We are witnessing the implosion of the trend cycle in real time
and why that may not be the worst thing
Skinny jeans are back! A sponsored post from Vogue appeared in my Instagram feed proclaimed that as dictated by the F/W 2024 shows, skinny jeans will be everywhere later this year. The New York Times also recently published an article explaining the reactionary rise of baggy jeans, effectively ending a 10-year reign of skinny jeans that began roughly around the time I noticed the cool-girl version of my middle school uniform included skin-tight khakis from Hollister. If you have spent any time on Tik Tok and Instagram you are likely aware of the nature of these cycles and various microtrends, many of which we can confidently lay at the feet of Hailey Bieber. These include but are in no way limited to:
tomato girl
vanilla girl
glazed donut nails
blueberry nails
strawberry makeup
latte makeup
eclectic grandpa
coastal grandma
If you have seen this content, you have probably also seen videos and thinkpieces ridiculing these trends and expressing exhaustion women feel at the changing goalposts of compulsory heterosexuality. “What the fuck is a TOMATO GIRL?” we groan as we swipe through a carousel of filtered images that conjure up something about oysters and The Talented Mr. Ripley. While Covid may have been the death knell for jeans with high spandex content (it’s all about choosing “pieces” with “high-quality natural materials” now), it also made us look at our phones a whole lot more. Perceiving so many more people and their outfits on a daily basis means that we become infatuated and disillusioned with different items on an exponential curve. We burned through coquette so fast that if you took a six-week social media hiatus at its peak you would have missed it.
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Think back to the early 2010s. The internet as we know it was just beginning. Mad Men was a cultural phenomenon and swing music was having its umpteenth renaissance. A-line dresses, polka dots, and peter pan collars were the thing and I was knee-deep browsing the ModCloth website after school. The mid 2010s, Coachella and boho style were major cultural influences — e.g., the flower crown SnapChat filter (don’t come for me I didn’t have SnapChat and have no idea what that’s called), tribal tattoos, and lest we forget that summer where we all got feathers in our hair?? I realize this is not the most direct support for my thesis, but for the sake of argument let’s call this a loose return to 70s aesthetics. In 2016, Stranger Things came out and we were all obsessed with 80s fashion for a minute — remember that collection Target did with all the clothes from the “Material Girl” sequence in that show? Then for a few brief years pre-pandemic, the Central Perk logo was screen-printed on sweatshirts and mugs everywhere and we were all wearing straight jeans again. In 2024, Y2K is already on its way out and making way for fashion that is new to teenagers but eerily similar to those of us that were jealous *ahem* of the Abercrombie and Hollister-privileged among us in middle school. To me, the supposed resurgence of skinny jeans marks the final breakdown of the cycle. If a defining trend, maybe THE defining trend of the previous decade, can go out and back into fashion in under four years, then, painting with extremely broad strokes, we have recycled everything there is to recycle.
Now of course, Trends™️ in and of themselves are not going away. I see three potential pathways for social media-fueled trends going forward now that cyclical trends have been broken down:
Clean girl (basic, and let’s be real — white) aesthetic:
Maybe at some point in the future I will write more extensively about this, but I want to preface by saying that I am in the camp that basic ≠ bad! Anyone who says so doesn’t like women! However, I think that this pathway is uniquely impervious to cycles as it is an endless trajectory of the new. In the early-mid 2000s, particularly in my experience growing up in North Carolina, basic was Jack Rogers sandals, Lilly Pulitzer, and Nike shorts with an oversized Vineyard Vines tee. Today, it is Stanleys, that Sol de Janeiro spray, Beis bags, Aligns and Scubas, etc. While the Nike shorts and oversized tee look is still a nostalgic and comfortable favorite of mine for summer days, it’s not coming back into mainstream fashion any time soon. I actually feel that dressing in a way that is “basic” can extremely comforting, and not just because when something is deemed basic it is usually because a large group of women likes a product for a good reason. What if I want to look presentable but I don’t want to think about it or draw attention to myself? There is a lot of relief that comes from wearing what everyone else is wearing sometimes. However, buying into that sense of comfort does require constantly buying and, inevitably, discarding. This trend pathway has historically been aligned with the runaway train of capitalism where there is always something new to be consumed as the old is cast aside, never to be picked up again. The comfort of blending in comes at a price.
I'm wrecking my Pinterest algorithm for this research I fear
Micro trends/aesthetics:
As reliably as there are those who enjoy the basic trends (which we all do to some extent), there are the Aquariuses out there, real or honorary, who will do anything to simply not do what everyone else is doing. This is where the minute diversification of trends and the repetition of cycles comes in. A scroll on the Instagram explorer page reveals any number of small-time influencers whose carefully curated aesthetic begs the question — so what do you actually wear to the gym? To the extent that these people encourage “staying true to your own style”, I think that there is value for the person consuming their content. However, these carefully curated “Pinterest girl” aesthetics still require LOTS of consumption. To their credit, a lot of the time that is consumption of small brands, vintage, or thrifted items, but at the end of the day it is still money leaving your bank account. I have found that following many of these influencers both increases my confidence that there is no one right thing to wear while at the same time increasing my anxiety about having a defined personal brand or aesthetic because I can’t spend hours of my life and lots of money doing that kind of in-depth online shopping. The pressure for everyone to have painstakingly edited their wardrobe to reflect exactly who they are as a person makes me feel that if I give in and wear my pink Scuba sweatshirt out of the house, then I have admitted defeat in my commitment to my personal style. I am forgettable. The longer we stay on the internet, the more micro these trends will become in the constant pursuit of differentiation. That pursuit will mean that we continue to buy. I’m not calling any one influencer out because I follow and enjoy these accounts — for any form of artistic expression it’s important to be exposed to a variety of ideas that you yourself would never think of for growth. Since I have already committed to placing these macro trend observations on the spectrum of capitalism to socialism, I think this brand of internet belongs somewhere in the middle and it heavily depends on the person running the account and the size of their following.
Victoria Paris, Victoria Montanari, Mya Gelber, and Lily Chapman via Instagram Logging off and touching grass:
If you’re reading this, then you likely have had a long-standing interest in fashion as a form of art, confidence, and self-expression. And yet, the above two options leave you caught somewhere between a rock and a hard place because you can either expend less mental energy choosing because you buy into new trends and enjoy the novelty and social acceptance that brings (totally valid), or you spend vast amounts of time and energy agonizing over wardrobe choices because you want to differentiate and express yourself in a world where you have more input on what to wear than ever in history (also totally valid). I go back and forth, as I think many of us who are operating with real-world money do. We won’t spend time right now discussing how men don’t have to deal with this and the double standards and unfairness of these pressures because that much is obvious. Regardless of where you feel you align here, what these two pathways have in common is their expense.
Dressing yourself in clothes that bring you joy is one of the simple pleasures of life. I think the collective exhaustion I described with blueberry milk nails and coastal cowgirl aesthetic may actually push some of us to stop giving a fuck, to the extent that we can. Most of us are on budgets, greedflation is very much a thing, and the realization that no matter how you engage with fashion content you’re going to want to spend more has driven me, at least, to be so worn thin over all this that some days I want to throw in the towel completely. The silver lining is that when trends are so diversified and expensive to the point that the wheels have completely fallen off, it comes with a freedom to actually just wear what you want and what you already have. Your old American Eagle Soft & Sexy shirts, a pair of skinny jeans you spent a lot of money on and now feel bad about not wearing. There is so much freedom in putting on the clothes you like because of their texture, how the color looks on you, or because it has nostalgic and comfort value for you — like my Nike shorts! When you do make purchases, it can be because there is something intrinsic about the item that appeals to you, free from external pressures. Then you are free to go out and spend time on other things and people, to read books and be in your community.
At the end of the day, a large part of the ability to partake in trends is financial privilege. For example, if you’ve planned a wedding in the last few years, you have come to the realization that having a wedding on a budget means that your wedding Pinterest board is highly unrealistic and you are largely at the mercy of whatever is en vogue on a population level because that is what is most affordable and widely-available at the time. The same thing goes for clothes. Trend anxiety and the pressures to consume are not going away any time soon, and none of us are immune to or above them. And giving up social media and refusing to interact with the fashion content you enjoy is not a sustainable solution nor what I am suggesting here. But unless you are Sofia Richie Grainge setting the trends or an aspiring Pinterest girl outfit influencer, give yourself a little grace and freedom. Enjoy and take inspiration from fashion on social media in a way that feels meaningful and healthy to you.