“Frutiger Aero” is the phrase coined by American illustrator and photographer Sofi Lee to designate a niche aesthetic that dominated our screens between 2004 and 2013. The term juxtaposes two essential elements of 2000s web culture: Frutiger and Windows. Aero font family, the graphical interface of Windows Vista and Windows 7, the operating systems published by Microsoft. On TikTok, Internet users share tips for turning their bathroom into an aquarium under the hashtags #frutigeraero, #frutigeraerocore and #frutigercore and lovingly display a collection of transparent plastic objects: laundry detergent packets, Palmolive shampoo bottles or colorful chairs. And on the Reddit subreddit r/FrutigerAero, we state bluntly: “I would like to live in Frutiger Aero after I am dead and buried.”
The success of this retrofuturistic images expresses nostalgia for a technological era perceived as a kind of Garden of Eden. Here, the promises of technology and the motifs of abundant biodiversity combine: there, a dolphin frolics in turquoise waters bordered by a field full of sunflowers and shiny CD-ROMs… Here, sanitized offices, deserted corridors and huge windows face a luminescent sky. Elsewhere, the hills of California’s Napa Valley wine region are dominated by bubbles and butterflies with wings tinted in saturated orange and yellow. These image fragments parade on the Internet in the form of photomontages accompanied by enthusiastic comments: “I want to be there” ; “Why is the world no longer Frutiger Aero?” ; “Let me return to this universe, thank you.”
“Frutiger Aero was the utopian future we were promised every time we turned on the family computer”says Australian music producer Harvey Miller in the video. An opinion shared by American novelist and web culture specialist Allie Rowbottom, who explains: “Millennials feed into a culture steeped in superhero movies and TV series reboots that harken back to their childhoods, a childhood that merges with early internet bliss. A propensity that resonates with Gen Z.”
“A form of naivety”
In the early 2000s, computers and the Internet became widely available in homes, where users with little experience with computers had to acculturate to new practices. Companies such as Microsoft then turned to “skeuomorphism”, a design technique that uses shadows, reflections and textures against a blue sky background to make interfaces intuitive.
You have 61.58% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
