on cottagecore, dusty swag, and the microtrend-fast fashion cycle
how tiktok trend cycles are destroying personal style and the planet (and rotting my brain)
When I was on Pinterest in 2019, I started longing for an escape from college life — I wished that instead of having to do my silly little readings, my only responsibilities were to the earth, my home, and maybe some animals. I pinned images of women wearing long, ruffled dresses; cute cozy kitchens with windows overlooking secluded gardens; pictures of baby goats and chickens, and dreamed of a life where I could really connect with nature. (Readers note: “Outdoorsy” is not a way I’d describe myself. That Pinterest board was slightly delusional.) Soon, a name came to the aesthetic I’d been obsessing over: Cottagecore.
Across social media, I’d started to notice evolving trends with increasingly niche aesthetics, all with their own names and distinct descriptions. I first remember seeing it with the art hoe movement in the early 2010s, which was a style made popular by young Black artists. Then came dark academia. After a while cottagecore became more popular. And then at a certain point, TikTok started spewing them, and then there were so many -cores, I couldn’t keep track of them.
A few months ago when I first learned what “coastal grandma” aesthetic was, I wanted to throw my phone out of a moving car. Last week, a friend sent me a video of a girl purporting to be the creator of “dusty swag,” a micro-trend that literally (LITERALLY) looks like the clothes I wore in fifth grade. I am begging you to please cut it with the medium-blue boot cut jeans and Merrells.
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But whether I like the trends is not the point. It’s that there are so many trends that tell us in ever-shortening cycles how we should present. No longer are we allowed to respond authentically and in the moment to situations or clothes or styles. There are hundreds of ~aesthetics~ to pick from.
TikTok’s algorithm and fast pace is perfectly suited to pump out dozens of these niches — and they just keep coming. Even taking a brief google into TikTok niche aesthetics, you’ll find things like “Tennis core,” “Weird Girl Aesthetic,” (?????) “Plazacore,” and more bizarre word salad trends that I literally have never heard of.
In Terry Nguyen’s VOX article “Trends are Dead,” Nguyen starts off by looking at the “night luxe” aesthetic, which was supposed to be a rejection of capitalism and a celebration of going out. (It isn’t.)
“It’s just one of many aesthetic designations for which the internet has contrived a buzzy, meaningless portmanteau. Rest assured that night luxe will likely have faded into irrelevance by the time this article is published, only for another meme-ified aesthetic (i.e., coastal grandmother) to be crowned the next viral ‘trend.’” — Terry Nguyen, VOX
Nguyen goes on to explain how desperate we are to give names to every single trend. She writes that these microtrends are “something that can be demystified, mimicked, sold, and bought.” TikTok truly has commodified everything it possibly could, and does it as quickly as possible.
In terms of style, these trends have little overlap, so if a new one drops, you’re going to have to go shopping to find something new. Because obviously your night luxe slip dress isn’t weird girl aesthetic enough, and your long cottagecore dresses certainly don’t vibe with tennis core. In order to keep up with an ever-shifting landscape, people are relegated to the only thing that will provide them quickly with cheap, trendy clothing: Fast fashion, of course.
Let’s go back to that dusty swag video for a second. Notice, if you will, that there are *very specific* requirements if you do, in fact, want to consider yourself “dusty swag” (for the love of god though please don’t). This fits the aesthetic but that doesn’t — if you wear this kind of shirt, you’re almost there but not quite. Looks like you’ll have to buy something new. Off to Shein you go.
In 2021, fast fashion giant Shein raked in a total of $16 billion on cheap clothes that are likely to get thrown away faster than the tomatoes that have been rotting in your fridge. In this Rest of World article about Shein, the authors write that many China-based fast-fashion companies “have evolved to cater to the desires of internet-native consumers — and transformed their consumption habits in the process.”
It’s a chicken-egg scenario. Trends come up faster than ever, so people buy more clothes, but at the same time, new trendy clothes are available faster than ever, allowing those trends to change quickly and seamlessly. And once the weeks-long trend is over — hey, you only spent $5 on that shirt, so you might as well toss it — or donate it. Thrift stores are increasingly full of Shein products deemed too “two months ago” to wear anymore.
With all these trends, does personal style exist anymore? Is there room for it in our hyper-short attention span TikTok economy?
I recently visited my college town and was struck by the amount of people I saw wearing corset-style tops, jeans and white sneakers. I hadn’t been around such a large amount of college-age people in a while, and I’d forgotten how homogenized things become. Those 18-22-year-olds who are probably very online are being inundated with information telling them how they should dress, so much so that there isn’t much room to make personal choices. And to see them all gathered in one place…whew. It’s a lot.
Frances Solá-Santiago wrote an article for Refinery29 about the end of personal style, where she asks a key question: “When billions of us are served up the same looks over and over, what do we lose?” Our sense of individuality, normally something Americans specifically are praised for, is no longer desirable.
It’s fascinating because in a lot of ways, capitalism necessitates individuality. You are praised for living on your own (not with roommates or family), having your own car (never taking public transit), and making money by being an entrepreneur (how dare you work a low-wage service job??).
But capitalism has also stripped us of individuality when it comes to personal style. Social capital is gained by performing the way others want to see us. Even if a style feels fundamentally inauthentic on you, it’s trendy and it will give you your five seconds of fame on TikTok. And giving a cute, quirky name to these styles allows people to find them easily, giving creators an easy route to an audience of people who are quick to succumb to new trends. These creators are essentially involuntary marketers for fast fashion companies.
I like to think I’ve stayed strong amid the influx of trends. I never went full cottagecore. I have a lot of clothes that I’ve had since high school, because I’ve had a relatively consistent sense of style for some years now, despite constant trend cycles. But none of us are immune to seeing hot, influential people wearing, I don’t know, West Elm Core — or whatever weird trend comes up next — and saying to ourselves, “I’ve got to have that.” Off to Shein we go.