Beyond the Clock: Unraveling Microtrends, Urgency, and the Essence of Trend Work in 2024

As of January 23, 2024, the Doomsday Clock was set to the closest to midnight as it has ever been. The closer the clock is to midnight, the more urgent and serious the perceived threats to the world. Yet, for the most part, forecasts are babbling about ballet core, corpcore, cowboy aesthetic and mob-wife style on equal footing with climate change, race and economic issues. Show Studio recently pointed out that Louis Vuitton’s cowboy-aesthetic show drew from Hollywood cowboy costumes, not reality.

What gives us the right to discuss such levity on equal footing with grave concerns? We seem to have lost the essence of trend work. Let’s be clear. Trends are information. They are not an end in themselves as they are currently being positioned on TikTok and in 2024 forecasts.

Leigh Esposito, author of the Godmother, has been asked by her Instagram followers what she thinks of the Mob Wife trend. She points out to her followers that the Mob Wife trend is a rehash of 80s/90s luxury. And that the real Mob Wife trend is witness protection, etc. She is not wrong.

We agree. The look is one of new money and we can take this one step further and assert that the Mob Wife trend correlates to Trad Wives in its accepted subjugation of women, only in a more palatable way. Fur and glitz is more provocative than modest midi dresses.

At the same time, costume creator and time re-enactor Asta Darling is being slammed for “playing dress-up and not solving the world’s problems.” This is wholly unfair. Asta Darling does in fact call out the strong women who have existed throughout history. But this is beside the point. The lanes are different, and they each need to exist so we can live in the world.

Trend work differs from entertainment. Both can provide information. Trend work is work that requires deconstruction, patterning, and correlation. The end result of trend work provides us with a post-analysis that should be explicit. Entertainment, on the other hand, gives us implicit information for readers to interpret.

A laziness has come about since the inception of the Internet. Rather than rise to the challenge of the tools we have, the platforms are used for the least common denominator for instant satisfaction. This is a formula for social disaster at a time when people are craving answers. Hopefully, we figure this out in our time.

Trends propagated on the Internet (call them microtrends or Internet aesthetic) are more akin to what we once would have considered fads – fast moving and fleeting and – at times – fun. And that is okay, but it is not trend work. Trend work is about finding resonance.

Let’s return to the Doomsday Clock. It’s no surprise that it was designed by an artist very closely involved with the scientists of the time. She heard their urgency and captured it for the generations in a simple dynamic iteration of a clock. Thank you, Martyl Langsdorf.