10 votes

Where did all the tween fashion go?

Posted by NaraVara
Tags: fashion, tween, teenagers, brands, trends, author.aiyana ishmael, source.vogue
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/where-did-all-the-tween-fashion-go

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Authors
Aiyana Ishmael, Illustration by Jill Heesbeen, Sara Delgado, Chiara Giovanni, Teen Vogue Staff, Kara Nesvig
Published
Jun 1 2023
Word count
2831 words

7 comments

  1. [6]
    NaraVara
    Link
    The other day I observed 3 middle-school aged girls walking down the street together and they were all dressed completely differently. One was the spitting image of a 90s grunge girl, baggy JNCOs,...

    The other day I observed 3 middle-school aged girls walking down the street together and they were all dressed completely differently. One was the spitting image of a 90s grunge girl, baggy JNCOs, the smiley-face Nirvana t-shirt, green streak dyed in her hair. She was dressed EXACTLY how my female friends dressed when I was 12.

    That alone was weird to me. But what was weirder were her two friends. One was dressed EXACTLY like a Kardashian. She had a velour trackpant and a matching cropped jacket over a cropped t-shirt. And the third was dressed in what I'd characterize as a chic Mormon mom. Like a very traditional maxi-dress looking thing.

    When I was young kids a.) Didn't have such put together "looks" for a regular day hanging out with their friends. b.) Friend groups didn't dress so differently within the group. It was kind of weirdly jarring to see, but I guess "fashion TikTok" or Instagram has combined with fast-fashion to make these sorts of curated "looks" really easily accessible.

    All that to say, I don't fully agree with the article. Back then girls were taking their cues from Tiger Beat and Seventeen and other such magazines. Now they're taking it from TikTok. I don't think they're any less original today than they were back then, I just think the culture-makers being unmoored from a monthly publication schedule + clothes being disposable and dirt cheap now have both combined to accelerate the trend cycles to the point where they aren't cyclical anymore. They're just continuously churning and never getting a chance to really sit and evolve into anything.

    It's not just girls either. There's a whole episode of Atlanta that revolves around kids bullying each other over who has a knock-off FUBU jersey.

    15 votes
    1. [4]
      EgoEimi
      Link Parent
      Yeah, there isn't a single dominant fashion anymore. The mass internet has shattered the cultural monolith, and now there are a bajillion subcultural dimensions flitting through people.

      I just think the culture-makers being unmoored from a monthly publication schedule + clothes being disposable and dirt cheap now have both combined to accelerate the trend cycles to the point where they aren't cyclical anymore. They're just continuously churning and never getting a chance to really sit and evolve into anything.

      Yeah, there isn't a single dominant fashion anymore. The mass internet has shattered the cultural monolith, and now there are a bajillion subcultural dimensions flitting through people.

      8 votes
      1. itstreach
        Link Parent
        Personally, I love it. Fashion has pretty much gone the way of Grand Theft Auto 5 characters but it's nice to see most people feeling comfortable in whatever they like.

        Personally, I love it. Fashion has pretty much gone the way of Grand Theft Auto 5 characters but it's nice to see most people feeling comfortable in whatever they like.

        11 votes
      2. NaraVara
        Link Parent
        Yeah which seems to have created a surfeit of prescriptive labels. The article talks about being “over pressured” into an identity. Like you have to “belong” to a -core and have a defined...

        Yeah which seems to have created a surfeit of prescriptive labels. The article talks about being “over pressured” into an identity. Like you have to “belong” to a -core and have a defined “aesthetic” to be a person.

        That seems to be a bit of a shame. There is some utility there in being able to more easily find and identify “your people,” but I think being too hung up on labels encourages kind of conforming yourself to the expectations that come with those. I can’t help but feel this actually stunts the process of identity discovery in some people the same way having too much choice in the dating market stunts people being able to form meaningful romantic connections because nothing is ever given a chance to properly take root and grow.

        4 votes
      3. C_B
        Link Parent
        ugh thank goodness. I was always one of those kids without access to trendy clothing and automatically stood out in every age. I just wanted to wear things that feel comfortable and compliment my...

        ugh thank goodness. I was always one of those kids without access to trendy clothing and automatically stood out in every age. I just wanted to wear things that feel comfortable and compliment my skin tone and body, and it was too much to ask as a teenager. Case in point: I'm so glad that skinny jeans aren't the only option available for purchase anymore. I saw some side by side super wide flare jeans the other day.

        3 votes
    2. gatitobandito
      Link Parent
      The micro-trends and sheer variety of ultra niche subcultures is wild to me. It's like nothing is really out of fashion anymore, you just have to brand it as xyz and suddenly it's cool again.

      The micro-trends and sheer variety of ultra niche subcultures is wild to me. It's like nothing is really out of fashion anymore, you just have to brand it as xyz and suddenly it's cool again.

      4 votes
  2. EgoEimi
    (edited )
    Link
    Oh! This reminds me of a fantastic interview with HCI researcher and thought leader—which I use without irony because she was a huge influence to me when I was in university—Judith Donath on...
    • Exemplary

    Oh! This reminds me of a fantastic interview with HCI researcher and thought leader—which I use without irony because she was a huge influence to me when I was in university—Judith Donath on Signaling, Design, and the Social Machine.

    Here's the relevant segment on fashion and signaling:

    Judith Donath: Yeah. And I think this notion of hip and fashion, which we tend to think of as very frivolous, is actually a lot more important in our culture than we recognize. Because we really do live in a world in which access to information is one of the key markers of status. I mean, wealth is certainly a very important one; but the whole notion of how do you get access to information, how good are you at assessing information, is a huge amount of how we display who we are. And that's really what fashion ultimately is: It's a signal of how good, how much access to information do you have and how good are you from parsing the good information from the bad information. And it's not just in the world of clothing. I mean, that's the very obvious one, where we think of fashion. But there's fashions in management styles. There's fashions in academic topics. There's fashions in all kinds of things. Slang is a fashion. One way of thinking about Twitter is that it's using news almost as fashion.

    ...

    Judith Donath: No, I don't think that's my point. I think the urge to divide the world into in-group and out-group and the urge to be in the in-group is pretty fundamentally part of what it means to be human. That's something you can sort of look into neuroscience research and how our brain reacts to those we perceive as in or out. There's a lot of plasticity about how we define in-group and out-group. It's quite plastic. But, we do that constantly. And so an enormous amount of signaling is about claims of affiliation, of being part of a particular group, whether it's a particular class or social group or the set of people who are interested in x or are Trump supporters or hate Trump or whatever. So I guess what my point with fashion is, is that since the development of fashion about 500 years ago, it increasingly isn't important whether you like it or not--that's a different thing--but it's an important marker of in-group and out-group membership in a world where access to knowledge is part of what marks those distinctions.

    ...

    Judith Donath: But the interesting thing, getting back to your tie, this is one of the things I find very interesting about fashion, and I certainly see this a lot with my 16-year-old, is this notion called 'countersignaling,' where if you have this tie and right now it's very out of style--in my case, my old jeans--my 16-year-old will wear them. And she's walking around in a pair of jeans from the 1980s. And her shoe goals for this year are a pair of sandals that Rihanna is promoting that look exactly like old lady bedroom slippers. And it's either that or Birkenstocks, all of which on somebody who was not in many other ways signaling, 'I am the height of fashion,' would mark you as extremely out of fashion. And it's a very interesting way to signal that you are so fashionable you do not have to worry about being mistaken for unfashionable. And it cannot be copied. That's one of the things, since the earliest theories of fashion, are that, like, the most fashionable, have a new fashion, and then the next below copy them; and make the top ones have to change. And countersignaling is the uncopyable fashion, because if you are not at the height of fashion, you can't copy it. Because people just look at--

    Anyway, in short, everyone engages in fashion. People who say they're opting out of fashion, are doing fashion! (Male) senior software engineers who wear sweaters and slacks are doing fashion. Why would a male SWE wear sweaters and slacks as opposed to... a dress? A suit? Designer jeans and a Supreme hoodie?

    Fashion signals information about the gender, national culture, ethnic culture, subculture, class, subclass, etc. etc. that we identify with and, more importantly, whose norms we have internalized to the point where it's like air to ourselves: unnoticeable yet all-permeating.

    7 votes