On Trends
It’s 1999, I’m eight years old and I’m sitting on a 1973 carpet. Cross legged, edging closer to the TV I’m watching my Friday night favourite. A band are lip syncing to their new single. They’re wearing parachute pants in different shades with matching halter neck tops. Their faces are slathered in gloss and glitter, hair clipped back in careful sections. I’m mesmerised. A few weeks later I’m taken to the newly opened Mall Cribbs Causeway. It’s part of a new generation of out-of-town shopping centres modelled on the US style. I pick out some lilac cargo pants and a halter neck top, edged with beaded tassels. To go with it purple snakeskin sandals with a low heel and some matching butterfly clips for my hair. I wear the outfit to my school disco. I look fantastic. It’s my first thrilling engagement with a fashion trend, many more follow.
At some point in 14th century Europe, after many millennia of clothing as a signifier of social status, belonging and other cultural codes, the rate of change began to increase. This acceleration continued over the following centuries, eventually converging with industrialisation in the mid-1900s. By the end of the 20th century, fashion production had scaled to unfathomable new heights and retailers could both stimulate and satisfy the demand for more and more new trends each year. The term ‘fast fashion’ was first coined in The New York Times in 1990, the year I was born.
My parents share a visceral response to clothing. “She was wearing an amazing dress!” My Mum says, wide eyed, the day after a party. “He’s looking great” My Dad exclaims, describing the style of a nephew, a shopkeeper, a school friend in a recent encounter. Like many people they experience both a public and private pleasure in clothing that is somehow deep rooted. And it seems this is an aesthetic experience that starts very young. Watching my friend’s two-year-old son grow and discover the world, I am struck by his powerful attraction to clothes. On seeing her wear a new outfit for the first time, he gasps. “Mummy your jeans! You look beautiful”.
The archaeological evidence shows that we have been interacting with clothes in an aesthetic sense for about as long as we have been capable of self-awareness. In the modern era, ever-evolving trends add an extra exciting layer to this particularly human impulse. They provide a sense of novelty that taps directly into our dopamine response system. It’s an addictive experience and a short-lived one. As Bernard Rudofsky pertinently described in his 1947 essay, Are Clothes Modern?:
From the first phase of timid desire for the adoption of a fad, through the sheer religious devotion, as demonstrated by the punctilious care for the detail of the fashion, to the sudden boredom and physical horror for an outlived vogue, we have the perfect analogy of the unravelment of the phases of courtship: craving and devotion for the love object, and its rejection after wish-fulfillment.
It’s 2004 and I’m reading Elle Girl magazine. There’s a new trend on the horizon. After years of baggy jeans and flares, themselves a reincarnation of the 1970s bell bottoms, the skinny jean is making a return. I don’t believe it but before long I’m searching for a pair in the skinniest, stretchiest fabric possible. Then I hear about a new sort of jean-legging hybrid from Japan: the jegging.
It’s 2006 and I’m carefully choosing my outfit for my school’s annual non-uniform day. I arrive at a tight zip-up sports jacket, some faded jeans and a pair of dangly earrings. Thank God I don’t have to do this everyday, I think – that would be exhausting. The school uniform provides blessed relief from the daily challenge of expressing myself through clothing. As much as fashion excites me, on a limited budget, the financial means required to keep up with trends can be a huge source of anxiety. Like my school uniform, trends can offer both certainty and belonging but they are also rigid and restrictive.
It’s 2012 and a generation of fashion bloggers emerge, I eagerly follow along, regularly checking an RSS feed for updates. They are the proto-influencers and they’re decked out in American Apparel disco pants, fedora hats, ankle boots, and polyester knits.Then Instagram hits the big time and the bloggers become the grammers. The app ushers in a new era for fashion and I happily follow along for the ride.
Since my school disco outfit in 1998 yearly clothing production has doubled. The fashion industry is now responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions – more than air travel and shipping combined. Then there’s the pesticide use, water wastage, microplastic pollution and horrendous labour conditions. After the oil and gas sector, it’s the second most destructive industry on earth. Many of the places at the forefront of global fashion production are already experiencing the direct effects of ecological unravelling. Most notably Bangladesh, the world’s second biggest exporter of ready-to-wear clothes, is facing the devastating impact of yearly floods, cyclones, and extreme heat.
Fashion trends are an incredible driver of the constant growth required by our economic system. Capitalism’s growth imperative means companies must compete for market share or face going under. To avoid these crisis moments new frontiers must always be opened up. Short-lived trends are a gift to a system that requires new stuff to be constantly produced, at a level far beyond what is necessary to meet our needs. It’s a structure that is incompatible with both our planetary resources and safe working conditions. 1 in 6 people in the world are employed in fashion production, the majority of them women.
My parents keep the newspaper front page from the day I was born. The headline is about ‘the greenhouse effect’. Our uncertain climatic future has never not been part of my life, but the fear that I felt as a child on learning about it was eventually metabolised, alongside the other terrifying what-if possibilities like nuclear war or a meteorite impact. Throughout my 20s the anxiety slowly starts to re-emerge.
It’s 2018 and I’m looking through the rails in an enormous vintage shop. There are miles of clothes, neatly arranged into categories. I am struck by the vast scale. The sections are huge: sports jackets, smart coats, Adidas trainers, knitted sweaters, nylon dresses, berets, leather belts, nightdresses. These vintage warehouses are just a tiny tip of the iceberg. There are now enough garments in existence to clothe everyone on earth for decades to come.
At some point in my early 30s, l notice people in their teens and early-20s wearing clothes from my own teenage years for the first time. Some of these garments are second-hand but the majority are new. All the Y2K low-waist jeans, velour tracksuits and strappy tops that once went to landfill, derided as ugly and unwearable, have returned. I am staggered by the pointlessness of it all.
Despite a renewed interest in thrift shopping and vintage, new fashion consumption continues to grow year on year. A lot has been written about the extreme fast fashion practices of companies like Shein. As well as how this need for constant dopamine release amongst consumers takes place against the backdrop of increasing work and housing precarity. However, there is growth at all ends of the market, from the luxury brands to longer-established high-street stores. The ecological cost of the fashion industry is enormous before the ultra-fast retailers are even taken into account. An increase in environmental awareness has led, not to a reduction in consumption, but an explosion in greenwashing. I watch as fashion brands co-opt the language and aesthetics of environmental activism to sell even more clothes. They allude to a ‘greeness’, make vague claims about recycled materials, and plaster billboards with images of the natural world. The aim is to pacify any nagging doubts about the ethical dimensions of buying a lot of clothes. I feel like I’m going mad.
On Instagram, an account called Diet Prada with 3.4 Million followers shares social justice news, alongside posts that excitedly pick apart the latest runway collections. There seems to be a cultural disconnect. Despite the ringing of ethical alam bells around eating meat, air travel and even hyper-fast fashion. The special allure of trends still provides some cover for the fashion industry more broadly. I couldn’t help but wonder – why are trends still socially acceptable at all?
It’s 2020 and I’m at a climate demonstration. I am brought to tears by a kindergarten group marching behind a home-made banner. The image of five and six year olds protesting for their liveable future is too much to bear. The weather is getting weirder. Another hottest summer on record. As the temperatures rocket into the late 30s celsius, I lie in my bedroom with the curtains drawn and a fan at my feet. I know this will be one of the coldest summers of the rest of my life. I read a book that carefully lays out the terrifying best-case scenarios for extreme weather events, biodiversity collapse, crop failures and water shortages. A malaise hangs over me for months.
I am confronted by my own complicity in an orgy of consumerism. I don’t have a ‘shopping habit’ and I don’t even have a particularly large wardrobe. But I am undoubtedly part of the Global North minority whose historic and current consumption levels are the driving force behind climate unravelling. The proposed solution for environmentally-conscious customers like me, is to keep buying new clothes but in a kinder, more gentle way. Production will be cyclical so new trends come from recycled materials as part of a “closed loop”. It sounds like bullshit. To paraphrase Naomi Klein: we bought our way into this crisis and we’re certainly not going to buy our way out.
In William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition the protagonist, a trend-forecaster, has a phobia of brands and meticulously removes logos from all of her clothing. I too am developing an aversion. I want to reject the concept of fashion, if I could just stop caring about what I wore altogether then I would no longer be part of this destructive cycle.
The more I learn about the scale of the environmental crisis the more I understand how wide ranging and embedded the problems are. I discover that the extent and urgency of the situation means any meaningful challenge will come at the sites of production and not consumption. That is not to say that we can happily bear no responsibility for our excessive buying in the Global North. Rather that it’s a structural problem, inherent to an incredibly unequal economic system, that no amount of individual, ‘responsible’ behaviour can truly make a dent in. Across the world carbon emissions and resource use are linked squarely to incomes – people who earn more consume more. It’s a knowledge that I find difficult to confront. I carry with me an obsessive guilt about my role in this system and my love for clothes. But while an acknowledgement of my relative privilege is important, self-flagellation gets you nowhere.
I integrate the source of these feelings and arrive, somewhat predictably, at my childhood. My parents' own love of clothes rubs up uncomfortably against the moral requirements of their religious upbringings. Although apparently Atheists, the impact of a Protestant worldview that demanded frugality and diligence looms large in our lives. It can be hard living with only the moral framework of religion without the spiritual comfort of a higher power. The rigid and contradictory expectations are self-imposed. This diagnosis also provides some sort of answer. I realise that I am not searching for a personal political solution but a spiritual one. The answers to ending the destruction of the fashion industry are clearly not individual but at the same time participating in this excess does not feel good for my soul.
It’s 2023 and I’m taking a course to learn how to use a sewing machine. Our teacher shows us how to cut the fabric, how to set up the machine, how to cut button holes and make elastic waist bands. She carefully takes our measurements so we can make things that properly fit our very different bodies. I create a pair of shorts out of some scrap polyester. It gives me a new appreciation for the level of craftsmanship that goes into making clothes. I have a fresh perspective. I start to perceive garments differently. I notice the cut, the richness of the dye, the fabric, the fibres, and the way it’s been crafted. I finally realise, it’s not clothes that are the problem, it’s trends.
I don’t need to suppress my joy in fashion to reject rampant, extractive consumerism. In fact, by truly embracing clothes and thinking about what I really love and why, brand-new trends have become far less alluring. Charity shops take on a new dimension as I search carefully through the rails, eBay and Vinted bring new joys when I know exactly what I’m looking for and, with my new, rudimentary sewing skills, second-hand fabric opens up whole new opportunities. What was once some old cloth is now a new skirt, a dress, a tote bag, made exactly how I want it. I am seeking delight, not condemnation or austerity.
In 2024 I find hope in an article about a group of Bangladeshi climate activists who successfully overturned the construction of a new Japanese-owned coal mine in their region. The photo shows them at a demo holding placards, they’re all dressed as Pikachu. I watch the film The Loud Spring. It depicts a fantasy environmental action that sees workers rise up, seize the means of production and reorganise society in line with human needs. Central to the film is the idea that utopian thinking is crucial to organising together and making any sort of change in the world.
If the first step in a revolution is imagination, then I will imagine. If fashion production stopped tomorrow. If the global supply chains unravelled. If we redistributed global wealth and decoupled growth from development in favour of health, wellbeing, and creativity. What would we be wearing? I imagine the creative possibilities for the billions of tonnes of textiles already in existence. I contemplate community wardrobes where neighbours could borrow clothes, experiment and do fashion shows for each other. I think about all the playful possibilities for self-expression if we were freed from the rigidity of narrow, homogenous trends. I consider what can be learnt from the many cultures who still engage with their rich heritage of traditional clothing. And the solidarity that could be found in collective mending and repair. I know this is a sentimental vision that takes place against the backdrop of a hot and uncertain global future. But I remember Mike Davis’s riff on Gramsci in his climate essay Who Will Build the Ark?: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the imagination”. In this daydream, I visit our trend-free sartorial future and know that the revolution must be joyful.
