When fashion went out of style

Fashion is often defined as a continuous cycle that proposes the new – or rather re-proposes the old in a new form – ad infinitum. Trends – that is, what historically constituted “the new” – have become micro and multiple; they last one season and then vanish. This is not because they're replaced by other competing trends, but due to the simultaneous existence of very different stylistic currents. If everything is fashionable, then nothing really is.To understand these dynamics, one only need scroll through micro-video platform TikTok, launched by China's ByteDancein 2016 as the international version of its Chinese platform Douyin. On TikTok, trends related to fashion, or rather “aesthetics”, are too numerous to be counted. From gorpcore to normcore, cottagecore, coastal-grandmother-core, bimbocore and dark futurism, anything can become a trend as long as a sufficient number of algorithm-driven users play it enough times for it to end up on the “For You” page. A new “-core” can then be considered born.Most of these trends are not new at all, as is frequently the case in the age of digital reproducibility. More often than not, they're revisitations of cues from the past, rehashed according to a sensibility that is not only contem-porary, but really topical here and now. They're linked to a specific film or character, music video or pop star; in short, pure vibes. To clarify: theY2K style (the one inspired by the 2000s) survives, but is accompanied by the 1990s looks so loved by model Bella Hadid. Cyberpunk and the tech-no-raver look coexist in a seemingly harmonious entropy with “vanilla girl”tops (another trend) and chewing-gum pink short skirts. This turning-in on itself has always been part of fashion and designer Martin Margiela had already guessed this when he started reintroducing pieces from his previous collections on the catwalk in the 1990s. But it is only with TikTok that the process has intensified to the point where the trend has increasingly detached itself from the concept of the new, which until now had defined its very existence.

According to many analysts, this fragmentation is a natural consequence of the often-blind trust that many brands have placed in a “globalisation of taste” in recent years, which has turned out to be illusory. With the advent of social media, the possibility of an audience unified in its hetero-geneity seemed achievable and not the flimsy dream that appears the reality today. In fact, this recent breaking into a thousand fashion trends confirms what we've always known: connection is not synonymous with cohesion, and it is unthinkable to imagine communicating the same mes-sage on a global scale. Social media is not only a place where there are many internal divisions, but also a real swamp, as media theorist GeertLovink writes in his bookStuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet. Generation Z, the undisputed protagonist of TikTok, is fully aware of this stagnation. All the discomfort, cynicism and disillusionment of these dynamics can be found by scrolling through the hashtag #corecore, which is both ironic and paradoxical. Corecore is a trend of short clips of different videos accompanied by melancholic background music aimed at criticising the saturation of content on the platform. Born to deal with social issues such as climate change, it too has since become a trend that clumps together videos without precise logic, clear categorisation or cohe-rence. Corecore is therefore an attempt at rebellion against a world in which everything is meticulously identified and categorised under a precise aesthetic label and thus saleable. Not exactly what brands seeking engagement would like to achieve. This is why more and more brands have started to look at what's happening outside fashion, putting clothes aside and increasingly focusing on pop-culture phenomena, as writer Joan Kennedy recently explained on The Business of Fashion Website. A shining example is the enduring success of Barbiecore, a phenomenon born well before theGreta Gerwig-directed film released in July. It is not just about pink gar-ments and accessories, but a broader topic of conversation that encompasses the film, cast, media and user reviews, lead actress Margot Robbie'slooks, childhood memories of Barbie and the discussion around the sym-bol of Barbie itself, which crosses themes of contemporary feminisms.The same can be said of another trend that dominated 2023 – that of the so-called #quietluxury style,with billions of views on TikTok.Within the cultural relevance of the phenomenon, there is certainly a social discourse on Succession, the Roy family saga that has captivated us for four seasons and will no doubt rack up more awards at the next Emmys, but there is much more. It is at the same time a return to minimalism that favours neutral garments of good quality, but also reflects a widespread desire for security and economic stability. And it is a trend that is easy to reproduce (at least for a video or a photo on one's own accounts, certainly not everyone can afford the quality of fabrics from Loro Piana or The Row), so much so that various users have called it yet another version of already existing or very similar trends – @melworeit made a complete list of them: old money, minimalism, that girl, clean girl, soft girl, vanilla girl, cinnamon girl, light femininity, coastal granddaughter. Yet it endures, because people find it interesting.

These examples teach us that what's changing is the perspective with which one looks at the trend itself, and these trends have been customised and declined so far that they no longer represent the various aesthetic tribes we have grown used to. You can be punk and mimic the style of European billionaires in the 1970s; dress only in specialist, technical brands, once the preserve of those who spent time mountaineering; or,like the Harajuku Girls in Japan in the late 1990s, you can thrift – namely,buy second-hand clothes to promote more sustainable habits, while also stocking up on fast fashion from Shein.Generation Z takes all the previous counter-consensus and dissent to the extreme and mixes it up. Gone is the Millennial positivity, which had partly believed in the aggregating power of social. For today's twenty-so-methings, micro-trends look more like a game, like content for its own sake that in reality – that is, on the market – has a relative impact and usually affects accessories more than actual garments. Generation Z doesn't like to take itself seriously. Aware of its own shortcomings, it doesn't ask brands to be taken literally or to be chased. It calls for awareness,it calls for something that is anchored in the spirit of the times, that is transversal and touches multiple realms of reality.The PenguinBook of Twentieth-Century Fashion writing quotes cultural impresario Malcolm McLaren as saying:“All fashion designers became speakers and philosophers when they began to believe they could design the lives of their customers as well as their clothes. Everyone was waiting for them to say something essential, but they never did.” In the world of social media, and particularly TikTok where everyone can be everything and definitions lose consistency, a brand can only survive if it interprets those messages and has an organic view on what is happening in the world, using its own specific or, if you prefer, niche codes.But can we all keep up? Even Gen Zers must find it hard. Matty Healy,frontman of The 1975, who is often at the centre of controversy due to less than happy public statements, expressed his sympathy for young people on the first track of the band's latest album,Being Funny in a Foreign Language, singing “I'm sorry if you're living and you're 17.” As he explained to journalist Jia Tolentino in an interview withThe New Yorker, if you're 17 right now, your mind and life are overwhelmed by the evidence of the catastrophes taking place – starting with climate change and ending with the failure of the capitalist system, all mixed up in the nonsensical vortex of social media.What is certain is that fashion seems to have lost its ability to interpret the world it inhabits and to anticipate its innermost desires. It, too, is overwhelmed by the logic of the market, by perennial communication.Although it has never been more pervasive than it is today, in some ways it is but a shadow of its former self.