One basic fact about consumer technology is that, at some point, someone has to persuade you to buy it. In the mid-2000s the persuasion involved a lot of bubbles. Computers came wrapped in glossy, translucent interfaces, desktop wallpapers showed dew on blades of grass, and the general message was that your new PC would put you in touch with nature, or the ocean, or possibly your own higher self. At the time this was just advertising. Twenty years later, a lot of people who were children back then look back on it as a utopia that was stolen from them.
The look has a name: Frutiger Aero. As Kelsey Vlamis reports for Business Insider, the term was coined in 2017 by Sofi Xian, a researcher and founding member of an online group called the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute. She used it for a corporate tech style that ran from the mid-2000s into the early 2010s: glossy surfaces, glass and transparent materials, close-up photos of grass. “Frutiger” is a typeface. “Aero” was Microsoft’s name for the interface design of Windows Vista, which came out in 2006. Xian is clear-eyed about where all of it came from:
“Nobody at the time really thought it was cool. It was a corporate product. It was sold to us.”
She says she doesn’t entirely understand the revival, which has grown well beyond what she first wrote down. Her book on the style, Archaeology of a Promised Future, comes out in November. Her website says it will appear as a standalone volume in the Slovenian art organisation Aksioma’s Multithread series, which hosted a preview talk in Ljubljana in May.
According to Google Trends data, the term started catching on in 2023. There is now a Discord server, a subreddit and millions of views on TikTok under #frutigeraero. Sammy Conti, who is 22, has more than 700,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok for her Frutiger Aero content. Business Insider describes her room as mostly blue with flashes of neon green, with jellyfish and vines hanging from the ceiling, lava lamps and aquarium lamps everywhere, old Nintendo and PlayStation games hung up like art, and a homemade mirror in the shape of an old Windows logo. The holiest image in the movement is “Bliss”, the photo of green hills under a blue sky that shipped as the default Windows XP wallpaper in 2001. Conti recently made a pilgrimage to the spot in Sonoma County, California, and reports that it is “just as beautiful as it is in the photos.”
Here is what she thinks was promised. “You grow up thinking the world is going to be this green utopia where we coexist with nature and have technology and it helps us,” she said. “Then as I started getting older, things became very sleek and modernist, very gray.” And: “We could have lived in that future. It could have been taken care of responsibly in a way that doesn’t take people’s jobs, doesn’t pollute the environment, but it’s not.”
The contrast with the present is easy to draw. Many young people now find technology bland, addictive or worse; AI gets linked to war, mass surveillance and environmental damage; data centers face fierce local opposition on environmental grounds. “It’s really a vision of technology that is quite different to what we have,” said Maria Gemma Brown, a cultural studies researcher at the University of Queensland. Richy Srirachanikorn, a PhD candidate at Concordia University who has interviewed more than 30 people in the community, says the nostalgia is less about the objects than about a feeling. His interviewees described it this way: “Whatever this aesthetic was as a kid, it made me optimistic, not about the future, but about the present.” He found the aesthetic works almost as a “coping mechanism”, and its online communities as places for “respite from the uncertainties of the world.”
The jellyfish were customer acquisition
I think the most interesting point here is Srirachanikorn’s argument about agency, because it is really an argument about bargaining power. In the early 2000s, he suggests, tech companies may have reached for bright colours and nature imagery because they still needed us to buy in. Today their products are close to impossible to avoid. Put it in business terms: the grass and the bubbles were a cost of acquiring customers. When computers and the internet were optional, you courted people with translucent purple laptops and pink MP3 players. Once everyone owns a phone they can’t put down, the courting stops and the product can go gray, which is what a thing looks like when it no longer has to win you over. Conti makes the same point from the customer’s side: products used to have “almost a personality”, and now everything just wants to “fit in.”
So the utopia Gen Z misses was, in a fairly literal sense, a sales pitch. That doesn’t make the feeling fake. Being courted is nicer than being taken for granted.
And the courting is back, in a small way, because the nostalgia is now a market of its own. Austin Horey, who founded the New York brand Unjust Jewelry, has sold more than 10,000 bottles of a Frutiger Aero-inspired fragrance (oceanic, clean, soapy) packaged in a box that plays an original song in the style when you open it. After he released a Windows XP bracelet with the operating system’s old application icons on it, Microsoft partnered with him on a necklace. So the company whose 2006 marketing became a critique of modern tech is now earning licensing revenue from that critique.
Fans celebrate each sign that big tech is coming back around: Xbox’s new glossy neon-green logo; Apple’s Liquid Glass design from last year, which Microsoft itself said on TikTok was reminiscent of Vista; and the budget MacBook Neo, which comes in a bright yellow-green. Conti calls the Neo the most Frutiger Aero product any tech company has put out in years. Apple introduced it in March in four colours, the green one being “citrus”, at a starting price of $599. On June 25 it raised that to $699, MacRumors reported, blaming a memory chip shortage. That is a 17% rise in three and a half months.
Conti hasn’t given up on the original idea, which she sees as worth working toward, “especially as Gen Z moves into these positions of power as we get older.” “I think it’s important not to forget what it still could be,” she said.
Meanwhile you can buy the promised future today, in citrus, for $100 more than it cost in March. Apparently even utopia is exposed to RAM prices.