How personal style discourse ate itself
It's so sad that nobody has personal style anymore and everybody just follows trends ... except for me!
“Adidas sambas, the trending shoe of 2024 summer, that have now fully disappeared.”
What? I thought to myself as I watched this TikTok user continue to list off 2024 ‘microtrends’ which she no longer sees anymore, proving to viewers that these once coveted trends were not regular trends. No no, they were microtrends. Disappearing just as quickly as they arrived, only remnants of these trends are left in landfill, and nowhere to be seen in our wardrobes or feeds.
Except, that’s not really the truth, is it? I see those Adidas slim style trainers on most days. Whether Sambas, Gazelles, Spezials, on strangers on the tube, the pub, on my own friends. I know that everyone on the internet (myself included) speaks in extremes and generalisations, but hearing someone say Adidas Sambas have “fully disappeared” made me feel like I was losing my marbles.
I feel bad for saying this because I know this TikTok user and others alike have good intentions (we will circle back to this later). But something about this video didn’t sit right with me, it had successfully gotten under my skin, but I couldn’t quite articulate why yet.
And then I saw this TikTok (why do I always see a TikTok? Go outside babes) from Emmama, and everything clicked into place.
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“I just think it’s so sad that nobody has personal style anymore, except for me.”
“I see all these girls wearing clothes that are trending and outfits that are trending all over Pinterest and I know I wear some of them too, but when I do it, it’s genuine and my unique style, and when they do it, I know they’re just trying to follow a trend to be cool.”
The satirical TikTok captioned ‘how yall talk about “personal style” on here’ currently sits at just over 100k likes. Even seven people I follow have reposted (the sign of a triple platinum TikTok in my eyes). I am clearly not the only person this video has struck a chord with. Personal style discourse has devolved into something which is making us all feel a bit, well, weird. And as someone who has made multiple video essays over the years about the state of the trend cycle and TikTok’s impact on the fashion industry, I’m taking it upon myself to get to the bottom of how the hell we got here.
It was only the post 2021 microtrends boom (RIP House of Sunny Hockney dress), did we begin to have conversations about how social media and the fast fashion industry maximised their joint awfulness to accelerate the trend cycle to a speed only intended to keep consumers miserable and spending. A trend would come about organically (Kendall Jenner was photographed wearing the Hockney dress in January 2021), and through for you algorithmic feeds (this is a key detail - the shift from following feeds to for you feeds means that trends have the capability of spreading further and wider than ever before) this trend begins spreading like wildfire. The ultra-fast fashion giants (Shein, AliExpress, Amazon, TikTok Shop) then flood the market with exact polyester dupes. These trends then oversaturate our feeds, they are then scattered amongst “trends I don’t get the hype about” videos (anyone remember the word cheugy?), and are swiftly abandoned and replaced by a newer trend.
But from the (partly influencer driven) microtrends mess, a new influencer was born, the anti-micro trends influencer. This creator jogs our memories of microtrends of long past, to hammer home the message “It’s only been a year! And look how quickly we have forgotten!” This creator sometimes even goes a step further and attempts to predict future microtrends, some predictions I’ve seen floating around are butter yellow, polka dots, and Puma Speedcats.
I want to make it very clear that I think the anti-microtrends influencer is very well intentioned. Microtrend predicting and spotting is driven by the desire to shop intentionally and mindfully, to attempt to decipher what trends we actually like vs what trends are just inundating our feeds, and to reduce our carbon footprint by reducing our clothing waste. But in my eyes, by even just theorising that an upcoming trend is a microtrend, or jogging our memories of microtrends of the past, is planting a seed.
Aren’t we just planting seeds in people’s heads that the clothes they own are microtrends? When they may not have had these thoughts before? I think this presumption goes beyond a piece of clothing you own possibly being a microtrend. I think it can lead to people feeling, well, a little ashamed. They were foolish enough to fall into the microtrend trap! And even if these thoughts aren’t conscious, I think it can lead people to feel a little bit weird about the clothing they own. It can almost have the opposite intended effect, it may lead people to shop more, in an attempt to rehabilitate their ‘microtrend’ filled wardrobes.
Although I wholeheartedly believe there are good intentions behind microtrend spotting content, aren’t we just shaming what people are wearing under the guise of sustainability?
Fashion, style, taste, and what people are wearing has always been a point of mockery. I remember flicking through my mum’s Closer and Heat magazines, my favourite section being Hot or Not or Who Wore It Better? Even the current conversation and memes around the performative male are rooted in mocking people for the way that they dress. Seeing how fashion shaming has evolved over time fascinates me, and we seem to be at a place of fashion shaming but through a discourse lens, which leads us on to the personal style crisis.
Like most internet discourses, the origins were good. It started off so well! Anything Mina Le touches turns to gold, and I really enjoyed her video essay about the death of personal style and why she began dressing more ‘basic’. But somehow this conversation has devolved into TikTok video after TikTok video of creators claiming “nobody has personal style anymore”, except for them.
These creators aren’t pulling these hypotheses out of thin air. As I’ve seen personal style discourse unfold for the past year, it is very clear that there is a widespread personal style anxiety amongst young internet users. Who are questioning what their personal style is, what trends do they actually like or what trends are their TikTok feeds telling them they should like, and whether they have personal style at all.
People may have a tendency to dismiss personal style anxiety as a sign of shallowness, but I think it’s the exact opposite. Caring about the way that you dress is really caring about the way that you’re perceived. For a lack of a better term, you want your exterior to match your interior, you want the way that you look to accurately reflect the person you are, and I think that’s a very human desire.
But I think this personal style anxiety is rooted in much more than how you are perceived, it is rooted in autonomy and personhood. In our curated algorithmic economy, it is becoming more and more difficult to decipher what content we are choosing to watch, and what content the algorithm is choosing for us. The lines between the content we actively consume and the content we passively consuming are blurring. One of the most commonly raised questions within personal style discourse is “I don’t know what I actually like or what TikTok is telling me to like” or “Do I like this trend or am I just seeing it a lot on my feed?”. These are all questions of autonomy, which feels precarious in the era of the For You page. Do these algorithmic feeds threaten our autonomy? And do threats to our autonomy threaten our personhood? No wonder people are anxious about polka dots.
But what strikes me as particularly interesting about the phenomenon of TikTok creators claiming nobody has personal style anymore (except for them!), is most of the time these creators are fashion influencers themselves. Or at least aspiring fashion influencers. Or at least adjacent to the social media fashion space in some way. The widely accepted conclusion of the personal style crisis is that social media/TikTok is to blame - personal style is a dying art because everybody is getting their fashion inspiration from the same places, TikTok and Pinterest. And with the rise of the For You feed, fashion trends are now spreading further than ever before. The short form content economy reigns supreme and rewards content which is fast paced, engaging, trending but also new, contributing to this accelerated trend cycle.
But there’s a paradox here - they critique those who pull all of their fashion inspiration from social media, but what is the fashion content they’re posting themselves if not to inspire others? The personal style detractors are contributing to same algorithmic churn they’re critiquing. We all have something to gain from TikTok virality. Perhaps this discourse is beginning to feel a little repetitive and silly because people are contributing to discourse they don’t really have an opinion on, but because this discourse is trending and they want the algorithm to reward them accordingly. Is anyone else seeing a pattern in how discourse unfolds these days? Of meaningful conversation devolving into tepid, elitist, and ego-stroking oneupmanship?
[Writers note - this episode made me spiral into a discourse fuelled existential crisis. Am I any different from the people I am critiquing? Do I contribute to driving discourse into the ground? Probably. I am aware this is a hypocritical episode! I actually don’t think of myself as above personal style discourse or microtrends theorising, maybe this content struck such a nerve with me because I pull a majority of my fashion inspiration online.]
But as someone who is chronically online I must remind myself that microtrends discourse and the personal style crisis really is an online issue. Trends which feel oversaturated on our feeds we rarely see in our real lives. And trends which have ‘disappeared’ are still being happily worn my thousands of people in the cities we live in. I found it interesting that 2024-2025 has been the year personal style discourse has bubbled to the surface, as I think the trend cycle has slowed down significantly in recent years. Or maybe I’m just spending less time in the digital fashion space? Not that I think of myself as an authority figure on the matter at all, but if you want to feel more stylish, put down the damn phone.
I discuss the state of personal style discourse, microtrends gate, and more on my latest episode of Voicenotes with Jordan Theresa - available on YouTube and all major podcast platforms.
I think assimilation in how we dress is more than we know down to location. Since moving from Manchester to rural devon, I suddenly have wax jackets and cream jeans, a clothing trend that never interested me before. When we find ourselves consistently online, our preferred location is the landscape of social media, we assimilate to the environment in our language etc.. but also in how we dress. I think micro trends are just that. Micro trends are the uniform of influencer or influencer adjacent. Like wax jackets and cream jeans for posh country girls, gymshark body suits for gymfluencers, microtrends are the uniform for those of us looking to be like the online it girls. Critiques are absolutely valid, mindful shopping can never be a bad thing in a climate crisis fuelled by mindless consumption, but it's interesting how we view this as a separate phenomenon, when historically we have always assimilated in our dress wherever the location, why is social media any different?
I loved this Jordan !! Recently I’ve really been struggling with the idea of personal style and how it forms people’s perception and judgement of us. As an 18 year old (hopefully) moving to Oxford to start uni this October, I am more aware than ever of the first impressions I make, and how my fashion comes into it. Do I attempt to dress the purest form of myself and allow judgement for being queer, northern, and all together quite flamboyant, or do I instead try to imitate the style of what I imagine to be higher classes? Is worrying about this in general shallow and fake? Am I attempting to manipulate the people I meet by tailoring my presentation to them? Battling with attempting to create an identity that is both authentic to you and palatable enough to make good friends and connections for the future feels to be becoming increasingly hard, not just with my upcoming life changes but also with the social media space and the judgement that comes along with being a step behind the expensive lifestyle changes everyone else seems to be able to keep up with. Basically I’m in crisis and am terrified of how I’m perceived, but listening to your thoughts always make me feel a little less alone in my confusion with the discourse and the direction of society today, so thankyou !!