Not Everything Needs to Be a Movement

[Michie]

Moving to a cottage, dressing in a full lace costume, or wearing a Chanel bag will not bring about your salvation.​

My recent hobby has been overhauling my friends’ (and my colleagues and relations) dressing styles according to TikTok fashion trends. To a strong-willed friend, I suggested that they adopt the “mob wife aesthetic” (faux fur coats, statement jewelry, red lipstick); to a daydreaming romantic colleague, I insisted that they master the “cottagecore” trend (linen dresses, corsets and braided hairstyle) and following an emergency intervention, my boyfriend now obliviously blends different elements of the “eclectic grandpa” and “old money” styles.

As much as I find this game of matching people’s personalities with different styles entertaining (to the extent of renaming every situation, feeling or event based on a TikTok trend), I’ve also been thinking about the underlying reasons for this new online phenomenon. Expressing our belonging to a particular social class, profession, or a religious order by the way we dress is as old as society.

There is no reason to deny our natural instinct to seek security via membership of a smaller community, and to try to distinguish ourselves from other groups we don’t belong to. Moreover, fashion trends have always been present in the life of the upper classes — think of the Ancient Greeks or 18th century France (Marie Antoinette even appointed a “Minister of Fashion” to design the three hundred gowns she required a year).

So, what if anything makes social media trends different?

Continued below.

Not Everything Needs to Be a Movement

Moving to a cottage, dressing in a full lace costume, or wearing a Chanel bag will not bring about your salvation.

www.americanpostliberal.com

 

[Wolseley]

Not everything needs to be a movement.....unless you're constipated.

 

[RileyG]

Ain't that the truth

 

[Bob Crowley]

As a knock-about Australian I must be sleepwalking through the tik-tok daisies. I hadn't even heard of "trad wife", and could not afford a $30,000 wood burning stove if my life depended on it which in our climate it doesn't.

It's just gone the last week of winter here and due to a warm spell we've had days up to 34 degrees centigrade (93.2% F) so we haven't got the yuletide fire going. We won't have one going at Christmas either, being slap bang in the middle of summer in our hemisphere.

Meanwhile the workers I've seen around and about haven't been wearing "black leather jackets, tight lace t-shirts, and cargo trousers" and being retired myself I get around in jeans and flannelette shirt (when it's cool enough) and jeans or shorts and T-shirt when it gets a bit warmer.

In Sydney maybe, but not here.

I'll go back to my septuagenarian hibernation. Wake me when its over.