What is a trend?
Great trends reflect a moment in time, but that moment is never fleeting, and the basic idea is more elevated. Good trends always focus on the shift in an underlying human behavior or belief. They don’t describe a single interesting story or a hot new product or industry.
Rohit Bhargava • Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future (Non-Obvious Trends Series)
More significant than what trends represent on their own and in the moment is what they collectively symbolize. Ours is a period of increasing noise. Everything is bleeding into everything around it. All trends, large and small, now suggest a new cultural mood—but only until the next Vaseline-smeared obsession comes along.
Jason Parham Culture • The Age of Everything Culture Is Here
(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
Haley Nahman • #100: New idea trending
While the general rule in fashion is that trends and items begin to reappear after two decades, at this point teenagers — who were too young to participate the first time around and who are some of TikTok’s most ardent users — are already remixing styles that were popular just five or ten years ago, as is the case with the 2014 Tumblr aesthetic.
Rebecca Jennings • Fashion is just TikTok now
Trend cycles are shortening
They used to be worth paying attention to, but now they’re just an endless cycle that people feel hopeless about keeping up with.
Trends have become synonymous with TikTok trends
Are trends fun or actively undermining development of healthy coping. Trends and brain rot?
The meme even expanded its seasonal footprint into Christian Girl Autumn and Short King Spring.
Callie Holtermann • Why Do We Brand the Summer?
We’re even branding seasons
Many of these declarations are not meant to be taken seriously, and plenty will not succeed (see: Hot Vax Summer and, less consequentially, The New York Times’s endorsement of the Dirty Shirley). But all arise from a desire to identify some distinct flavor of each summer that can be captured and stored like strawberry preserves.