For the past few years, opening up social media has felt like standing in front of a fire hose of fashion and internet fads and cranking open the nozzle, full blast.

New “it” water bottles are anointed almost quarterly. Influencers urge their viewers to style themselves as coastal grandmothers, ballet dancers, indie sleazers and coquettes — looks that have little in common besides the consumption they require. Specious fads like the “mob wife aesthetic,” recognized by publications including this one, prompted The New Yorker’s humor column to predict what might come next: How about “Supreme Court casual” or “spotted-lanternfly goth”?

To keep up would leave most people broke, not to mention disoriented. And while a majority of these crazes are labeled “Gen Z trends,” members of that generation may be the ones most fatigued by the churn.

It’s not that they don’t get what’s going on: Today’s young adults can comfortably discuss the way that social media and fast fashion keep many members of their generation buying, sharing and discarding items. They are aware, sometimes painfully, that their insecurities are being harnessed for someone else’s bottom line. But awareness does not equal liberation. Understanding the mechanisms at play does not always mean they can escape them — although many are trying.

Neena Atkins, 16, a high school junior in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., said she felt “constantly bombarded” by product recommendations. Cheetah print was hot less than two months ago, she said, “and now when I go on TikTok, I see people saying, like, cheetah print is getting so old.”

Lina, 15, a high school freshman near Fort Wayne, Ind., watched classmates buy $35 Stanley tumblers only to covet another brand of pastel water bottles shortly thereafter. “It’s wasteful,” she said. “You’re just wasting resources, you’re wasting money.”

James Oakley, 19, a college student in Oregon, thinks his age group has reached saturation: “The prevalence and pure amount of microtrends has made it impossible to understand or participate.”

‘This Is Gross’

We tend to think of trends as a means of demonstrating that we know what’s cool and new, or as a way to take part in a bigger collective “moment.” For decades, critics have rightly pointed out that following trends facilitates a consumer capitalist culture — wake up, sheeple! — but it can also be experimental, playful, even fun.

Lately, though, trends feel more overwhelming. I recently set out to make sense of which trends were actually relevant to Gen Z-ers’ lives. But after hearing from dozens of young people, a pattern emerged: Many wanted to talk not about any one trend that they thought mattered, but about their struggles with the relentless onslaught of trends, and the whiplash they felt from trying to process them all so quickly.

Young people I spoke with described an online trend ecosystem that resembles a soupy flood plain of fads — trends that are at once flimsy and a genuine source of stress for young people eager to fit in. The insecurity that young people feel when they don’t have the “it” item is amplified when there’s a new “it” item every week.

To be clear, not every member of Gen Z has gotten sucked into the whirlpool that awaits them on their phones: Many can’t be bothered — or simply can’t afford — to pay attention. “A lot of people don’t buy from Shein, do not have the time or money to invest in every microtrend that just walks by,” James said.

Bemoaning the quickening of trends is itself a tradition. The scholar Quentin Bell observed in a 1978 edition of his book “On Human Finery,” that “the pace of fashion has become noticeable, so noticeable that the fashions of a man’s youth could look dowdy by the time that he was middle-aged.”

Almost a half-century later, the journalist Kyle Chayka wrote in his book “Filterworld” that “microtrends” now rise and fall in a matter of weeks. In its quest to retain our attention, social media seemed to have heightened both the quantity and intensity of what we once called a fad: “Under algorithmic feeds, the popular becomes more popular, and the obscure becomes even less visible,” he writes.

That’s how it feels for Francesca Oliva, an 18-year-old college freshman in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. As a middle schooler, she said, she felt pressure to own the signifiers of the “VSCO girl” look that was then dominant: pastel scrunchies, a Hydro Flask water bottle. When she got them, it felt a little bit like she was putting on a costume.

“When you have 18,000 different ‘core’ identities being thrown at you — like eclectic grandpa, or coastal grandmother, or office siren — you’re like, What am I supposed to be?” she said.

As she watched even more trends come and go, each one seemingly requiring a new wardrobe, she took a step back. She wants to spend her money on clothing that will last, she said, and she has neither the budget nor the mental energy to keep pace with a trend environment that resembles a game of Whac-a-Mole.

“People that continuously are buying these clothes just trying to fit in, it has to feel exhausting,” she said. “As someone who’s just observing that, it’s exhausting.”

Keeping up is a full-time job for Casey Lewis, author of the Gen Z trend newsletter “After School.” As an adolescent in rural Missouri in the late 1990s, Ms. Lewis, 37, learned about the popular styles of the moment — low-rise slip skirts, embellished baby tees — in teen magazines that arrived monthly. Fashion trends, in the macro sense, spun in 20-year cycles: Today’s tier of more slight digital ephemera did not yet exist.

Her newsletter, a daily cheat sheet for millennials and their elders who want to know what young people are up to, is stuffed with a survey of everything that social media users and fashion publications are simultaneously declaring to be of the moment. Some of its tongue-in-cheek subject lines barely scan as English: “Quietcations and Tweecore”; “Rococo Revival and Cinnamon Softcore.”

A sense of consumption fatigue has set in, she said. “Eventually, you’re just kind of like, ‘This is gross. Why am I even participating in this culture?’” she said. “I think creators and brands are increasingly having to answer to that understanding from young people.”

Status, Anxiety, FOMO

Accelerants for the trend cycle abound. TikTok requires novelty to hold our attention, and has an algorithm potent enough to elevate the unknown to ubiquity in a matter of days. Fast-fashion marketplaces are able to churn out polyester to meet whatever bottomless demand is generated online. And platforms are rolling out click-to-buy functions like TikTok Shop to all but eliminate the friction between seeing something online and having it dropped on one’s doorstep.

That can make being online an unsatisfying experience: Social media was sold as a playground, but ended up feeling more like a mall. “Every time I go on Instagram, it’s like something is being sold to me,” said Sequoya, a 22-year-old living in Salt Lake City.

Ensuring that the wheel continues to spin is the status-seeking element of human nature itself, W. David Marx argues in his book “Status and Culture.” We want what other people have in order to fit in, but eventually abandon those same things once we see them as too accessible to the masses. Or, as Ms. Lewis put it, “Once a 12-year-old is crying over getting a Stanley, a 17-year-old isn’t going to want one.”

In fashion, the result is a glut of low-quality clothing items that are not wearable for long. The average number of times a single garment is worn has decreased 36 percent compared with rates 15 years earlier, according to a 2019 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Company. For every five garments produced, the report added, three end up in a landfill or incinerated.

But it’s not just clothes. David Peraza, 21, a college student in Yucatán, Mexico, watches new titles surge to the top of the online game marketplace Steam more quickly than he can afford to buy them. At the beginning of last year, it seemed as if everyone was playing “Helldivers 2,” he said, only to pivot a few months later to an updated release of “The Legend of Zelda.”

“It is overwhelming,” he said. Games trend so quickly that his FOMO — fear of missing out — has grown “exponential.”

Some so-called trends feel more like mirages. Things like “mermaidcore” and “barefoot-boy summer” function less as reigning aesthetics in real life and more as mash-ups of words memorable enough to achieve social media virality for a week or two. But trend pieces reliably follow: “Lately I wonder if we’re living through a mass psychosis expressing itself through trend reporting,” the fashion critic Rachel Tashjian wrote for Harper’s Bazaar in 2022.

Those fleeting trends can still cause real anxiety for young people who feel pressure to measure up to what they see online.

Neena, the 16-year-old, recalled a conversation with a panicked friend during study hall. “She told me: ‘I’m really stressed out. I don’t know whether I want to be an Aussie girl or a vanilla girl,” Neena recalled, naming two looks that had briefly overtaken her TikTok feed. “That was kind of my realization: This is not normal.”

Enter ‘Underconsumption Core’

Is it possible that the fire hydrant of trends is starting to run dry? Business of Fashion predicted in January that viral microtrends were on their way out, in part because of the uncertain fate of TikTok, which was set to face a federal ban in January. The app flickered dark, and then back to life, after President Trump signed an executive order that delayed enforcement of the ban for 75 days.

Hana Tilksew, 19, a college student near Fresno, Calif., got rid of the app anyway. It’s been a relief, she said: “I think a permanent TikTok ban would definitely help mitigate the relentless pressure we feel to keep up.”

Other TikTok users have been making their fatigue known for a while now. In a flurry of videos last year, some expressed frustration at the buy-buy-buy ethos on the app. Others pushed “underconsumption core,” which encourages users to show off their off-trend, but still thoroughly wearable, clothes. Still more have documented their attempts at a “low-buy year” in which they vowed to cut back on shopping.

Such neatly packaged repudiations of trendiness strike Abner Gordan, a 21-year-old college student in New York City, as ironic. “In a weird way, I think being anti-trend is very trendy,” he said.

While many of his friends still buy secondhand clothing or furniture, he has watched the “underconsumption core” label lose steam online, just like all of the “cores” before it. It was dispiriting, he said, to witness what at first seemed like a move away from the trend cycle be subsumed by it instead.

“It’s like you can’t escape,” he said.

Perhaps Gen Z is just aging out of the period of their lives ruled by trends, Ms. Lewis said, noting that its eldest members are in their late 20s. But she does not think the online trend madness will slow down anytime soon. Enter Gen Alpha, whose eyes are already racing across screens. “I think they’re going to be trend freaks,” Ms. Lewis said.

Hana stopped buying ultra-trendy items when she realized that a closet full of bags and Brandy Melville miniskirts wasn’t making her any happier. She said she gave her hand-me-downs to her 13-year-old sister, a middle schooler who is “still obsessed with trends.”

“She’ll grow out of it eventually,” she said.

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Published March 7, 2025 7:00 PM PST