Vaporwave
- aesthetic
- mallsoft visuals
- A E S T H E T I C
A Greek bust, a pink and cyan grid, Japanese text and the melancholy of a dead shopping mall.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Vaporwave is nostalgia for a future that was advertised and never arrived, so the imagery is always slightly wrong and slightly sad. That melancholy is the whole content.
It is also visually generous. A bust, a grid and some katakana is a complete composition before you have added anything of your own.
How it works
Assemble from the fixed kit: a Greek marble bust, a magenta wireframe grid floor, palm trees, an early computer window, 1990s clip art, a dolphin or a Roman column.
Pink and cyan gradient sky, glossy plastic textures, faded VHS scan lines and chromatic aberration over the whole sheet.
Set full-width Japanese katakana beside widely letterspaced Latin capitals, and put the practical text inside a Windows-style dialog box.
When to use it
Use it for an electronic night, an internet culture event, a games event, a 90s night, an art show, a student night.
Leave it alone for a general audience. The whole style is an in-joke about a decade.
Told apart from its neighbours
Synthwave is the confident, cinematic cousin: a sunset, a sports car, driving music. Vaporwave is the degraded, ironic one.
Y2K chrome is from the period itself and is optimistic. Vaporwave is a later reconstruction and is not.
Glitch art damages the image. Vaporwave degrades it gently with VHS artefacts.
Where it was used
Macintosh Plus released Floral Shoppe in 2011, whose cover, a Greek bust on a pink and cyan field with katakana, became the template for everything after it. The style spread through Tumblr and has since been used to sell the nostalgia it was mocking.
- Macintosh Plus
- Floral Shoppe
- early 2010s Tumblr
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, vaporwave aesthetic, a classical Greek marble bust floating in an empty pink and cyan gradient sky, a magenta wireframe grid floor receding to a low horizon, palm trees and an early computer window frame, faded VHS scan lines and chromatic aberration, full-width Japanese katakana set beside widely letterspaced Latin capitals, 1990s clip art and a Windows-style dialog box, glossy plastic textures, <date, time and place> inside the dialog box
What goes wrong
The model returns bright cheerful 80s retro. Ask for faded degraded colour, VHS scan lines and an empty abandoned feeling.
The second failure is modern interface design. Say the window frames and dialog boxes are early 1990s Windows style.
Leave out
warmth, sharpness, natural light, modern interface design, saturated primaries
Watch for
It has to feel abandoned. A cheerful vaporwave poster is just 80s retro.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
