The 2024 Fashion Mood
Fashion was full of flair this year, ushering in an era of chaos and mess
2024 was full of bizarre, unexplainable, and confusing fashion highs and lows. The mood was chaotic and messy; long may its unstoppable reign continue.
Fashion is an industry that constantly evolves. For better or worse, each year we’re presented with an onslaught of new trends, new brands, new figureheads, new it products and new moments that delight, amaze, and bewilder us all at once. And in 2024 that looked a little like the rise of the alt baddie, the emergence of meme humour and fashion as irony, thong song summer and the state of patriotic fashion paradox we’re currently living in.
Making sense of the fashion senseless is not a challenge for the faint-hearted. But that’s what Fashion Tingz is here for.
So, what was the overarching 2024 fashion mood? It was wonderfully chaotic, seemingly transparent, raw, and refreshingly devoid of mass-produced, social media-curated perfection. Farewell to stealth wealth, clean girl and fashion ‘meh-ness’ — because who wants to look like regurgitated carbon copies of one another anyway? In 2024, fashion pushed back against the pitfalls of homogeny and stepped into its everything and anything goes era.
This year girl core trends flatlined. We bid farewell to tomato girls, vanilla girls, snail girls and whatever other core-ified personas TikTok drip feed us, and instead welcomed a time when dressing according to the rules is the exact thing you don’t want to be caught doing. The most groundbreaking aspect of this new wave? It’s unfiltered freedom.
In the spirit of 2024’s chaotic energy, viral 'ick-worthy' fashion month moments started to dominate, anonymity was declared the new cultural cool as fashion played a game of hide and seek, and working-class aesthetics were the trend du jour as the industry continued to appropriate. It was part ironic, sometimes iconic, and deeply confusing.
But if one thing’s for sure, it’s that fashion finally got its personality back in 2024, and that’s always going to make the headlines.
THE MOST TALKED ABOUT
Brat summer: the season we didn’t ask for and couldn’t escape
Charli XCX didn’t just drop an album — she unleashed a marketing juggernaut masquerading as music that brands jumped on in their desperate attempt to tap into culture. Love it or hate it (there’s no neutral ground here), that slime green hue is permanently etched into our collective memory. It oozed its way into every corner of pop culture like a radioactive spill, making everything look like it had been dipped in Nickelodeon goo, and somehow, we all just… went along with it for kicks and thrills.
Even more absurd were the try-hard campaigns that came as a result of the season’s most highly regarded anti-aesthetic aesthetic. From Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign graphics to Charli XCX collaborating with H&M to Asda changing its TikTok bio and KFC attempting to insert itself into the conversation, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, slapping their out-of-touch messaging onto brat summer. The result? A bizarre cultural moment where grocery store promotions and fashion meet political campaigns shared the same vibe as Charli’s chaotic, neon-fueled bops.
THE ‘WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING’
Very demure, very mindful, very trad wife
Ankle-length skirts, zip-up cardigans, floral smock dresses, scrunchies and bandanas — this year, dressing like you’re auditioning for a Little House on the Prairie reboot somehow became fashion’s biggest flex. Thanks to the likes of Sandy Liang and Miu Miu, coquette-style ballet flats in opalescent pinks became the go-to shoe of the fashion crowd, while the endless stream of tradwife content from influencers like Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm had been priming us for this very demure, very mindful fashion takeover.
Domestic labour is being performed online in real-time and for those of us fed up with playing by capitalism’s rules, a slower pace of life sounds idyllic and is in direct contrast to the hustle and grind culture modern society is known for. Some of these styles have, however, been co-opted by trad wives like Smith baking cookies from scratch while clad in designer gear, while for others this trend offers a cloak of invisibility against the male gaze. This may have started as an embrace of traditional stereotypes, but this level of performance is not the cultural reset we were hoping for nor is it the one we need.
THE UNEXPECTED AND NICHE
Swagger, style, and a touch of Olympic cool
The Olympics never fail to surprise, and 2024 was one for the books. From Céline Dion’s comeback concert and Australian breakdancer ‘Raygun’ winning the meme Olympics with her controversial performance to marriage proposals, minion socks, Snoop Dogg living his best life and Lady Gaga’s cabaret set in a custom couture dress by Maria Grazia Chiuri and milliner Stephen Jones, there was a ton to unpack. But this year, the real hot ticket event was the global thirst for Korean Olympic shooter Kim Ye-ji’s style.
Kim’s vibe is the kind of untouchable cool you can’t fake or learn and that’s exactly what made her an accidental icon. From her backward cap and shooting glasses to the zip-up she donned to take part in the games, she gave us a masterclass in the precision of swagger. And then there was the pièce de résistance: the tiny elephant plush clipped to her belt loop, a cute nod to her daughter that made her look even cooler. Kim Ye-ji owned the Olympics with a quiet, unteachable confidence, and that’s exactly what earned her glossy editorials in Vogue Korea and W Korea. We stan a relatable queen.
THE FREAKY FLEX
Toe shoes: fashion’s latest foot fetish
The fashion industry has always had a bit of a shoe kink, but in 2024, it embraced its foot fetish with open arms. This was the year toes took centre stage, both in an artful and creatively grotesque way. From Tabi split-toe shoes to AVAVAV’s four-toed boots to the Schiaparelli pumps Kylie Jenner rocked at Paris Fashion Week, complete with creepy toe indentations, to Vibram FiveFingers, the divisive toe-hugging shoes once reserved for hardcore runners and barefoot purists, and now Balenciaga’s practically non-existent “Zero” shoe, all things toes have made the leap to high fashion.
Toe-related fashion moments have officially joined the ranks of trends that people hate and can’t stop talking about. This movement aligns with a broader cultural fascination with the uncanny, resonating in an era of disruption and reevaluation of fashion norms. Such designs invite wearers to make a statement, rejecting uniformity for individuality and something previously unseen. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that when it comes to shoes, the freakier, the better. After all, nothing says fashion like making people deeply uncomfortable with your feet.
THE ONE I’D RATHER FORGET
Mark Zuckerberg’s midlife fashion crisis
Meta and its founder are never far from some shadowy controversy, but this year, Mark Zuckerberg decided to hit pause on the tech overlord vibes and instead chose to have a full-blown Gen Z cosplay glow-up. Out went the chinos, non-branded hoodies, wetsuits and corporate dad aesthetics, and in came the baggy hypebeast tees, oversized pants, and chains. Yes, a chain. Pair that with what looks like a tan (natural? Spray-on? AI-generated? Your guess is as good as mine), and suddenly, Zuck 2.0 was born.
Oh, and let’s not forget the hair: those clean-cut Silicon Valley locks transformed into a trendy, curly crop. The internet lost its mind. For once, people were talking less about Meta’s misdeeds and more about Mark’s midlife fashion crisis. But let’s be real: when the memes are about your outfit and not your lapses around data privacy, misinformation, content censorship and moderation, maybe the rebrand worked a little too well.
The 2024 fashion mood hasn’t yet crystallised into a sellable, marketable, and profitable aesthetic — and that’s precisely what makes it so appealing. It feels like we’re rejecting the mass-produced, perfectly curated sameness of the past decade, and are giving a middle finger to fast fashion cycles and late-stage capitalism that’s imbued into the essence of the industry.
2024 celebrated inventiveness, self-expression, and a kind of chaotic beauty that’s deeply in tune with the zeitgeist. This is messy authenticity at its finest and the result is a fashion free-for-all thrown into a glorious, chaotic heap.
We’re revelling in defying fashion norms and generating “look at me” moments, remixing everything from memes to niche subcultures that reflect our individual sensibilities, all in a bid to keep even the most cynical average Joe gawking. It’s a little bit tribal and a whole lot of cryptic, and getting dressed in 2024 should have come with a disclaimer.
For the fashion uninitiated, 2024 was both a style protest and an experimental playground, a chaotic collage of personal style where everyone’s in on the joke — except for those who aren’t, and that’s half the fun. Getting dressed has become both baffling and a badge of honour, a collective shrug at abiding by the rules and instead choosing to wear what you want, when you want, however you want. And that’s an attitude I can get on board with.
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