S o f t

C o l o n i a l

W a n d e r

l u s t

DESCRIPTION

Evokes Victorian-era imperial/technological/consumerist optimism, wonder and whimsy.

Maps, wanderlust and leisure travel via boat or small aeroplane, hot air balloons, magical ways of looking at travel, luggage labels, posted letters, the eiffel tower, travelling circuses (& sideshow performers), strings of lightbulbs

Phonographs, typewriters, lightbulbs, penny farthings, grammarphones, radio waves and general machinery of the decade that's on the verge of modernity being used today, 'impossible' rube-goldberg-like machinery and machinery interiors. NOT steampunk or factories.

Whimsical masculinity: monacles, moustaches, top hats, pipes.

Victorian-to-1940s at the latest

Engraved prints like from a Victorian newspaper or book - decoupage, collage - interesting types of paper: Technical diagrams, sheet music, dictionary pages, maps, product packaging, posters/adverts wheatpasted on walls, naturalist sketches, phrenology heads

ostentatious typographical confetti - 'fig.01', ampersands, curly brackets, manicules, typography as design, letterpress block printing, jumbled cut-out font, circus fonts

animation, like early film or 2D cut-out animation / sepia or film flicker colours

politically, we are 'post-problematic' so can joke at views in the past to distance ourselves; post 9/11 imperial anxiety

Terry Gilliam, Jules Verne, Georges Melies, Dadaism.

Adjacent to: indie music, hipsters, steampunk, decay victoriana.

Shares victorian typography and indie down-to-earth aspirations with Genericana. Shares handcrafted-visuals with Indiecraft.

History of the term

Soft colonial wanderlust consumer aesthetic has an associated facebook community

This page was researched by the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, with examples found by many volunteers.

Soft Colonial Wanderlust is a thinly-veiled layer of irony over actual colonialist longing; the continued exploitation of unseen workers abroad which began in the historic colonial period; consumerism and cutesy patriarchal nostalgia. Turn it into a TikTok trend at your peril.

The key Soft Colonial Wanderlust period is 2001 - 2010, with an aftertail continuing to around 2016.

Visual Motifs

Maps, wanderlust and leisure travel via boat or small aeroplane, hot air balloons, magical ways of looking at travel, luggage labels, posted letters, the eiffel tower, travelling circuses (& sideshow performers), strings of lightbulbs

Phonographs, typewriters, lightbulbs, penny farthings, grammarphones, radio waves and general machinery of the decade that's on the verge of modernity being used today, but NOT exactly steampunk; including 'impossible' rube-goldberg-like machinery and machinery interiors. But never/very rarely 'factories' - the technologies on display are more Jules Verne whimsy. Here, the romance of travel and colonial ingenuity is travel to the future.

Whimsical masculinity: monacles, moustaches, top hats, pipes.

Use of Media

Influences

The motifs are typically Victorian, but the art styles it draws from tend to be 1920s. However, some examples draw as late as the 1950s - often because actually identifying with someone in Victorian dress is harder than a person who seems 'modern'.

Politics

The Soft Colonial Wanderlust period is roughly 2001 (and the release of Moulin Rouge!) through to 2010, with a tail for a few years afterwards.

world events

The (most recent) 'western' war on Iraq began in 2002, with American and British troops present through to 2011 - paralleling this aesthetic period closely. Troops entered Afghanistan in 2001. The 9/11 attacks sparked a period of colonial anxiety, to be resolved by new colonial wars, and an aesthetic trend in media and branding depicting such adventures as whimsical, victimless, 'clean', jolly good fun.

Anglo-Afghan Wars, three conflicts (1839–42; 1878–80; 1919) in which Great Britain, from its base in India, sought to extend its control over neighbouring Afghanistan and to oppose Russian influence there.

Encyclopedia Britannica

In the essay 'Millennial Englishness' (in New Model Island (2019)), Alex Niven notes that 'England' as a concept came back into the public discourse in the 00s & 10s (in contrast with the 80s & 90s, and 'cool britannia', 'britpop', the BNP where 'Britain' was the central construct) - supported by Joe Kennedy's book Authentocrats.

Readers who have been paying even slight attention to the 2010s culturescape — from pop albums like P.J. Harvey’s Let England Shake and the Good the Bad & the Queen’s Merrie Land, to countless art exhibitions and installations exploring “England beyond Brexit”, to recent trade and middlebrow books like Robert Winder’s The Last Wolf: The Hidden Springs of Englishness, Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies, Nick Groom’s The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year, Ben Fogle’s English: A Story of Marmite, Queuing and Weather and Harry Mount’s How England Made the English: From Why We Drive on the Left to Why We Don’t Talk to Our Neighbours — will already be wearily familiar with the ubiquity of the Englishness franchise in contemporary discourse.

According to Joe’s account in Authentocrats, the recent bourgeois vogue for twee artefacts and rural lifestyle touchstones has shaded into a much more politically questionable liberal revival of English patriotism.

It is likely that SCW would have faded from consciousness within that first decade - and yet examples persist throughout the 2010s, which to my mind may reflect Brexit (in the UK context) and ongoing anxieties of western imperial powers about their place in the world. In the UK, this period coincided with 'austerity' (2010- 2019) - a gradual cutting of public services by the Conservative government. People felt increasingly poor and like society was coming to pieces; yet SCW stylings make the consumer feel 'posh' or 'proud', selling a fantasy because poverty and depression is bad for the economy. PM David Cameron deliberately used 1940s retro stylings to portray baking your own bread to save money as a jolly, nostalgic, 'help your country in times of war' instead of unhappy 'Girl Named Jack'-style crisis survival. Two examples are Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food (2008 onwards) to the Great British Bake Off (2010 onwards)

I'd like to argue that despite the name 'victorian', this trend draws from a broader range of dates. Victorian people are used when it benefits the brand to use 'distancing' - for example, a adventurer searching for crisp spices whimsically instead of contemporary appropriation, exoticisation and labour exploitation abroad, or a mad inventor developing new flavours with magical machines. Whenever the customer is represented, however, they will be in a more 'relateable' decade - 1940s burlesque glamour for celebrities, 1930s tea dresses in fashion for women, and 1950s children's holidays to the seaside by train.

The 'tweeness' and collage elements of SCW are rarely seen now, except in very specific brands, where once they were everywhere. However, the troubling popularity of nostalgia-for-the-olden-days content promoted by fascist-adjacent internet personalities may be its modern manifestation and legacy.

And we are still fighting and sponsoring war in the SWANA regions.

Interpretations

The softness of soft colonial wanderlust can be understood as similar to the tender of tenderqueer; i.e. a cutesiness that masks deep violence

SCW artworks give the air being 'post-racism' and 'post-class' and we can therefore enjoy this sort of thing 'ironically'. Examples include: twee upper class characters and depictions of upper class people; images of sideshow performers from freak shows; misogyny and racism but with a 'knowing' wink.

Penhaligon’s pries open the apothecary tables of ancient Egypt, but to no avail. The empty-handed journey back from Cairo allows us time to smell the roses – how very pleasing they were! We decide to use the city of Cairo as a muse – Damascan Rose is macerated in an overdose of woods and spices – the scent mirrors the city. Cairo instantly enthrals, yet reveals deeper treasures over time.

Heritage - Penhaglion’s website (2024)

A 'cutesy' sense of wonder about Victorian consumerism and enthusiasm for marvellous inventions as a way to get ironic distance from contemporary consumption. Brands evoking historic colonialism with a wink-of-the-eye to obscure contemporary colonial practices and relationships in their manufacture and distribution chains. In practice, contemporary labour exploitation in the global south continues inqualities begun in Victorian/pre-Victorian colonialism. Products using SCW motifs often choose them to brand product lines with 'flavours from all over the world' (Penhaglions, Phileas Foggs), blotting out the cruel history of exploration for resources, and reducing other peoples to 'exotic' reference points.

Similarly, the cutesy wonder towards genius and invention and the marvel of technology masks the realties of how objects are produced - the locations, the experiences of workers, and destruction. The rise of SCW followed the decade in which the internet changed everything, with its diffuse and intangible interfaces, its mysterious all-pervading aether, its deliberately impenetrable chains of control and material manifestations (server farms, undersea cables, underpaid video content reviewers, etc). SCW evokes the enthusiasm for unbridled progress and advancement visible in both the 00s and the Victorian period; but also reveals an anxiety about this slippery new domain, proposing the romance of Verne machinery and Rube Goldberg designs where the whole design can be easily seen and comprehended.

The 'nations' visible as protagonists in SCW are England and France. England continues to have 'poshness' as an international brand identity. Meanwhile, French accents (notably Verne references and Eiffel tower motifs) tend to represent whimsy, presumably because the key consumers of these products are English-speaking and therefore view France as a jolly, but non-exotic, place for a holiday.

Like all 'ironic' depictions of bad stuff, much of this is a way to safely expereiment with unpolite ideas you genuinely believe. For example, the Chap magazine's protests were:

against what they see as modern living's vulgarity in general; "against the pointless intrusion by contemporary art pieces into public areas";"to draw attention to the appalling lack of gentlemanly services available on Britain's high streets"; against modern art installations;against the proposed opening of an Abercrombie and Fitch store at the centre of traditional English gentleman's tailoring, Savile Row.

all of which are fascist-adjacent and classist goals. Some analysis by participants in SCW-adjacent subcultures during the period:

The key attraction, it seems, is the tremendous optimism of the Victorians and Edwardians. "The impression we get of the Victorian era, however inaccurate," says Tom Wright, author of a blog called London Particulars, "is that they thought the future was going to be awesome."

Steampunk rockers: the trend for tweed - Jenny Hall - 2010

By implication, then, participants were attracted because they knew the present day was NOT in fact awesome. Mark Fisher argued that in this decade, hauntological media such as the crackle of a Caretaker album, the public-service-industrial of Mordant Music's Dead Air or the melancholic post-rave comedown of Burial revealed the 'slow death of the future', the end of our ability to even imagine a time beyond neoliberalism, or that the future would be exciting - or even different. We might understand some of the appeal of Victoriana, then, as retreating to a time in which the future can seem exciting again. In particular, this period saw a profound expansion of the internet's role in society, and increased techno-pessimism about the opaque and oppressive powers of Silicon Valley; but the Victorian is a technological optimist, especially the Jules Verne protagonist. More importantly, perhaps, the steampunk protagonist is in control of the technology - professors, inventors, and geniuses, creating not the iPhone but magnificent flying machines.

I believe SCW products were aimed at a middle class consumer. The role of the middle class has always been to bolster the ruling class in the hope of ascending to it: these are products for people who want to feel 'a bit posh' by, say, buying a shaving cream with a picture of a moustachio'd aristocrat on it, but do not feel any disquiet about what that aristocrat represents. Actual upper class people buy from genuinely posh retailers - or, famously, in the UK - are astonishingly cheap in their purchase preferences. I recently spoke with someone who attended a Chap picnic, whose memories backed this suspicion. They said the demographic was an even split between goths and the sorts of people who moved to London to wear Ralph Lauren and 'be something' in the City.

Memory

I was at university 2009 - 2011, as this trend was at its apex. My feelings about the trend were always awkward. I was hugely into Victoriana at the time, and a lot of these products hit me as 'so close but too far away' - feeling like a commercialisation of something I enjoyed that didn't speak to what I loved. I wanted time travel. I didn't quite have the design insight to point to the 'errors' in the fashions, but victoriana didn't feel quirky to me - it felt dark, and like home, and was very much about real antiques (if only I could get them). I had an arsenic-green bow tie but could never figure out how to wear it. Deep in my jack the ripper phase, which spoke to me of a kind of ghostliness in the city, a passageway into the past, and an image of masculinity which was dangerous, shapeless and compelling, and contrasted with the also-appealing repression and confinement of the respectable man of the period drama, an image of benign darkness. That was me: a kind of hipster about the victoriana hipsters.

Nevertheless, I was certainly part of that moment: I carried a gentleman's cane around town, went to gigs in a top hat, and used the penny farthing as a personal symbol. I had the ceramic phrenology head and got everything I could in big luxurious damask. I'm more embarassed by that interest politically now than I was when I was 19 (I've given away the drinks bar shaped like a globe I craved so dearly as a teenager, it's colonial cringe), and with the gentleman as a point of identification; but I still go nuts for a Morris wallpaper or a day out at a stately home. It's hard to see through something that felt so personally, intimately mine and of my psychology to judge to what extent I was picking up on the cultural moment, or if I would always have been like this.

Key Examples

Music Videos

Films

Book covers

Album Covers

Products

Other

Fashion

The word 'dapper'. Hipsters. A fad for 'gentlemen' dressing - waistcoats, bad moustaches, bad suspenders, bowler and top hats, shirts without their pin-on collars - all done really badly (like, suspenders and a belt, or waistcoats with low-waist trousers). Frock coats

Part of why this fashion looks so bad is that:

'Ringmaster' tailcoats, bowler hats, historic military jackets,

The ubiquity of the 'moustache' in the ironic 'awesome moustache' trend.

'Wizard Chaps are sartorial and really rather stylish. They get their clothes and accessories from Old Town, Gentleman's Emporium, Savvy Row and other stores online. On the street their houndstooth comes from Dashing Tweeds, Dolly Dare or Beyond Retro, while their tartan comes from Vivienne Westwood and the brogues from Crockett & Jones. Authentic tweed was everywhere in the winter collections, from Prada to Margaret Howell to Rapha's dedicated tweed cycling suit. Shooting jackets were worn all over central London. Even All-Saints is full of Victoriana, with its riding habit style, faded leathers and funked-up muttonchop blouses.'
Steampunk rockers: the trend for tweed - Jenny Hall - 2010

The two key looks for men were:

But a lot of men in these scenes would also just be wearing nice quality Marks and Spencers dressed-down-formal jumpers, shirts and trousers, like at an informal white collar workplace.

IMO, there wasn't an equivalent trend for women, but one possibility is visible Victorian underwear as outerwear: frilly petticoats; step-in slips and playsuits; corsets. Women associated with these movements were more likely to read as 1920s-1940s/rockabilly-adjacent/Dita von-Teese-adjacent, probably because actual victorian styles are not street-friendly the way modern whimsical men's vintage is.

I met someone who attended a Chap picnic, and they said a lot of women were wearing 30s/40s tea dresses. Another person remembered the decade:

when every girl wanted a knee-length or just above gored skirt that would flared when she spun, but darned if I remember what we called them.

Image Galleries

Masculinity & fashion

In this decade masculinity was, as it always is, in crisis. SCW provided models for an 'alternative masculinity' which both filled a desire for an 'outsider' position, but remained 'safe' as it provides no meaningful challenge to the status quo - a quirky of the mainstream

No fashion trend is capable of undoing patriarchy, but SCW was especially egregious as it drew from either twee farmhand or colonial adventurer aesthetics, both of which evoke the power of white men in the physicality of labourers and the actual geopolitical power of the colonialist and aristocrat.

This fashion/social style was popular with middle classes - filling the traditional role of the middle class to support upper-class lifestyles and values in the hope of joining them. As ever, people adopt ideas 'ironically' as a cover for adopting them sincerely. Products like moustache wax marketed with penny farthings and top-hats aimed to suggest the user would 'feel posh'; the subculture therefore was made of people for whom 'feeling like a Victorian aristocrat' seems an unproblematic life goal.

Cutesy appropriative vintage labourer looks, therefore, added insult to injury as their wearers were not in any sense salt-of-the-earth working men.

This was parallelled in queer fashion, epitomised by DapperQ - a fashion website for butches - founded 2013. Notably, 'dapper' has wealthier overtones than the working class masculinity traditionally associated with butches. There was a fad for bow ties, so you would look like a whimsical professor - rather than a car mechanic.

Some examples:

Music

There was a music trend associated with this visual movement, although at first glance it's unexpected.

Quoting from Steampunk rockers: the trend for tweed - Jenny Hall - 2010 in the London evening standard

The soundtrack that accompanies the new what-ho! lifestyle comes from bands such as Abney Park, Mumford & Sons, Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit, E.S. Posthumus and Tom Waits. Perhaps a banjo or a hurdy-gurdy shanty beat accompanying a husky voice, with a dash of honky-tonk piano.

You might point out that Mumford and Sons and Johnny Flynn are both indie or genericana, but to me it's relevant because this was what these people were listening to. The consumer of soft colonial wanderlust was not (primarily) attracted to music which 'sounded' victorian or historic, or 'world music' (the idea of wanderlust did not, say, produce a renewed Western fad for sitar music). Instead, they were drawn to an extremely white, down-to-earth, 'handmade' indie sound.

Bands included Arcade Fire, Decemberists, Fleet Foxes.

However, the 'gothy' end of the subculture did listen to more subcultural music - such as Bellowhead, Abney Park, and chap hop. One song of the era I had on my playlist by Worsted went

seduction and doffing are so interlocking
you can't really tell them apart
if you want to get a girl, get yourself a hat
and doff your way into her heart
Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer

Interior Design

In this era, I was in no position to buy permanent objects for my home, so I feel less certain of describing this; which is frustrating, as consumer objects tend to be more ephemeral than films or albums.

I associate this era with wallpapers, cushions and curtains with huge damask motifs, like this:

I have this motif on a pillowcase bought in 2009, which I still own. It is a rich, warm purple, with the pattern raised in flock, and it came from a supermarket (i.e. targeted at the 'affordable' customer).

Rather like the badly put together menswear, nobody was replicating a real Victorian room. Instead, the logic of collage would throw together 'posh feeling' furniture pieces with modern logic - for example, these rooms were rarely cluttered (in the way of actual victorian decor). There would be that wallpaper, one rococo sofa, and maybe a modern lampshade on bare wooden boards. The feeling of a theatre stage set of a room.

I remember plates and notebooks with SCW collaged Victorian images on, often ironic juxtapositions (a lion in a top hat, a rhino on a penny farthing) in black on the cream white ceramic. The following plates were photographed in 2023 at Machen Interiors, Caerleon, Wales - I couldn't get the designer's name. In the SCW period, these things were EVERYWHERE, including supermarkets and upmarket stores off Picadilly. I made a special 2hr trip to revisit this shop with a camera to capture what these 2023 plates looked like.

Big ornate frames as a design motif, but often in all black or a single tone, rather than being golden or distressed golden. And strings of lightbulbs as if at a carnival, throwing a chiascuro lighting contrast echoing the sense of a sepia B&W image or two-tone engraving.

The wallpapers, sofas and frames are neither victorian nor really colonial - they tend to be rococo - but they speak of a kind of ostentatious, posh, maximalist luxury, a celebration of feeling aristocratic (and a little debauched about it).

When i try and articulate what this looked like as a furniture style, I keep getting the mental image of 'porn that wants to be posh'. I think I am remembering the titillating news cycle that The Kings Speech (2011) was filmed at 33 Portland Place, a London address which was also the set for porn films, and possibly fancy orgy parties.

I am reminded, quite against my preference, of getting messages on dating sites from men who self-define as 'gentlemen' and wear badly fitted bowler hats and waistcoats, as if this pretense of sophistication is supposed to communicate something Elevated about their personality or values. These guys are still about, especially in BDSM scenes - but this is no longer a mainstream kind of guy who appears in music videos and popular culture. This kind of guy continues to be accompanied by girlfriends who dress goth, or pinup-vintage. In the SCW period, this kind of thing was considerably more mainstream.

Interesting edge cases

Associated Aesthetics

Steampunk

Steampunk was popular at the same time as this trend, so there are aesthetic and political overlaps; but there are some distinctions

It's probably not true to say that SCW 'isn't' steampunk. The term 'steampunk' was in popular use at the time and used to refer to all things which might be linked to it.

Once you start citing Panic! as a decay victoriana reference point, you essentially need their complete works. Here they are, mainstreaming Steampunk in their Ballad of Mona Lisa video (2011)

unsorted

Click here to view mess ...it has pretty much ruined me for all other games of the same genre, that way. oh also (unrelated question) is there a name for the -- I guess I'm going to call it the "paper doll" aesthetic that's common to the Witch scenes in Puella Magica Madoka and these Hendricks Gin videos? It basically seems to be cut paper + supernatural whimsy, and I've seen it around some. I guess Ayakashi Mononoke I get the impression that a lot of SCW pulls from a post ⁠whimsigothic interest in kooky "dark fairytale" imagery, that blends well with the exoticism and melancholy of victorian illustration, which isn't really present in examples like this. Happy to be corrected! But am curious what distinguishes these two aesthetics. Chord Shore — 10/13/2021 7:09 AM they both have common faux-19th century motifs, but ⁠genericana's tone aims specifically at a rustic/weathered look, while this is emulates more elegant naturalist illustrations during the victorian era Pokemonprime's example may not be the strongest, Visually it's clearly aligned hipness' scratchy margin doodles, but far more informed in its intent by SCW. I'm sure I used to see this blend around a lot, but drawing a blank on other examples. (consider the difference between Trader Joe's branding and any of the branding used by the IPAs listed in ⁠genericana) The more romantic mid 2000's designs I associate with SCW feel very distinct from the more minimal, corporatised 2010s microbrewery look, but if the dividing line is elsewhere, no worries this distinction of "romanticism" vs. "corporate minimalism" isn't an invalid one in this case. there are a number of dividing lines between aesthetics, it really depends on which motifs within them you're choosing to analyze for instance, typographically you could say SCW uses more baroque lettering: Image while genericana is more stencil-based: Image this lends itself to different observations about their use cases and the brands that gravitated towards them (and ultimately the audiences that consume quirky. put a bird om it called hipster at the time insider-outsider quality, where the values espoused are still very mainstream (and like, these guys are still straight white guys) mighty boosh
  • Close cousin to Gregory Alan Isakov - The Weatherman album art by Good Apples and Smokeproof Press, 2013 - subject matter teeters on the edge of ⁠genericana but the design feels much more like this aesthetic
  • Understood! So his This Empty Northern Hemisphere album (2009, art directed & designed by Cultural Operations) would be closer to SCW for the collage elements and map overlay?
  • Benjamin Francis Leftwich - Last Smoke Before the Snowstorm (2011) / Dirty Hit
  • logo for the odd gentleman video game development company designer unknown, date circa 2008
  • "The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom" (2010) may also belong here.
  • f dark 2000s whimsigoth trend I found a few examples of a while back (particularly Gotye's Hearts A Mess music video and the short film Jo Jo in the Stars)
  • Nick Nicely - Psychotropia, 2004 - Design by Tom Ornshaw
  • Neverending White Lights ‎– Act 1: Goodbye Friends Of The Heavenly Bodies, 2005, cover design by Brett Jubinville https://www.discogs.com/master/1661006-Neverending-White-Lights-Act-1-Goodbye-Friends-Of-The-Heavenly-Bodies
  • The Visitor - Arena (1998) Art Direction: Hugh Symes

    • Original description

    Photos of people spanning from the Victorian era to the 1940s (at most, not too into the Fifties) culture/aesthetics appropriated for modern day consumption. Maps, wanderlust and leisure travel via boat or small aeroplane. Chinoiserie/Japonisme and general Orientalism (think blue on white Ming Dynasty pottery used exclusively by white people). Carnivals and boardwalks, mail art, Neutral Milk Hotel's/Arcade Fire album covers, Baroque Pop, privileging of nature/ecology in art (throwbacks to Art Nouveau/Arts and Crafts Movement), sense of whimsy, hot air balloons, magical ways of looking at travel, phonographs, typewriters and general machinery of the decade that's on the verge of modernity being used today, but NOT exactly steampunk, floral wallpapers with crowning seen in cafe's that serve New American cuisine.

    first published Jan 2025

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