Vaporwave

Eighties and nineties consumer imagery is pulled out of context and arranged as nostalgia for a decade the viewer may never have lived in. Chrome, marble busts, grid horizons, mall interiors.

The style came out of a music genre around 2011, and it kept the habit of treating commercial material as found objects. The images are borrowed rather than designed, and the borrowing is visible on purpose.

The palette is nearly the whole thing. Pink and cyan, held at high saturation, with almost nothing outside those two families. Lock them and the rest of the look follows.

Props from a specific catalogue: a wireframe grid running to a horizon, a classical bust, chrome text, a palm tree, an early computer interface.

VHS softness on top. Slight chroma bleed, a soft focus, tracking noise. The degradation places the image in the past even when the content is new.

Use it for nostalgia, for anything referencing early consumer computing, and for music-adjacent work where the palette is doing the identifying.

Skip it when you need the image read as current. The style is a period marker before it is anything else.

Neo-noir also uses saturated pink and cyan at night, and it keeps hard shadow and deep black. Vaporwave is flat, bright and evenly lit, with no shadow scheme at all.

The test is the contrast. Neo-noir hides most of the frame. Vaporwave shows all of it.

The model returns a natural palette with a few neon accents. Lock pink and cyan explicitly and say the palette excludes other colours.

The second failure is a modern clean render. Ask for VHS softness and chroma bleed, and name at least two props from the vocabulary, such as a grid horizon and a chrome surface.