2025 fashion forecast

Fashion dichotomies for the upcoming year

A few months ago, I was at my Amsterdam office chatting with my then-manager (hi if you’re reading this) about a trend report — maybe it was last year’s Ssense report, or something by LSN. I can’t quite recall. What stuck with me was something my manager, a seasoned trend forecaster with both formal training and hands-on experience, said about the report’s tone of voice. It proclaimed its trend forecasts as absolutes, stating definitively what the “major trends for 2024” would be. The problem? Trends rarely operate in absolutes.

More often than not, trends emerge as dichotomies. There’s the mainstream trend, and the counter-movement opposing it. Subcultures coexist and fashion often evolves in layers, not as a single, unified narrative. Declaring one trend as the trend misses the mark — it’s short-sighted at best.

Summer 2024 provided us with a perfect example of this. On one side, we had brat summer: a celebration of messiness, fun, and liberalism (politically and personally). At the same time, trad wife culture was thriving online, perpetuated by creators like Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm, whose content about traditional homemaking was racking up millions of views and spawning countless thinkpieces. On TikTok, fashion mirrored this cultural split. Brat summer leaned into playful chaos, while trad wife aesthetics embraced milkmaid dresses and linen whites. These two opposing worlds operated in tandem, often unaware of (or baffled by) each other’s existence.

This duality had me thinking about my own fashion predictions and how they often contradicted other major forecasts. But it’s clear to me now: we’re not looking at a singular, coherent fashion future but rather a patchwork of trends that will coexist. With that in mind, I’ve mapped out two fashion dichotomies (four fashion themes in total) that I think will define the coming year.