From fame fatigue to fast fashion, was 2024 the year celebrity style died?

While celebrities were busy wearing more outrageous clothes, the rest of us have become fixated on personal style.

In mid-November, Charli XCX performed her hit song 360 on Saturday Night Live on a comically bare-bones stage done up in her signature hideous Brat green.

The appeal of Charli’s rise this year has been her cheeky, cheap charisma: making economising, like performing in a sloppy miniskirt and an oversize T-shirt, or making an album of heavily autotuned vocals over minimalist production, or the album cover that looked like a quickly designed mock-up, seem like stylistic choices.

This performance was a Charli thesis statement: the set, the dancing and most of all, the handbag. Why in the world would a pop star carry a purse while performing? But on her shoulder was an enormous Jackie, named for Jackie O, by the Italian fashion behemoth Gucci, which is struggling to connect with consumers amid a global downturn in luxury spending.

As Charli shimmied and bobbed, spitting out her lyrics in a sassy huff, she seemed to preen the handbag into the camera’s lens. She was making the hard sell for that Gucci bag – something she was likely paid to do - but she seemed to be impudently overdoing it. By the end of her song, which is only 2 minutes 15 seconds long, she seemed to be teasing the absurdity of her role as celebrity sales model, of the celebrity “I-wear-it, you-want-it” game in general.

It was as if she was less eager for us to buy the bag, than celebrate the fact that after years in the industry, she was either being paid, or had been crowned as culturally significant, by a big corporate brand so eager for attention that it wants its bag where it could not be less useful. She made a mockery of the myth of “celebrity style” by exposing its mechanisms.

In 2024, celebrity style – once the most important element in building awareness for luxury fashion houses and Hollywood and music industry mythologising – died.

Charli was not its grim reaper, but its mischievous Pandora, opening her gifted designer handbags to show us the ridiculous greased wheels of celebrity promotion. A series of Google Shopping ads she made with Troye Sivan went further, scripted as a meta-comedy about the stupidity of plugging products.

Charli was arguably this year’s most influential style icon because she made people feel good about what they already have.

Her clothes, expertly styled by Chris Horan, were compelling because so many people already have them in their closet: a big black T-shirt and something a little too naughty, too revealing. Horan said he didn’t want the clothes to look like stage clothing, but real party clothes: “We could even see people attending the shows being able to recreate the looks, [because] they were wearable.”

Of course, celebrity style isn’t really “style,” per se, but a carefully (and often expensively) coordinated campaign between fashion houses, extremely powerful stylists and celebrities to convince us that fashion brands are culturally relevant. And this year, that machinery all but collapsed.

Celebrities may still move the needle for brands – many designers have told me that putting Taylor Swift in one of their dresses often spikes sales – but they no longer communicate to us what taste and glamour look like. Nor do they tell us what is trendy or modern.

And while celebrities were busy wearing more outrageous clothes, the rest of us became fixated on personal style. Conversations about how to find or even “discover” your personal style became a defining social media and newsletter conversation this year, as people became sick of the TikTok microtrend churn and buying too many useless or disposable clothes. Vogue Runway’s annual industry poll said that the year’s defining trend was that “trends are over”.

“I don’t know when the word fashion came into being, but it was an evil day,” designer, fashion critic and labour activist Elizabeth Hawes wrote 86 years ago. “For thousands of years people got along with something called style and maybe, in another thousand, we’ll go back to it.”

In her book Fashion Is Spinach, from which that passage comes, Hawes wrote about fashion as the thief of American style. Too many American women were obsessed with cheap copies of trendy or “fashionable” French clothes, seduced by the myth of Parisian superiority and the diktats handed down from that city’s designer and editor deities.

Instead, Hawes argued, Americans should look to American mass-manufactured clothes: utilitarian but designed with great creativity, made in the service of the wearer’s figure and lifestyle rather than to conform to fashion’s caprice. Those kinds of clothes were superior, she argued, to the ideas of Paris designers.

In the time since Hawes published her book, everything and nothing has changed. It would be impossible to follow her advice to buy American clothes because clothing is rarely manufactured in the United States. And while Paris remains the centre of fashion, designers now come from all over. (In fact, many American designers, like Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford, are considered the best in the world.)

But we did not, as Hawes hoped, abandon fashion in favour of style. In place of the irrational whims of French designers, we now have the irrational whims of celebrities and their stylists. They have the same dopey hold on our wallets that Parisian hem lengths once did.

Fast fashion brands do not aim to make wearable, beautiful but inexpensive clothes. Shein, Zara, Temu and Cider exist to copy pieces and ideas popularised by celebrities, and give us what celebrities have, which is not style, but “fashion”.

Let’s face it: most celebrities this year looked downright terrible.

Swift is 35 but trapped in an endless sartorial adolescence rather than clothes that reflect the sophisticated, accomplished business executive and artist she is. (For someone so adept at storytelling and narrative, her clothes have the complexity of a nursery rhyme.)

When Harry Styles arrived at Alessandro Michele’s Valentino debut, his once boundary-pushing, femme-inspired look appeared dated. Even Rihanna is slipping lately.

The continued commitment to so-called method dressing - Zendaya in tennis clothes for the Challengers press tour, Anya Taylor-Joy in steampunk-y leather for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Dakota Johnson in a crystal mesh dress for Madame Web – has delivered some of the worst offenders. This started as a fun concept in 2023, as Margot Robbie played the forever metamorphosing Barbie.

But now this sartorial parlour game prizes watery subtext over the powerful fashion statement, turning us into amateur detectives at the expense of admitting something is simply boring, ill-proportioned or even silly.

The Wicked press tour, with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in an exhausting cycle of absurd-themed outfits, was like a parade of AI-generated responses for “bad taste gown”. Who cares if a dress is an Easter egg if it’s just plain ugly?

Once upon a time, celebrities did look very fabulous. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was easier to get nice clothes - just good clothes, what some might call “tasteful” clothes like beige suits and herringbone coats, a nice pair of trousers or just a great cocktail dress.

A-listers were very good at mixing them in casual and not-so-casual ways, which is why Instagram accounts like NightOpenings and Getty Images Fan Club always fascinate those who are even casually online, why something like Lauren Hutton in a rainbow sherbet Halston dress and tawny fox coat at the 1975 Oscars still looks so good now, why famous people used to look so chic at the airport and why fashion designers and shoppers are still so obsessed with Princess Diana and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. That is style.

Average Americans, too, tended to dress better. (Hawes writes extensively about the excellence of American style, which at its best had a dogmatic pragmatism uninterested in European fixation on hierarchies and class. And many of the best designers have been American for this very reason: what Hawes, plus Bonnie Cashin, Claire McCardell, Halston, Tory Burch, Bill Blass and Geoffrey Beene share is an ability to create intelligent, beautiful and useful clothes.)

But in the early 2000s, and even more so in the last decade, it became cheap and easy for everyone to have fashion, and more difficult, because of the decline of quality manufacturing, for people to have style.

Vintage stores today – even upscale vintage stores, ones that stock 1980s Saint Laurent, gently used Pleats Please and licensed department store copies of European designer goods – often carry articles made by the Limited, Dress Barn or the Gap from a couple of decades ago. Retailers, in other words, whose current output is seen as low quality or fast fashion by today’s standards.

But it’s clear why these labels have endured at even the best secondhand stores. Inspect the seams, feel the fabric – consider the fact that these pieces are decades old! – and you’ll notice they’re superior to a lot of what’s considered “high fashion” today.

Now it seems we are coming into a new era of style. This year’s most interesting celebrity dressers put on clothes as if they had a perspective rather than a paycheck from a brand. Zendaya in her multipart John Galliano feast at the Met Gala. Paul Mescal in his tiny little shorts. Timothee Chalamet recreating a bizarro dud of a Dylan look. Cole Escola in their hilarious but precise outfits. (The key to looking funny: make your proportions deadly serious.)

Even if a big name works with a stylist, they have chemistry with their clothes: Danielle Goldberg became this year’s go-to stylist because she makes Greta Lee, Ayo Edebiri and Saoirse Ronan look like they plucked clothes from their own (admittedly very fabulous) closet. They look natural. At ease.

The idea that we should fall at the feet of designers’ ideas couldn’t be less relevant. Designers should be so lucky that we want to wear their clothes – that we see something they made and it feel it will be relevant or functional or joy-giving in our lives. Fashion, at its best, is a collaborative thing.

“Fashion is so shrouded in mystery, so far away and so foreign, so complicated, and so boring when you understand its ways, that it has become a complete anachronism in modern life,” Hawes wrote. “One good laugh, and the deformed thief would vanish.”

Thank you, Charli, for all the laughs.

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