Isabella Xu
Fashion and film enthusiasts alike will be quick to recognize Miranda Priestly's iconic “cerulean” monologue in The Devil Wears Prada. Beyond actress Meryl Streep’s incredible delivery, the scene memorialized itself by pointing to the highly manufactured nature of fashion trend cycles.
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She explained that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta and Yves Saint Laurent both featured “cerulean” as a key color in their collection. From there, “cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner.”
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Viewers finished the movie with a newfound understanding that the emergence of new trends is a result of top-down company decisions.
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Those chocolate brown suede bags that have taken over your Pinterest? No, you haven’t discovered a new unique autumnal accessory. Back in February, high-end designers like Bottega Veneta and Miu Miu debuted the trend on runways. Celebrity “it-girls” like Bella Hadid and Iris Law began sporting the bags, prompting more accessible retailers like ASOS and Madewell to dupe the product.
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That is how a trend emerges. It’s frighteningly calculated, yet subtly done—dispersed through platforms like TikTok and Pinterest to trick us into thinking our tastes are organic.
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But what about the death of trends? That moment when the entire internet seems to simultaneously decide an item is out of vogue, and it begins popping up on TikToks titled “10 items I do NOT want to see in 2024.”
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Popular consensus points to trend cycles as a result of oversaturation: humans love novelty, so we naturally grow sick of a popular item and move on.
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But this isn’t necessarily true. Luxury brands like Hermes feed on the prestige associated with their product. The Birkin has been around for decades, yet we haven’t grown sick of it, despite seeing one in the crook of every A-lister’s arm. Trend cycles aren’t simply about the number of people who possess an item. It’s about who possesses it.
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Just like the emergence of trends, trends are discarded through an explicit, top-down decision to differentiate a brand from the low-end retailers who have begun copying their product. After all, it just wouldn’t do for a Bottega bag to be mistaken for Madewell.
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The trend cycle exists because the rich don’t want to look like the poor.
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Executives heading these luxury conglomerates are more stressed now than ever that their designs will get duped. Due to the rise of overseas industrialization and low-wage garment manufacturing companies, luxury brands must continuously reinvent their look. It’s an endless game of cat and mouse—one furthered by both actors.
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Online fashion discourse is quick to point to “fast-fashion” manufacturers as the catalyst for shortened trend cycles, but this is an incredibly faulty analysis of the system. Trend cycles are shortened because of luxury brands' classist aversion to association with fast-fashion manufacturers.
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So as we wrinkle our noses seeing a “cheugy” or outdated outfit, Miranda Priestly’s words once again ring true: “It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you.”