Why Trends Move Faster Than Ever
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In the first part of this piece we looked at the oldest explanations for why dress refuses to sit still: Flügel on adornment, Veblen on conspicuous consumption, Simmel on imitation and distinction, Laver on desire. Between them they describe a machine that runs downhill — from an elite outwards.
It is a good story. It is also, as researchers found the moment they tested it, not quite what happens.
The engine breaks: it was never only class
The tidy trickle-down model started failing empirically as soon as anyone tested it. In 1969 the sociologist Herbert Blumer replaced it with something better. Watching buyers select from hundreds of designs, he found they converged on the same handful — not by copying elites, since never, in any period, were enough people doing that for it to drive a trend, but, as Blumer put it, by independently sensing which designs felt right for the moment.
Blumer called it collective selection. Elites, in his account, do not steer the movement of fashion; they ride it, and they hold prestige only while they are seen to embody where taste is already heading. A style dies not because the elite abandons it, but because a newer one fits the developing mood better. That is a fundamentally different claim: fashion becomes an attempt to be modern rather than an attempt to be superior or exclusive.
Styles rise from below as often as above — denim from workwear, the T-shirt from underwear, streetwear from skateboarding. Dick Hebdige's work on subcultures showed how subversive styles are absorbed and defused by the market with striking speed. The Situationists had proposed the opposite operation: to seize the psychological machinery of advertising and consumer persuasion and turn it back against the market and the liberal politics it serves. In practice, the traffic has mostly run the other way. Ted Polhemus named the upward flow bubble-up. Fashion, it turns out, moves in every direction at once.
The engine inside us
None of that explains why the individual keeps wanting. The sharpest answer came from the sociologist Colin Campbell in 1987, and it is uncomfortable.
Modern consumers, Campbell argued, do not really desire objects. They desire the imagined pleasure attached to them — the daydream of the person they would be in that coat. Because the daydream is always richer than any actual object, the purchase is followed reliably by a small disillusion, and the longing detaches and reattaches to something new. He called it self-illusory hedonism: a desire that cannot be satisfied by acquisition, because acquisition is not what it was ever about.
This is the missing psychological piece. Simmel explains why styles must keep moving; Campbell explains why we keep following. And it means the restlessness is not a flaw in the consumer — it is the mechanism working as designed.
Two other thinkers complete the picture. Pierre Bourdieu showed in 1979 that taste is never merely personal: our sense of what is elegant or vulgar maps closely onto where we stand socially, which is why taste feels instinctive while being profoundly learned. And Gilles Lipovetsky argued that in late modernity the driver shifted again — from class imitation to individualism, from wanting to belong to wanting to be distinctive. We no longer dress to join a class. We dress to be a person.
What clothes do to the wearer
There is a final loop that Flügel intuited and psychology later tested. In 2012 Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky coined enclothed cognition: the finding that clothing influences not only how others read us but how we think. Their participants wore identical white coats; those told it was a doctor's coat performed measurably better on attention tasks than those told it was a painter's. The effect required both the symbolic meaning and the physical act of wearing.
Honesty demands a caveat here, because it is often quoted without one: a high-powered replication failed to reproduce one of the original effects, and the authors themselves published a meta-analysis in 2023 examining whether the wider body of work holds up. The general direction survives; the specific claims deserve care. But the core idea — that a garment shapes the person inside it — is exactly Flügel's extension of the bodily self, arriving ninety years later in a laboratory.
And then the interval collapsed
Everything above was written about a world where fashion moved on a roughly twenty-year cycle. That number is now historical.
Trends today are widely described as rising and dying within weeks. The mechanism has not changed — imitation and differentiation, collective selection, imagined pleasure and its disappointment — but the interval between the stages has collapsed. Where a style once needed a season to reach the high street, an algorithm now distributes it globally in hours, and a supply chain answers in days. What is genuinely new about microtrends is not that they exist. It is that the loop closes faster than a garment can wear out.
The interval between a style arriving and being replaced. Shown for comparison, not to scale.
That is where the psychology stops being an academic matter. A cycle running at that speed cannot be served by clothes built to last, because lasting is no longer the point of the object. The result is the disposable garment: made to satisfy a daydream that will have moved on before the seams do.
Knowing the machine
None of this is an argument against enjoying clothes. Flügel's first observation still stands — adornment is older than covering, and there is nothing shameful in it. Wanting to look like someone in particular is one of the oldest human projects there is.
But it helps to know what is pushing. If a style feels suddenly wrong, it is worth asking whether the garment changed or only its distance from now. If a purchase promises to make you someone, Campbell's warning applies: the daydream will not survive the delivery, and the longing will simply move. Recognising the drift for what it is doesn't stop you dressing well. It stops the drift from dressing you — which is, in the end, the only reliable route to a wardrobe that lasts. We've written elsewhere about what sustainability really asks of a wardrobe.
Finally
All of this can leave a bleak impression: desire fixed at an unreachable point on a wheel built, quite deliberately, out of social and psychological mechanisms that keep us walking towards garments which never satisfy a want that renews itself every time. They are always insufficient and, at the same time, a small dose of dopamine — building a powerful addiction and a tolerance to their own pleasurable effect, so that what they open is an endless horizon.
We would rather not leave it there, as a lament. Our answer is modest and practical: to offer a way of looking, and things to wear, suited to a more frugal and more realistic kind of pleasure — objects that can genuinely meet a need and give satisfaction, without extending into an infinity that has nothing to do with any real reason for making or wearing clothes. Products that do not prolong that dark horizon of dissatisfaction, which needed analysing, but which we are not going to leave standing as a simple lament. You can read more about the thinking we work from on our values page.
