“The rapid exposure to endless content means trends can rise and fall within days,” Smith says.
“They’ll emerge fast and capture audiences and it’ll feel like the biggest moment in time, but they can die even faster.”
Earlier this year, Charli XCX’s sixth studio album brat started a trend of its own. It coincided with the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, so then it became “brat summer”, and suddenly everything was brat-coded and lime green.
While the term was inherently understood by digital natives, the cultural phenomenon took a bit of explaining to older generations. There wasn’t a succinct definition for what “brat” meant - you either got it or you didn’t.
Linguistics expert and content creator Adam Aleksic, better known as @etymologynerd on TikTok, says “brat” followed a popular trend within trends, wherein they grow increasingly conceptual in nature. In other words, there’s no specific explanation, just vibes.
“Brat is brat, the definition is self-contained. Everybody knows what brat is - and yet it’s very difficult to actually put that into words. You can only gesture at what brat really is by talking about all the related concepts.”
Charli XCX herself couldn’t define what brat meant - instead, she gave examples of someone with “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra”. But when Kamala Harris announced her bid for presidency, Charli tweeted, “kamala IS brat [sic]”, which doesn’t really line up with that definition at all.
“Clearly brat is something more, something ineffable that can’t really be captured with a cohesive definition,” Aleksic says.
“On one hand, there’s the named brat - a messy girl that likes to party - and on the other hand, there’s the unnamed brat - this indescribable essence connecting Chappell Roan to coconut trees to the colour of lime to the summer of 2024.
“Brat is a mentality that can be extended to new concepts simply by identifying domains where it exists. Once you see something as brat, you call it brat, and it is brat.”
On August 2, TikTok creator Jools Lebron created the next big trend, all about being demure, cutesy and mindful at work. It started naturally, with a sense of humour.
“You see how I did my makeup for work? Very demure, very mindful,” she said.
“I don’t come to work with a green cut crease, I don’t look like a clown when I go to work. See how I look very presentable? Only a little chichi out. Be mindful of why they hired you.”
Lebron’s delivery to camera gripped people, and her vocabulary caught on quickly. More than 366,000 videos are currently tagged #demure, while the original video itself has been viewed more than 42 million times.
Celebrities like Penn Badgley, RuPaul and Jennifer Lopez have jumped on the trend, using audio bits from Lebron’s original videos to promote and showcase their own personal brands.
Pansy Duncan, a senior lecturer in media studies at AUT, says part of why this trend may have taken off is because these common terms all hold “vernacular currency”.
“These [words] feel like they kind of arise from everyday speech, even when they’re kind of imposed from above. Even if someone starts saying they’re brat or demure, it feels like it’s part of a popular movement among everyday people, even if it’s just something someone’s coined on TikTok.”
Historically, there’s been a separate class of people determining the trends - they even had a name: trendsetters. Usually, celebrities, famous people and fashion magazines would tell people what to care about.
Now, everyday people like Lebron, a former supermarket cashier, can determine what’s hot, inclusive of all the terminology, aesthetics and revenue associated with the trend. The online success of #demure has even allowed Lebron to pay for her gender transition surgery.
“In an earlier moment, especially in fashion and beauty media, there was a much closer connection between seasonal fashion cycles, designers and publishers - they operated in sync, they were in dialogue constantly about, ‘This is going to be the trend and this is how we’re going to sell it’,” Duncan says.
“Whereas now I think TikTok is just ordinary people. It’s got its own steam now [but] there’s a very reactive element to it.”
While Aleksic argues the trends are becoming increasingly obscure and hard to understand, Duncan suggests they are actually relatively straightforward. Words like brat, demure, and mindful already exist in everyday speech, and they mean exactly what they mean. Demure is still an old-fashioned word for modest, but now it’s just used in everyday settings.
“I wonder if people just assume they don’t know what they mean ... they are actually what they say on the box,” Duncan says.
“I guess ... older people feel like there’s something alien about what’s going on on TikTok, they feel distant from it, so they just assume it’s sort of operating in a completely different realm with a whole new vocabulary, when actually, it’s quite accessible. They probably know exactly what it means if they just trust themselves.”
