Vaporwave emerged around 2010–2012 as a music genre on Tumblr and SoundCloud — the work of producers like James Ferraro, Ramona Lisa, and the artist working as Macintosh Plus, who slowed down and pitch-shifted samples from 1980s and early 1990s smooth jazz, R&B, and corporate ambient music into something that felt simultaneously familiar and deeply wrong.

The visual aesthetic that attached itself to this music — developed in parallel by graphic designers on the same platforms — was equally specific: the color palette of early consumer computing (cyan, magenta, the specific purple of a Windows 95 screen saver), Greek and Roman sculpture rendered in digital pink and teal, the sun-and-sea backdrop of Miami Vice, early CGI grids, kanji characters used decoratively by people who couldn't read them. The result was nostalgia for a version of the 1980s and early 1990s that was always slightly fictional — the aesthetic of mall culture and early internet filtered through a decade of distance and considerable irony.

The full-width Roman character style — ｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅ, using the Unicode Fullwidth Latin range — became a typographic signature of the genre, as instantly recognizable as any other element.