These pictures were taken almost a year ago and with a charitable outlook, you could still use them to illustrate a fresh piece of writing on current trends (which I am, sort of, doing). The colour story is certainly up to date: there are massive amounts of lilac, brown and yellow around at them moment, although the latter should be slightly mellower than the colour of my Bottega mules.

The fashion-industrial complex is doing its best to convince us that short-term trends are still essential, but I’m not sure they are entirely succeeding. I have felt for a while now that the turnover of trends is getting slower, that a significant amount of them stick around for many, many seasons. Leather – both real and fake – is one of these megatrends and while I think we are past peak leather by now, I fully expect it to hang around for a few more years.

I am using leather as an example, because this is what I happen to wear in the pictures. It could just as well have been a slouchy knit or an oversized blazer or a crop top or the big sleeve – these hardly register as trends any more, they are simply the new normal. The exact shape of course varies slightly from season to season, but the basic form, the idea remains. There has also been a seismic shift away from skinny jeans: something that’s been going on for a long time, but is now, famously, epitomised in the millennials vs gen-Z face-off. Again, this does not feel like a fleeting trend, but a broader change in sensibility.

Far be it from me to tell anyone not to wear skinny jeans (I own and constantly wear a pair from Guess, of all brands, so I really am not pointing fingers), but if your goal happens to be to look current, pretty much any shape is better than skinny. Long and straight styles are having a major moment, as are flares/bootcut and relaxed tapered jeans, which I think of as an easier version of mom-jeans. I recently heard a youtuber I otherwise really like complain about the unflatteringness of mom-jeans and hence, the utter pointlessness of them. But she forgets, as people often do, that there are many other reasons for going for a certain aesthetic, beyond what looks most flattering on you. Often, these are the best reasons to wear something.

The overall big shift is, of course, the shift towards the Big Chill. I truly wonder if heels are ever going to recover from this. They probably shouldn’t. I find it difficult to believe that women will abandon their flat sandals and sneakers and willingly torture themselves again. I have loved high heels all my life, but these days wear them exclusively in the office and at parties, which means that currently I’m not really wearing them at all. Similarly, I strongly feel the comfort factor in clothing is here to say. It doesn’t mean people will wear their home office tracksuits to their face-to-face meetings (well, some people probably will), but the reluctance to go back to confining clothing will have serious impact.

I am not saying trends are dead, even when thinking of trends in traditional terms – short-lived, disposable, perhaps a bit silly. Last summer, there were the gold link jewellery and padded muscle tees (both still acceptable this year, in mu view), now it’s the return of the corset and the ubiquitous ‘flossing’. As long as humans are humans, I believe there will be an element of that – the inexplicable, sudden desire to wear exactly that thing that screems of now.

It is also dangerous to project your own mood to everybody else. The fact that I, personally, seem to be craving less trends does of course not mean everybody else agrees. There might be many people out there who cannot wait to buy the latest fashions and wear something new every day. (While I do miss dressing up, I don’t necessarily miss buying as many clothes as I used to nor the daily pressure of looking polished.)

I do not speak entirely without broader evidence base, however. I follow a number of fashion outlets and style influencers and especially with the latter, trends have become a dirty word. There is a strong emphasis on sustainability/investment/neutrals. In my view, it often results in a realtively boring, samey style, but I approve of the sentiment.

These tend to be the slightly older (in this context, older means anything over 25 or so) influencers. One would expect the younger ones to be, undestandably, more trend-led, but I also find that the TikTok crowd often has a strong focus on aethetics rather than trends. I have to admit with embarrassement that I only discovered dark academia less than a year ago (if you haven’t yet, search for #darkacademia and #cottagecore hashtags on the social platform of your choice), but I am a big fan of this approach.

It is less restrictive and less inherently ridiculous than trends, but gives one an aesthetic home and some broad guidance – something that many of us want, especially as 15-year olds. I can say with confidence that if dark academia had been around in 1995, I would have been an instant convert. I would still be all over it today, if emulating a univeristy student wouldn’t be one of the easiest ways for a 41-year old woman to look pathetic. Still, if I took the ‘English aritocracy’-adjacent route and just absolutely avoided Mary Janes…

Anyway. This has been a rambly post even by my standards and I could, easily, be wrong about all of it. Perhaps the fashion industry will return to the exact same place it left off when the pandemic arrived. Perhaps I will be prancing about in high heels in no time, switching from one trend to another on a daily basis. If that’s the case, I will be sure to let you know.

Images Laura Nestor, MUAH Lembe Lemmiksoo. Silk shirt by & Other Stories, faux leather shorts by Zara, shoes by Bottega Veneta.