Fuck unicorns / The meaning of the mushroom

I’ve been thinking about how the images of different animals, creatures, plants become bizarrely popular for a time. That you suddenly see them on everything, from t-shirts to pencil cases to posters even down to nail art, tattoos and cake decorations. My dad and I even have a theory that you can see this play out in inflatable pool animals. When I was a kid the inflatable dolphin reigned supreme and a few years ago you couldn’t move for inflatable unicorns. These micro representations extend all the way up to a kind of wider aesthetic that says something about a particular time. They seem to represent something of the zeitgeist, a totem of the collective unconscious.

It turns out I'm not the only person to have thought about this. In a preliminary google search I asked… Why were we so obsessed with dolphins in the 90’s? A reddit thread popped up with people asking the same question and putting forth a similar idea of a sort of organically arising zodiac. There was some disagreement as to what was most popular in the 00s, with arguments breaking out about whether it had been butterflies or owls that were the most popular. But there was definitely a kind of consensus that different decades had different animals as a kind of emblem or mascot that were plastered over everything.

I’m just about old enough to remember the dolphin craze of the 90’s. Dolphin images were seemingly on everything and even having large kitschy dolphin figurines on mantelpieces was common. I had a dolphin necklace that was the object of an unreasonably obsessive adoration and I remember dolphin rings also being very popular. Today this aesthetic looks frankly so embarrassingly ugly that retrospectively it seems hard to understand. I mean I was 8 but I don’t know what excuse the adults had.

As I’m writing this my dad just walked past and I asked him: “Do you remember in the 90’s when everyone was obsessed with dolphins?”

“Yeah”, he said, “I remember adults having dolphin soft toys. I thought it was kind of infantilised madness. Mind you people still do that with all sorts of things.. Adults behaving like children, playing with toys…” I had to cut him off here because while this is an excellent point and probably warrants its own blog post it wasn’t strictly relevant.

“ What does the dolphin represent to you?” I asked him. “ As an image, what does a dolphin say?”

Without missing a beat he said “Freedom” and that immediately felt right. The 90’s was still the height of seemingly endless growth. The dolphins were like the sleek grey cars everyone drove and wanting to swim with dolphins was the first thing on everyone’s bucket list. According to reddit, children in the 90’s often cited Dolphin Trainer as ‘what they wanted to be when they grew up’ as if this was a genuinely feasible profession.

So if dolphins represent a kind of sleek flashy freedom then what did its successor the butterfly represent? Also freedom perhaps but also beauty and transformation? A kind of pretty glamour that makes me think of lip gloss and dewy makeup. Perhaps this was when makeover culture really took off, with tv saturated with makeover shows and plastic surgery becoming far more common for non celebrities. Perhaps then the subsequent image of the owl was a reaction, a kind of hipster pose in opposition to the ubiquitous butterfly tattoo. I am wise, I am alternative, I would never stoop so low as to get a butterfly ‘tramp stamp’. I remember having an owl t-shirt in the mid 00’s that I thought was the height of cool tucked into my high waisted jeans, flanked by a chequered shirt.

The 2010’s is when things get interesting to me. On the one hand we have the arrival of the pot plant and its aesthetic friends, the cactus and the avocado, which create a kind of general ‘pleasing’ green calm modern neutrality and on the other hand its gaudy opposite, the ultimate sticker on every surface, pink saccharine vomit over every child’s birthday party, the unicorn. The fucking unicorn. If I never see another unicorn cake for the rest of my life it will be too soon. In a few years I reckon, charity shops will be so piled high with children’s unicorn t-shirts it will be like the walls of copies of Fifty Shades of Grey that couldn’t be shifted in 2013. They’ll have to turn it into bunting or rag rugs like the 50 shades of grey forts some amusing charity shop employees built. Most likely they will all end up in landfill, great gleaming piles of pink sparkly fabric to confuse the magpies.

Why unicorns then? As we headed towards the 2020’s what did the image of the unicorn represent? I think the mythical creature of the unicorn tells us to create ourselves, to create our own glamorous personal myth. To show the world how unique we truly are, how sparkly. It is perhaps the apotheosis of the butterfly, of transformation into something enchanting, taken to the furthest extreme. This is not the makeover of the 90’s; this is the complete transformation, extreme makeover into a person so wholly unrecognisable from your original appearance that your own mother wouldn’t recognise you in the street. Because you can be whoever you want to be. Glamour is the highest virtue and the way to truly show who you are on the inside is through a dramatic transformation of the exterior. The unicorn is the perfect effigy of hyper-individualism, the thing that never really existed, we have never really been individuals, we have just conveniently shipped a lot of the labour needed to keep our lives turning over abroad and hidden it from sight. A shiny mirage, a non animal that never was truly real or embodied, a dancing glittering distraction that allows us to tell ourselves that everything is ok, that we are in control because we can express ourselves with unicorn nail art and multicoloured My Little Pony hair.

So then in contrast, what of the ubiquitous image of the pot plant? Arising at a similar time to the unicorn, in abundance in the background of every aesthetic youtuber’s videos, on tea towels, t-shirts, posters, memes about being addicted to buying more plants. Was it just an attempt at a more natural aesthetic? At bringing some comforting aliveness into the sterile environments we now call our home? Or is it deeper than that.The pot plant is certainly a good metaphor for modern times, for domestication, for being cut off from root networks, isolated in silos, to not know your kin. To be taken wherever you need to go, the transient worker’s best friend. Relocation is not a problem if you have no roots. “Keep the aspidistra flying”. And so maybe we can see the pot plant again as a kind of reaction. A soothing aesthetic, a balm for our lonely human existence cut off from other species. The pot plant aesthetic falls neatly into what my partner calls the ‘wellness clinical’ aesthetic. Pink and gold circles painted on the walls. Pot plants hanging in white crochet baskets and tiny shelves big enough to hold just one candle or one crystal. It’s an attempt at something nourishing, an albeit anaemic one that poses no threat to the dominant paradigm. The type of 'wellness' that is your own personal 'journey' that you pay for. Not a collective healing where one relies on others and vice versa.

The recent proliferation of the image of the mushroom in the 2020’s gives me hope, because mushrooms seem to represent something very different from all the previous trendy images. In contrast to the pot plant I think the mushroom represents a longing to reroot, to connect through relational webs and community. To no longer see through the lens of competition. A longing to build the web that might be the safety netting that catches the fall for us all. We are tired of hyper-individualism. I think this is what the mushroom represents. In the end the shiny mirage of the unicorn amounts to a sugar rush, nothing more. I have a feeling now that we want to be fed and to feed in webs of reciprocal and complex relationships. The mushroom is not just an image that you see everywhere on t-shirts, socks and mugs and the subject of awe inspiring time-lapse documentaries, it’s become a new way of explaining our human and ecological functioning, a new metaphor. We are no longer little machines, our brains are not like the internet and we are not demi-gods. The language of mycelium is being used to write a new myth for our times, one that highlights collectiveness. It represents a system of growth and decay, a more accurate representation of the cyclical systems that govern life on earth. A recognition of the need to return to a more cyclical way of living that acknowledges the interrelatedness of all things if we want to save ourselves and other endangered species. Interestingly, the mushroom will be fine, the mushroom eats radiation for breakfast, literally. We however may not be.

So how can we learn from the mushroom? What is the sporing of its image across our aesthetic landscape trying to tell us about the collective yearning of our times? A longing to bed down into place perhaps and yet build intimate, intricate webs of relationships that extend outwards in every direction. What would happen if we sat still long enough for new relationships to form. For real butterflies to come and land on our arms instead of their tattoo replicas, for our skin microbiota to become re-inhabited by local microbes and fungi that make a home in/on us. We don’t need to necessarily eat the shrooms to see things a little differently. Maybe we can feed our own body’s fungi to the bread and eat the bread. Are we then feeding the mushrooms or are they feeding us? This is the type of thinking this age of the mushroom reflects. A radical type of thinking we so desperately need right now.

So long live the time of the mushroom! And particularly fuck the unicorn, let it die and one day reincarnate in a new, less superficial way, as a new kind of myth. And let’s hope that the interest in mushrooms isn’t just a superficial one. Hopefully there’s enough people imbibing the wisdom of Paul Stamets, Merlin Sheldrake and Sophie Strand to realise how powerful these earth allies are, that hopefully this won’t just be another passing fad but represent a shift towards a new way of seeing, relating and understanding ourselves and the natural world. But if not, at the very least, as an aesthetic it definitely beats the dolphin sculptures.