Fashion is just TikTok now

Gen-Z has inverted the design process — aesthetics like Barbiecore, Cottagecore, Dark Academia and Coastal Grandma originated bottoms-up from social media and resale platform content instead of top-down from fashion brands and retailers. As a result, many Gen-Zers tend to adapt pieces representative of trends into their own personal styles, as opp

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So there’s a weird thing going on where there’s abundance, and yet, at the same time, we’ve become really conservative about our own styles, because people fundamentally don’t want to adopt things that feel inauthentic to them, or will be judged inauthentic.

And because culture is so ephemeral, there’s just more stuff that people are worried that —

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Virality treats humans like fast fashion: algorithmically generated products to shove onto all of our screens at the same time, on which we then spend enormous sums of money and attention before ending up in the literal and/or figurative landfill.

A generation’s currency is measured in trends, the moments that make an era mouthwateringly memorable. Only these fads are no longer dictated by a handful of tastemakers. Instead, what gets crowned as cool is often determined by how well a trend appeals to the rhythms of a specific platform. An idea’s artistic or cultural cachet depends on how easi... See more

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it ... See more

(In The Death of Trends, Vox's Terry) Nguyen is examining a more abstract consequence of this rapid acceleration, which is that it saps trends of their subcultural context, reducing them to status symbols that represent status itself, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading to more breadcrumbs. Her piece is focused on fashion trends, or aesthetic ... See more