Vaporwave

A remix aesthetic of Roman busts, dolphins, early Windows chrome, Japanese lettering and magenta-to-cyan gradients, built out of consumer imagery from the recent past.

Vaporwave: a pink-to-mint gradient, a script line with a hard black shadow, a tilted browser window, a field of mint squares and a compact disc. — Sample Vaporwave Artwork, Kazachstanski nygus.
Public domain
Public domain: The maker uploaded the work to Commons on 2023-11-20 under a public-domain dedication; the uploader is the maker, read from the first revision.
Retrieved 2026-09-10.

Vaporwave: a banded orange sun over a magenta perspective grid under a starred violet sky, with a wireframe ridge. — Vaporwave WP3, Mike Grauer Jr. CC BY 2.0. Scaled to 1920 wide. Retrieved 2026-09-10.

A Roman marble bust of Herodotos, second century AD, the material vaporwave lifts: this is what it is made of, not the style itself. — What it is made of: a marble bust of Herodotos, the Met, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photograph; the sculptor unknown. CC0 1.0. Cropped to the bust. Retrieved 2026-09-10.

Near it

Memphis

Y2K Frutiger Aero

What it is made of

palette	magenta and cyan, often as a gradient
imagery	classical sculpture, early computing chrome, palms, grids on a horizon
type	full-width Latin characters, and Japanese set as decoration

Where it came from

An internet music genre first, around 2010 to 2012, whose cover art became a visual language of its own.