No sensationalism, just facts and context. 
Kids feel “trapped” and confused by social media’s microtrend machine
Kids feel “trapped” and confused by social media’s microtrend machine
Finally got that hot new cheetah-print skirt that’s all over TikTok? Too late, it’s already old news.
Social media is spawning fashion microtrends faster than teens can adopt them — sometimes several a week, said Callie Holtermann from The New York Times style desk, who wrote about it. Pair that with fast fashion’s ability to spit out products, and the cycle can be dizzying.
Young people know they are being targeted by marketers, Holtermann said. But they find it hard to step away, even while feeling burdened by the overconsumption.
Holtermann talked with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about the pressure kids are feeling to keep up with the latest trend. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: So, trends, I get in fashion, right? That’s been a thing forever. Microtrends — help me out.
Callie Holtermann: Yeah, I hate to come with the news of microtrends to you. Which, of course, I’m slow to bring you. But in recent years, especially since COVID, there have been all of these things that seem kind of like fashion trends. Perhaps it’s a type of top or a print like cheetah print, or even a little phrase like the mob wife aesthetic. But the young people I talked to said they kind of rise and fall in a matter of months, or even weeks.
Ryssdal: The really interesting part about it, well, many parts about it, which were, by turn, interesting and horrifying, is that the younger kids, because these are teenagers, right, getting absorbed by all this, and they know what’s happening.
Holtermann: Totally. I spent the past few months talking to a lot of teenagers and people in their 20s about what the trend ecosystem feels like to them right now. And over and over, they sort of gave me these kind of sobering monologues about how they know that their attention is very valuable. They understand that things like short-form video platforms, like TikTok, and fast fashion are kind of working together to speed up the trend cycle. And yet, at times, they can still feel caught up in it, and that can feel like a kind of confusing and trapped place to be in.
Ryssdal: I bet. It is also, and they know this too, being more environmentally aware, I suppose, than older generations, by and large, they feel bad about it. They know it’s all about consumption, right? It’s about buying things quickly and then turning around buying more things.
Holtermann: Absolutely. Yeah. A trend is, at its core, a structure for advertising and selling something. It also can be a kind of more fun mode for self-expression, but I think the consumption aspect of trends is really heavy on the minds of a lot of young people right now. And you hear the word consumption, and it’s kind of opposite, overconsumption, all the time when you get onto a platform like TikTok or Instagram.
Ryssdal: And while acknowledging that social media, you know, has done a lot of good for a whole lot of people, this is Reason 3,972 that social media can be bad.
Holtermann: I heard from a lot of young people who sort of said that the proliferation of microtrends every year or couple of years — the way that might have been the case when I was in middle school — there can be several a week, and it ratchets up the feeling of insecurity or inadequacy, or if you don’t have and can’t afford that item, right?
Ryssdal: So, on the whole can’t afford thing, I mean, fast fashion is cheap and a lot of these things are not incredibly expensive, but they add up, and it’s not nothing.
Holtermann: I spoke to one young woman who talked about, in middle school, really like begging her parents, saying she just started at a new school, she really wanted to fit in, and she mentioned the fact that she went to school and saw every girl at school had scrunchies. And then she went home and scrolled through TikTok and saw another 20 videos of girls with scrunchies. And it, I think, ratcheted up that feeling for her of, “Oh, I’m not going to fit in without this.” But as our conversation went on, she was one of several young people who expressed to me, “I can feel that this is happening, and I am really trying to take a step back from it.” And so many of these young people who, again, know what is going on are trying to take steps backwards from the trend cycle. Although sometimes, they are finding that difficult to do.
Ryssdal: So where do you land on this? Is this going to keep going, and will it get faster and faster, or is it eventually going to die out because teenagers just go, “I can’t do this anymore.”
Holtermann: It’s funny. I’ve posed this question to so many experts, and I heard a lot of really conflicting things. On one hand, there are people who think that, you know, TikTok is in jeopardy right now. On the other hand, one person I talked to who writes a daily trend newsletter said, “I do think [Generation Z] is growing up and they’re wising up to trends. But coming up right behind them is [Generation Alpha], and she thinks that members of Gen Alpha will be even more clued in to trends than the generations that came before.
Ryssdal: I had such hope there, and then you got to Gen Alpha.
Holtermann: Sorry about that.
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