Mood-Board Parties: How Gen-Z Turns Hostel Rooms Into Festive Visual Diaries

Kunwar Gaurav Giri

Hostel rooms have always been temporary spaces — four walls borrowed for a few years before life moves on. The contemporary Generation Z hostel embodiment is turning the otherwise conventionally less artistic forms of their transition into adulthood into visual diaries via the use of the concept of a mood-board party. Mood-board parties are very new and developing as a form of culture, ultimately uniting creativity, a sense of belonging, and memory, as well as a bit of an underground culture or rebellion.

Mood-board parties do not create the same standard, formal, and tidy (in a ‘clean’ formal) mood boards as found within studios. Rather, they are messy, eclectic, and from personal experiences (dreams, memories, inside jokes, cravings, etc.) that get bigger and evolve into a collage that is ‘growing’ throughout the wall/s of a hostel. And the ‘venue’ of such events (parties) is providing a new way for Generation Z to celebrate the idea of how raw and unrefined the hostel experience is.

A Mood Board Is Not Just a Board — It’s Emotional Architecture

For Gen Z, mood boards are less about having an aesthetic and more about having a source of emotional reassurance. With all the back-and-forth associated with classes, deadlines, competitions, and figuring out who they are, the mood boards of Gen Z serve as visual anchors that help define the ever-changing emotional complexity of being a young adult — what they’re feeling at that particular time, what they’re passionate about at that time, what their future aspirations are, and what the emotional highs and lows of living in a hostel are like.

Students paste everything imaginable:

• a crumpled Metro ticket from a spontaneous trip
• a photo of their friends eating Maggi at 2 a.m.
• dried festival flowers
• a sketch made during boredom
• printouts of quotes that helped them survive exam week
• the wrapper of a chocolate gifted by a roommate after a bad day

In a way, these boards become architectures of memory, turning small hostel rooms into autobiographical spaces.

Why Parties? Because Gen-Z Knows the Power of Collective Creativity

Initially, mood-board parties began with a single contribution (a roommate pasting photographs) while other roommates offered a little light or a postcard until they evolved into a “new” type of party – featuring music playlists, scissors and tape scattered on the floor, lots of soft conversation in the background, and a very enjoyable and somewhat different act of creating something, without needing to complete it to see its beauty.

Unlike traditional parties, mood-board gatherings don’t demand loud energy, glamorous clothes, or big budgets. Instead, they invite intimacy. They are “quiet festivals”, where the celebration is in the details:

• The friend who suggests a better placement for a picture
• The laughter over a terrible drawing someone insists on including
• The silence that suddenly feels comfortable
• The stories stirred by an old photograph

This is not decorating — it’s storytelling. And everyone gets a chapter.

The Gen-Z Twist: Turning Transience Into Identity

Hostel life is temporary, and Gen Z knows it. Perhaps that’s why they cling to small rituals that give meaning to fleeting years. Mood-board parties let them rewrite the idea of temporary living. They transform plain rooms — often identical from one hostel to another — into personalised ecosystems.

Every board tells a different story:

• a wall filled with polaroids of sunsets — someone learning to slow down
• a neon-themed board with sarcasm quotes — someone finding humour in chaos
• a board filled with family pictures — someone steadying themselves against homesickness

Gen Z isn’t decorating walls; they’re claiming space in a world that often feels too fast, too digital, and too overwhelming.

A Gentle Resistance Against Loneliness and Digital Fatigue

Ironically, the generation most active on social media is also the one most aware of its emotional side effects. Mood-board parties offer a break from curated feeds and filtered realities. Here, imperfections are welcome. Nothing is cropped; nothing needs a caption.

The boards are tactile, imperfect, human — a refreshing contrast to screens. They remind students they are not just DP photos or usernames but living people with messy handwriting, creased memories, and real stories.

And for many, these boards act as soft antidotes to loneliness. Every image pinned on the wall is a reminder: you are not alone in this place. Something as simple as a shared poster can make a room feel like it belongs to everyone inside it.

The Unexpected Afterlife of a Mood Board

By the end of the academic year, these festive visual diaries almost feel alive. They have absorbed heartbreaks, exam fears, birthday surprises, festival nights, homesick tears, and spontaneous laughter. When it’s finally time to pack up, students often find it harder to peel off the pictures than to leave the room itself. Many click one last photo of the board — the last frame of a movie they lived in. Because mood-board parties are not just about decoration. They are about turning the ordinary into the unforgettable.

A New Hostel Tradition with an Old Heart

Mood-board parties may be a Gen-Z invention, but their essence is timeless: humans gathering to express, remember, and belong. And in campuses across regions like Greater Noida, Noida, and student hubs near top 10 universities, this culture feels even more alive — fuelled by diverse friendships, shared late-night creativity, and the unique freedom of hostel living. These handcrafted collages give hostelers something rare — a physical reminder of their shared journey.

They turn plain rooms into emotional landmarks. They turn moments into memories.
They turn hostel walls into living, breathing diaries of youth. And most beautifully, they turn strangers into storytellers.

Kunwar Gaurav Giri is Chairperson, Annapurna Hostel