August 7, 2025 |
There was a moment last year – somewhere between my eighth saved TikTok on ‘office siren’ dressing and a 70-slide trend report theatrically heralding the return of ‘mob wife chic’ – when I realised I’d hit peak aesthetic fatigue. Micro-trends were multiplying by the week and every desperate attempt to get up to speed only dragged me deeper into a hot mess of hauls, hot takes and influencer think pieces debating whether the ‘vanilla girl’ was finally passé (it indeed, at the time, was not).
So, I did the unthinkable, or at least, the unfashionable and I turned to numbers.
Not spreadsheets, mind you, but a more stylised strain of data that began surfacing on an increasingly curated corner of my Instagram feed. These were dressed-up statistics rendered in crisp serif fonts, paired with runway stills and backed by market insights. It was the kind of content that would look right at home on the double-page style spread of a monthly glossy.
Suddenly, fashion started to make more sense. There was rhythm in my refined sources and reassurance in cyclical breakdowns that could be digested over morning coffee or a lunch-hour scroll. I didn’t need every opinion under the sun, just a few smart ones. And in that shift, fashion felt less like an existential scroll and more like a system I could actually learn.
Why, you might ask? Because trends aren’t a matter of opinion – they’re a matter of metrics, cut and styled into something covetable.
Last month, it came as no surprise to the fashion-savvy that the Lyst Index made its usual rounds online, distilling consumer behaviour into a trend-based leaderboard. Lyst – much like fashion search engine Tagwalk – has positioned itself in the industry as the go-to for your quick trend fix. This time, The Row’s Dune flip-flops claimed the top spot, driven by a 162 per cent spike in searches after Jonathan Bailey was papped wearing them at the London photocall for the Jurassic World premiere. But the Lyst Index only scratches the surface for business content online. The more nuanced insights live elsewhere – in Instagram saves, Substack roundups, resale market fluctuations and niche runway breakdowns tracking absurdly accurate silhouette shifts across the four fashion capitals. Here, all that information is distilled and decoded so it makes a lot more sense.
Enter the data girlies.
Accounts like @databutmakeitfashion, @style.analytics and @heuritech are among the new class of fashion analysts making the business of style digestible, visual and – somewhat unexpectedly – addictive. Their posts operate like shortcuts for the visually fluent: cleanly designed, algorithm-aware and filled with just enough data to feel smart without losing its lustre. Instead of echoing catwalk coverage or chasing aesthetics for clicks, these creators investigate trend evolution and cultural traction, armed with infographics, timeline tools and just enough pastel-hued irony to feel native to the feed – it fits perfectly into mine. It’s new wave fashion reporting for the scroll generation – a type of cheat sheet, if you will.
More than just an aesthetic Instagram account, Madé Lapuerta’s @databutmakeitfashion feed approaches fashion business and trend data analytics with a Harvard-educated engineer’s brain and an over-analysing Tumblr-era eye. She’s running image recognition models, scraping search data and manually tagging silhouettes to figure out what’s gaining traction and what’s already dipped 20 per cent since your FYP told you it was “back in style.” Take the literal rise of burgundy during spring of all seasons, which shot up in online engagement by 76 per cent according to Lapuerta who aptly labelled the trend “actually kinda groundbreaking.”
Or take @style.analytics, the equally visually satisfying Instagram account run by Molly that coined the “cringe-sincerity cycle” – which you can also track on Substack – a tongue-in-cheek but uncannily accurate way of describing how trends fluctuate between irony and It-girl item. Ugg boots, Von Dutch, low-rise jeans and cow print – which saw a 334 per cent increase this July according to Heuritech (part of the Luxurynsight Group, a luxury fashion and beauty data intelligence platform) – have all followed the pattern. What was once labelled “cringe” then becomes ironic and after, “sincere”: pieces reappear on our Pinterest boards only to morph into “saturation” or what we might classify as a micro-aesthetic, until we inevitably cringe again. And somehow it all makes sense – not because it’s intuitive, but because someone has finally plotted the timeline and put it all in one place.
I, for one, have got to grips with efficiently and accurately breaking down key Fashion Week content into an easy capsule wardrobe of my own – not one I’ve necessarily bought (yet), but definitely one that lives on the wishlist. I create my own style formulas. I start by choosing three key colours of the season. Let’s take Heuritech’s palette from their trend radar for 2025: yellow – “creamy vanilla yellow” to be exact (+9 per cent and still ascending), merlot (+7 per cent) and scarlet (also +7 per cent). Then I pick two shapes, materials, or patterns – say, polka dot or lace – and one standout motif. This season, my top pick is definitely bag charms: big, small, cartoonish or borderline ugly (Labubu, I’m looking at you). From there, it becomes easy to strategically remember and track what trends you actually want to engage with or buy into – and whether tones or materials have had sustained relevance, kind of like a maisons permanent collection. It’s a way of filtering fashion into something tangible and something (re)wearable for sure – all without ending up with an unruly clothes chair full of facts that you can never remember – myself included. And if you know me, you’ll know I keep my stats as close as I do my Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk lip liner.
Which brings me to the new cohort of social platforms taking a creator-first approach to industry data – fashion-fluent, funny and often more candid than legacy outlets. On TikTok, Mosha Lundström (@newsfash) has become something of an industry sensation and, in my opinion, one of the most compelling voices online. Her 190.8k followers likely agree. Her tagline – “Insider Fashion News. Delivered by a Journalist.” – does what very few can: brings both expertise and experience to the industry’s digital round table.
Since watching Lundström, I’ve swapped my twenty panic-saved videos and 23 open tabs on TikTok-core taxonomies for something far more linear and articulate. She covers everything from designers’ unanticipated musical chairs to Michael Rider’s debut at Celine which took place in early July calling it a “true testament to the power of styling.” She goes on to describe it as a “classic concoction” of staples and unexpected wardrobe warps – one being a charming asymmetric grey cashmere cardigan flipped on one arm, held together with petit buttons.
Other TikTokers offering similarly un-gatekeep-y guides include Ryan Yip (@ryanyipfashion), who describes his content as “uncovering lesser-known fashion stories,” alongside thought-provoking hot takes on micro-trends. Someone who shows and styles more than tells is Atiya C. Walcott (@atiyacwalcott), who leads her followers through world-transforming fit checks. While these platforms might not be as known as your Tagwalk’s or your @ideservecouture’s, they remain, to certain fash packs in the know, as content creators worth being influenced by – for their zeitgeist-y takes on news and style alike.
Newsletters and Substacks are another go-to for content dispatches and are – in some ways – fashion’s most useful filter. Substack newsletters like The Wardrobe Edit by Anna Newton (@theannaedit) and Inside Fashion by Glam Observer, as well as @heuritech’s own ‘fashion updates’ send-outs, are some of the most compact yet content-rich ways to feed any appetite for trending intel, opinion pieces and – if you too are a visual learner – runway-ready receipts for forecasts, fastest-growing trends and even product rankings as specific as Alaïa’s leather and stretch ballet flats, which have grown by 59 per cent in the EU over the past month. They even catch pieces that haven’t yet peaked but are on their way to becoming the next must-have on the radar, scarf belts included. And while Instagram offers a taste of the above ideas, newsletters act as a springboard for deeper content – decoding shows, spotting shifts and putting your growing style cravings at bay. They’re so good you wish they’d spam you.
As for my inbox? It gives last-day-of-a-Prada-sample-sale energy – a little frantic, fabulously jam-packed and brimming with curated chaos, with hidden gems just waiting to be uncovered.
Because that’s the thing: you don’t need to know everything, you just need the right voices, the right filters and, increasingly, the right cohort – a curated pack of data-literate, culture-savvy observers who track fashion not as a frenzy, but as a system. What’s trending? What’s moving? What’s clicking? In the hands of the right platforms, fashion’s data stream becomes a decoding device – and with them in your corner, everything will finally start to make sense.
Top image: from left: Chanel AW25, Dries Van Noten menswear SS26; Miu Miu AW25. Photography courtesy of Chanel, Dries Van Noten and Miu Miu.
