Fashion
2024’s hottest fashion trend? No trend at all
What was the biggest trend of 2024? Well, it depends on who you ask.
For a particular pocket of URL-native Gen Zs and millennials, it might have been the chaotic rave-readiness fuelled by Charli XCX’s Brat. For another “very mindful, very demure” subsect of the same demographic, it might have been quiet luxury. For the truly runway-pilled, it might have been the return of boho chic, resuscitated for autumn collections in March by Chemena Kamali’s Chloé debut. Or, it could be the Western vibe set forth by Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton in January and underscored by Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.
But what if the biggest trend was no trend at all?
When I asked over 100 industry professionals — from editors and writers to stylists, models and designers — what the best trend of 2024 was, through Vogue Runway’s annual Industry Poll, 50.2 per cent voted simply that “trends are over”.
That’s a half truth that contains an amalgamation of fatigue caused by micro-trends and the current fragmented state of fashion — fuelled, in part, by social media and its algorithms — and a dash of industry jadedness. Yet the Vogue Runway constituency is not far off from what’s happening en masse. It’s not necessarily that trends are over — they remain alive and well and continue to shift the fashion business (we detail said trends here). It’s more so that trends nowadays shift and evolve quickly with the direction of the wind, and the internet has a tendency of making things feel bigger than they actually are.
Take Charli’s Brat, which swiftly evolved from album to pop cultural movement. By the hand of stylist Chris Horan, Charli XCX went from cult favourite to the year’s biggest pop star — and one of its best-dressed ones. When I interviewed Horan about his approach at outfitting the Brat universe, he said that it was important to him and Charli that the pieces she wore felt authentic to her as a person, but also real, meaning familiar or approachable (from an aesthetic standpoint more so than an economic one).
“We would see people attending the shows being able to recreate the looks, because they were wearable,” said Horan of the Sweat tour co-starring Troye Sivan, which was the top-searched music tour according to Google Trends this year. This is why Brat — the fourth trending aesthetic searched on Google and the ninth most-searched “trend meaning” — became such a marketable idea, despite it stemming from a club record with a relatively niche sound. Charli partnered with H&M and fronted campaigns for everyone from Acne Studios to Google Shopping.