It was raining when I got in line too early on Glendale Blvd to the Echoplex for a New Year’s Event, dubbed “Tumblr Prom.” My friends, of course, were on the guest list (it is L.A. after all), and my last-minute planning required waiting for the box office to open because they sold out online. I took shelter for over two hours under the Sunset overpass before I stepped foot into the venue. I anticipated a long line because the party was reposted by the 200k+ follower Instagram account: @indiesleaze, and the promise of the event was to be photographed by the famous Cobrasnake.
The sidewalk stayed empty until 15 minutes before open when the groups of partiers alike formed behind me. I’d underestimated the Angeleno disdain for rain.
The dress code, a familiar name, Indie sleaze, filled the event space in a collage of mismatched textures: faux fur, spikes, thick-glitter makeup, leather, and rolled-up dress shirts.
When It Was Just a Night Out
M.I.A. performing at a Marc Jacobs party / The Cobrasnake, 2008
Indie sleaze originally emerged in the late 2000’s, spanning into the 2010’s as a nod to the decade’s nightlife culture. It was messy, overexposed, and documented with flash. Cobrasnake’s work is synonymous with the indie sleaze aesthetic and is widely regarded as the reference for the style’s current-day incarnation, an archive.
This last New Year’s Eve, the flash of his camera was everywhere all at once. People dressed as ridiculously and posed as icons in hopes of being the baddest of them all on Cobrasnake’s website the next day, an interesting internet phenomenon seemingly gone with the wind, alive for one night only in L.A.
Tumblr Taught Us
Mary Kate Olsen / The Cobrasnake, 2008
Indie sleaze is the latest in a string of aesthetic revivals taken up by Gen Z, who made up most of the crowd. For my fellow Gen Z contemporaries, indie sleaze is something we discovered through our middle school Tumblr feeds, largely through Cobrasnake’s party shots. The crowd reflected that lineage clearly. The silhouettes, textures, and styling all pointed back to the same visual references, like the room had been assembled from a shared archive.
However, if I’m being honest, the room lacked the conditions that shaped indie sleaze the first time around. The posture of not caring, which once came from existing outside polish and taste, doesn’t translate in the same way when the aesthetic is approached primarily as an image.
This isn’t unique to indie sleaze. Older trends resurface all the time in the cultural zeitgeist: Y2K, old money, scene, and now indie sleaze. It’s easy to frame this as trend recycling, but that explanation doesn’t fully account for the behavior’s consistency. In a culture where choices are constantly read and explained, older aesthetics provide a way to exist without having to define everything from scratch.
A Broader Pattern of Nostalgia
From left to right: The Dare, Charli XCX, and Billie Eilish / The Cobrasnake, 2024
Gen Z has grown up with everything visible all the time. Style doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s immediately read, shared, and reacted to. There’s little room for things to remain unclear or unresolved, and choices tend to arrive with explanations already attached. Indie sleaze doesn’t easily fit into this environment. Even in its Gen Z evolution, it remains visually busy and slightly uncomfortable. The references overlap, the images refuse to resolve neatly, and there’s no single description that can summarize the look perfectly.
As the countdown to 2026 began, the night didn’t feel like the past returning so much as a pause from the present. Moments like this tend to surface first in rooms like these, before they harden into language or trend cycles.
Gen Z doesn’t seem especially interested in living in the past. However, they keep returning to it anyway, borrowing its shapes and surfaces, not because it was better, but because it still offers a way of being that feels harder to find now.
The indie sleaze crowd at Tumblr Prom / The Cobrasnake, 2026
You just had to be there.
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For more of The Cobrasnake visit: https://www.thecobrasnake.com/
