Sleaze Revival
What once was unfiltered and chaotic is now a performance. Indie Sleaze may be back, but its spirit of spontaneity has been replaced by curated imperfection and digital longing.
Charli XCX’s Birthday by The Cobrasnake in 2024. Available via The Cobrasnake © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Back in the mid-2000s, before Instagram had its chokehold on perfection, Indie Sleaze was born.
It wasn’t called that at the time, of course. It was just style, or rather a lifestyle. It lived on MySpace, Tumblr, and Flickr. It was gritty, chaotic, and allergic to polish. It celebrated individualism, dirty glamour, and all-night party energy.
Indie Sleaze ran from around 2005 to 2010 and thrived on a certain kind of internet freedom. Social media was just beginning, so you posted without overthinking. You dressed for the night—not the story. It was MGMT on repeat, American Apparel hoodies, Lindsay Lohan stepping out of a club at 3 a.m., and M.I.A.’s Paper Planes blasting from someone’s iPod.
Now Indie Sleaze is back. Scroll through Instagram and you’ll see the signs: smudgy eyeliner, big belts, deep side parts, neon-lit party pics. Charli XCX’s Brat era has brought it back with full force—the ironic fonts, 365 party-girl vibes, and a refusal to be traditionally “pretty.” Brands like Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta are channeling the same messy-glam energy in their campaigns. Julia Fox walks around like the physical manifestation of a Tumblr moodboard.
But while the surface looks familiar, something’s missing underneath. That raw, unfiltered energy that defined the 2010s isn’t something you can thrift back into existence.
Now everything is intentional—even the mess. The eyeliner smudge is perfectly placed. The grain is added in post. That chaotic flash photo is probably their 50th attempt. It’s not that it looks bad—it’s that it looks designed to look bad. It’s performance chaos.
That naive, messy joy we felt when we first discovered Tumblr, when we uploaded a photo without thinking twice—that’s what we can’t get back. And maybe that’s what we’re really nostalgic for. Not the fashion, but the era.
A time when social media wasn’t a job. When you wore something ugly because it made you laugh, not because it would perform. When being chaotic wasn’t a costume—it was just being young.
So now that we know it’s back, why?I think we’re burnt out.
Perfect skin, soft lighting, oat milk minimalism—it’s exhausting. Gen Z is tired of curated wellness aesthetics. Millennials are nostalgic for a time before Instagram dictated our taste. And together, we’re longing for something raw, unfiltered, imperfect.
Even if this new version is more self-aware, more styled, more expensive—it still gives us a glimmer of something freer. We miss the version of the internet where photos were bad but honest. Where outfits were stupid, fun, fearless.
We’re not just missing skinny jeans or flash-lit selfies—we’re missing a cultural moment when being a mess wasn’t a brand strategy. It was just life. Personally, I love that messy girls are cool again. I love that we’re letting go of perfection—even if we can’t completely let go of performance. So is this a revival? Or a eulogy?
What we’re seeing now isn’t Indie Sleaze—it’s the memory of it. But that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. There’s something beautiful in the attempt. The fact that we even want to return to something less curated says a lot about where we are.
Maybe we’re just romanticizing the past.
Maybe we’re grieving a version of the internet—and of ourselves—that didn’t need to be filtered.
Even if it’s not real anymore, at least it reminds us of when it was.
