Q+A with Digi: From sleaze to core, what’s behind the name of the trend du jour?

Goblin mode, ballet sleaze, blokecore… the hyperspeed at which the internet coins, hypes up and moves on from trends is one of contemporary fashion’s most discussed dilemmas. What’s behind our infatuation with naming aesthetics and trends – and how does that tie into the new gen’s approach to self-expression and identity? We investigate further with The Face:

The Face: From 'goblin mode’ to ‘night luxe’, it seems like the internet is currently naming trends/moods faster than ever before. Would you agree?

Digi: Definitely – it’s gotten to the point where there is observable backlash, both humorous and serious, to the swift and constant naming and categorisation of every trend, mood, and ‘aesthetic’. 

The Face: Why do you think this?

Digi: The rhetoric around ‘trends’ and ‘moods’ have become so ubiquitous with the daily content churn that we’ve become a bit numb to it all. Much like ‘hot takes’ synonymous with celebrity culture, it has reached boiling point – for cultural commentators, this means providing slower, more considered analysis. Lots of these ‘trends’ and ‘moods’ borrow from cultural scenes and subcultures, anyway – which can lead to their categorisation feeling reductive. 

Additionally, these trends function as labels – a means of identity exploration and formation, a quick route to highlighting one’s core interests and characteristics, no matter how temporary, and signalling these traits to others succinctly. Labels are also essential to the ‘moodboard economy’, in which individuals seek and organise inspiration on image sharing and social media platforms like Pinterest, where images are searchable through increasingly specific keywords and tags like ‘cyber y2k’, ‘rockstar gf’, and ‘pastel coquette’.

The Face: Where do these terms typically originate from?

Digi: Typically on the platforms where they proliferate – Tumblr, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. There’s usually not a single person credited with developing a term, and congruent early examples seem to originate almost simultaneously.

The Face: Do you think the rise in coining names for trends is related to the increasingly rapid trend cycle we’re seeing at the moment?

Digi: There is no doubt the rapid trend cycle has increased the rise in coining names for trends — in part due to the “TikTok-ification” of our tastes, what’s trending within smaller community niches can be surfaced quicker to consumers thanks to the pace of the platform’s algorithm. It means that the hierarchical fashion-house-to-consumer trend cycle is over. A perfect (and troubling, for the environment) mixture of the need to satiate our feeds with ‘newness’ coupled with access to a never-ending vault of nostalgia (aka the internet) means trends are being coined almost daily. 

The Face: Sometimes these trend names take off and become an online phenomenon – indie sleaze and goblin mode, for instance. What makes these names take off more than others?

Digi: Some trend names, like indie sleaze and goblin mode, have a certain stickiness that contributes to higher reach and use beyond hashtags. How catchy a name is is certainly a factor – indie sleaze rolls off the tongue and is emotive and visual. Its rise came at a time when discussion of a revival of 2000s and early 2010s alt fashion had been circulating for months, but there was no singular identifying term for what was being discussed. Goblin mode is similarly emotive, visual and catchy, and ties back to the word ‘mode’ becoming more popular in culture, from Travis Scott’s “SICKO MODE”, to dark mode becoming more common as a display setting.

The Face: Is the rapid cycle of these terms swapping and changing actually useful for identifying trends in the long run?

Digi: It’s unclear what will happen to these trend cycle terms in the long run and whether they are useful or not, as the cultural commentary paradigm has been turned on its head. One theory is that these microtrends might be signalling a bigger ‘vibe shift’ – as identified by the now viral post by trend forecaster Sean Monahan – in which we’re on course for a post-pandemic era fuelled by hedonism and escapism, of which many of these moods are a byproduct. 

Read the full article by Olive Pometsey here.

✨ Contributing Fairies

• Biz Sherbert, Culture Editor
• Natalia Christina, formerly Director of Strategy

✨ Digi Reading Recs

• Digi’s Fashion’s New Algorithm report 
• ‘Core’ is the New Chic (Vogue, 2022)
• Fashion has reached peak trendcore, and we’re all tired (Vice, 2022) 

For more content like this, explore the rest of the Digiverse, or connect with us on TikTok or Instagram. If you’re a brand or business and want to inspire your audience in innovative ways, reach out to our strategic & creative lab eve@thedigitalfairy.co.uk