#micro trends

After a decade of stalking ebay auctions I finally have my very own monogram fan - the product of an short-lived 1896/97 obsessive micro-trend among teenage girls on the East Coast.

Though this particular young lady was either flirting with danger, or being staunchly neutral, by having both a Harvard AND a Yale flag on her fan (also a Cornell so she may have just been playing pokemon with the Ivy League).

So if you saw my last post, I posted “clean girl is over” and thought I was just spiteful because I look terrible in a slickback.

But I did a lot of research since then.

A lot.

So I just wanted to share what I found since I promised to update you guys.

You guys gave me more trends to test, so I expanded to these aesthetics:

Balletcore

Office siren

Indie kid

Tumblr grunge

Dark academia 

Y2K 

Coquette

Shoujo girl

VSCO girl

Downtown girl

Acubi

Goblincore

I basically tried to measure waste from aesthetic trends without directly tracking landfill data (which is almost impossible to get in real time).

So I used three proxies:

1. Value collapse

I measured this as % of listings under $15

Because in resale, under $15 = near-discard tier

2. Listing surplus

This is just total resale listings

More listings = more material committed to the trend

Cottagecore is insane here btw (356K listings)

3. Supply-demand mismatch timing

Basically a trend peaks, demand falls, but supply doesn’t

The longer prices stay low after the peak, the more likely that stuff never gets used again

Then I combined all three into one number:

Trend Waste Index (TWI)

It weights:

– cheapness (0.4)

– volume (0.4)

– how long the oversupply lingers (0.2)

And the ranking is kind of brutal:

Which leads into the second thing I measured:

Trend Half-Life

This is just:

How long until a trend loses half its attention?

Average across everything: ~2 years

But here’s a pattern I’m noticing:

Older trends (2020-2021):

~2-3 year EHL

Mid trends (2022–2023):

~1-2 EHL

New trends (2024-2026):

sometimes under 1 year

This shows trend decay is accelerating.

And when you line that up with resale data, you get this pattern:

Fast spike

Instant overproduction

Price collapse

Resale flood

Which explains why prices all cluster around like $11-$13

Everyone is undercutting each other because there’s too much supply

Different types of trends behave differently though:

Microtrends (office siren, acubi)

explode

die

create the most waste

Slower cultural trends (cottagecore, tumblr grunge)

decline gradually

still wasteful, but less abrupt

Revival trends (Y2K, dark academia)

never fully die

actually less waste because demand keeps coming back

This is basically a market failure. platforms and influencers generate demand while holding zero risk, brands produce fast and sell volume while offloading excess, and consumers and resellers are the ones stuck with depreciation, while the environment absorbs whatever is left.

The system overproduces by design because the decision-makers don’t bear the downside, which is what creates a negative externality. And it’s getting worse as everything speeds up. Trends move faster, production reacts instantly, economic life gets shorter, and waste per trend increases.

Resale markets don’t actually solve this; they just delay disposal while prices collapse. So trends aren’t just cultural cycles anymore; they’re compressed economic cycles, where value is extracted quickly at the top and waste is pushed downstream just as fast.

So I tested some other trends from Italy and South Korea. So far, they show me similar patterns, but I need more South Korean trends to really test my study. Five South Korean trends in total were used:

발레코어

하이틴

고프코어

Y2K

우아한

if you know of any more, please tell me bc i really am invested in this project.

also, sorry if any of this was unclear or anything; i’m writing this kinda late and my brain is fried. if you have any further questions feel free to message me and ask! if you want you guys can look more at my notes: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DS2rFtq7b8t9jRk-l74gw8Ozb8qbaW34?usp=sharing they’re not finished but they give you more of an explanation than this post probably will lol.

Yes the style is cute

No you don’t need to change your personality to match

No you don’t need to change your interests to match

You dont have to like the smiths to wear big jumpers and leg warmers. You don’t have to be quiet and mysterious all the time. You don’t need to be a hopeless romantic or a hater. You don’t need to love reading always.

You can be an extrovert and snarky and summer toned and still wear brown pleated skirts with doc martens. You can like math better than English. You can not gaf about the piano or the smiths or poetry.

You do not need to be the entire persona to like the style there is no restrictions or disciplinary action that will be taken if you don’t have wired headphones.

I guarantee you will be a thousand times cooler if you’re being your authentic self while wearing pinteresty outfits you love. Please just take your leg warmers and piano skirts and move on.

the 2020s are in an identity crisis

this Black creator’s video gave me a lot to think about what ive observed and experienced with the transition of fhe 90s to the early 2000s from elementary school to high school & growing up with the advent of social media. she puts to words things i couldn’t name on my own exactly really well, tying into her analysis of contemporary fashion, consumerism, technology, feminism and economics.