The age of algorithm fashion is upon us: we’ve all started wearing the same thing. Rosa Abbott resists…
It’s Saturday morning. You go to your neighbourhood coffee shop to get a flat white, joining the queue of people wearing puffer jackets, baseball caps and Salomon runners. Head to Grafton Street to hit the shops and it’s the same thing, maybe throw in a few leather crossbody bags. You might call into a bar later on the same evening and expect a slight elevation – a heel perhaps, or a cocktail ring? – but even after hours, urban style has petered out into the same formula of minimal basics and athleisure items. It’s a way of dressing that’s cool, casual, and comfortable, yes, but creative? Not so much.
As our content consumption and shopping habits drift increasingly online, it seems like the age of algorithm fashion is upon us, and we’ve all started wearing the same thing. Blame it on a post-Covid relaxing of social mores, the hegemony of Zara, or our collective exposure to the same Instagram ads and viral TikTok trends, fashion in the early 2020s has been as flat as a touchscreen.
Even in the digital era, it wasn’t always like this. When I started using the internet as a teenager in the mid-2000s, the days of MySpace, customised profiles were what set you apart. You’d express your taste by pinning a song to your profile and using code to customise your design (my page was hot pink and leopard print, an aesthetic I’m happy to report I’ve since “archived”). A few years later, my loyalty shifted to Blogspot, then home to a thriving community of personal style blogs. The best of these shared unique perspectives from creative individuals: idiosyncratic Man Repeller’s Leandra Medine, Style Bubble’s ever-colourful Susie Lau, Style Rookie’s eccentric and precocious Tavi Gevinson. The early internet promised to introduce us to fresh perspectives from around the world, connecting us to new ways of dressing and supercharging our fashion senses. To me, a teenager growing up in the post-industrial North of England, it felt like the moment in The Wizard of Oz where black and white footage bursts into technicolour. Bolder, brighter styles entered our wardrobes; “statement” items and self-expression were de rigueur.
So when did individualism shift into identikit fashion? Sometime in the mid- 2010s, as the amount of content online exploded, tech platforms began to “curate” our timelines into something more easily digestible. Enter the mysterious invisible force we know as the algorithm, which pushes top-performing posts to the top of our home pages, and filters out anything it deems irrelevant. This way of organising information has since become de facto on both social media and e-commerce sites, its dominance supercharged by the advent of TikTok, where the “For You” feed is default and clips go viral within minutes. This is catnip for fashion marketers – as evidenced by the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt – but how well do these apps really know us, and how well do they serve our wardrobes?
While micro-trends proliferate at ever-increasing speeds, an unintended side-effect is a new and puzzling ubiquity. That’s because, in the eyes of the algorithm, commonality reigns supreme: its AI scans for images that look similar to what is already gaining traction, boosting more of the same. The generic is given precedence over the exceptional, or genuinely pioneering; our feeds steer us back to the safety of what is ambiently popular, depriving us of a genuine surprise or sense of discovery. Like the worst kind of fashion victim, it can only follow what’s hot, and by the time it filters down to you, often at a lag.
Life imitates art, Oscar Wilde once said, but he didn’t have Instagram – nowadays life imitates the algorithm.
Life imitates art, Oscar Wilde once said, but he didn’t have Instagram – nowadays life imitates the algorithm. As social media users subconsciously (or consciously) imitate what the apps favour, they begin speaking in what has been called “TikTok voice” (its hallmarks are upspeak and vocal fry), or using contouring tricks and cosmetic fillers to achieve what Jia Tolentino identified in 2019 as “Instagram face”: poreless, with long lashes and plumped-up lips à la Kylie Jenner. The algorithm promised us “curation” but instead it gave us mimicry, an endless repetition of arched eyebrows, taupe knitwear and vacant stares. What’s more, TikTok’s catapulting of “micro-trends” into mass consciousness means that fashion manufacturers and retailers often can’t match demand for the latest viral sensation, causing quality to plummet. Sites like Shein and Temu are awash with poorly manufactured “dupes” of trending products, while horror stories proliferate about dubious e-commerce sites with misrepresentative product shots (ever hear the one about the knitted halterneck that, when it arrived, was so tiny it could only fit the cat?).
Is it too easy to blame the algorithm? As I’m sure tech-savvy readers might be quick to point out, algorithms are trained by their very users – us. Our feeds are moulded by our behaviour online, the posts we like, profiles we stalk and even ads we linger a second longer on. Before we had social media we had a natural algorithm of recommendations in our friendship groups – an in-person version of the “people like you also bought” feature – and in the relationships we built with devoted shopkeepers, an underutilised class of experts who tend to make suggestions better than any “discover page”. Despite the targeting of online ads, my most enduring and life-affirming fashion purchases in the past few years have come from one particular vintage seller – a very chic French lady who occasionally sells a selection of designer pieces at a flea market in Hackney. By now she knows my style and will make personalised suggestions each time I visit, introducing me to brands I hadn’t known, and styles I might not have thought of myself: Kenzo balloon pants, tartan wool culottes, a Jean Paul Gaultier peplum denim jacket. More often than not her advice has been bang on; she finds pieces that add a special something, an unusual silhouette or striking cut, to an otherwise formal outfit. I also like to hear the back stories of the pieces she sources. Looking for more intel on a pair of boldly striped jeans by French denim brand Marithé & François Girbaud, I asked whether she sourced them in Paris. “Yes,” she said, “this pair was my dad’s in the 1980s.”
In a sea of fashion noise, true genius prevails. At the time of writing, couture week is ongoing in Paris, and my algorithm, for a change, is steering me towards something exceptional: John Galliano’s haunting, surreal couture show for Maison Margiela Artisanal. Distorted silhouettes, intense corsetry, layers of silk and latex and bias-cut chiffon are paraded through a cinematic backdrop, made even stranger by impossible-looking porcelain doll make-up and movement-coached choreography. Presenting us with clothes that are more than the sum of their parts, the collection is being hailed as “the return of fashion”, and though virality online might have catapulted it onto our devices in record time, the clothes were the antithesis of fast fashion, in some cases taking twelve months to craft. Galliano’s vision reminds us of what fashion at its best can do – transport us to another place, another time, both futuristic and historic at the same time. His inspiration? 1930s photographs by the medium’s early pioneer Brassaï, and “getting offline and taking a moonlit stroll through the cobbled Paris streets in the dead of night”.
We now have the option to turn off our algorithm-generated feeds, due to new EU data laws that came into effect a few months ago. The effects have yet to be felt, but I hope that more and more people take this option, or better yet, shift their attention to the world around them – to magazines, films, art exhibitions, old photographs, or the increasingly rare passerby who offers a fleeting glimpse into an entirely unique fashion universe. Discovering things online is not a problem, but becoming passive – and letting the algorithm dictate our tastes – has led us to an uninspired era of identikit fashion. Style at its best can open a window into a different culture and worldview, offering an expression of identity or a rejection of the status quo. We shouldn’t let the pull of doomscrolling diminish that.
