Live a life, not a trend

Outfit repeating? Quiet quitting? Very demure, very mindful...

My friend and longtime fellow writer

Jo Fisher

recently wrote her list of ‘ins and outs’ for 2025, and one of them was to get rid of the phrase ‘outfit repeating’ because it actually just means wearing your clothes more than once. Revolutionary, I KNOW. What a time we live in, in which going to your wardrobe and picking out the same combination of clothes that you wore last week and the week before that is considered a radical act.

Anyway, this isn’t a post about how fast fashion and consumerism has entirely warped how we approach getting dressed every morning. When did we start living trends, instead of just…oh, I don’t know, living a life?

I suppose, in essence, trends give us a sense of belonging, and humans crave belonging. This is not a new revelation by any means, but it’s only just occurring to me that we are spending more and more time looking for ways to frame or categorise the way we live through online trends, as if we need the comfort of knowing that someone else is making the same choices that we are making. By watching a stranger’s life play out online, we can recognise elements of our own lives and feel comforted by the knowledge that we are not alone.

Perhaps it’s that we need some kind of permission slip, for someone to tell us that what we’re doing with our lives is acceptable, and social media has become a space where that acceptance is freely given (and taken away, but that’s another post entirely). We need to make sense of the world around us somehow, and we do that by watching other people living lives that we relate or aspire to. Our lives, our politics, our choices are informed by social media trends, and vice versa.

One any given day, I might see someone documenting their ‘gentle parenting’ journey, or telling the story of how they left their job by ‘quiet quitting’. I could spend hours watching videos of people cleaning their houses (#cleantok), or cooking dinner, or tending to their rosy-cheeked children, or committing to a ‘no buy’ year. Everything is fodder, everything can become a viral trend.

When we see these snippets of other people’s lives, we see the potential of our own reflected back. We see what our homes could look like, the way we could choose to parent our children, what we could improve or change or shift to fit a trend that we didn’t even know we wanted to emulate until it popped up on a tiny screen.

Social media gives us a space to document our day-to-day, to find community and connection that can be deeply meaningful and impactful, but it also exacerbates our need as human beings to be part of something, to not be left behind. It breeds comparison.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is…we don’t need to categorise everything, or fit our ways of being into a neat little box that someone else has crafted. We can acknowledge that trends can be incredibly helpful and inspirational, while also recognising that we don’t always need to follow them or find space for them in our lives.

Outfit repeating can, as Jo says, just be called wearing the clothes you already have. Quiet quitting can just be not killing yourself to succeed at a job that you don’t like. We can let our lives spill over the edges of the parameters set for us, let them exist outside of social media.

It’s OK for our lives to be lives, and not content - to embrace mess and complexity and contradiction. To not always be perfect, because a life well lived could never be so.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this post. Please let me know what you think in the comments!