Fireball protection

This. This got me:

First of all I just love Tina Boetto and have since forever. Smartest, warmest, most insightful award. Here, she just NAILED this thing that’s been gnawing at me. Don’t you just love it when some wonderful writer does it and you get that good kind of happy jealousy? I do.

Her article (and so much of what she writes) got at something unspoken and gnawing at me. We’ve seen the BINGO cards with all the so very Substack things, the Donni, the paracords, etc. But WHY? Why does so much of fashion Substack look alike? And what (if anything) do we want to do about it?

At one point, my feed was all young white moms, liking and commenting on each others’ posts, and wearing (and linking) barn jackets, pink pants, Juju Vera, a High Sport dupe, track shorts. Sometimes we didn’t see or hear from the writer at all. (Or maybe it was one unstyled mirror selfie. ) The rest was all linked collages.

But. I’m both a reader and a writer here. For me, Substack is the joy of the big-ass print magazines I miss savoring. I ritualize reading my Stacks and see them as a treat. When I complete something loathsome, coffee and my subscriptions are my reward. Seeing all the same stuff — much of largely irrelevant in my life as a 55 year old — and often without any POV to draw inspiration from (I can draw inspiration from all sorts of people if I get a point of view), really got me down. Especially as it seemed to be proliferating. What was wrong with me? Others seemed to eat this stuff up!

As a writer, I started to doubt myself. You vote with your feet; there’s a reason why this kind of post proliferates. Who am I to knock it? If this was the writing we all wanted, I was doomed! I’m not capable or interested in writing what I don’t want to read.

And then, there’s the other bit: I’m also an avid shopper. It’s how I know whereof I speak. And I can be influenced. I have a wish list I keep on ShopMy and I notice that reading certain authors has me immediately adding to it. It’s not one individual stirring the urgency, it’s the tsunami effect, the pile on.

Tina talked about that effect: “My strongest memory of my first few months on Substack is what I think of as The Great Barn Jacket Craze of 2024. Barn jackets were everywhere virtually overnight. Fashion writers were wearing them, affiliate links were flying, people were desperate to get their hands on certain brands that were sold out, and the chats were rife with sizing questions. Then the weather turned frigid and barn jackets abruptly fell off the radar … and I’m not betting on a big 2026 trend comeback.”

I remember this so vividly. I was actually upset that, living in Miami, I had no need for a barn jacket. I wondered, should I get that Prada one and let it sit on my shoulders at night? (OMG, Rach.) I didn’t, but I’m no hero of restraint. When I saw a Carhartt x Marni jacket in a secondhand shop, I bought that. And I believe I would not have had I not been influenced by the barn jacket Fireball. I love it, sure, but it’s seen limited use.

The High Sport pant, the Juju Vera Petra necklace, Tina calls these hypertrends (I’ve dubbed them Fireballs) and notes that “they suddenly come out of nowhere (often facilitated by affiliate programs and/or brand gifting), saturate the platform, cause a shopping frenzy, and disappear without a trace the next season.” In college, I remember Aerin Lauder saying to me “once it’s in, it’s already out.”

Does it even matter?

Say you’re totally influenced by trends, you buy in and enjoy them until you don’t. Is that necessarily a problem? I wanted to talk to my friend Asta of Fit Happens, because I suspected she’d have a unique POV. Actually I predicted she’d tell me how she tuned out the trends; she is the ultimate in confidence, dressing for no one else, one of her style words is “commanding.”

But she had a different - and resonant take.

“I’m very neutral towards trends. And shopping and dressing in general. I find a lot of this messiness with trends comes with morality we attach to it. Like we are so morally superior if we ‘don’t fall for trends.’ We have cracked the code and we are above being marketed to. Like a point of pride. Or there is that lens of aversion to looking like others which makes people have feelings about trends.”

This idea of removing judgment is key, and I’m so glad she raised it. Within fashion in general there is this eyeroll snobbery around anything that “everyone” has. I think it’s ick. Just to not like it because so many others do. It’s that whole “I only wear vintage” holier-than-thou-ness.

“It’s important to note that there’s a core customer for all of these trends who still happily wear them today. There have been multiple Juju Vera pendants in resale threads and there are also people who’ve never wavered on their Petra necklace,” Tina said in her story.

“I’m very selfish is how I look at anything style. Do I like it? Do I not like it? Who cares if I like it because I see it everywhere,” Asta says. And that “. . .might come from having worked in advertising for about 12 years. Marketing works. That’s just a human fact. I don’t need to try and prove to myself that I am above it all.”

Filter: On.

There is one thing embedded in Asta’s answer, though. It’s the part where she asks “Do I like it? Do I not like it?” That’s her filter. What I think sometimes happens is that you find yourself ceasing to ask these questions; the bombardment effect can make your filter permeable. Just as the barn jacket craze got me to soften my insistence on buying only what I need for my real life.

“Removing morality from it and just thinking about what I like and what I don’t like without worrying about why I like it just makes it easier,” Asta wrote me. “Once you remove all that noise and weight from these decisions, you can listen to your gut.”

That is the key. I like the idea of removing judgement of ourselves and others. But also tuning into our true gut and heart. “There have been many, many trends that I do not like and was just not drawn to,” Asta says. For me, someone more susceptible, the Juju Vera necklace didn’t tempt me - mostly because I just didn’t like it that much. I have long necklaces I like better. Easy. But I bought (and hated and sold) the High Sport pants.

You have to have that filter turned to on. And it can be hard to keep it there.

As Tina put it: “The community component of Substack participation is what rapidly disseminates a hypertrend. It starts with highly visible fashion creators wearing and affiliate linking the pink pants³, which waterfalls into smaller writers with engaged communities affiliate linking the pink pants as the star of their post, and turns into readers asking the writers about the pink pants. This constant drip of pink pants triangulation between newsletters, notes, and chats quickly becomes The Great Barn Jacket Craze of 2024 . . . creating a collective fomo that makes the hypertrend feel urgent and necessary.”

Trendproofing

We’ve established that there’s nothing wrong with buying something because everyone has it; who cares why you bought something? But with this caveat: as long as you love it. And will wear it in your real life. And for a decent amount of time. I do see an issue with buying something because it’s a trend and then being completely uninterested post trend cycle and getting rid of it. The cycle has moved on, you’ll find a limited secondary market for that thing. Collectively, if we’re all moving in this way, it’s anti-sustainable.

We also feel a lot of post-trend guilt about these things. You got swept up, the tags come off, the moment passes and if it wasn’t a full-body yes, you’re staring at it in your closet feeling bad. We don’t need that, either.

So I wanted to look at some practical ways to make your Substack reading leave you less trend-susceptible. Below, 8 key tips plus 7 questions to ask before you add that Fireball to basket.