Your nails are polka-dotted. Your eyebrows are bleached and “high fashion.” Bloomers, heels, fur is in and you can’t wear any of it casually. They hang in your closet for the occasional night out. In the back of your car are bags of corset tops, high rise jeans, jerseys with lace. You leave them at Goodwill with everyone else’s outdated clothes. But how old were these? You bought those boots four months ago. You wore that dress once for a concert.
A microtrend is a piece of trash talking like Chanel. It’s the burden and journey of personal style and self expression burned and plastic wrapped.
If you are a social media user, you are susceptible to microtrends. They show up on social media labeled under everforming aesthetics preaching “mobwifecore” or “y2k”. It’s the cow print that is “in” again or the white lace midi skirts that flaunt an elite sense of ethereality now that everyone’s wearing them. But as innocuous as they can seem, these trends have inequitable and unsustainable undertones.
What happens to those tons of discarded plastic and polyester when they inevitably go out of style? And what are the consequences of being in the outgroup who can’t or won’t participate?
A microtrend, thanks to the era of social media, is an aesthetics-related fad that fades in and out of the public zeitgeist as quickly as information takes to be spread online in this day and age. All it takes for a phenomenon to become popularized is virality. One case of a popular microtrend is the Clean Girl aesthetic. You might summarize this look in the words: beige, slick-back, and body-tight. In April of 2024, Sabrina Carpenter began advertising for Kim Kardashian’s clothing brand Skims. She dawned muted lingerie and skin hugging leggings and tees. All of a sudden, multi-million follower influencers were wearing the brand, attracting names like Paris Hilton, SZA, and Billie Eilish. Skims started in 2019, but gained traction with a vigor in 2024. Then, in the same month, Challengers came out. Zendaya was up close to the camera, her hair slicked back in a bubble braid and her skin glowing, makeup minimal. The Clean Girl look was everywhere. It didn’t take long for people in public to start imitating the aesthetic they saw on celebrities. And posting it.
This is what a microtrend offers: a sense of community. The comfort of being able to lean into an aesthetic that is tried and true and looks great in it. When normal people can trace what they see on their favorite celebrities to the clothes on their neighbors and friends, it can create a perception of shared proximity to the elite. But microtrends also reveal themselves to be something else: a status symbol.
Let’s take a look at a current case study: Labubus. The ugly but endearing dolls found on the average performative male’s tote bag. These furry keychains are everywhere, and their wide cartoon eyes and mini eclectic fashion senses have won over the hearts of the masses. And while, in a vacuum, these strange toys are harmless, looking at them from a bird’s eye view, they are undeniable contributors to everything wrong with consumerism. Labubus come in blind boxes, with 6 different variations and one chaser. It is this element of mystery that represents a masterful tactic by the Labubu company to encourage customers to keep buying. To collect all 6 and try for the chaser. Or, if you don’t like the Labubu you got, buy another one. You have a double? Throw it away. And here, in this world of buying until you find the one you want, of flaunting the chaser everyone else is jealous of, is the overwhelming sense of exclusivity. Belonging to a group that can afford to keep spending money until they can get the desired product is pure privilege. But as soon as another adorable character occupies the market, labubus will disappear from mainstream culture.
It takes an overwhelming amount of expendable income to be able to fuel these trends. With the rapidity of social media minds, you would need to be online and shopping everyday to keep up with all of them.
Not to mention the sheer amount of waste these trends generate. As of 2023, the apparel industry produces 100 billion garments annually, and 92 million tons of this become textile waste. And this problem is a staple of American culture. Every year, the average American discards 81.5 pounds of clothing. Is excessive waste production the cost of being “in”?
Microtrends often mark what “fashionable” is. To say fashion is your art of choice, and to stay in a community of likeminded people who all consume the same content, there’s a push to conform. How can you call yourself informed in style if you’re not wearing whatever sunglasses are in this week? And when they change as rapidly as they do, why aren’t you keeping up?
Same as being in the fashion community, any musician feels the pressure to innovate. Multiple versions of every album, cassettes, and CDs filling shelves; anything to keep an artist relevant and keep listeners buying. Observing this with Taylor Swift’s tactic of releasing the same record with many different covers, each for an incredibly high price. Her fans want to seem supporting to Swift, but also include themselves in the social ritual of buying the newest edition.
So what’s the solution to these microplastic-filled, ever changing trends? A daily reminder that nothing we have can ever just go away, that there is no “away”. Donating isn’t always the fix that this issue needs. Too many clothes are donated to large organizations, and tend to end in the landfill quickly. Every purchase made by social media influence and not whole-hearted confidence is a step towards irrevocable environmental damage. Small things add up, and with such common wasteful trends, responsibility is on everyone. Remember that everyone has different tastes, so if something’s no longer working for you, pass it on! An easy way to keep unwanted products in use is to trade with your friends! Donations can always happen in your own community. If you once wanted it, someone else will too.
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