Ava Nelson, a 15-year-old student from Northern Michigan, started her dark-academia blog two years ago, after she read The Secret History, and told me that she’s gained about 50 followers each day for the past several months.
#The plague doctor cosplay gif how to#
They share tutorials on how to stain paper with tea before you write on it, how to thrift sweater-vests, and how to stay up all night reading something dark but enchanting. (On TikTok, videos tagged “dark academia” have been viewed more than 254 million times.) These young people are obsessed with the moody teenagers of Donna Tartt’s modern classic The Secret History and the architecture and outfits of elite boarding schools and British universities. The aesthetic also exploded this year-again, first on Tumblr, then on the wider web. Those who prefer a good tailored pant and a slightly spookier vibe could turn to a look called dark academia.
You can dress up as her if you buy her cardigan or, in keeping with the style’s emphasis on the handmade, knit a knockoff yourself. Taylor Swift, the only major celebrity still on Tumblr, released a cottagecore album in July and another on Friday-both marketed with allusions to fairy tales and visuals of Swift wandering in the forest with braids in her hair. In cottagecore tags on every major social-media platform, admirers of picnic baskets, sprigs of baby’s breath, patchwork quilts, and vintage teapots gather to talk about making their own clothes and baking their own bread. By mid-March, cottagecore was more popular on Tumblr than Harry Styles or Marvel, according to the platform’s year-end data. The most popular aesthetic on Tumblr is “cottagecore,” a style centered around the idea of living quaintly and happily in a little house in the woods. Plaguecore is one option, but teens have found other, prettier ways to escape. Read: How quickly can a girl go viral on TikTok? “A lot of them have been turning to Tumblr for coping, whether it be with escapism or fantasy.” “Tumblr has been reflective of how Gen Z acts online in 2020,” Amanda Brennan, the site’s head of editorial, told me.
Though Tumblr is often forgotten as an engine of internet culture, because its user base and cachet have long been eclipsed by Instagram and TikTok, it has produced all kinds of new interests for the young and bored this year. Pandemic cosplay is an expansive genre with a low barrier to participation: All you have to do is feel alone and creative. Though they couldn’t be more different visually, all of them offer young people the opportunity to weather the pandemic by dressing up and posting about it. And it’s not just plaguecore that’s receiving new attention: Lots of fashion-and-fantasy trends are popular right now. The plague doctor appeared on Tumblr’s year-end list of the site’s biggest memes, and “plaguecore”-the name given to the whole aesthetic-is now popular on Instagram and TikTok as well.Ĭosplaying is an opportunity to actively select one’s vibes, so it makes sense that it would boom in a year with uniformly bad ones. Some teens have even reimagined the plague-doctor ensemble to work for a burlesque routine, or a Valentine’s Day dinner. In the spring and summer, fashion “inspo” posts showing leather gloves, black capes, wide-brimmed hats, and, of course, beaked masks made the rounds, racking up tens of thousands of likes. According to Tumblr, engagement with the “plague doctor” tag spiked 446 percent from January to March of this year. The plague-doctor look emerged on Tumblr in the middle of 2019, Vega said, but it blew up this year after the pandemic hit. Today’s plague doctors look similar, though their masks are sometimes filled with snacks such as M&Ms or popcorn. (They didn’t know about viruses.) In most images, they’re depicted wearing black robes and carrying sticks, which were used in part to keep the ill at least several feet away. They wore enormous, beak-like masks that were usually filled with herbs to prevent them from smelling the “ poisonous air” that caused disease. The plague doctors, the real ones, were amateur physicians who tried to help people suffering from the bubonic plague. She’s part of a Tumblr community in which people dress up like 17th-century plague doctors and post pictures and videos of themselves online. Leeches were a common medical treatment 400 years ago, which is why Vega owns them now. “Which a lot of people don’t expect from a leech.”
“They each have their own personalities,” Vega, a 22-year-old biology student, told me. They’re her friends! The leeches, named Chungus, Burrito, Wormitha, and Chocolate Chip, live in a fishbowl, but they’re curious about the world. Alexandra Vega calls her four pet leeches “the Squish Squad.” They eat once every six months yes, they drink blood and yes, she lets them feed on her body.
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