As is the case with everything good - 2010s House music, high waist jeans, wired headphones, etc. - it seems people have decided that Charli XCX’s brat is over… before it’s actually over. The increasingly rapid trend cycle that makes us constantly seek out what’s “new,” pushing our need to drop trends after a matter of months, or even weeks, has announced that brat’s had its moment. But we have to disagree.
We know that people are likely just listening to the brain rot infecting their thoughts that likes to start saying, around 1 month into a trend, that: “that’s enough. Onto the next thing. Let’s keep the cycle moving.” But it’s such a tired take. What happened to being obsessed with things for more than a fleeting few weeks? Why do we now feel the need to jump ship as soon as a trend ages into its fourth week, citing an expiration date that doesn’t exist?
Arguably, our need to abandon trends mere weeks into their popularity is partly because of the aggressive consumerist cycle that dominates social media nowadays. Particularly when it comes to clothing trends, we’re constantly being pushed to find something new: a new interest, look, core, or viral moment we can hop on to feed our hunter-gatherer instincts.
Nowadays, we consume about 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year, a 400% increase from the amount we consumed two decades ago, and the increasing speed of the trend cycle is partially at fault for this.
This isn’t how we’re meant to consume media, fashion, or anything else; these things should be built to last. The more that we accept trends as limited to a few months or weeks, the more we’re encouraging things like clothing designed to last that long too, churned out by fast fashion brands as a quick fix rather than a piece made to be passed down eventually.
The trend cycle needs to be allowed to slow down, get longer, and give trends a chance to become more ingrained in our lives than on a Shein tank top discarded after a few weeks. Can we as a society agree to re-learn what it means to enjoy things for more than their current popularity? brat might be ageing out of its initial hype, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.
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