A little over 14 years ago, in early 2011, a group of New York creatives banded together to form K-Hole – a tongue-in-cheek project that initially sat somewhere between art collective and trend forecasting agency.
Soon after, the group began publishing PDFs detailing their fashion predictions for the months and years ahead, of which a movement called ‘normcore’ was number one. They couldn’t have hit the nail any harder on the head. Soon, fashion fans across the globe were switching out the skinny jeans and brash logos that dominated the 2010s in favour of the kind of middle-of-the-road cargo pants, sensible sweaters and deeply uncool sneakers your dad would go wild for, as the aesthetic infiltrated runways and fashion magazines alike. We’d seen trends come and go before, of course, as ’60s miniskirts made way for flares in the ’70s, and those flares faded out as the punk aesthetic took over in the ’80s.
But K-Hole’s trend prediction was a harbinger of what was to come, as social media platforms like Instagram and later TikTok made space for trends to snowball in the space of just a few clicks. Across the last few years, we’ve traversed the dawn of cottagecore, which landed during the heady days of Covid lockdowns and had everyone slipping into floaty cotton ‘nap dresses’ as they attempted to block out the horrors plastered across the front of every newspaper. Remember that crossbody bag from Uniqlo? There was a point at which you were never more than a foot or two away from one. Later, the mob wife movement saw 20-somethings and teens dabble in Sopranos-worthy ensembles, as they invested in faux-fur coats and gold doorknocker earrings, right before they transformed into the sexy office siren.
All tight-fitting blouses and corporate-chic pencil skirts, the look was topped off with a pair of Bayonetta glasses – as sported by Bella Hadid, before she set her sights on the rodeo and switched it all out for leather chaps and a cowboy hat. And that’s just a small cross-section of the cores and aesthetics bubbling up across social media in the last few years – who could forget our brief forays into Barbiecore, blokecore and balletcore?
By the time we hit the ‘quiet luxury’ movement in late 2023, as some of the fashion world’s biggest brands played it safe on the runway in the face of a deep financial downturn, it’s safe to say that most of us were pretty fatigued by the frenetic churn of the trend cycle. At this point, the ‘cores’ seemed to splutter and fizzle out, with TikTok trend analysts and glossy mags alike heralding the return of personal style – but, as it transpired, it’s not as simple as all that.
Thanks to our insidious addiction to our phones, the grip of celebrity culture and the rise of the influencer, fashion and the way we dress has become more homogenous than ever. Now, anyone with even a passing interest in fashion will find it’s likely not going to be long before they come across someone wearing a pair of yellow Onitsuka Tiger sneakers, Charlotte Simone’s shearling-trimmed leopard-print coat or a split-toed Maison Margiela Tabi shoe – once the preserve of die-hard, in- the-know fashion fans and now a completely mainstream style that sells out over and over again.
Sure, it’s nothing new for humans to want to dress alike. The clothes we wear are often signifiers of our personality and are used to forge bonds with likeminded people. It’s just that where once our identity was tied up in community – a music scene like goth, emo or punk, for example – now, it feels kind of untethered. Like we’re ships on a stormy sea waiting for the waves to sweep us towards whatever fast-forgotten fad comes next. With many online fashion critics pointing to the fact you can now tell how much time someone spends online by the ‘It’ clothes they choose to deck themselves out in, many of us are putting down our phones and dramatically decreasing our doom-scrolling in an attempt to reset the algorithm and, by default, trying to ‘de-influence’ our wardrobe choices. With approximately 3.8 billion people – or a hefty 48% of the world’s population – confessing they feel addicted to their phones (as per a 2023 report), there are surely more benefits to this than just a closet cleanse.
It’s been wild to see friends who are not usually swayed by trends slip a pair of clear-lensed Miu Miu glasses up their noses, despite the fact that, unlike me, they have 20/20 vision. But if the devil works hard, then the fashion industry works harder. Despite a slowdown when it comes to new trends emerging, recently we’ve seen a swathe of houses seemingly latch on to the fact we want to feel like individuals again. Case in point are the likes of Balenciaga, which has been turning out bags – like the Rodeo, strung with charms and tchotchkes – for a stratospheric sum. Where fashion-forward people like the stylist and creative director Jamie-Maree Shipton have long been decorating their bags with bits and pieces picked up on their travels – all of them then imbued with memories and sentimentality – brands are now com- modifying the aesthetic and turning out ready-made ‘curated’ packages that allude to a life lived, when they’re actually mass-produced and plucked off a shelf.
Clothes are about emotion – there’s the top you love that you wore on your first date with a partner, the tee picked up at your favourite band’s merch stand or the dress at the centre of countless drunken memories that never fails to make you feel fab – but if even those emotions are being packaged up and sold back to us, where do we go from here? It’s time to put down the phone, think about what you like to wear and try to do your own thing.