This article is the third edition of our Collections project, in which we ask some of our staff writers to write a short blurb in response to a prompt. This edition’s prompt: write about a trend. Is there a new trend you love? A recurring trend you hate? From the rebirth of jazz to the come-up of tinned fish to the resurgence of bell-bottom jeans, our staffers analyze what it means to be trendy, providing immersive anecdotes, potent analyses, and strong opinions on the pervasion and omnipresence of the trend.
Tinned Fish - Lucy Kaplan
In my youth, a jar of pickled herring claimed the back right corner of the fridge. At the time, I couldn’t quite point to my father’s Jewish ancestry as the reason, more of a personality quirk that compelled him to crave tangy fish on a seeded cracker before his three o’clock nap.
My brother and I followed suit, curious eaters tempted with scores of gefilte fish and gravlax at family gatherings. On weekends, we grabbed bagels with whitefish from Lenny’s, loyal recipients of the nostalgia evoked by the name it shared with our late grandfather. Not the finest in the city, but every New Yorker knows that the best sandwich comes from the place around the corner.
After our westward relocation, my appetite grew inwards. No longer able to race down the stairs and across the street to fix my hankering, I stacked the cupboards with fish of my own choosing. Sardines in smoky oil, salmon in preserved lemon, a hazy ode to New York winters gone by. Salt and sour clung to the walls of our kitchen, reminiscent of the mom-and-pop shops we once frequented. This one, our own.
When I left home, I folded my fixation into my suitcase—not a trend, but a history. I etched a pair of salmon onto my upper thigh, drawn with a dark ink that felt like blood. A fine line reminder of Passover and my grandfather and the pickled herring.
Last month, I stopped dead in a familiar crosswalk when I saw the closure sign in Lenny’s window. Two years gone and I hadn’t yet mourned. That same week, my father sent me a pair of boots, a tin of smoked fish stuffed inside the left footbed. Somehow, I feel he knew.
Sweet Girls - Juliet Corwin
I try to remember when it became trendy to forget to eat. Somewhere around fifth grade, I think.
I remember in health class, how my teacher told us about thigh gaps and how to check we had one. After class, a group of us stood in a circle, touched our ankles together, and prayed for emptiness.
We’d skip meals and then skip rope during recess. When we got lightheaded during P.E., we’d lie and pretend we had cramps (most of us hadn’t started our periods yet). When one of our stomachs grumbled in class, we’d pretend not to hear it. Out of school, we’d look at magazines of flat stomachs in low-rise jeans and poke at our pudge. We bragged about how long we could go without eating. We'd sneak chips and cookies when the others weren’t looking and hope the crumbs didn’t leave a trail.
To be hungry was to be weak. We couldn't give in to the gnawing. It became normal to ache for food. Fullness should be something we could give ourselves.
And nothing could taste as good as skinny felt, right? I remember wondering when I would believe that.
I remember the shame that blushed at my cheeks after I caved and ate the dinner my mom had lovingly cooked for me.
On-Campus Observations From An Off-Campus Oyster Farmer - Riley Stevenson
To be on a college campus is to be surrounded by trends. Spend fifteen minutes on the Main Green and you’ll see a dozen micro-trends, some here to stay and most bound to disappear into the backs of closets; new accessories worn in creative ways over ever-lower-slung jeans held up by a kaleidoscope of belts all turning to dust.
My boyfriend is an oyster farmer from a small town in Maine. His world is one of salt, frost, and firewood, of wearing the same mud-caked sweatshirts to work and seeing the same fleece-clad old people in our small Maine hometown–a life without much room for personal expression through trendy clothes.
Observing the trends of our campus is his favorite activity when he comes to visit. He walks into the Blue Room, sympathetic to all of the college students hunched over their laptops, buys a coffee, and sits on the terrace overlooking the Green, noticing. As a freelance journalist and astute observer of the human condition, he is uniquely primed to note and catalogue, dedicated to his craft of perceiving what has changed since he last stepped foot on both this and his own college campuses.
After I am done with class he barrages me with questions and commentary about what he’s noticed, like an off-duty anthropologist, notebook in hand. He is excited, irascible, brimming with observations, seeking confirmation, ever-excited by his day’s work.“Does anyone here use a backpack anymore? Could the jeans get any baggier? Do you think anyone wants to buy my pre-paint stained Carhartts?” I shake my head at him and laugh, knowing the questions are the fun part, their answers irrelevant. We walk through the Green hand in hand as he tells me about his findings. I marvel at the worlds we occupy, the observations that allow us to see how others see their world, how lucky I am to share this world with someone as thoughtful and observant as he is.
Jazz is Dead - Elsa Eastwood
They say jazz is dead. It died first after World War II, when a changing business landscape rendered big bands unviable. It died again in the 60s, when bebop became esoteric and cerebral, a “musicians’ music”. Young people wanted to rock instead of think. It went out with the Old Guard—with Armstrong and Ellington, Billie, Dizzy, and Dexter—and again with Clifford Brown, with Bird, Monk, and Miles, Wayne and Coltrane. They say we’ve succumbed to the musical Big Mac of commercial pop, and not even Wynton Marsalis can bring us back. I believed them.
Then last year, I won a ticket through an Arts Institute lottery to see Jon Batiste in concert. I never win anything on that website. I knew him only as the bandleader on The Late Show, but I had to go.
Arriving at the venue just before 7pm on a Thursday, I stepped past a nauseatingly long standby line of older listeners and peers from my music theory courses. I offered a few guilty waves over my shoulder as a woman scanned my ticket.
I chose a seat in the very front, just beneath the grand piano—the piano on which my jazz hero would perform a reharmonized “Star Spangled Banner” unlike anything I’ve heard. His expansive fingers stretched across the keys like vines, entwining gospel-inflected voicings with modal color, face contorting in testimony. His was a music of lineage and remembering, pain and power, the improvisatory human experience; a music that traverses valleys and wades through rivers, moving through space and psyche. It was sacred and raw, percussive and lyrical. Creation and truth-telling unfolding in real time.
The arrangement lasted 15 minutes. Standing with the crowd, hand to heart, I soon shook with tangled sobs of peace, joy, and heartbreak at what felt like the most perfect convergence of sound and history. The old and patriotic, broken open in one trembling instant.
I say jazz is not dead. It’s adapting to a changed landscape, shedding its skin in the dark. Emerging between genres like a ghost in the machine. We may talk over it at cocktail parties, let it waft over our heads in elevators, because we, like the youth of the 60s, have enough to think about. With music, we scroll and skim surfaces.
But if allowed, it will instruct. It will wait for us to remember how to listen. It will continue to send messengers to remind us that, bruised but dignified, it still pulses beneath the noise.
The Chronicles of the Traveling Pants - Ava Satterthwaite
The first time I asked to borrow my mother’s bell-bottoms, her face scrunched in disbelief. “That’s the trend now?” she asked, befuddled.
“That’s the trend, Mom.”
I followed her to the attic, where we coiled between stacks of doodle-laced notebooks, faded letterman jackets, and clusters of swollen crates—one labeled CHRISTMAS DECOR, another RECORDS + CDs, a third DENIM. It was like Narnia – an entire world of memories hidden behind her wardrobe.
She found the bell-bottoms under a mound of distressed overalls and low-rises and threw them over her shoulder. Snickering, she asked if I’d like a flower headband or some fringe boots to finalize the look. But, as I stood in the mirror, smoothing the creased flares and fiddling with the waistband, a tear skimmed down her cheek.
“That’s the trend?” she echoed, voice faltering.
I nodded.
“It’s just like I remembered.”
When I came to college, my mother snuck those bell-bottoms into my suitcase as a farewell, her scribbled note stuffed between its folds. Call Your Mom! it insisted – like I’d need the reminder.
Frankly, the further I wander from home – from childhood – the more striking our resemblance becomes. I listen to “Landslide” with such reverence it feels biblical. I add crushed Kellogg to my cookies “for some crunch” and dark chocolate chunks “for the bite” like she advised. I drink iced Sauvignon Blanc and shake my leg so excessively the whole table wobbles, its steady thrum reminiscent of our once shared dinner table.
I never considered myself sentimental until I rediscovered her bell-bottoms looming in the recesses of my dorm-issued wardrobe. I never wear them, of course – the tide of the trend shifted long ago. Still, in those bell-bottoms live fields of her rose and lavender fragrance, denim threads interweaving like strands of hair she’d dutch-braid before bed, silhouettes of her twirling between twill ruffles like we’d dance in the kitchen to “Better Than Revenge” and “Fearless.”
All around me are reminders of adolescence. Pink bow UGGs mellow into classic tans. Black puffer vests overtake matted lime-colored North Faces. Like my mother, I’ve been fossilized over and over, my fleeting memories buried beneath old boxes and new clothing, my own forsaken Narnia. The trends, timeless and teenage-dirtbagish alike, fill these archives with precious evidence of our evolution.
I grab the bell-bottoms and look toward a clouded mirror. I’m much older now: cheekbones more defined, brows furrowed tensely. The denim is stiffer now, too. It holds me a little tighter, and I think warmly of my mother’s arms.
It’s just like I remembered.
Merriam-Webster - Annabelle Stableford
trend noun
a
: a line of development : approach
b
: a current style or preference : vogue
c
: a general movement : swing
d
: a prevailing tendency or inclination : drift
Approach: To identify three intrigues: two trends of my life, and for fun, a not so subtle trend that consumes me, which you may discover in easter eggs hidden throughout this text (although I am no mastermind).
Vogue: So it goes, it is not in vogue to be in vogue in this case, nor am I in vogue. But I persist.
Swing: “You have a favorite spot on the swing set / you have no room in your dreams for regret.” According to my memory, everything that ever happened to me happened when I was eight: troubled nights and tears culminating in the visit to the energy healer (she proclaimed me a blind farmgirl in a previous life; that escapes me like a pendulum now, coming back in crisis to explain everything); the drunk man at the natural hot springs and the woman who told me to look away and imagine his image washing away in the river (except every time I try, the current reverses); when I read Tuck Everlasting and in the story felt like I’d discovered a profound magic all for myself (I already loved to read, but this is when I discovered reading for real).
Drift: “Pulled him in tighter each time he was drifting away.” I refuse to forget my life–the words that crack me apart when I read them “He is with me, but he is very far away. And now he always will be” (James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk); the ten hardboiled eggs I watch someone eat at breakfast, all in one go (perhaps not profound, but noteworthy); the things that happened to me when I was eight and all the things that happened after (showgirl era!). All of this goes into my Volumes, my Immortal Histories, my Moleskines (2019-2024) and Leuchtturms (2024-present), my most critical trends. I don’t let any of it drift away.
Quarantine Trends - Anika Weling
It’s sad to think of what I will say when my children ask me what I did during the COVID-19 pandemic, the most prominent event of our generation. I wish I could say I did anything useful. I wish I could say I helped save lives or protect rights,, but instead I sat in bed for months on end, fixated on a little LED screen 8 inches from my face. I would listen to the distant hum of the news from my living room, an ominous loop of monotonous voices with nothing good to say, so I stayed under my covers. I would watch video after video on dalgona coffee while hating coffee and memorizing Tiktok dances I had no desire to ever learn. I saved DIYs and recipes to a folder, only to never look at them again. Propped up in bed, I took online classes while the world fell apart around me. I saw the counter rhythmically tick upwards: 1 million cases. 2 million cases. 10 million cases. No one ever taught us what to do in the case of a pandemic. No one ever thought we would ever need to know. So in the utter chaos around us, we turned to distraction to survive, to escape. We followed threads down rabbit holes of never-ending entertainment, never having to stop, reflect, or process what our lives had become. All that matters is that one person, that one video in front of you. In this world, that storm on the horizon never moves, never comes nearer, never threatens you. It’s trend, after trend, after trend. Everything is still, everything is quiet.
Sole Magazine