Brat! Wicked! Demure! Olympics! 2024 has been a monumental year for fashion, culture, sport and the increasingly blurred lines in between.
Fashion brands started this year playing it safe. The Autumn/Winter 2024 collections featured classic silhouettes, commercial or high-ticket pieces like outerwear and homogenous, samey colour palettes, forcing many editors (including this one) to bemoan a lack of originality and excitement from fashion today. Little did we know that a whiplash-inducing year of pop culture trends, buzzy moments and unexpected partnerships was in store to spice things up.
Here, Vogue Business breaks down the four key industry and consumer trends of 2024 that have shaped the way consumers and brands interact.
Luxury labels learnt internet speak
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How many aura points do you have? Are you very demure, very mindful? Did you have a Brat summer? Or do you have brain rot? This year, the internet birthed a host of cultural movements, terms and phrases that have since entered the Gen Z and young millennial vernacular. (Collins English Dictionary crowned ‘Brat’ word of the year, while ‘brain rot’ was Oxford’s).
While brands have to toe the fine line between cringe and cool, with many criticised for inauthentic bandwagoning on the aforementioned trends, some labels produced innovative TikTok strategies, interesting new talent partnerships and social media savvy content by their employees or founders.
Loewe is a case in point. The brand continued to stand out on social media (most notably on TikTok) this year, collaborating with comedic creators like dancing-with-his-mum influencer @Pribel, fashionable dog owner @Mariona.Roma or style influencer @Miiueki to create funny sketches that incorporate Loewe products and show audiences that the brand understands internet humour. The brand now has two million followers and 37 million likes on TikTok, and was declared hottest brand of Q2 2024 by global shopping platform Lyst.
Marc Jacobs has taken a similar tack in recent months. From the founder’s own content of his extremely long stiletto nails, to the brand’s May campaign featuring Sylvanian Families figurines shoplifting a Marc Jacobs tote (courtesy of creator @SylvanianDrama) and of-the-moment influencer Nara Smith pulling a large red bag out of the oven in July, in place of her usual ‘trad wife’ meals.
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Also in July, Jacquemus created a stir with its playful involvement in the Latin LGBTQ+ community TikTok phenomenon ‘Legend of the Puchaina’, which features an animated avocado carrying a handbag, telling a tale. In the Jacquemus version, the Puchaina spots someone with a Jacquemus python bag and pines for one itself. The video garnered nine million views. In August, the brand also handed creative control to rollerskating creator @Janis_Dropin, who skated along wearing a yellow Jacquemus fit, garnering 2.6 million views.
Bottega Veneta hasn’t posted on social media since it wiped its feeds in 2021. But last season, the brand proved it still gets it. Following the viral success of Jools Lebron and her “very demure, very cutesy, very mindful” video in June, Bottega Veneta invited the creator to grace the front row of its SS25 animal beanbags show in Milan in September.
Consumers took stock
Luxury has undergone a reckoning this year, in various ways.
2024 kicked off with the ‘deinfluencing’ (or underconsumption core) movement, which saw some social media users encourage their peers to stop buying the products being sold to them online. In January, TikTok creators made resolutions to reduce their consumption of fashion and beauty. Some joined American fashion creator Mandy Lee’s 75 hard style challenge, where they attempted to refrain from buying new clothes for 75 days, finding new ways to style their existing wardrobes instead. Others tried the ‘Rule of Five’, where they vowed to only buy five items the whole year, inspired by British Vogue sustainability editor Emily Chan’s attempt in 2023 (which in turn was based on a campaign by fashion editor and sustainability advocate Tiffanie Darke). On TikTok, over 50,000 posts have featured the #Deinfluencing hashtag to date, up 50 per cent on last year.
To get more mileage out of their clothes, Gen Z are increasingly using the iPhone Notes app to store an inventory of their wardrobes, almost like the Clueless outfit generator. Elsewhere, they are making Notes app and Pinterest mood boards to plan gifts for friends, collect fashion inspiration or show off their desired aesthetics, which experts suggest offers the same dopamine hit as purchasing goods.
The value of luxury has also been called into question. Gen Z have done more research than ever into the products they buy this year. In fact, according to youth culture agency Archrival, 70 per cent of Gen Zs and 69 per cent of millennials only trust a brand after carrying out their own research, while 56 per cent of Gen Zs believe brands lie about the products and services they provide. Dupe culture has exploded this year, as people tighten their purse strings and seek affordable alternatives to luxury. (Much discussion over luxury margins and the true value of goods on TikTok has only fuelled the fire).
To boost audience trust, brands from Rhode to The Frankie Shop have increased their user-generated content in 2024. In showing micro and nano-influencers (regular people) trying and styling their products, these brands have sought to promote more authentic product information that feels less like sponcon.
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Luxury went mass
High-low fashion is not new, but mass-market and high street labels have invested heavily in designer tie-ins this year to boost brand cool factor. Alongside the usual ‘ugly’ shoe labels like Ugg, Crocs and Timberland, a swathe of unlikely mass-market brands collaborated with fashion labels in 2024, including Hellmann’s mayonnaise x Chopova Lowena, Heinz ketchup x Kate Spade and American Express x Luar (complete with a bag made of Amex-inspired bag charms). As the luxury slowdown continues to squeeze emerging talent, we’re set to see more of this in 2025. Whatever next?
High street labels have also attempted to boost their fashion credentials, perhaps to entice consumers who were buying luxury pre-slowdown and are now seeking more affordable options. In September, H&M held a blockbuster 2,000-capacity party to kick off London Fashion Week, featuring a performance from megastar Charli XCX, who designed a collection of Y2K-esque pieces for the brand. H&M then held a rave during Milan Fashion Week with DJs Romy, Chloé Caillet and Love Foxy; flew press and influencers to the French capital during Paris Fashion Week to preview its latest collection; and rounded off with a Times Square takeover last month, which saw Charli XCX perform her Brat hits in H&M, shutting down the area.
On the high street, Zara unveiled a Kate Moss collaboration last month, Zac Posen was appointed EVP and creative director of Gap Inc, Uniqlo tapped former Givenchy artistic director Claire Waight Keller as creative director and Topshop is plotting a revival, with a view to open physical stores, once beloved by the fashion set. Elsewhere, British label Roksanda designed a collection for English supermarket chain Asda, while New York designer Brandon Maxwell designed two Walmart lines in the US (the supermarket also sponsored Maxwell’s 2024 shows).
Some go low, some go high
While some went mass or tongue-in-cheek, other luxury brands went high brow in 2024. In February, high-luxury label The Row banned phones from its AW24 show, cementing itself as the quietest of luxury labels and rejecting shows’ increasing roles as content machines.
Other brands invested in art and literature activations to establish or underline their intellectual, high-brow brand identities. In April, booming brand Miu Miu hosted a literary club entitled ‘Writing Life’ during Milan’s Salone del Mobile art fair. Salone played host to more fashion activations than ever this year, including exhibitions from Gucci, JW Anderson, Loewe, Hermès, Prada, Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, each in collaboration with an established artist or architect, often with limited runs of product on sale. It makes sense, as fashion increasingly shoots for the high-end customer, that brands would take aim at the affluent consumers of the art world. We saw similar levels of fashion activations and collaborations across Frieze, Art Basel Paris and most recently, Art Basel Miami, where Gucci mounted a snow globe installation of its iconic luggage and Bottega Veneta displayed a furniture collection of its SS25 beanbag chairs.
After Writing Life, Miu Miu furthered its literary endeavours, holding a ‘Summer Reads’ pop-up across eight cities in June — from New York to London, Shanghai to Seoul — distributing feminist literature like Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Alba De Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook (each book was selected by Mrs Prada). In April, Valentino announced a partnership with the International Booker Prize. Le Bon Marché opened a book-themed exhibition in late February, while the same month, Saint Laurent opened bookstore Babylone in Paris.
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During the SS25 shows in September, in London, Erdem Moralioglu was inspired by The Well of Loneliness, a lesbian novel published in 1928, which was swiftly banned in England for the next two decades. Milan label Del Core sent models down the runway holding various literary works, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
As the luxury slowdown continues, finding cultural relevance via high or low alignments — running the gamut from Sylvanian Drama to Jane Austen — will be crucial in 2025.
Highlights from fashion’s big year of sport
Brat, bodysuits and bag charms: The year in TikTok
The Vogue Business TikTok Trend Tracker
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