Trends, by design, are not built around you. They are built around a moment, a cultural pulse. It’s an algorithm’s idea of what is engaging this week, month or year. And when we organize our lives around them, we slowly outsource our taste, our identity and our choices to something external that has nothing to do us or cares about us. This disconnection is real and I have felt it too. The moment I shared in my first post- putting my face down and just sat was partly this; information overload. Exhaustion of trying to build a self out things that keeps changing.

There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from following trends. Not physical tiredness-something quieter and harder to explain. The feeling that you are slightly behind also slowly hits. But, by the time you buy or wear the thing, is already over and replaced by something newer, shinier, more appealing and more urgent. I used to think that exhaustion, not keeping well enough or feeling left behind was just me. And I needed to get more organized. But now I have started to take it as a symptom for all. Social media gave the trends a metabolism we were never meant to keep up with. And trying to keep up has a cost- not just financial, but cost to our sense of self, our nervous system and the planet we live on.

What used to move through culture in seasons and years has now started to move around in days and weeks. A color becomes ‘the color’ the next day. A retro fashion style gets flattened into a content, becomes trending and also gets discarded; all within the same month. And somewhere in all this race, sustainability loses quietly.

Sustainability ask you to slow down, to buy less, to think about where is a certain item coming from and will go and its affects in multiple dimensions of the ecosystem. It will ask you to wear the same piece of clothing for many years and still feel good and trendy about it. Whereas trends ask you to become the opposite; the will ask you to keep up, to participate in the race and of course to not be the person who missed it.

Though the newly emerged fashion brands have learned to speak both the languages; sustainability and trends termed as ‘conscious collections’. But they do produce more clothing than ever before every week, attaching words like recycled, sustainable and recycled. But I term it as aesthetic in a cover of sustainability.

I am not writing this from a place of having all this figured out. I still get pulled into algorithims.