Image via Complex Original
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Trends are for humans what worms are for dogs: They live forever in your heart until you drink arsenic to get rid of them. Some trends are wonderful, bringing us great pleasure and endless memes and some really great slideshows, while others make us look back and wonder where it all went wrong—“Did I really look that bad? Because I couldn’t have. Because it looked so cool.” And then you just get sullen and eat three or four, but definitely four Hot Pockets. The most perverse class of trends is filled with ideas that feel hollow even when they’re only just beginning to brew. Ahead are some of those very trends, which totally died before they even set sail into the big salty ocean of #trendswear.
Rachel Seville is a writer living in New York who believes in miracles. Read her blog, Pizza Rulez, here and follow her on Twitter here.
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3.1deadtrends
Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann’s movie-cum-HSN special means you’ve had wide eyes at pink suits, chandelier dresses, and sweaty hotel specials for months. But once that movie is unleashed upon the masses tomorrow, you know exactly what’s going to happen: People will be throwing shirts everywhere, getting hit by cars and wearing headbands that look like a thousand dish soap bubbles. Everyone will start chasing the American dream relentlessly and going to the mechanic. Perhaps worst of all, they’ll start throwing parties and listening....to...rap music? So, let’s throw this out before before optometrists are advertising all over your city.
4.2deadtrends
Punk
The Met’s "Chaos to Couture" show has already brought us such rubies and emeralds as Kimberly Chandler asking if the Goo Goo Dolls are punk and a slew of salty to sour reviews. (Which isn’t terribly surprising when it skews so heavily towards Britain, where Malcolm McLaren just ripped off punk boss don Richard Hell’s look and slapped it on the Sex Pistols. Yes, fellas, it happened before blogs.) Now that it’s officially open to the public today, we’ll soon see a summer—if not autumn and winter and spring and oh! the circle of life—of gals who are told vaguely of Debbie Harry fairy dust and nothing about, say, Anya Phillips or Sylvia Reed or Adele Bertei and other babezillas who really had it going bossanova. And a bunch of semi-reputable internet outlets will push “get the look for less” posts hocking spikey duds from Hot Topic. And also, people will stop cleaning their bathrooms. Don’t let this be you!
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Kids
As we exclusively reported yesterday, everyone is getting married. And that’s cool because getting married allows you to be the ultimate influencer—5-10 dudes have to wear exactly what you want them to wear! But then married people are going to want to have a kid, who is pretty much just the worst blog troll, whining all the time about everything you do and spreading lies like, “You never give me chocolate milk.” Skip this kids part and get a boat.
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Neoprene
Over in Girl World, which is a purple and lime green phantasmagoria in which all the buildings are constructed of hundreds of copies of Gwyneth Paltrow’s It’s All Good, we’ve been dealing with neoprene for several seasons now. Neoprene allows you all the comfort of a scuba suit without the…um…I don’t know, you guys, I don’t even know why women are wearing scuba suits for dresses and my parents think I’m a woman. But regardless, neoprene is coming for you! I can feel it. Think of hair buns, skirts, and a general sense of longing—they all started with the ladies and moved handily to the men. But if you start hating it now, maybe it will never happen and you’ll never have to explore the ocean in a scuba trenchcoat.
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Grunge
Also big in Girl Town USA or whatever it’s called and coming straight to you? Grunge. We gals are not just not washing our hair, we’re apathetic, feeling helpless and longing to reject a world that misunderstands our every move. So we’re turning to Dries Van Noten and Phillip Lim and Saint Laurent and whoever else made beanies, natch. And these designers are hugging us to their plaid breasts like, “Can I tell you a secret? Cobain is neat, but at the end of the day I just want to hear something nice like Billy Joel’s ‘River of Dreams.’” But, like, haven’t we been tying shirts around our waists and been like “MAAAD 4 PLAAAID” since Miley Cyrus was born? Can a trend be a trend if the trend never ends?
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Das Berlin Intellectual
A cousin of the Cobble Hill dwelling tree branch in APC jeans, Das Berlin Intellectual bought the Warby Parker 1922 collection and wears a lotta waistcoats and cries when he looks at his hands for too long. The ubiquity of the whole jeans and Air Max thing has got Das Berlin Intellectual thinking that his time is nigh, but tiny glasses will make you look like Theodore Roosevelt, who only ever had brand collab ever and it was a Teddy bear.
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Masculinity
Face it, all the generations of American men before yours could probably beat you up with one swift suckerpunch because you’ve all been reading namby-pamby menswear sites like, “Ohhh, what’s the new special way to tie these laceless loafers?” Your forebears, on the other hand, were literally bears. For a moment, you might dream of making masculinity something more than twee commentary on one’s ability to grow facial hair, but be warned! Once you hit puberty, physically or culturally, you cannot go back. Leave this could be trend in the dust or find yourself in a lifelong Dos Equis commercial (not a good thing).
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White
It’s almost the summer and everyone’s going to want you to wear white. Yawn. “You’ll look so beautiful,” your girlfriend will say, “It will be like we are Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan in City of Angels,” except Meg Ryan has that motorcycle accident and ends up in heaven forever and Nicholas Cage remains on earth and the guy from my favorite dubstep band, the Goo Goo Dolls, has a telescope. This summer, ditch the white linen pants and tell your girlfriend, “Let’s stay on the same metaphysical plane, boo. Thanks.”