When the minutes drag
In a piece for Vogue about the rise of "-core" as a trend identifier, Sarah Spellings asks, "What’s with the deep desire to label a trend with an entirely new word, to elevate it from a series of garments into a fully fledged phenomenon?" Framed that way, the question almost answers itself: That is what fashion is, not a particular "series of garments" but a social "phenomenon" that requires a common language to cohere and circulate. Fashion changes continually, which means that change itself is its stable, steady certainty. The "-core" suffix reflects the sameness that underlies fashion's superficial permutations. It conveys a faith that fashion will continue, that there will be an endless series of -cores that ultimately transcend the significance of any particular -core. Fashion is nothing but -cores.
But no -core is especially meaningful in itself. The discussion of fashion tends to be preoccupied with specific trends, overrating the significance of a particular distinction as if it disclosed something significant about the current moment and not just difference from the recent past. Spellings's litany of recent "-cores" suggests the relative futility of trying to interpret the deep meaning of, say "gorpcore," rather than focusing on the rate of change itself, the experience of temporality that the succession of fashions makes possible. While fashion can be understood as a component of personal and social expression, the word "style" generally does a better job of capturing that aspect. Fashion seems better reserved for the description of a collective participation in time, in which its momentum is felt as a social fact that can ameliorate the sense of isolation even as it burdens us with the impossibility of keeping up.
To borrow from Peter Osborne's description of "modernity" (and put it to use in a way he would likely reject), fashion is a "fundamental form of time-consciousness in capitalist societies." It works to naturalize such requisite capitalist phenomena as obsolescence and "creative destruction," while dictating to consumers the rate of consumption that current economic conditions demand. The urgency with which we desire the "new" is downstream from those conditions. It is not as though we have some intrinsic demand for novelty that companies are struggling to keep up with — one of the ways fast fashion is sometimes rationalized ("we have to make shabby, uncomfortable, and instantly disposable garments to keep up with the increasing whimsey of our customers"). Rather, the competitive environment in the garment industry pushes producers toward scale to maintain profit margins.
So it's misleading when the headline of this Atlantic article by Amanda Mull about ultra-fast fashion companies like Shein complains that "Fashion has abandoned human taste." It wasn't about human taste to begin with, but the demands of capital (at least ever since it stopped being about sumptuary laws and maintaining aristocratic distinctions). In that article Mull examines the persistence of certain arbitrary trends in the face of the apparent logic of fast-fashion and the constant acceleration of trends. "At a time when most fashion trends have gotten more ephemeral and less universal because of constant product churn, some manage to achieve the opposite: a ubiquity that feels disconnected from perceptible demand," Mull writes, pointing to the lingering of puffy sleeves as an example. She attributes this to algorithms gone awry and the withdrawal of expert human discernment from the machinery of garment circulation. Companies like Shein "can just trawl the internet for anything that shoppers already find vaguely compelling, make a bunch of versions on the cheap, and track responses to them in real time."
But that doesn't mean the fickleness of consumer tastes is driving the process. The internet is the more important subject of the process; its manifestation of scale and datafication allows consumer taste to be recognized and then structured as a set of statistics that necessarily fluctuate from moment to moment depending on how data is gathered. The acceleration in trends (and the anomalies that stand out against that pace) is driven not by human desire but new efficiencies in data processing. Our tastes are pushed to keep up with the machine's capacity to make meaning out of correlations and patterns in ever larger data sets. We are trained to want to consume "ephemerality" as an end in itself.
The feeling of "being online" is in part the experience of this coercion, of trends co-existing and unfolding at a rate that compels a kind of surrender. The "metaverse" — where even the flimsy material limits of fast fashion will be surmounted — posits a space where that rate can be ratcheted up further, in the belief that companies can continue to compete on speed to infinity. A different outfit for every second, and countless different outfits simultaneously.