Trends Are Trending: Suddenly Everything Is In — & Out — Of Fashion Faster Than Ever – The Zoe Report

Rattling off fashion’s current hottest “trends” can feel something like a Stefon sketch from Saturday Night Live : Barbiecore , night luxe, coastal grandmother , vacationcore, indie sleaze, balletcore. This season has, quite literally, just about everything — and by the time you read this, it’s likely that half of these will be outdated and a new crop of trending terms will have popped up to replace them.

It seems like the only real, reliable trend right now in fashion is, well, trends. The trend cycle has sped up to a dizzying pace, to be sure, and most of that will growth is driven by TikTok, where individual creators can single-handedly create the newest thing with one viral video. But the particular popular social media app couldn’t have done it alone; would you be all that surprised to learn that the COVID-19 pandemic had a hand in creating today’s head-spinning trend landscape?

“TikTok will be such an interesting conversation because it’s really accelerated the trend cycle since 2020, ” says Cassandra Napoli, a senior strategist at trend forecasting agency WGSN. “Before that, people were living their lives outside, and it was business as usual. Then, all of a sudden, we were all confined to our homes, and there was little else left to do but scroll TikTok. We spent all this time on digital media, and as a result associated with that, between 2020 up until now, the trend cycle has accelerated at an exponential pace. ”

The proof is in the numbers, which are staggering in some cases: #nightluxe took off upon TikTok in the beginning of the year and offers been used some 47 million times since. The hashtag #coastalgrandmother is now from 167 million views worldwide. And # cottagecore , which first took hold during the pandemic, is holding strong with 10. 8 billion views, 2 . 1 billion dollars of which usually happened within 2022 by yourself.

“Aesthetic” Culture Is Now All-Encompassing

The meme-ification of fashion trends isn’t particularly new — recall 2014’s “normcore” phenomenon, for example — yet there’s a new pressure to keep up with the punishing speed at which these trends rise and then die out. With more traditional fashion trends, there were always ways for people to incorporate those changes into their own wardrobe; maybe this was a matter of adding in a new accessory or trying out the latest print in a favorite silhouette. That’s no longer possible with these brand new social media-driven trends, that are meant in order to encompass an entire lifestyle rather than just one or two key pieces in your closet.

“Before, I could pick plus choose what I was participating in, but also still maintain some aspect of my own personal style that I did not have to sacrifice to have any kind of interpersonal relevancy, ” explains Gabrielle Prescod , fashion director at large for Blanc Magazine . “I feel like that is becoming less and less [true] now, because with all of the social exposure that almost all these other trends are getting, it is kind associated with pushing whatever you are usually drawn to out of design. ”

But how much stock should we be putting in this particular virtual avalanche of styles? Many of them can be traced back to a single viral movie created by a social media user; creator Lex Nicoleta can take the credit for “coastal grandmother, ” while “indie sleaze” came from Olivia V . What happens from there, according to Vox senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings, is that other makers see a good online success they want to emulate.

“I think there’s this race to name the next thing — whether the particular next thing exists or not is kind of beside the point, ” she says. “It’s more just like, ‘I coined this cool term; here’s one example that will may or may not actually be happening. ’”

The particular Algorithm Amplification Effect

Once a video like this particular takes off, it teaches the particular algorithm that people are interested in that will concept — and thus, an actual trend is born. As other designers see a topic going viral, they, too, want to get within on the potential for views. “If you have a decent following on TikTok, like, you are probably burnt out; you are probably feeling like a person need to post multiple times the day; you are sick associated with coming up with ideas, ” Jennings says.

“When a brand new pattern comes along, that gives you a video idea; like, ‘Oh, I may do what ever my point may be — thrifting, beauty, get ready along with me — and you can just say, ‘I’m doing a coastal grandma thing such as that , ’” she explains. “ And you’re hopping on a trend, which might increase your chances of getting looped into the For You page on certain people’s feeds. ”

The more conventional media outlets pick up the baton following that, carrying these microtrends from their original platforms in order to the broader fashion industry at big. In a piece for Vox , Jennings details how a combination of pressure to perform on an SEO-driven Internet and the hustle to be the first to report upon something buzzy has created the perfect environment for a flash-in-the-pan viral video clip to become a good actual, industry-influencing trend.

Style Industry Styles & Social Media Trends Are Locked In A Cycle

Still, the current trend landscape is definitely tied up inside a “chicken or the egg” situation: As much as social media can influence trends happening in the particular fashion world, the capital-I industry is equally responsible for sparking ideas across various platforms. Prescod cites the still-popular Y2K revival as an example: When a brand like, say, Blumarine mines its own archives in order to put a new twist on older pieces — low-rise pants, handkerchief skirts, butterfly tops — a fashion-obsessed Internet community will then dig up photos of the originals and find even more things to dredge back upward.

“Whatever the particular fashion business does, they dictate fashionable to the certain extent, after which social media could be like, ‘If this is relevant, remember when this was relevant and this happened, ’ and after that these people take that and run with it, ” the girl says. “That might be more related to a lot more masses due to the fact social press has a larger reach compared to our style community does. ”

This is exactly how we end up inside a world exactly where a hit Miu collection can lead to a full-fledged renaissance of those ultra-micro-miniskirts you may keep in mind from your days as a high school student, with one key generational difference: Millennials approach these types of fashion moments from the comforting nostalgia — “It’s kind of like a big hug, talking about the Backstreet Boys and Y2K plus things like that will, ” explains Napoli — where Gen Z has just enough distance to romanticize the era. (Imagine telling your younger self that your own flared dance pants would one day become worth such reverence. )

Yes, Nostalgia Is Moving Faster Compared to Ever Before

And if this feels like that nostalgia-driven cycle is moving faster than ever now, as well, that’s because it is. Once again, technology is usually responsible with regard to completely shaking up the generational order. Prior to, it made sense regarding generations in order to be spaced about 15 years apart; baby boomers had a completely different childhood experience than Gen X, who themselves lived within a different world than millennials. But still by the particular tail finish from the millennial generation, points had changed just enough to require a new term intended for those born within the three-year span of the millennial/Gen Z divide (that might cover among 1993 and 1998, if you’re curious): Zillenials. With the rate our current technology is expanding, that’s only bound in order to break down further.

“The fringe generation is definitely becoming more important because our own relationship to technology is so different; it didn’t accelerate as quickly then, plus so somebody born at the beginning and with the tail end of the generation shared commonalities, ” Napoli says. “But if a person look at today, the technology that exists for the end associated with Gen Z versus the starting of Style Z, it’s so different and their particular experiences coming of age are going to end up being vastly various, because simply by the period the youngest Gen Z . reach adulthood, the metaverse might be here. ”

The particular result is a collapse of that nostalgia, which means where developments might have operated upon a 20-year cycle before, they’re right now having resurrections closer in order to the ten to fifteen year range. That old style adage about sitting out on a trend revival of something you lived through the first time around is getting harder to live by — and, more importantly, it leads one to wonder whether we’re regarding to hit rock-bottom when it comes to new suggestions.

“Now, I feel like we’re in the late aughts to early 2010s, and I’m simply like, all of us don’t possess anything else in order to reference? We’ve exhausted the particular ’60s, the ’50s, the particular ’70s, the ’80s, the particular ’90s, that we’re today up into the 2010s to harp back on? ” Prescod asks. “It doesn’t feel like we should be that will close. If we do not really have any original concepts outside associated with that, I’m concerned about what people are now drawing inspiration from. ”

To Participate Or Not To Take part: That Is The Question

We’ve been so exposed to the deluge of new hashtags to try out, it’s hardly a surprise that this concept of taking part in trends can be starting to feel exhausting to all generations. Gen Z is still interested in tendencies, but in accordance to Napoli, their approach to these popular hashtags is certainly centered around the idea of finding a community rather than constantly switching up style — hence, those lifestyle-encompassing aesthetics. They even built a platform, the particular Aesthetics Wiki , in order to share plus name all of the different sub-genres. “Gen Z are actually looking to social platforms to find camaraderie, to find themselves and to seem like they know themselves, plus part associated with which is finding like-minded people online, ” she says.

“This umbrella term of the ‘core’ aesthetics: If I’m ‘cottagecore, ’ what does that mean? That helps me identify with other people who might be like-minded, this helps me personally find people that share interests and values and things such as that, ” Napoli describes. “There’s this particular appetite in order to curate our lives, and make our lifestyles and who we are usually fit into an umbrella term so that we all can understand it, and we can build community around it. That appetite really is a Gen Z-focused trend, rather than a millennial tendency. ”

Maybe it’s time for us to think more like Gen Z: Until the next coverage terms sparks a feeling of local community for you — I personally is waiting for #BlairWaldorfCore, yet that might just sit under the already-existing #oldmoneyaesthetic (388 million sights on TikTok this year) — feel free to sit away the next wave of virus-like fashion hashtags sure to strike come fall.