You’re Thinking About Trends All Wrong

When a conversation arises about ‘what’s trending’, as they often seem to do through the likes of tiktok FYP, it lacks a certain crucial understanding. Now, this isn’t to say people don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to trends but... people don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to trends.

It isn’t that trends are being churned out mercilessly and far too quickly to form any adequate opinion (though they do indeed seem to be getting ever quicker...), it’s that people are thinking about them all wrong.

No. Polka dots and block coloured tights and fur for winter aren’t the be-all and end-all of this season’s trends.

If your understanding of trends begins when they hit Zara, TikTok ‘what’s hot’ lists, or fast fashion rails, you’re not witnessing the birth of a trend. You’re watching its afterlife.

Think of a trend like a star.

At its birth, a trend might ignite quietly as a dense cluster of ideas, references, and conditions, continually collapsing in on themselves until something new begins to burn. This is the earliest phase: when a trend exists as intuition, instinct, and collective murmur. It hasn’t been named yet. It hasn’t been packaged. But it’s intensely alive.

As the star grows, it burns brighter. This is the moment when a trend is at its most powerful, as it circulates through subcultures, creative communities, niche spaces, and informal networks. It’s worn without self-consciousness. It feels natural, even inevitable. People aren’t following it; they’re responding to something in the air.

Eventually, the light becomes visible to everyone.

By the time fast fashion picks it up, what we’re seeing isn’t the star itself but instead, the afterglow. The residual light travelling long after the core energy has already begun to collapse or move elsewhere. The brightness remains, but the combustion has passed.

This is where the misunderstanding happens.

When people look at fast fashion to ‘predict’ trends, they aren’t forecasting the future but are observing the past. They’re measuring light that’s already been emitted, already processed, already diluted. It feels predictive only because the systems that deliver it move slower than the culture that created it.

Fast fashion doesn’t anticipate trends; it documents them.

And just like stargazing, there’s a delay. What we think we’re seeing in real time is often history of a beautiful illusion created by distance, scale, and speed.

To truly understand trends, you have to look not at the glow, but at the pressure points: the conditions that caused the ignition in the first place. The economic gravity. The social density. The emotional temperature. That’s where the next star is already forming, often long before its light reaches us.

Consider everything but the trend itself.

Trends don’t exist in a vacuum. They never have.

Fashion is often treated as a closed system: designers create, runways declare, brands distribute, consumers follow. But this is a simplified fiction when in reality, fashion is porous. It absorbs pressure from every direction and translates it into form, material, and gesture. Clothing becomes the surface on which deeper conditions register.

What we wear is shaped by political climates, economic instability, technological shifts, and collective emotion. Periods of austerity tend to produce restraint- think narrower silhouettes, muted palettes, practicality framed as taste. Times of uncertainty often trigger nostalgia, a reaching backward for imagined stability or familiarity. Moments of social rupture can open space for experimentation, gender play, or the rejection of traditional dress codes altogether. These shifts don’t originate in fashion; fashion is where they become visible.

This is why studying a trend requires looking outward before looking closer.

Inflation determines not just what people can afford, but how they value durability, repair, and reuse. Housing crises change how people move through space, how they store clothing, and whether fashion feels expansive or excessive. Climate anxiety reshapes attitudes toward consumption, materials, and longevity. Even when those concerns are imperfectly expressed. Labour conditions affect what can be produced, how quickly, and at what ethical or aesthetic cost. War and geopolitical tension alter supply chains, cultural exchange, and the symbolic weight of certain garments or references.

Social movements, too, leave material traces. Shifts in gender politics, race, class consciousness, and bodily autonomy are often first negotiated through dress. Clothing becomes a way to test identity, signal alignment, or resist categorisation. Trends emerge not because people suddenly agree on an aesthetic, but because many people are responding, consciously or not, to the same underlying conditions.

When trend analysis focuses only on the visual, silhouettes, colours, micro-aesthetics, it flattens this complexity. It describes what is happening without addressing why. Without context, a trend becomes a style choice rather than a cultural response. And without understanding the surrounding forces, any attempt at prediction is reduced to pattern recognition rather than insight.

Fashion doesn’t just reflect the world but reacts to it.

Clothes are one of the most immediate, accessible ways culture processes pressure. They are worn before ideas are articulated, before policies shift, before narratives settle. To study fashion seriously, then, is not to isolate it, but to place it in conversation with everything else and to read it as evidence rather than instruction.

Only then do trends stop looking arbitrary, and start making sense.

You Can’t Opt Out of Trends (Even If You Think You Have)

There’s a persistent belief that rejecting trends places you outside of them. As if by dressing ‘timelessly’, minimally, or indifferently, you somehow escape the cycle altogether. In reality, this rejection is rarely neutral. More often, it is shaped by the very same cultural forces that produce trends in the first place.

Minimalism, normcore, anti-fashion, quiet luxury are positions that don’t emerge in opposition to fashion, but in response to specific moments of saturation, excess, and fatigue. They are not absences of trend, but articulations of it and choosing to dress against the grain is still a form of dialogue with the moment you’re living in. Even refusal requires awareness.

This is because trends are not commands; they are signals.

They reflect what a culture is negotiating in its values, anxieties, and aspirations. When people collectively move toward restraint, it often speaks to economic pressure or moral unease around consumption. When maximalism resurfaces, it can signal defiance, play, or a desire to reclaim pleasure. When nostalgia dominates, it points to uncertainty about the future. These shifts are rarely conscious or coordinated, but they are patterned.

Seen this way, trends become one of the most accessible tools we have for reading the cultural landscape.

They allow us to trace how large, abstract forces like economic instability, political unrest, technological acceleration and filter down into everyday life. Trends show us how people are adapting, coping, resisting, or conforming in ways that language doesn’t always capture. Clothing becomes a kind of evidence: not of individual taste, but of collective mood.

This is why opting out of trends is impossible and this isn’t to say that participation requires any kind of enthusiasm. It only requires existence within a shared context. Even those who pride themselves on being untouched by fashion are responding to prevailing ideas about authenticity, sustainability, or restraint in ideas that are themselves culturally produced.

The difference, then, isn’t between those who follow trends and those who don’t. It’s between unconscious participation and conscious reading.

When trends are treated purely as things to follow or avoid, their usefulness collapses. But when they are understood as indicators and as data points in a wider cultural system, they become invaluable. They help us make sense of where attention is moving, what feels unresolved, and what people are trying to articulate through form.

To engage with trends critically is not to surrender agency. It is to recognise that fashion, like language, is a shared system and one we are all already using. The choice lies in whether we treat it passively, or learn to read what it’s telling us