TikTok Summer Trend Survival Guide
By Florenne Earle Ledger published 17/07/2024
TikTok micro-trends come alive in the summer months. With niche-style personas emerging in 2023 including Tomato Girl Summer, Coastal Cowgirl and Barbiecore, I'm excited to see what sweeps our phone screens this year.
Although trends can be fun and interesting, all the noise can get overwhelming. It’s easy to feel like you need to follow trends to be deemed ‘fashionable’, and it can make your current wardrobe and identity feel inadequate.
I always try not to let TikTok trends heavily influence or define my style, to remain confident in my personal fashion choices. This guide is designed to help you decide which trends are for you, and how to know when you should skip something.
It’s more than the clothes
Recent TikTok trends haven’t just been about the clothes, they have focused on desirable lifestyles as well. Euro Girl summer fashion isn’t just dressing in a more “European way”, it’s also about being incredibly tanned (naturally) and having enough money to go on lots of holidays, take photos in beautiful places and buy endless pasta and Aperol spritz. It’s the same with the OG, Cottage Core, it’s not just the gingham and long white skirts, it’s also about the country side lifestyle and baking all day.
The point is, if you’re being convinced to buy into TikTok trends by buying certain clothing items, the picture isn’t complete until you change your lifestyle, which isn’t realistic. We can’t expect to magically have more money or up and leave to live in the countryside to achieve certain aesthetics. Buying the clothes is only doing half the work, which leaves us unsatisfied with our purchase as we feel short-changed. Thinking about how you can dress in the way that makes you feel good in your daily life is what’s most important.
Have confidence in yourself
Targeted content indirectly makes us feel like we need more stuff to be a better version of ourselves. It’s not news that a lot of what we see online is fake, but making the effort to back your personal style will make it easier to decipher between micro trends you don’t love and those that invite you to explore a different version of yourself.
Get inspiration from elsewhere
TikTok isn’t the only place to get inspired. Seek fashion inspo outside of online circles and find what appeals to you. In an increasingly digital age, we don’t often look outside our phones for ideas on what to wear, but there’s so much in our surroundings we can be inspired by. We spoke to Wherers worldwide to hear the niche places they get styling ideas from, read all about it here.
Find your niche
If finding your personal style seems too daunting and you’re not sure how to categorise yourself, defining your niche is a good way to hold TikTok trends to account. If you boil your taste down to a few deciding factors, like what kind of colours or patterns you like, fabrics you lean towards or similarities in how your clothes make you feel, this is a good starting point to refer back to when considering new trends.
Check-in with yourself
Short-form content makes it so easy to doom scroll for hours and forget what content we’ve consumed, or blindly accept what we’re being told is trending and fashionable after seeing it time and time again on our feed. Take time to check in with yourself and think for a little longer about what the internet is telling you you need. Whether you’re impulse buying clothes or not, believing what you see online is what you should be wearing will have a negative effect on your self-image.
Here are a few questions I remind myself of when I’m considering buying something after seeing it online:
- Is it who is wearing this item that is making me like it? How would this look on me and how would it fit with my current wardrobe?
- Have I worn anything similar to this before? Does this match my understanding of my style, or is it too much of a wild card?
- Would I still be excited to wear this even if it wasn’t trending?
- If the brand of this item was different, would I still want to wear it, and would others?
- Would other people in my life be surprised to see me wear this? Does this match my style track record or am I buying into a gimmick?
- Can I imagine wearing this in years to come? Does it go well with other items I own? Could I wear it in different seasons?
Bringing myself back to the present moment rather than being sucked into an internet bubble helps me ground myself and think more clearly about myself in relation to what I’m seeing online, rather than wanting to look like someone else.
Whilst we’re bracing ourselves for the trends to hit TikTok this summer, it does feel like there’s been a shift in understanding of TikTok trends. More people are sceptical, and more of us are trying to stay focused on what’s important to us, rather than what’s seen as cool. Stay with us this summer to follow the journey of TikTok trends.
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