Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter Get the latest luxury news and insights, exclusive member-only discounts and more.
Last summer saw a flurry of micro-trends emerge: Sofia Richie-Grange’s wedding in the south of France elevated quiet luxury, Hailey Bieber cemented tomato (and strawberry) girl summer with her Rodeo-wear-matched beach shots, and Margot Robbie brought Barbiecore into the mainstream with her commitment to method dressing.
Trend cycles have accelerated and trends have become even more niche. But the tides have turned in recent weeks. Fewer “cores” are trickling from TikTok feeds into fashion magazines, and fashion fans are starting to wonder if the coolest thing to do is not follow trends at all. Meanwhile, others are writing about leaning into personal style as a “trend” for summer 2024. This is a torn between the industry’s current struggle with algorithms and the current culture’s need to define and name microtrends. Pinterest offers even more bizarre word combinations, such as “tomboy femme” and “Y3K aesthetic.”
Are we gearing up for a summer without microtrends? If these aesthetic trends are the result of hyper-scrolling and dressing online, could this summer mark a turning point for how we dress – and market – in the physical world we live in?
Microtrends fade, trends last forever
The trend hasn’t gone away yet, argues Agus Panzoni, a trend forecaster and trend spokesperson for Depop. What’s fading is the need to categorize style into ultra-niche aesthetics.
“We’re moving away from ‘These things together will give you an aesthetic,’ to a more fluid state,” Panzoni says. Rather than “grabbing” an aesthetic as a whole, consumers can pick up elements and incorporate them into their own style. “This shift is why we haven’t seen microtrends in a while,” she says.
This is partly because early fashion fans are pushing back against algorithms that push the same “micro” trends to the masses and distancing themselves from the mainstream (where these trends proliferate), said Lukiat Ashawe, editorial and social director at marketing firm Digital Fairy.
That doesn’t mean we’re heading into the era of total individuality. Certain items are catching on as summer trends, Panzoni said. On Depop, searches for “mesh” are up 47% since January, “see-through” up 34%, “micro shorts” up 234% and “tank tops” up 212%. The fact that these are just generic summery items rather than specific, defined aesthetic categories may signal a lack of need for such strict categorization.
