Each season the Vogue Runway team looks at every single show we cover—over 300 for spring 2024, in case you were wondering—to create our trend reports. The concept sounds straightforward enough: Click through the collections, see what designers seem to agree on, put the images together, and define what’s trending in ready-to-wear, accessories, and jewelry. But that’s not the full picture.
Rather than merely organizing and analyzing data, we take the temperature of the season and break it down for those of you who aren’t looking at every single image we publish. It’s a process that merges information and perspective. For today’s episode of The Run-Through, I sat down with my Runway colleagues Nicole Phelps, Laird Borelli-Persson, and Laia Garcia-Furtado to share a little bit more about our POV.
Among the topics we took up: the place of the runway trends in a world of TikTok, viral items, and fashion #content. Nicole said, “I think trends are a fairly old fashion concept. They’ve almost become a little irrelevant because they move too fast for people to actually act on them.” What gives a trend weight, and makes it worth covering, is the way it intersects with the real world. “These are really difficult times, everything feels in conflict,” Laird added, explaining the preponderance of often shrouded, black looks and the ethereal white dresses that are their hopeful opposite.
That said, we didn’t ignore memes entirely. If men are always thinking about the Roman Empire, as TikTok would have us believe, are footwear designers constantly thinking of gladiator sandals? The runways seemed to suggest that this season. As for other footwear trends we saw, what was new is actually old. Flip-flops were everywhere on the runways, and paired with boho chic jewelry at Ralph Lauren and Paco Rabane they put us in mind of the style that denominated the streets and runways in the late 2000s—think Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen circa 2007.
The mid-’90s also made a comeback this season. That may be because the Internet—and everyone else—is ready to move away from Y2K, but also because fashion has Helmut Lang on the brain with Peter Do’s debut. If you ask us, fashion is in a bit of a reissue funk. There’s only so many times folks can remake an archival look or reference a collection before it gets old. More so, it’s the Internet generation’s obsession with times they’ve never known that has fashion in a state of ennui. There’s a specific word for this decontextualized nostalgia—listen to the episode to find out what it is.
On the topic of Vogue Runway, guess who else uses it for ’fit inspo? None other than Travis Kelce. This week, Danielle Salzedo, head of strategy at A&A Management group, who works with Kelce consulting on his image, joined Chloe and Chioma on the podcast to talk about the athlete’s style. She had lots to say about his recent viral looks, from the KidSuper look he sported during his first public date with Swift and his Collina Strada cargo pants, to the J. Logan Home top he wore during that kiss this past weekend in Buenos Aires.
