When brands realised that one viral TikTok could skyrocket sales, many tried to create products that people could buy to instantly show they were “on trend” and in the know. Like anything, once a product is widely popular and easily accessible, its street cred dramatically declines, leaving copy-and-paste aesthetics in the dust. Enter auras.

Where does this leave us now? For years I’ve been waiting for online trends to slow down, to give us space to think for ourselves and develop our personal style. Now it’s happened, it’s not quite as satisfying as I thought it would be. The post-microtrend world I imagined was a place where people would feel freer to wear whatever they wanted. Creativity would be rife. People would feel less pressure to fit in. Sadly, I fear what’s actually happened is that being “fashionable” has become even more inaccessible with auras being associated with niche brands and fancy clothes. Although, there is plenty to suggest this isn’t the case. Let’s explore both sides.

It seems trending auras online are reserved for people wearing expensive items from niche brands you probably won’t have heard of. Dazed put it like this: "Nowadays, it seems that what constitutes cool isn’t dressing edgy, but rather it’s the quality of your clothes, the hidden layers of cultural cachet that exist in knowing that the microshort or knit jumper you purchased is from Cafe Forgot or bespoke brands like Lucila Safdie and Sherris”. In a shift that could have made feeling confident in yourself easier, arguably it’s made that feeling even more exclusive and difficult to obtain.

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