Follow the trends!

Accept that you are a creature of your time and place and enjoy clothing

You don’t have to click on the NYT advice column (gift link), “Do I Need to Keep Up With Microtrends?,” to know what the answer’s going to be.

Every how-to-dress guide has that bit about the importance of valuing taste, or personal style, over the whims and whimsies of fashion. “Don’t follow trends,” they say, a capacious “they.” Various celebrities—Dolly Parton, Zooey Deschanel—profess to bucking trends, per headlines I have not followed through with.

But it’s all nonsense. There’s this whole ritual of saying that you don’t do trends, that you’re not trendy, that you are approaching clothing in some radically different way than Other Girls. But you’re not that special! Nor, conversely, are the women you perceive of as sheep as sheep-like as you think - they’re customizing their subcultures’ looks in ways you’re not perceiving, or if they’re not it’s because they… don’t care about clothes.

This is why I’m always confused about who the trend-chasing straw-woman even is. Is she into fashion or not? Is she wearing trends because she lacks the creativity to do otherwise, or because she’s vapid and too interested in the sartorial?

So for not the first or last time, the case for following clothing trends, if so inclined:

-Humans are social creatures. Doing this whole dance of pretending otherwise, of pretending I don’t care what other people think, is tiresome. Either you’re a true non-carer where clothes are concerned, or you’re caring in a way that involves communication with the world around you. Even if you’re a shut-in and the interactions are virtual, there are interactions happening! There is no such thing as personal style in a bubble. What I’m saying is, if you are interested in how you dress, you are already participating in trends.

-Used clothing exists, and there’s nothing new-new being invented where clothes are concerned. You can be trendy without fast fashion or newly-made clothes at all, this is always an option! Case in point: I have one pair of of-the-moment jeans. I got them at one of those local vintage shops that curates for current-looking old clothes. They cost precisely one dollar more than the average price of jeans in Toronto in 2019 according to an article I just googled, so probably pretty normal-to-low for 2025 when I got them. Buying jeans probably from the early 1990s made me look more ‘now’ than do the ones I bought new (or uh that someone did and that I bought from them on Poshmark not long after) more recently.

A lot of trendiness is a matter of proportions, or which size you choose to take. You can size up or down, or shop a different section (men’s, kids’, hunting gear) and the next thing you know you are on-trend, without Shein having been involved. You can do microtrends, even, be the coastal tomato mob wife, whatever it is, via the local thrift shop or by-the-pound used clothing establishment. There’s no law against this!

-Clothing does not fit forever. Rare is the person donating or discarding a heap of out-of-style jeans when a new silhouette comes to town. Chances are, by the time the silhouette shifts, so has your own body, even if your height and weight are stable but goodness knows if there have been any changes. Do you know what prompted my purchase, I guess some time during the fall, of the aforementioned jeans? My existing (straight-legged) jeans were fitting strangely!

So rather than scoffing at Miss Chaser of Trends, consider that her existing clothes fit wrong and she decided, rather than bemoaning this, rather than willing her waist size into what it maybe once was, to turn it into a chance to try a new look.