Noun: "(neologism) a fashion and visual art style, characterized by aquatic themes and colours, rave culture, and the digital aesthetic of the 1990s"edit
2012, Marke B., "Mermaids vs. unicorns", San Francisco Bay Guardian, 10 January 2012:
Seapunk's aqueous adherents, mostly in the Midwest but spreading fast […] have been characterized as goth mermaids, which certainly captures the look and feel: think turquoise-dyed hair and an embrace of all things oceanic, yay for steampunk jellyfish outfits.
But halfway through, she switched to singing "Part of Me," her ostensibly serious new single that may or may not be motivated by her recent divorce from Russell Brand, all while still looking very seapunk-y.
Sprouting from the digital petri dish of social networking, seapunk is a whimsical style that mashes together cartoonish aquatic themes, rave culture and a nostalgia for ’90s Internet imagery.
2012, Helen Stringer, "The Looking Glass", Time Off, 4 April 2012, page 23:
The journalist turned artist is forgetting her mostly adolescent participants are just internet happy, neon-haired teenagers with a penchant for online networking and an underdeveloped set of social boundaries and not some magical bunch of septum-pierced seapunk dollar signs upon whose bandwagon she'd best be jumping if she wants to get kids on side.
So if you want to flaunt your prism peacock back piece, pyramid-shaped jewels, or "seapunk" coif—or if you just want to "feel it"—the heat is at Volunteer Park this Saturday, all day.
The instant Tess's aquamarine steez caught our eye, we had just one word for her: seapunk? "That's kind of a mixture of '90s-retro punk rock, but with barnacles instead of studs," she said. "Some people say my look is seapunk, but I think it's more mermaid."
2012, The Grinnell Review, Volume XII, Fall 2012, page 91:
Leah Yacknin-Dawson '13 only thinks seapunk is cool when Rihanna does it.
But the progenitors of the seapunk aesthetic style — all yin-yangs, aquatic imagery, and 3-D renderings cribbed from '90s fashion and early web memes — appear for all the world to be deathly slighted anytime the mainstream jacks their flipper-fueled swagger.
Both videos take freely from the Lisa Frank aesthetic of seapunk, a web-based art genre that was formed after someone tweeted about a dream he had about a leather jacket with barnacles as studs.
Many thought this understandably short-lived meme had died a watery death in 2011, but when Rihanna took to Saturday Night Live to perform Diamonds recently, with a full-on seapunk-influenced production, it got a new lease of life.
She also lashed out at Azealia Banks, who dropped an explicitly seapunk video the same week, but Azealia’s fine in my books. She’s always been into seapunk stuff, she “came from the internet” unlike Rihanna, she actually commits to and genuinely engages with the seapunk visuals (e.g riding dolphins) and they at least somewhat fit her song and attitude.
