Average as Alternative: Generic Fashion in Subcultural Spaces 

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Written By Rita Chandler

The cover of Weezer’s self-titled debut, better known as the Blue Album, is one of the most iconic of all time. Against a simple blue backdrop, the band members stand in a row, staring directly into the camera. They’re dressed in plain T-shirts and button-downs, paired with equally unremarkable trousers. They look like they could be starring in a Gap ad.

The album cover for 1994’s “Weezer,” better known as the Blue Album.

In a 2020 interview, frontman Rivers Cuomo said the blue of the backdrop was carefully chosen to match the walls of his childhood bedroom, and added,  “This mode of nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood was the same source of my ‘look’ in the Blue Album era—the glasses frames, bowl cut, dickies, blue t-shirt, and windbreaker from my childhood photos.” In other words, retrospection drives the aesthetic: a reclamation of adolescent awkwardness into a conscious identity statement. The Weezer “look” would later go on to symbolize a broader ’90s sub genre known as “geek rock.”

But Weezer’s nostalgia extends beyond Cuomo’s personal memories to a broader retro sensibility. This is evident in their tribute to Buddy Holly—both in the song of the same name and its accompanying music video, which incorporates clips from Happy Days,a 1970s sitcom set in the 1950s. And, to return to the Blue Album cover, the image of the four band members imposed on a sky-colored backdrop is based on a Best of Beach Boys collection called Do It Again!.

Why invoke such references? Buddy Holly and the Beach Boys are pioneers of rock and roll history, to be sure; but their clean-cut image wasn’t so much a “statement” as a strategic move adopted by many rising acts of the era to achieve mainstream appeal. (The Beatles, for instance, later abandoned it.) You could read Weezer’s aesthetic as a playful nod, complete with knowing kitsch; but it seems to me that Cuomo was genuinely drawn to the neat, wholesome visual itself.

That wouldn’t necessarily be unusual. There are countless examples of things once seen as plain or nerdy being recontextualized as cool decades later. It makes me think of a quote from Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977): “Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.” A similar phenomenon likely explains the 2000s hipster fascination with analog and démodé media, early-20th-century mustaches, and seemingly random vintage clothing items like waistcoats, suspenders, and newsboy hats. Time eventually positions most artifacts, even the most mundane, at the level of cool.

Examples of hipster outfits, via Pinterest.

Furthermore, plain clothing and “nerdy” pieces carry their own subcultural pedigree, apart from vintage revivals. In several alternative movements, plain and utilitarian garments have been adopted due to economic necessity or a deliberate, anti‑establishment thrifting ethos; and “nerdy” items have functioned as signals of intellectual or philosophical curiosity. 

These two impulses have even intertwined before: consider the Beat Generation of the 1950s, a pioneering literary movement which spawned its own uniform. Blue jeans, white T‑shirts, sneakers, and work jackets all spoke to working‑class roots, nomadic practicality, and rejection of suit‑and‑tie conventions. At the same time, Beats incorporated Ivy League staples—tweed jackets and polo sweaters—to hint at their intellectual leanings. Their fusion of the utilitarian and the scholarly has reverberated through later waves of disaffected students, although now it has become a caricature of its own: “pretentious youths in black turtlenecks smoking and writing in French cafés,” as Sophie Wilson writes in her article on Beatnik fashion.

Lucien Carr, Jack Keroac, Allen Ginsburg, and William Burroughs, notable writers of the Beat Generation. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

So there’s definitely a precedent here, even if the Weezer aesthetic seems atypical in subcultural fashion. But the fact remains: it is, impressionistically, atypical. When compared to its direct indie/rock contemporaries and predecessors—grunge’s dishevelment, punk’s aggression, goth’s darkness—it stands in stark opposition to their overt nonconformity. Those scenes would have sneered both at Weezer’s wholesome brand of retro and its ability to blend effortlessly into everyday, non‑subcultural life. And, in fact, I’d argue there’s a bit of conscious subversion there—even provocativeness.

In that interview I referenced earlier about the Blue Album’s cover artwork, Koch goes on to say:

“The guys actually went out and found 4 matching striped button down shirts (1), and in fact in late 1993 they played at least one show wearing them, much to the contempt of the LA scenesters of the era. Noted 60’s fashion photographer Peter Gowland was contacted to do the shoot, as his mellow pastel colored shots of girls in bikinis and guys out golfing had the exact ‘anti-90’s’ feeling we needed.” 

(1) To match what the Beach Boys wore on the cover of the Do It Again! collection; the idea was later dropped.

Perhaps, in the end, Weezer’s Blue Album aesthetic participates in the eternal dialectic of subversion: by subverting the visual codes of alternative culture—rebelling against rebellion itself—it both undermines and renews the notion of what it means to be “alternative.” Subversion, after all, has a habit of devouring its own tail: once an iconoclastic style becomes familiar, it risks self‑parody or collapse into cliché. 

Yet every act of reclamation also plants the seed of something novel, an offshoot that, in time, will itself ossify and demand its own counter‑gesture. Weezer’s embrace of the plain and the uncool is a cultural reference of its own, now, sparking its own series of references and parodies. And the aesthetic it has come to typify has grown so large and self‑contained, it no longer stands as a rejection of alternative fashion, but as its own distinctive form of “alternative” dress.

Rita Chandler
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