Do you feel exhausted having to keep up with fashion's microtrends like angelcore, whimsigoth, mob wife, tomato girl and more? Will they keep popping up in 2026?
First, let’s distinguish between an actual trend and a microtrend, at least when it applies to dress.
A real trend – a deep one – changes your eye. A microtrend, on the other hand, comes not from the runway, designers or magazines, but rather from TikTok and has less to do with real style than algorithms.
Essentially, microtrends have created the digital version of what used to be called fads or crazes, formalised by our penchant for naming and thus hash-tagging things.
Everything has “core” or “girl” stuck on the end of it.
According to my colleague Madison Malone Kircher, who covers such phenomena, microtrends occur in large part because once someone has spent any time looking at one kind of post, most platforms serve up more examples of similar posts.
“Which, in turn, motivates the creators on the other end to make more similar videos,” Kircher said. “It’s a digital ouroboros.”
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Which means we are being served a constant sense that whatever you are looking at is a bona fide trend.
Kircher pointed out that microtrends generally last only six to eight weeks, which is why there are so many that they could drive anyone nuts.
In fact, last year Styles reporter Callie Holtermann discovered that, while the microtrend trend is often blamed on the youth, the youth hate it, too.
As for how to separate a microtrend from an actual trend like, for example, barrel pants, Kircher said that her first tell is that it is being “peddled by somebody breathlessly trying to sell me a garment I need RIGHT now!”
Whether you should pay attention to all of this or – even more significantly – buy into any of it, the answer is one, maybe, and two, no.
There is, after all, a difference between understanding what people are talking about and being a living, breathing adopter of it.
Understanding what is going on around you, even if “around you” simply means your social feed or your friends’ or kids’ social feeds, is a way of understanding a part of the subculture, which can be useful, if brain-cluttering.
Buying into microtrends, however, is a fast route to becoming a fashion victim. They are also bad for the budget and the planet, given their built-in disposability.
As Kircher pointed out, by the time you order an item and it actually arrives, often a new microtrend has taken its place.
Read more: ‘Lamest thing in the world’: When fashion’s necktie revival feels forced
Momentary as they are, however, microtrends can have an afterlife that, thanks to their names, continues to live on long after the trend itself disappears. That’s why you remember the “tomato girl” moment, even though it was a summer 2023 microtrend.
Being fluent in the names is one thing; dressing like a name is another.
Though the death of microtrends has been heralded since at least the end of 2024, and is gaining steam again with the movement to just say no to social media, they live on.
Which suggests it is possible that the reported end of microtrends is itself... well, a microtrend. – ©2026 The New York Times Company/Vanessa Friedman
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
