I have never thought of trends as something to avoid. They are a natural part of fashion, and of life in general, and a wardrobe with no trace of its time would probably be a rather dull one. What matters to me is clarity. When we fall for a piece, especially an expensive one, it helps to know what we are really responding to: our own taste, or the mood of the moment that happens to be in the air.
Once you understand how this works, you cannot unlearn it. That does not mean you stop buying trend pieces. It is entirely possible to say, “I know this might not feel current in a year or in five, and I want it anyway,” and then spend the money with open eyes. What clarity saves you from is the other scenario: jumping into a purchase without realising you are being influenced, and discovering later that what you loved was never really your own taste at all.
I have always been fascinated by fashion, but like taste and trends, the way it actually worked felt abstract, even a little mysterious. My logical brain wanted to understand it. It was partly selfish: I was building my own wardrobe and wanted to make sense of the mistakes I had made, and hopefully avoid repeating them. So I started researching the psychology behind our decisions, how trends and marketing influence us, and where personal preference fits into a constantly changing environment. This article brings together what I found, along with my own interpretation of how the pieces fit.
The Invisible Trend Cycle: How Fashion Shapes What You Find Beautiful.
We tend to experience fashion as a series of separate trends. A silhouette becomes popular, then another replaces it. A bag is suddenly everywhere, then it disappears. Something that looked dated becomes fashionable again. What we rarely notice is that these movements are part of something larger and slower: a visual cycle we live inside, a little like a bubble, with the smaller trends coming and going within it. The trends we can see are the visible surface of this larger movement, and they share its direction. It also shapes our sense of proportion and aesthetics, which means our personal taste is never entirely personal.
Imagine you are looking for a watch. You are building a collection and want the next piece to fit in seamlessly. You browse your favourite brands, magazines and social media, and without realising it you focus on the smaller models and skim past the larger ones, even in a full catalogue of Cartier. Oversized watches were the norm for well over a decade, and the move towards smaller, more jewellery-like cases has been gradual enough that few of us noticed the moment our eye changed.
I understood this properly when I cleared out my closet some years ago and found a few pieces I had once considered forever shoes: Tod’s moccasins, Prada kitten heel sandals and Gucci knee-high suede boots, all bought in the early 2000s, in classic colours and excellent leathers. They were almost perfect, except for one detail that was hard to ignore, the square toe. Nothing about it was extreme, and I would have noticed an exaggerated shape back then, but some fifteen years later the pieces looked slightly out of place. At the time I could not see it, because I was living inside the trend. In my mind they were classics, and they were also wearing the time stamp of their era.
Right now, something in your own wardrobe is probably doing the same thing. You cannot see it yet, and that is what makes it invisible: you only recognise it later, once you are living inside the next one.
The Zeitgeist in Fashion: Why Designers Arrive at the Same Ideas
This larger movement is largely shaped by the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It is our collective mood, beliefs and attitudes, the cultural, political and intellectual shifts we are living through and the way our values change with them. Clothing happens to be one of the most visible ways that mood shows up in daily life.
For a long time the dominant explanation for why fashion changes was status. Georg Simmel argued in the early 1900s that the upper classes adopt something new to set themselves apart, the rest copy it, and the upper classes then drop it and move on to the next thing, round and round. That captures something real, but it does not explain everything.
In 1969 the sociologist Herbert Blumer proposed a different view. He argued that designers do not invent taste out of thin air. They are closely tuned in to the world around them, picking up on political shifts, artistic movements and cultural anxieties, and translating what they sense into designs. Out of everything they produce, the public gravitates towards the pieces that match a mood people had not yet put into words. Blumer called this collective selection: thousands of designers and buyers independently arriving at the same instinct, with nobody organising it. Fashion moves because a shared mood is shifting and enough people sense it at once.
The first time I read about this, it made immediate sense, and I felt it before I understood it logically.
Why Your Taste in Fashion Changes: Belonging, Standing Out and Familiarity
Most of us have looked at something we once loved and wondered how we ever thought it looked good. It might have been skinny jeans, a tiny handbag, a particular heel height, or a silhouette that once felt effortlessly chic and now looks wrong. The thing itself has not changed. Our perception of it has. A few pieces of psychology help explain why, and they fit together in an interesting way.
The first is optimal distinctiveness theory, proposed by the psychologist Marilynn Brewer in 1991. Her idea is that we are pulled by two needs at once: to belong to a group and to stand out from it. Neither wins for good. We look for a sweet spot where we feel part of something without losing our individuality. If a group becomes too large and generic, our individuality evaporates. If it is too small and isolated, we lose the comfort of belonging. Fashion makes this tension visible. A new style lets us set ourselves apart from what is currently ordinary, but once enough people adopt it, standing out with the same style becomes impossible and it turns into the new ordinary. I know that feeling well, and I suspect you do too.
The second mechanism comes from the psychologist Robert Zajonc, who demonstrated in 1968 what became known as the mere exposure effect: the more familiar something becomes, the more we tend to like it. Repetition creates comfort. A style that once felt strange starts to feel normal, then pleasant, then correct, because we have seen it often enough.
Repetition has another side. The same exposure that makes something familiar can eventually make us stop noticing it, a process psychologists call habituation. Once a shape is everywhere, the eye stops registering it as remarkable.
Put together, they work as a loop. Someone wants to stand apart from what is ordinary, and a new style appears. As more people adopt it, familiarity takes over, and the mere exposure effect makes it feel safe to belong to. This is the mass adoption phase, when a trend seems to be everywhere. Then the same exposure that made it feel safe makes it overfamiliar. It starts to look dated, then tired, and eventually almost unwearable, and the people who wanted to feel distinct in the first place start looking for something new:
Differentiation → exposure → assimilation → habituation → differentiation
This is how we can change our minds so completely while the object itself stays exactly the same.
How Long Is a Fashion Cycle? Laver’s Law and the 20-Year Rule
The question of how long all this takes has an old answer and a new one. In 1937 the costume historian James Laver published Taste and Fashion, which set out what became known as Laver’s Law: a timeline for how we perceive the same garment as time passes. A style is smart at its peak and dowdy a year later. Ten years on it looks hideous, and after twenty it looks ridiculous. At thirty it becomes amusing, at fifty quaint, and only after about 150 years, he suggested, does it become beautiful. The scale was a witty generalisation rather than research, and the 150 years has not held up, but his instinct that our eyes recalibrate what looks normal turned out to be a good one.
The fashion industry has long worked with a rough rule of thumb: styles tend to return after about twenty years. In March 2026, researchers presented a study that puts data behind it. Emma Zajdela, who did the work as a PhD student at Northwestern University and is now at Princeton, and Daniel Abrams, a Northwestern mathematician, analysed around 37,000 images of women’s clothing, taken from sewing patterns and Vogue runway photographs spanning 1869 to 2023. They measured features such as hemlines, necklines and waistlines, and found that they move back and forth in waves of roughly twenty years. The researchers also noted that the pattern becomes less distinct from the 1980s onwards, as a wider range of lengths began to appear at the same time.
If a full cycle takes around twenty years, its low point comes about halfway through, which is roughly where Laver placed “hideous”.
You can see the rhythm in handbags. The Dior Saddle bag was introduced in 1999 and reissued in 2018. The Balenciaga City, launched in 2001, came back around 2021. The Chloé Paddington, which I bought about twenty years ago, appeared in 2005 and returned to the Chloé runway for Autumn/Winter 2025. All three went through the cringe phase that cyclical pieces go through before they become desirable again.
These cycles are not exact rules and they do not run like clockwork. What they do show is that we never judge clothes and accessories in isolation. We look at them from inside a constantly shifting visual environment, and that changes how we see them. Even with many trends overlapping, I believe they are all still answering to the same thing underneath: the spirit of the current moment.
Why Old Fashion Trends Return: Nostalgia and the Spirit of the Times
If a style becomes undesirable, why does it ever come back? This is where nostalgia comes in. In 1979 the sociologist Fred Davis published Yearning for Yesterday, one of the early serious attempts to understand nostalgia as a social phenomenon rather than a personal feeling. He explored how nostalgia gives us a sense of continuity between who we were and who we are now, particularly when the present feels uncertain. It makes sense that this reaches fashion when a generation gains cultural and economic influence. Adulthood arrives with its own anxieties, and looking back at the colours, textures and aesthetics of adolescence can feel strangely comforting.
Nostalgia alone cannot explain what comes back, though. A generation may feel nostalgic about dozens of things from its formative years, and only some of them return. The way I see it, nostalgia supplies the archive, and the spirit of the times decides what gets taken out of it. The past comes back filtered through whatever the present needs from it.
That leaves two rhythms running at once. A faster one, roughly ten years, changes the broad shape of what feels normal: proportions, silhouette, scale and the general visual philosophy of the moment. A slower one, roughly twenty years, brings specific references back around, with nostalgia choosing what is pulled from the archive and the current visual environment deciding how it is allowed to return.
It also explains why a resurrected trend can still look wrong. The details may be nostalgic, but if they do not fit the proportions, aesthetic language and mood of the current moment, they look dated rather than fresh. The reference can be old, while the way we see it is new.
In short: we want to belong, and we also want to stand out. What is unfamiliar becomes familiar through exposure, and what becomes too familiar loses its appeal, so we start looking for something different. When that search reaches back into the past, nostalgia supplies the material and the spirit of the times decides what still makes sense.
What Trend Cycles Mean for Your Next Luxury Purchase
Which brings me back to where I started. None of this means trends should be avoided. They are part of how we express ourselves in a given moment, and enjoying them is entirely legitimate. What changes once you understand the mechanism is that you can ask better questions before you buy, particularly when the price is high.
Every time you decide on a purchase, your subconscious asks whether the piece is in line with your personal preferences and values. What it cannot tell apart is your own, individual preferences and the ones you have borrowed from the collective. You can never stand completely outside the trends, and the current era will always affect you, since none of us would be dressed in crinolines today. But knowing how you are influenced gives your own taste a real chance to show. Understanding your own style archetype helps with exactly this, and I write about it in Why Most Capsule Wardrobe Advice Fails.
If you want to test your own response to a piece you are drawn to, I wrote about how that feeling can help you recognise a trend piece in Luxury Classic or Trend: How to Tell the Difference. And if you decide you want it anyway, knowing it may not feel current in a year or in five, that is a good enough reason to buy. It is a decision you have made knowingly.
