When I was a little girl, I loved looking at the trends, watching them cycle like seasons and celebrating the changes. One year, my family let me enroll in a kids’ modeling class at the local community college. It was an experience I’ll never forget, and a small proof that fashion and the trends I loved could lead to something more.
Now, the trend cycle is faster, and the internet has taken much of the power away from fashion houses, placing it into the collectives that unite common interests.
The aesthetic groups, vibe hashtags, and -core communities now define niche fashions. The fashion house prowess of knowing what is “in” and what is “out” has been replaced with an authenticity of self-expression driven by identity and belonging.
Today’s fashion trends are loudest in their identity-affirming inclusivity.
Identity affirmation is one side of the fashion coin. By celebrating all parts of oneself, a person can embrace #grandpacore on Tuesday and #hightechurbanism on Friday. Until the social internet, Western social structure rewarded those who could afford to, and chose to, follow the fashion leaders.
The stereotypical characters in The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls gave way to a more nuanced view of people, resulting in Glee, Pose, and even Do Revenge. These productions all define the separation many people experienced in high school, college, and the workplace. They show how centralized fashion trends strengthened cliques. Productions set in the social internet era show how decentralized fashion trends are usurping fashion houses and provide a means of identity expression.
Pose, in particular, shows how differences led to outsider status. The show presents identity-affirming niches in the form of “houses” in the Ballroom Drag scene. It illustrates the analog social structure of the 1980s and nineties complete with a central fashion house that dictated belonging. In Pose, community elders, the judges, and spokesperson Pray Tell are the central authorities.
In Do Revenge, cliques and otherness are defined by online and offline behaviors. Social media leaves receipts for every character and is criticized due to its potential for abuse. The quintessential teen movie makeover scene shows the intricacies of the niches available to today’s trend setters. Unlike the makeover in Breakfast Club, this makeover displays a new side of the character rather than remaking her in the “popular girl” image. This serves as further evidence of identity-affirming niches leading the way in trends, rather than centralized fashion houses.
Like the printing press, the radio, and the television, the social effects of the internet are upending an older social structure.
Exclusion is the other side – the older side – of the fashion coin. Before the social internet, media communication was a one-way street. Fashion houses dictated what was “cool,” “in” style, and “in” fashion. Fashion houses set themselves up as fashion leaders and, intentionally or not, punished those who did not follow along.
But those days are gone. When you choose a shirt, a pair of pants, a piece of jewelry, you show where you belong. You share your identity (identities!), and in doing so you find your tribe.
Here at Pendant and Ring, we are a tribe of treasure seekers, and we hold space for each treasure, each seeker, and each story you want to share.
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