold and brash with their outfits, along with stuffing their bedrooms full of eclectic decor; eye candy that gives you a flavourful taste of their personalities and interests dear to them. So, it begs the question, how did we get here?
If we wind back the clock, minimalism's 'artsy' yet corporate-friendly nature absolutely dominated the 2010s. Pristine, monotone, decluttered, houses were the rage. Fashion was slim to form-fitting and restrainedly desaturated. Everyday visuals like logos and operating systems were flattened and simplified in stark contrast to their glossy, 3D, 2000s counterparts. Very importantly, it could be viewed as a sleek and "grown-up" pushback to the messy, playful aesthetics of the 2000s like Y2K, Frutiger Aero/Skeuomorphism, and McBling, just to name a few, that had a chokehold on everyday visuals and interior decoration within youth culture.
This matters because the widespread idea that trends are recycled every 20 years can be applied to societal shifts between minimalism and maximalism. Many maximalist fashion trends and aesthetics of the 2000s were seen as outdated, stale, and tacky by the 2010s, hence a swing in the other direction. Then by the end of the 2010s, disillusionment online had grown towards the minimalist fashion trends/aesthetics of the decade, in particular due to the sterility and prolific corporate feeling it became associated with giving, but minimalism generally still thrived as the decade came to a close.
Then came covid...
boredom naturally led to unrestricted creative visions
The few months of quarantine under the pandemic is widely agreed to have had a massive influence on artistic styles and trends. There is a reason many people look back on their "2020 Alt Style" with some disdain, but ultimately a sense of wonder for the freedom of experimentation the era brought. The thirst to do anything to avoid boredom naturally led to unrestricted creative visions in every facet of visual culture as people wanted to explore and express themselves to pass the time, and no one was there to judge them. With people already becoming tired of restrained fashion and bare-bones design, unbound expression and going all-out shifted to become the norm. This was invaluable in a time when all you could really look at was your 4 walls and a screen.
Four years on since COVID hit the world, maximalism still permeates fashion and overall visual culture even as we've long since returned to relatively normal lives. You could say that the visual overload and unabashed experimentation of fashion and bedroom decor in 2020/21 has since toned down a little, but the hunger for unhindered creativity and self-expression still carries on, especially as social media algorithms have come to favour content high in audio and visual stimulation.
At the end of the day though, minimalism/maximalism are still just visual trends that have gone back and forth between each other in decades past. People on a wide scale may become sick of the clutter and return to minimalism as a rest to the eyes, but the future is never certain; we can only extrapolate. For now though, maximalism reigns.
