A few years ago, during a fit of self-actualization, I got my ears pierced. I don’t have any tattoos, and I’ve never even dyed my hair, so the decision to pierce my ears felt both exciting and personally out of the ordinary. I still don’t quite understand why I did it. Men have been piercing their ears for centuries, but I suspect, as with so many things we guys also do, particularly where clothes and accessories are concerned, my decision had something to do with tiny hoops being trendy.
Trends are as old as civilization itself, but the speed at which they move in the age of TikTok and AI-driven algorithms has never been faster. Likewise, with a good portion of the global population on some kind of social media, a trend’s reach has never been farther. These changes—exemplified by my sudden, inexplicable desire for hoops—begged a couple of questions: Where do trends come from now? And how do we know when they’ve run their course? For answers, I turned to the people who study trends for a living.
Nick Paget, the senior menswear strategist at trend forecasting company WGSN, believes that “it will be increasingly hard to look back on this decade and say, ‘Ooh, it was all about this kind of styling, this look’ in the way that we used to be able to say about the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s or ’60s.” Nowadays, it’s like every era-based trend has been chucked into a blender and blitzed into oblivion. Institutional tastemakers, including high-fashion designers and magazines such as this one, seemingly have less say than ever.
To understand what consumers want and where they are headed, WGSN has its own methods of analyzing data. According to Paget, the company uses TikTok metrics to monitor various algorithms (a platform they aptly call “TikTok Dashboard”) to get a more holistic view of what users are interested in. “We neutralize the algorithm bias that someone might have if they just use their own account,” he explains. Via this mechanism, they can effectively watch a fashion trend be born on the runway and transform, grow, and die across social platforms.
Take, for example, the recent resurgence of skinny jeans. In this case, Paget casts a wide net about how we got there: “A darker aesthetic has come out of the geopolitical mood,” he says. “And then something happens like designers start talking about skinny jeans again, and we start thinking, well, could the Hedi Slimane kind of dark, grungy, but slightly glamorous rock star be relevant again?”
As any dogged menswear aficionado knows, slim silhouettes and skintight jeans defined Slimane’s tenure at Dior Homme in the early aughts. Slimane’s punky aesthetic, which helped define the decade’s look, is now a key reference in the indie sleaze revival trending on TikTok; their return is also a reaction to the big-pants trend of the last five years. Slimane’s skinny jeans gave way to over a decade of slim denim being embraced by the general population, but given the pace at which the app’s algorithms cycle through trends now, it seems unlikely to last nearly as long the second time around.
Ziad Ahmed, head of Gen-Z-focused marketing agency UTA Next Gen, spends a lot of time thinking about the pace of trends online. Brands and creators often hire Ahmed to help them connect with a younger audience; his recent work includes a Coach campaign that gave the 85-year-old fashion brand a boost from the likes of pop star Charli xcx and activist Malala Yousafzai. “It’s often the things that middle-school girls are rapturously consuming that [become trends],” Ahmed says. “And once everybody knows it, it may not be that niche trend-setting phenomenon anymore.”
Since Ahmed began working with creators and brands a handful of years ago, he has watched the ecosystem shift in favor of influencers as public personas. “A critical mass of young people are making revenue based on social media, and the algorithm is constantly changing, and we have no visibility into those changes,” he says. When algorithms change, whether on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, they directly shape the trends that appear in one’s feed, and they impact creators. The architecture of the algorithm, Ahmed suggests, has an enormous say on what we see or covet on any given day. The job of the influencer, then, is to interpret those trends and advise users on how to adopt them (including, but not limited to, by making relevant purchases via affiliate links) into their own lives.
But despite the mysterious hand of the algorithm, there are still some believers that actual human beings can influence a trend’s lifecycle. “The way we know that trends are changing is internal,” says Avery Trufelman, host of the fashion history podcast Articles of Interest. “I think it’s that feeling when you look at your closet, and you think, ‘I have nothing to wear,’ even though you’re looking at a bunch of clothes; it means you’ve changed, times have changed, the need for clothing has changed. That’s been the biggest thing about learning about how trends work. I really did always think it was this dictum on high from [the media] or influencers being like, ‘This is out. Everybody get rid of this and go buy the new thing.’ But I don’t think that’s how it works for most people. I think it really is this little voice in your head that’s like, ‘It’s time to go shopping.’”
The genesis of today’s disparate, granular, and highly self-referential trends—quiet luxury, gorpcore, dressing like JFK Jr.—may be harder to pinpoint than the trends of decades past, but Trufelman has a different theory. She tells me about Chronophoto, an online game that shows you an image and you have to guess what year it was taken. “You realize what you’re looking at to place people in their time [is] mostly the clothes. To me, this is just the most irrefutable proof to anyone who’s like, ‘I don’t care about fashion. I don’t care about trends.’ It’s like, this is how time marks you. This is how we place ourselves in time.”
She continues: “If you read some of the new trend guides from the 1960s, the first big heyday of vintage, they’re like, ‘There are no trends anymore. Everyone’s wearing things from other eras. Trends are over.’ But we can look back at a picture and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s from the ’60s.’”
The difference now is that trends no longer primarily flow from designers at the top and rebellious teens at the bottom, but from many angles, including artificial intelligence, and the whims of Big Tech. “The fashion world used to be able to dictate a lot more easily what came and went, and it’s lost control of that to a degree,” Paget says. “The way that high-fashion houses have to court influencers and entertainment stars either as ambassadors or by putting them front row at the shows, or both.” In that sense, “the relationship between those brands and magazines has radically changed.”
After a few years of wearing my tiny hoops, I’m beginning to think about taking them out for good—but I can’t help wondering if my waning enthusiasm for them is the product of the same forces that made me want them in the first place: a subtle yet undeniable shift in the zeitgeist driven by fashion designers, influencers, legacy media, and algorithms. Maybe I’ll just bleach my hair instead.