You hear talk of Gen Z everywhere nowadays—in the news, on your socials, in talks with friends. Maybe you’re part Gen Z, or maybe they’re a species of human completely foreign to you. Regardless of what you think of the young, feisty, and unconcerned group, one thing is clear: they have style.
In 2022, a survey showed that in the United States, fashion was the favourite entertainment category for Gen Z—outranking dining, video games, entertainment consoles, and more.
There’s been a lot of discourse centered on how Gen Z fashion relies too much on micro-trends and fads. From the “clean girl” to the “mob wife” aesthetic, looking at the fashion world of Gen Z from a bird’s-eye view surely seems to indicate we just flock from one popular TikTok trend to the other. Looking deeper, I don’t think this is the case.
Speaking as an older Gen Z myself, fashion means more to me than just clothes—it’s an embodiment of personal creativity. Many of us don’t view clothes to impress or to indicate professionalism, we see them as a form of self-expression. In a survey of 1000 US Gen Z-ers, eighty-nine percent said fashion was important for boosting their confidence, and eighty-two said fashion is important to establishing their identities.
Fashion is another way for us to tell the world who we are, like the music we listen to or the posters we put up in our rooms.
But if fashion really is self-expression for Gen Z, how do we explain the prevalence of these huge micro-trends? I think the answer lies in the dichotomy itself.
Gen Z views fashion as a means to make them into who they want to be and turn the world into what they want to see. For a Gen Z, they don’t just see a cute sweater or a nice pair of jeans—everything is an aesthetic, a vibe, and a tangible thing that they can have too. Clothes are personified and they represent the personal, the social, the political, and the economic.
The popularity of fads speaks to something deeper than Gen Z being a group that incessantly copies within itself—it tells a story of how the art of fashion has changed with the connectivity and collaboration of the online world.
And if we turn the pages back in time, I think we can find answers as to why Gen Z has developed such a unique relationship with fashion.
The earliest members of Gen Z were born in 1997, meaning that they’ve experienced a catastrophic world at best—their lives started with 9/11, their adolescence was marked with the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, and their early adult years have been marred by a devastating global pandemic. On top of it all, they were essentially guinea pigs for new forms of technology and online advertising.