Looking at specifically fashion trends; How wide legged jeans, dad sneakers, long white socks, crocs etc. are ‘back’ in trend when it used to be fashionable quite a while back.
How do trends actually become a trend? How did the human population manage to agree on one certain thing and deem it suddenly popular? For example, can one just start wearing skinny jeans and make it popular again?
In: Other
Someone in a very dense city finds a new type of shirt that they like and wear it with their favorite jeans.
They wear that outfit out, and many, many people see them.
This person is popular. They go to clubs and bars and have lots of friends who admire that new outfit. Other people think it looks good, or they want to be like that person.
More and more people wear similar shirts with similar jeans in that big city.
Then, a group of those people fly to another big city wearing their new outfit. Their other big city friends see it. They emulate that look by buying their own outfits.
Then people who have no personal connection to the look see it, and they want to just look good, so they take on the look.
Rinse, repeat.
Now everybody is following it, and the rest is history.
Speaking generally:
There’s usually a trendsetter, basically the equivalent of an influencer. They will have some idea for fashion, and will generate some sort of buzz or other popularity.
That will influence companies to make that type of clothing and sell it in their stores. If it’s generally popular, then more people will buy it and companies will produce more to profit off of that.
Another permutation on that is if there’s no influencer, and the company can react to the changing trends proactively. So say a company makes 5 styles of clothing – if Style A drops in popularity and style B gains in popularity, they can reset and prioritize Style B instead without having to keep a pulse on the influencer market.
Probably not a proper ELI5 answer, but I highly recommend reading The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell.
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