The fashion trends that made 2024
And what they signal for 2025
We live in a trend driven world. Fashion trends themselves don’t just appear out of nowhere – they cascade down from inspirations of the past, fashion runways, and small designers trying to break out from the crowd. Once in a while, micro trends break out on socials, sweeping across audiences as we collectively decide to wear the same thing.
I searched through my notes, public search trends and designer runway collections to find the themes that stood out over the last year. Below are the top trends that made a dent in 2024.
Let’s dive in.
Mob wives and their furs
We started off 2024 with viral furs, mostly popularized through the “mob wife trend”. Inspired by Italian-American 90s and 80s aesthetics, the trend went extraordinarily viral in January and featured big fur coats, bold makeup, and black leather or velvet clothes. It got picked up by Kendall Jenner, who can afford exceptionally high quality furs and so furs – faux furs, this time – made a comeback into the mainstream culture in 2024.
2025 Take - Bearish: By December, the store racks in an average retailer were full of dupes on dupes of faux fur coats – minimizing the nuance of the trend. It’s hard to replicate a quality fur for the long term, and polyester, which is what faux furs are made from, is not very good for the environment or too pleasant to wear. Perhaps we’ll move on by next winter.
Fit and flare, gather and bubble
Spring is when we started moving into a recurring theme of the year – exaggerated skirts. Smaller designers found breakthroughs with dresses exaggerating hips with fitted waists combined with gathered or flared skirts; bigger brands caught on and replicated the trends.
Demand for midi dresses and more classic, feminine styles grew. Retailers saw viral success with fitted waist, boatneck bubble and gather midi skirt dresses. Multiple designs of the style went viral and sold out quickly, empowered by the crave for fitted, feminine forms.
Gathered skirt interest evolved into the bubble skirt mania that we saw in July. Suddenly, bubble skirts were everywhere. They’ve had quite a journey. Originally a nod to the 80s and Princess Diana, bubble skirts were picked up by Prada and Proenza Schouler in 2022 and 2023 collections. In July 2024, they achieved virality due to a massively affordable Zara dupe, tons of ‘girls walking across the street’ Instagram reels and our human fear of missing out.
Another popular form was the drop-waist skirt or dress; a standout of this trend was the black and white long sleeve drop waist viscose dress and its many dupes that followed over the year.
2025 Take - Bullish: Based on how things are going, I bet we’ll continue to see more drop waists and fit and flares in 2025. Personally, I loved tons of the styles we saw last summer – and I hope they make a comeback this year!
Linen and pajamas
If you saw linen everywhere last summer, you’re not the only one. Linen summer demand was up ~20% relative to prior year – it was a summer favorite, and for good reason. Linen is biodegradable, good for the heat and feels great. Its cons are that it’s easy to wrinkle and can be a bit transparent — this is why finding items with the right construction is key.
By August, we gave up and started wearing pajamas. I’m not kidding, boxer shorts and pajama pants for women went viral this August as some retailers tried to stand out from the linen pants.
2025 Take - Bullish: While the boxer shorts never grew on me, I suspect we will have the trend linger this summer. And I’m down for more linen — it’s a great, sustainable fabric that can last a long time if picked and taken care of well.
Suede, leopard, dark brown, burgundy
The micro trends that defined fall seemed to come all at once – suede, leopard and dark brown were trending up in search interest and showed up across retailer floors.
Suede was really popular back in the 70s, in the early 2000s, and back again in 2023. By 2024 fall it came back stronger, with suede bags, jackets and shoes becoming a frequently mentioned staple. Leopard search interest slightly ticked up, but didn’t become as viral as I suspect J Crew, based on their overabundance of leopard in the fall, expected.
Dark brown became one of the main colors of fall, inspired by earthy tones in FW2024 collections like those from Ralph Lauren. We also took a page straight out of 2012 – oxblood was so popular back then that the season was labeled “2012 oxblood fall”. Slightly over ten years later, Sabato de Sarno released a new color – the Gucci Rosso– in his spring 2024 collection. Since the color is basically oxblood red, burgundy, oxblood, dark red became more popular across runways and stores, exploding in popularity this fall.
2025 Take - Bearish: We’ll have to watch the runways in February to confirm what is more likely to be marketed at us through the fall. If history repeats itself, we’ll have a chance to wear our dark reds again through the oxblood fall of 2034.
Wide leg jeans and trousers
In terms of pants – the theme of 2024 was - ‘bigger’. Baggy jeans, already popular in 2023 went mainstream in 2024, largely driven by Gen Z preferences (I am not Gen Z but got my first pair in 2023 😎).
Perhaps as a response to the office siren trend, trousers started appearing more often in stores. Wide pants with pleats, relaxed pants with legs, pants became a lot more popular last year than the year prior, growing in early 2025 as well.
2025 Take - Bullish: I enjoyed adding trousers to my closet, and with increasing amount of Gen Z in the office, I think they will continue to grow in popularity in 2025.