Belgian designer Jacques Averna built electric guitars shaped like clouds, fried eggs, feet, and padlocks. They're painted in bright, saturated colors — bubblegum pink, sky blue, yolk yellow — that photograph beautifully against white walls. According to Designboom, the instruments "wear bright colors that make them more alluring to look at, capturing the full form of the shape they're borrowing." That phrasing is doing a lot of work. "Alluring to look at" is the operative phrase. Not "alluring to play." Not "engineered for tone." The guitars are designed to be seen, not heard.
Averna's work sits at the intersection of industrial design and internet aesthetics — a place where musical instruments are judged by their shareability first and their sound second. The shapes are clever enough to warrant a scroll-stop. The colors are optimized for engagement. The objects themselves function as guitars in the most literal sense: they have strings, necks, and pickups. But their primary function is visual. They're props for content creators who need a hook, conversation pieces for design-forward spaces, and collectibles for people who want to own something that looks like nothing else on the market. What they are not, functionally, is a serious answer to the question "what guitar should I play?"
This is not a critique of Averna's craftsmanship. The guitars are well-made, intentional, and self-aware. The issue is what they represent: the colonization of musical instrument design by social media aesthetics. Guitars have always been about identity — Fender Stratocasters and Gibson Les Pauls are as much cultural signifiers as they are tools. But those designs emerged from decades of iteration by players who cared about sustain, resonance, and ergonomics. The shapes became iconic because they worked. Averna's guitars bypass that process entirely. They start with the image and work backward to the instrument. The question isn't "how does this sound?" but "how does this photograph?"
The shift mirrors what's happened across other creative industries where virality has become the primary success metric. Paris Hilton's bathtub skincare selfie turned her personal life into an ad network. The Row serves berries at fashion shows because every detail is brand strategy. Averna's guitars are the same logic applied to musical instruments: design for the feed, not the stage. The result is objects that exist primarily as content — things to be photographed, shared, and liked, but not necessarily used.
There's a broader question here about what happens when Instagram metrics replace traditional measures of quality. In fashion, it's led to collections designed for the front-row photo rather than the wearer's closet. In architecture, it's produced buildings optimized for drone footage rather than human experience. In music, it's created instruments that prioritize aesthetic novelty over playability. The cloud guitar might get 100,000 likes. A well-balanced Telecaster won't. But the Telecaster will still be playable in 20 years, and the cloud guitar will be a design curiosity gathering dust in a corner.
Averna's work also raises uncomfortable questions about who these guitars are for. Professional musicians need instruments that hold tuning, balance well, and produce consistent tone. Hobbyists need guitars that are comfortable to play and don't fight against their technique. Collectors want provenance, rarity, and craftsmanship. Averna's guitars serve none of those audiences directly. They serve the audience that values objects as content generators — people who need a visual hook for their creative work or their personal brand. That's a legitimate market, but it's a fundamentally different one than the market for musical instruments as tools.
The irony is that guitar design has always been conservative for good reason. The electric guitar's basic form — a solid body with a bolt-on or set neck, a scale length between 24 and 25.5 inches, and pickups positioned for tonal variety — emerged because those specifications produce reliable, playable instruments. Deviations from that template usually fail not because they're visually unappealing but because they're ergonomically or acoustically compromised. A guitar shaped like a foot might look striking in a gallery, but it's going to have balance issues, uncomfortable access to higher frets, and unpredictable resonance. Those aren't problems if the guitar is a sculpture. They're dealbreakers if it's an instrument.
What Averna's guitars reveal is that social media aesthetics have created a parallel market for musical instruments — one where playability is optional and virality is essential. That market will continue to grow as long as content creation remains a viable career path and personal branding requires constant visual novelty. The question is whether that market will eventually influence mainstream instrument design or remain a niche curiosity. If the former, the electric guitar's next evolution might prioritize how it photographs over how it sounds. If the latter, Averna's work will be remembered as a fascinating footnote in design history — beautiful, clever, and ultimately beside the point.
