Thoughts on Trend Cycles #

May 13, 2025
Nowhere in particular

I’ve been, sadly, using Instagram more than I’d like to be as of late, and this has bombarded me with a great deal of fashion and fashion advice content. My experience with fashion advice has always been somewhat wrought, just due to the sort of expectations it lives by. I got into fashion in high school, and so have had a lot of time to mess with my style and experience a lot of failure and bad outfits. Evetually this has brought me to something I am somwhat comfortable with, but there are a lot of things I’d like to change. I would probably consider fashion to be a hobby of mine by this way, mostly because of the amount of time I have spent learning about fashion and messing with clothes. This is not to say I am an expert or even know a lot. Every time I do see some video/reel/article about fashion online, I am astounded by how little I know and just how big fashion as a subject is.

I find that a lot of this content online (at least the content targeted towards men and men’s fashion more generally) seems to be teaching people style through very quick blurbs. This is pretty similar to what I had experienced in high school, too, just in the form of Youtube videos and blogs. There is nothing inherently wrong with this and I don’t mean to write these pieces of advice off like they’re worthless. There is a lot of incredible advice online in every format (be it through reels, videos, articles, etc.), and I have learned a lot from each of these formats.

Something interesting I’ve noticed lately, though, is that a lot of men dress pretty similarly, and a lot of the advice given here (especially from gen-z content creators) kind of output similar styles. The one I’ve seen most commonly is the “big pant and small shirt” (with variants), which has become popular everywhere. What felt to me like a thing only relevant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, suddenly became an internet-wide phenomenon.

I'm not going to put a picture here because I don't want to attack any specific creator, but you can google "big pant small shirt" to get an idea of what I mean. None of these outfits are bad, I actually like a lot of them and have worn outifts pretty similar in the past, its just interesting how all of the outfits kind of feel the same.

A lot of the advice themselves, though, is pretty similar to what I saw in high school, it’s just that the aesthetic has changed. So instead of favoring “slim pants long shirt” we now have “big pants small shirt”.

Back in high school, I remember the advice generally followed the trajectory of “fit, fabric, and function”, and I feel like this is still true to some degree with advice I see today. Of course, there are many flaws to this “trifecta”, but so be it.

• "Fit" back then meant that clothes needed to hug your body, because slim was in and the de-facto "good look".
• "Fabric" just meant wearing the right materials for the weather / use case / outing.
• "Function" meant the clothes you wore needed to have a reason for being worn, so neckerchiefs were not allowed.

That last one ignored that fact that ties are, in fact, no longer useful anymore, but for some reason it got a pass.

This is decent advice (albeit generic), and so too is all of the varying advice that comes from it. I often see people talking about “fit” the most out of all of these, and that’s because it’s probably the most fun to talk about. Silhouettes are cool and it’s fun to joke about bad silhouettes. My frustrations mostly surround discussion of “fit”, and while I do have a lot of problems with the other two prongs, I think fit, as a point of discussion, tends to be the one we have the most feelings about.

At the current moment, wider fits are the fashion norm and people love to deride skinny fits, making fun of them for “looking bad”. I don’t want to defend skinny fits, I just want to say what I feel. I know that back in 2016, I thought that the skinny fit and the good outfits that came from it looked incredible, and I also know that now in 2025, I think that the wide fit and the good outfits that come from it look great. In the same way, I thought that wide fits looked bad in 2016 and now I think that skinny fits look kind of bad in 2025. This sort of cyclical approach to fashion and silhouettes is normal and there’s nothing wrong with changing your opinions on style here, I just don’t like the absolute correctness that people feel with the style that they like the most.

Something that bothers me are the people and influencers that gave style advice back in the 2010s whose advice I followed are now giving the stylistically opposite advice, but still framing their opinions as fact or in absolute certainty. I don’t want, again, to point out any specific person here, but I’ve seen plenty of skinny derisions online (and if the algorithm thinks you like fashion, you’ve probably seen it too). I get that we’re all just going with the trend (I, too, own some wide pants), but surely we should all know by now that none of this is fact and everything we’re doing when it comes to style is purely vibes based. Trying to put a “scientific certainty” or making just claims about how the current style that your are espousing is the right way to do things lacks some awareness.

In 2016 I remember hearing advice about how everybody should wear skinny clothes regardless of their body type. Specifically,

• skinny people trying to look less thin by wearing baggy clothes just look skinnier, so they should just wear skinny clothes
• bigger people trying to look skinnier by wearing baggy clothes don't look good, so they should just wear skinny clothes

and so on. Clearly looking back on this, we can see this as bad advice because plenty of people are now out and about wearing wide silhouettes regardless of body type and look great while doing that. I should also say that I am probably just saying that because now I’m culturally attuned and steeped in a world where baggy jeans are the norm.

Nowadays, I tend to hear things like

• skinny clothes are incredibly uncomfortable and they are hard to put on
• skinny clothes don't work for the majority of body types

While both of these points have merit, are they both not also just due to our current cultural misgivings? I hear so many millennials and older Gen z who say that they’d never go back to skinny jeans because they’re so uncomfortable and it was so hard to put them on. I don’t remember this really being an issue for anyone back then, though, and really all those jeans had some degree of elastane in them so they would stretch around your body and be reasonably comfortable.

With respect to that last point, one very good argument against skinny clothes, though, is that they over-rely on plastic-based materials in order to provide the stretch needed to make certain slim clothes comfortable. This being bad for the environment, specifically.

The best take on the skinny silhouette I’ve heard so far is by Nicolas Gabbard at Husbands, who said in his interview on Throwing Fits:

The last big thing in tailoring was Heidi Slimaine at Dior...suddenly tailoring was relevant again. You know, he managed to do this with [a] body that doesn't exist. I started to understand the way that Heidi was working and it was about fantasy and it was about dreaming, and that's the world of fashion, and tailoring is real body...Then, of course, the market, which is always lazy, copied this silhouette, but this time for [the] real body. And then it ruins the silhouette.

These are the best arguments I’ve heard against skinny silhouettes so far, but even this is born of the current cultural moment. I could argue that there is also a “perfect body” for a wider silhouette, as I do see some people wearing the same outfit better than other people. At least to me, taller people get away easier with wider clothes than shorter people, but even that isn’t a standard (just in the same way that skinnier people don’t necessarily look better in a slim silhouette). Surely in another decade or so, we’ll see Gen alpha kids saying things like

• wider silhouettes are a waste of fabric and energy/materials needed to produce that garment
• wider clothes are a hallmark of conservatism

and whatever other arguments feel relevant to their time.

I don’t think it really matters whether you prefer a skinny silhouette or a wide silhouette, I’d just like people to recognize that their preference was probably birthed out of a “cultural moment”, rather than objective fact.