Are We Trendaholics? Kinda Chic to Never Say Chic Again

By Sophia Wheway

Sometime between AI taking over our lives, TikTok becoming our search engine, and everyone suddenly having a Substack, we became trendaholics.

Not just consumers of fashion trends, but micro-trends in everything: the words we use, the restaurants we like, the drinks we order, even the way we describe whether something is cool. And lately, it feels like nobody is allowed to simply like anything anymore.

Take chic.

For decades, chic was just a word. Your mum could call a dress chic. A fashion editor could call a hotel chic. Your 75-year-old dad could, apparently, call something chic. Then the internet got hold of it. Suddenly everything was chic. Cigarettes were chic. Tiny sunglasses were chic. Martinis were chic. Being late was chic. Not texting back was chic. Bread and butter was probably considered chic at some point.

It started as a cute little internet joke, until inevitably we used it so much that we killed it.

Then came the backlash: “chic is over.” And somehow saying that chic was over became… chic.

When Did Everything Become a Micro-Trend?

The trend cycle used to give us at least a little breathing room.

Now something can go from niche to cool, to everywhere, to painfully cringe before the Zara version has even arrived. We aren't just buying into trends faster. We're collectively cycling through entire identities at an insane speed.

One month everyone is a clean girl. Then we're mob wives (seriously- what?). Then we're office sirens (please don’t wear a tube top to the accounting firm, girl). Then we're suddenly horrified that we ever participated in any of it.

Even words aren't safe. The other day my 75-year-old father used the word “chic,” and I physically cringed.

This is a man who has never consumed social media in his life. He has only recently discovered Substack. There is absolutely no reason his vocabulary should make me think of TikTok discourse. And then I realised how ridiculous that was. Chic is a completely normal word.

Why had the internet convinced me it was embarrassing?

Do We Actually Have Taste Anymore?

Maybe that's the slightly uncomfortable question.

When everyone is consuming the same references, watching the same TikToks and being served increasingly similar algorithms, how much of our “personal taste” is actually personal?

We like something. The internet tells us it's cool. Everyone starts liking it. Suddenly we see it everywhere. Then the internet tells us it's cringe, and almost overnight we decide we hate it.

Onto the next thing.

We've become so hyper-aware of trends that being caught liking something after its cultural expiry date almost feels embarrassing.

But isn't real personal style supposed to be the opposite?

The chicest person in the room probably isn't checking whether her shoes are still trending before she leaves the house. She probably doesn't care.

The Commercialisation of Cool

There's also something strange about watching perfectly ordinary things get packaged, renamed and sold back to us as aesthetics.

A martini isn't just a martini anymore. A ballet flat isn't just a shoe. Reading isn't just reading. Going to a little wine bar isn't simply going for a drink.

Everything needs an aesthetic, a name, and preferably a TikTok trend attached to it.

It can make culture feel weirdly flattened. Things with completely different histories and references get pulled into the same internet blender and repackaged into one easily consumable version of “cool.”

And once everyone has consumed it, we throw it away.

Maybe Chic Was Never the Problem

Maybe the problem isn't that we used the word chic too much.

It's that we've become so addicted to the cycle of discovering, consuming and discarding things that even completely normal words can suddenly feel dated.

We don't need to stop participating in trends. They're fun. Fashion has always been cyclical, and half the joy of the internet is watching some random thing become culturally important overnight.

But maybe we need to stop letting the algorithm decide when we're allowed to stop liking something.

Because if something becomes embarrassing the second everyone else likes it, were we ever actually into it in the first place? And if “chic” is officially over?

Maybe using it anyway is the chicest thing you can do.