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What was the biggest trend of 2024? Well, it depends on who you ask.
For a particular pocket of URL-native Gen Zs and millennials, it might have been the chaotic rave-readiness fuelled by Charli XCX’s Brat. For another “very mindful, very demure” subsect of the same demographic, it might have been quiet luxury. For the truly runway-pilled, it might have been the return of boho chic, resuscitated for autumn collections in March by Chemena Kamali’s Chloé debut. Or, it could be the Western vibe set forth by Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton in January and underscored by Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.
But what if the biggest trend was no trend at all?
When I asked over 100 industry professionals — from editors and writers to stylists, models and designers — what the best trend of 2024 was, through Vogue Runway’s annual Industry Poll, 50.2 per cent voted simply that “trends are over”.
That’s a half truth that contains an amalgamation of fatigue caused by micro-trends and the current fragmented state of fashion — fuelled, in part, by social media and its algorithms — and a dash of industry jadedness. Yet the Vogue Runway constituency is not far off from what’s happening en masse. It’s not necessarily that trends are over — they remain alive and well and continue to shift the fashion business (we detail said trends here). It’s more so that trends nowadays shift and evolve quickly with the direction of the wind, and the internet has a tendency of making things feel bigger than they actually are.
Take Charli’s Brat, which swiftly evolved from album to pop cultural movement. By the hand of stylist Chris Horan, Charli XCX went from cult favourite to the year’s biggest pop star — and one of its best-dressed ones. When I interviewed Horan about his approach at outfitting the Brat universe, he said that it was important to him and Charli that the pieces she wore felt authentic to her as a person, but also real, meaning familiar or approachable (from an aesthetic standpoint more so than an economic one).
“We would see people attending the shows being able to recreate the looks, because they were wearable,” said Horan of the Sweat tour co-starring Troye Sivan, which was the top-searched music tour according to Google Trends this year. This is why Brat — the fourth trending aesthetic searched on Google and the ninth most-searched “trend meaning” — became such a marketable idea, despite it stemming from a club record with a relatively niche sound. Charli partnered with H&M and fronted campaigns for everyone from Acne Studios to Google Shopping.
Still, Brat did not take over fashion and culture in its entirety in 2024. It overwhelmed the pockets it resonated in, and struck a chord with Gen Z in particular (likely why it received only 6.5 per cent of votes from our industry constituency, who skew older and are not Brat). This is something luxury and high street should keep in mind as we go into 2025.
Consider also the idea of boho, which was widely reported as having ‘returned’ this year after Kamali’s first Chloé show. (I myself wrote about it first for Vogue Runway, and then for the summer issue of the magazine.) It’s true that boho enjoyed a boost this year, particularly on the runway — see also Gucci resort 2025 or Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2025 — and on celebrities from Rihanna and Beyoncé to Maya Rudolph and Sienna Miller, but that doesn’t make it new, it just makes it trendy. If labels like Zimmermann and Ulla Johnson had retained boho as their primary aesthetic for the past decade, it was this year that it went back into fashion as a real trend. Boho was, in fact, voted second as the year’s biggest trend in the Vogue Runway Industry Poll with 16.3 per cent of votes.
This idea of flouncy and feminine clothing — blouses, bloomers, frilly frocks — is timely. You can read more about the history of boho as a fashion idea here, so I will not bore you with the context, but this sartorial wavelength has risen in culture time and time again during or following moments of cultural distress. “At some point, boho was overdone and overused; it was past its peak and had gotten really commercial,” Kamali told Vogue ahead of her debut, “the industry got tired of it, and it disappeared.” She continued: “It’s the moment for it again. There’s so much going on in the world — so much harshness and ugliness — and I think there’s this longing for douceur… people are longing for something that feels kind of warm and soft and douce, people want beauty.”
More practically speaking, it helps that boho, unlike more prescriptive micro-trends like ‘mob wife’ — the top searched aesthetic on Google this year — and ‘Barbiecore’, which have refashioned the way Gen Z approaches personal style, is unconfided and far more versatile. Though this is also what has made it more niche and more mature, and essentially why you see less of it online.
It’s telling that the biggest trend of the year, arguably, is a non-trend trend. Quiet luxury is ultimately a sanitised and homogenised idea of what wealth looks like sartorially. Take that in step with the rise of conservatism happening both online — look to this year’s ‘trad wife’ aesthetic — and off (did you know sales of the Bible are up 22 per cent in the US this year?) and you start to develop an idea of where culture — and trends at large — are headed in 2025.
While quiet luxury is more reserved, Brat and boho helped break through the noise this year. But the reality is that these were more blips in a system — no fashion trend has managed to break through into pop culture and the mainstream in the same way that, say, streetwear did in the second half of the 2010s. I’m talking fashion so mainstream you see it everywhere: on the subway, on the street, at the doctor’s office. It’s one thing for something to go viral, but the lesson here is that algorithms make things seem larger in the URL world than they are IRL.
This is why our poll voters say that trends are over: because trends as us fashion industry folk see them— wide-ranging, overbearing, vibe-shifting — are hard to come by today. On the topic of vibe shifts, as luxury fashion reshuffles and regroups ahead of 2025, stay tuned to see who and what will cut across next year.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
How quiet luxury changed dupe culture
Where does luxury fashion fit in the gift guide Olympics?
The runway-to-red carpet pipeline has burst. What happens next?
