How trends spread, from royal courts to TikTok
For a century, the theory was that fashion trickled down from the rich. Then it started bubbling up from the street, and now it moves sideways through algorithms in weeks.
Model 1: trickle down (1904)
The sociologist Georg Simmel saw fashion as a contest between two urges: to fit in and to stand out. The upper classes adopt a new style to show their status. The middle classes imitate them. Once a style is common, the elite abandon it for something new, and the chase starts again.
The economist Thorstein Veblen (1899) added the idea of conspicuous consumption: expensive, impractical clothes are a way of displaying wealth. Corsets and long trains showed that you didn’t do manual work.
Model 2: trickle across, and bubble up
By the 1960s, mass production and magazines put new styles in front of every class at the same time. Researchers found that fashions mostly spread sideways, through opinion leaders within each group. Meanwhile many important styles moved upward: jeans (workwear), leather jackets, punk, hip-hop streetwear and sneakers all began outside the elite, though they usually became mainstream only after designers and celebrities adopted them.
Model 3: the algorithm
Social media changed the speed. On TikTok, a look can be named, filmed, copied by thousands and sold by fast-fashion brands within days. Journalists and fashion writers describe:
- “-core” aesthetics: cottagecore, balletcore, “clean girl”, Barbiecore. These are bundles of clothes, colours, food and interiors with a name that makes them easy to search and copy.
- Microtrends: items that peak and fade within weeks or months, where trends once took years.
There isn’t yet solid academic measurement of how much faster cycles have become, so treat the specific numbers as reporting, not established fact. The underlying mechanism is Simmel’s, sped up: people imitate to belong and move on to stand out. Algorithms simply supply far more people to imitate.
Bring it up
“Fashion used to trickle down from the rich over decades. Now a TikTok aesthetic can rise and die within a single season.”
Follow the thread
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- Same patternPink for girls and blue for boys is younger than your grandparents Shops, magazines and manufacturers helped turn a loose preference into an apparently fixed rule.
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