"[A]bsurd trends flooded [TikTok]: 'night luxe,' 'coastal grandmother' and 'clean girl,' each with a highly specific set of principles, imagery..."

"... and even beauty standards. They were usually framed as rejections of what came before. The 'mob wife' aesthetic, for example, was contextualized as a brash, dramatic and flashy rebuttal to the clean girl aesthetic, which encouraged women to be contained, efficient and beige. 'People on TikTok started to realize that they could go viral if they had a really pithy aesthetic name,' says Casey Lewis, who started her newsletter, After School, to chronicle these ridiculous trends. There was even a trend for anti-trends: 'quiet luxury.' Pitched as the ultimate dunk on all the trends that came before it, it claimed that people who really have money and taste wear understated labels that you’ve never even heard of.... [F]ashion media took this experimentation as gospel. When [Mandy Lee, a trend forecaster on TikTok] made a video... predicting the return of what she called 'indie sleaze,' or the 'amateur-style flash photography' and 'opulent displays of clubbing,' Dazed magazine wrote a story about it within a week. GQ, British Vogue, Vogue, Highsnobiety, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Refinery29 heralded its return, and anything remotely related to mid-2000s indie rock or American Apparel was seized upon as proof...."

Writes Rachel Tashjian, in "How TikTok changed fashion/As the app faces a potential ban, it’s stepping into the spotlight at fashion’s biggest night: the Met Gala" (WaPo).