Trends are usually long and incremental, but in today’s TikTok, world microtrends reign supreme. With the ever-increasing pace of information and content being poured into the social sphere, fashion trends are also beginning to rise and fall at a much faster rate than ever before.
Microtrends can be understood as trends in fashion that quickly rise in relevancy due to heightened media exposure and just as quickly descend back into obscurity. In just this past year, microtrends blew through trucker hats, low-rise jeans, corset tops, crochet bags and tops, Y2K and cottage-core style. These trends mentioned just barely scratch the surface of all the microtrends that rose and fell within the short span of a year.
So how do these microtrends gain as much traction as they do and then rapidly descend back into irrelevancy? Part of the mass responses to microtrends come from the relationship between social media and consumerism culture. The latter is defined as a lifestyle intensely focused on spending more money to buy more material goods. This lifestyle and microtrends themselves are fueled by social media exposure.
A user on social media, like an influencer or celebrity, purchases a product and promotes it on TikTok or Instagram. This promotion goes viral, inspiring countless others to purchase this product. Suddenly, entire social media pages become inundated with users who have bought this product and are showing it off or continuing to encourage other users to purchase this product themselves. So much of this product is being bought and shown off that it becomes oversaturated and overdone. The trendiness of that product, just as quickly as it became popular, becomes tired and is replaced by a new product that will follow the same cycle. Thus, it becomes a microtrend.
Put in a more concise statement, microtrends are merely an extension of a concept seen on social media everywhere: FOMO or fear of missing out. FOMO refers to the anxiety that comes from seeing others on social media having gratifying experiences, whether it’s a grand vacation or a jealousy-inducing shopping spree and worrying that you’ll never get to share those same experiences. Microtrends cause this feeling of FOMO amongst users, as people are left wondering, “Will I be out of the loop if I can’t or won’t get this same product?”
Microtrends pose an additional issue outside of the ones mentioned above. They have an unfortunate and even dire impact on the environment. Accelerated production of clothing and other products that are in high demand due to their quick rise to fame on social media has caused numerous issues for the environment: excessive usage of water, microfibers and toxic materials being released into the air, and landfills overflowing with discarded clothes no longer trendy enough to wear. The levels of overconsumption that have occurred because of the dawn of microtrends are actively contributing to the decline of an already unstable environment.
While microtrends are a newer concept, they are likely to become a cemented aspect of a society deeply rooted in their social media practices. Microtrends can be fun and exciting, as people always tend to love the new and great next thing, but it’s important to understand the ramifications that they have on both the human psyche and on the environment. Ultimately, the trends you choose to follow should be because they personally speak to you, not the ones that are quickly brought to the forefront and overwhelm your social media feed.
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