If you’re not quite sure why everything is suddenly Dubai chocolate or what exactly a Labubu is, you’re not alone. Trends have such a tenuous connection to our culture at large that posters online have started to identify the phenomenon with word salad: “labubu matcha dubai chocolate crumbl cookie benson boone …” You get the gist.
Amanda Mull, who’s writes about consumerism and the internet for Bloomberg, says this miasma of trends is all a part of our algorithm-mediated world.
When Mull looks back at fads of the past, like when everyone was collecting Beanie Babies back in the nineties, she can follow a clear trail of sociological phenomena and human actors that paved the way from cult status to ubiquity.
But tastemakers don’t control trends anymore; the algorithm does. What all of these new fads have in common is the ability to grab your attention while scrolling on TikTok or Instagram Reels. Something like the soothing green hue of a matcha latte or the rich textures of the kunafeh filling in a Dubai chocolate bar is perfectly positioned to make you pause as you scroll.
Mull spoke with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram about how trends used to work pre-algorithm and what evolving social media consumption means for the trend cycles of the future. Below is an excerpt of their conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You wrote about a strange group of items that had a very big summer.
Well, I have to give full credit for this to zoomer internet users who sort of created this grouping of trends on their own. The matcha lattes go along with Dubai chocolat,e and Labubus, and Love Island, and Benson Boone — and you can sort of spiral out from there.
This set of weird recent trends, I think, is indicative of how weird the trend cycles have gotten in consumer goods in the past. Trends have forever seemed a little bit weird, because the average person doesn’t have a ton of insight on where something ultimately came from that is suddenly everywhere. You know, in the Devil Wears Prada scene about cerulean and blue sweaters sort of demonstrates that dynamic, and that’s existed for a long time.
But when you get down to it, a lot of random-seeming trends in consumer goods from decades past have a pretty easy way to explain them if you dig a little bit. Trends recently seem to have even less connective tissue to culture at large than they used to, which is a real change in how trends are produced, how people become aware of things, why people buy things.
So what binds all these things together?
Yes,