Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer

Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments that have defined our social and academic lives for the last few years. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight.

In the days after Nov. 5, 2024, the cultural and political vibe shift felt sudden. But it wasn’t sudden at all.  

Mainstream coverage of the current vibe shift began at least as early as 2022, when Allison P. Davis published “A Vibe Shift is Coming: Will Any of Us Survive It?” in The Cut, New York Magazine’s women’s interest vertical. Davis’s piece is a mock-breathless response to superstar fashion journalist Sean Monahan’s earlier predictions of a vibe shift on his Substack newsletter, 8Ball. The timeline is important: Davis’s article in The Cut appeared on Feb. 16, 2022, eight months after Monahan’s initial piece on the vibe shift, which he published on June 9, 2021. 

Davis interviewed Monahan for her article. In their phone conversation, Monahan summarized the political angle of the vibe shift he was noticing: “The culture-war topic no longer seems quite as interesting to people… people are less interested in things like quote-unquote cancel culture.” It is difficult to imagine that the culture wars’ ferocity was in decline in 2021, but perhaps the fashion world had less energy to #resist than the average online activist or academic. 

Monahan’s central concern was the fashion vibe shift, of course: the return of “indie sleaze” and other early-2000s staples, like low-rise jeans and “flash photography at parties.” Early-2000s digital cameras have made a comeback, like Polaroids before them. The vibe’s jury still seems to be out on low-rise jeans. Perhaps history’s least flattering trouser trend will return in the higher echelons of fashion, but the general populace seems unlikely to accept a low-rise revival. And the return of indie sleaze is still, at the very least, a hard maybe. 

In a follow-up to his initial report on the vibe shift, Monahan hypothesized that the shift had started with the New Right subculture associated with Dimes Square in 2021 and trickled down to the mainstream through the emergent new media landscape. The role of independent media’s ascendancy in the vibe shift cannot be overstated. In the years since Monahan’s early commentary on the vibe shift, his observations have increasingly proven prescient. 

The vibe shift outpaced journalists from the start 

Although Monahan’s newsletter boasts a sizeable readership in the fashion industry, it was Davis’s response to his predictions that initiated a frenzy in the culture-criticism discourse. After all, in 2021, a paywalled Substack newsletter was less likely to merit the commentariat’s spotlight than an article in The Cut. 

Davis’s article was a boon for commentators in establishment and independent media alike. So rapid was the discourse’s pace that Emma Brockes referred to her own opinion piece about the vibe shift, published in The Guardian a mere ten days after “A Vibe Shift is Coming,” as “predictably late.”  

However, even “A Vibe Shift is Coming” had been predictably late to its own topic. Author Leigh Stein, while serving as guest host for the popular Feminine Chaos podcast (on March 3, 2022, to be precise), speculated that Davis’s article had been delayed from publication since the summer of 2021. It’s hard to imagine the fashion journalist responding to Monahan’s piece so belatedly, unless she had written the article when her subject matter was fresh and then shelved it for the intervening months. Despite some revisions to make her reflection seem more retrospective, Davis also never reaches forward in time from the lost “hot vaxx summer” of 2021, a term that everyone had likely tried to forget before 2022 when her article appeared. 

In other words: the vibe had begun shifting four years ago, and responses to it even at the time were markedly delayed. The cutting edge of commentary on the topic was already behind the times. Most importantly, the vibe shift clearly had nothing to do with Trump 2.0.  

The importance of reheating old news 

When Sean Monahan began accurately identifying the current vibe shift and Allison P. Davis thrust his ideas into the mainstream, few pundits were expecting a second Trump term. Most were caught up in the peak of the early-2020s culture wars on the side Monahan had already identified as moribund. 

There’s no simple answer to the questions of when and why the vibe shifted. To reach any sense of clarity, we need to piece together an unflinching and holistic idea of what happened in our popular and political culture in the years leading up to Nov. 5, 2024. It can be difficult, with the fast pace and fragmented landscape of contemporary media, to remember the hot topic of a few weeks ago, let alone five years ago. But if we want to understand our moment, we need to revisit some of the weirdest—and often, least flattering—episodes in our recent past. Vibes don’t shift themselves, and their shifts are not sudden. 

Edited for formatting and column description.