'The Algorithm' is Homogenizing The Vibe

On freeing ourselves from the shackles of 50 Shades of Beige

Why does everything look alike right now and why is it all so beige?

There is a court case currently unfolding in Texas that offers a window into the why.

Here’s the short version: influencer Sydney Nicole Gifford — who makes a living posting Amazon hauls and lifestyle content from her minimal home — claims in her lawsuit that influencer Alyssa Sheil — who makes a living posting Amazon hauls and lifestyle content from her minimal home — has copied her entire look, and is therefore leading Gifford to make less money. (Gifford makes less commission on affiliate links, she argues, because Sheil is essentially biting her style and muddying the waters.)

From the lawsuit: Gifford’s video is on the left, Sheill’s is on the right

The case has pretty wide-ranging implications on influencing and copyright law but it’s unclear just how it will all play out. After all, can one trademark an aesthetic? Does “a vibe” amount to intellectual property?

But what I find perhaps most interesting about the case is that there is nothing particularly original about the aesthetic that either woman promotes. It is, simply, very beige.

From The Verge:

This aggressively neutral aesthetic is wildly popular — it’s so ubiquitous online that I might be the weird one for not liking it. This minimalism is also aspirational; millions of people have seen Gifford’s and Sheil’s videos, and thousands have likely purchased products from their affiliate links. What I was not prepared for, even after watching hours of their content online, was that it wasn’t just their social media profiles that were monochrome: their lives and their homes are exactly the same. It’s like you grabbed the corners of your phone screen and expanded a TikTok video out into a world of neutrals.

Gifford was certainly not the first influencer to post content from her very minimal home. In fact, there’s likely a direct line between the beige aesthetic of influencers in 2024 and the virality of Kim Kardashian’s incredibly minimal home, as first seen in Architectural Digest in 2020. Kim’s home no doubt set the beige aesthetic in motion — and to be clear, even she didn’t invent it (her home was designed by Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt). But, she no doubt popularized it and, as such, set the wheels of the trend into motion.

Kim made the look more palatable, and therefore more popular, and brands began creating cheaply-made versions of items like those in her home: faux bouclé chairs, marble trays, oversized pots to put one large branch in. Within a couple of years, “beige” was a top search on Amazon and “beige home” a top search on social media.

And now, in 2024, everything is 50 Shades of Beige.

We are seeing homogenization in everything these days. Have you been to a bookstore lately? You may have noticed that all the fiction looks alike. But so, too, do the design books — the same font, the same wide border, various shades of the same neutral color scheme. They are, in a word, completely inoffensive.

The interior design books at Target

There is a very specific reason that “beige” is ruling the world of interior design and aesthetics. We can blame it, mostly, on the algorithm.

You may have heard people complaining — loudly — about Instagram in recent years. “I am being shadow-banned,” people will allege. Or: “No one sees my posts anymore.”

While there’s no vast conspiracy from the human beings who work at Instagram to punish certain creators and reward others, there is a very real reason people think there is.

Back when Instagram (and Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr, for that matter) first launched, our feeds were largely chronological. We saw content from people we followed, in the order in which they posted it. But the platforms grew and — notably! — a new platform joined the pack. In 2018, TikTok launched and, in 2020, when we were all stuck at home during the pandemic, it blew up. And it completely changed the game.

Even if you aren’t on TikTok, it has influenced the way you consume social media. Why? Because TikTok invented the For You page. This allowed users to constantly consume new content, that is refreshing all the time and comprised of posts from all over the world. Rather than showing you only those you follow, TikTok was showing you all sorts of people — people who it thought you might like, as determined by the algorithm. Instagram, in an effort, to compete, created its own version of For You, the Explore page, which does essentially the same thing. Twitter also has a For You page now, which is why it’s harder to sort through what’s real and what’s fake on that site — it’s showing you everything, based purely on what is the most popular or most engaged-with.

Today, when you open an app like Instagram or TikTok, you see posts in the order in which they are recommended by the app — often out of chronological order and based on the algorithm. In other words, the apps are showing you what they think you want to see, even if it’s from people you don’t follow, because they want you to keep scrolling.

Here’s what a search result for “beige home” turns up on TikTok

Remember that scene in The Devil Wears Prada, where Miranda Priestley so astutely explains to Andy that her cerulean blue sweater may have been purchased in a bargain bin at the mall, but it was actually picked out for her by the editors at the fashion magazines she so detested?

That’s how things worked for years. For a song to become popular required that a big-name DJ liked it and played it to a huge audience that then, in turn, requested it until it became popular. For an interior design trend to make its way to Target required that an editor at Architectural Digest write about the trend and then, months later, that it trickle its way into big-box stores.

But professionals are no longer the sole arbiters of taste. Instead, trends are now dictated by the algorithm.

In his book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Kyle Chayka writes:

In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. While this shift has lowered many cultural barriers to entry, since anyone can make their work public online, it has also resulted in a kind of tyranny of real-time data. Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers. The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the market of humanity’s proudest cultural creations.

This “flatness,” Chayka writes, has created a culture of “presets, established patterns that get repeated again and again.”

This sounds very philosophical but it’s something I notice again and again. If you want to be successful on social media and establish some sort of “brand,” you have to pigeonhole yourself. Social media will reward you for it with views and follows.

Once you determine what your viewers want, you have to keep dishing it out — different variations of the same meal, over and over and over.

And when Person One is dishing out a sad, bland beige meal, and it’s being consumed relentlessly…well what do you think Person Two is going to dish up when they open a competing restaurant, just across the street?

50 Shades of Beige has become so pervasive because of the algorithm.

Writes Chayka: “A certain degree of originality, unprecedentedness, creativity, and surprise disappears when so much weighs on culture’s ability to spread through digital feeds.”

In other words: The trend-cycle is much faster, and spreads more widely — and the trends themselves are flat, boring, average…. completely and totally inoffensive.

But — BUT — the pendulum always swings.

We’ve seen this already in the medical aesthetics industry. For years, “the look” was overfilled and over plumped (you can again thank the Kardashians — and the algorithm! — for that). But surgeons say women are now going sans filler, asking for small tweaks (mini facelifts, for instance, where you don’t change how you look, you just tighten things up a bit). The pendulum swung from wholly unnatural to more natural — now, the look is probably still surgically enhanced but in a can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it-way… à la Lindsay Lohan or Jennifer Lawrence.

So…how do we get the interior design pendulum to swing from 50 Shades of Beige to Unrepentant Maximalism? We swing it ourselves.

Diana Vreeland’s home in 1979, designed by Billy Baldwin.

First, you can follow creators who embrace color. But you can also change your shopping behaviors.

One of the reasons I love shopping vintage is that it’s the quickest (and often, least expensive) way to get a look that no one else has. Vintage encompasses all manner of things — decades, styles, colors …. and it’s impossible to be injected into the algorithm because it isn’t mass-produced.

Some of my favorite vintage purchases are those that are wholly unique: My three-foot-tall papier-mâché frog. My death mask. My ass art.

Freeing yourself from the shackles of 50 Shades of Beige is as easy as walking into a thrift store. Or buying local art. Or, at the very least, bookmarking and interacting with creators who showcase something a little different.

Also: Come to your own style over time, rather than buying every single thing at once. Collect. Refine your taste. Or don’t — frankly, I am a fan of a little dose of tacky and think we all could benefit from not being so obsessed with pretty.

Shopping at vintage or family-owned companies ensures we are looking at merchandise that was hand-picked — not placed there by an algorithm. So we can reach for things that more original, a whole lot less beige, and frankly, maybe a little offensive. (Ugly-Chic, it’s your time to shine, baby.)

Social media has democratized some things — which is great! You don’t have to be rich and famous to have a wide audience. But I do yearn for the days when a Miranda Priestley would have been the one helping dictate the 2025 color of the year.

Because….Mocha Mousse? For 2025? Groundbreaking.

A color scheme featuring Pantone’s “Color of the Year” — the very inoffensive Mocha Mousse

The Algorithm has made all of us very comfortable with the comfortable. While book covers that are perfectly inoffensive might sell to the greater masses, a little bit more color and a little more oomph are what I’m after. Frankly, I think we’ve let “palatable” rule the roost for too long.

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From the Archives…

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And I’ll leave you with this…