When your social media is dominated by all facets of fashion, every month or so you’ll hear about a supposed TikTok trend with a name that stops your scroll. Last year there was the frazzled Englishwoman, 2020 had cottagecore, and, reaching into the very distant past (2019), there were VSCO girls. These names are silly—by design—fun to talk about and imply a visually cohesive world that goes beyond individual trendy items. You may run out of things to say about a camel-hair coat, but the old-money aesthetic provides endless commentary.
It’s easy to dismiss it all as noise because these trends often just repackage existing aesthetics and looks: It’s not minimalism, it’s stealth wealth. It’s not sporty, it’s blokette. The -cores, aesthetics, and microtrends of 2023 are most fun to remember as a group—the class of 2023, if you will. And together they show certain themes.
Class anxiety, clearly, made its way into our wardrobes this year, with stealth wealth, quiet luxury, and old-money aesthetic all becoming recognizable buzzwords that actually affected sales numbers. Girlhood became a broader cultural trend, exemplified by girl math (internal calculations like “if I pay for something with cash, it’s free”) and girl dinner (a thrown-together snack plate in lieu of a proper meal). Fashion matched this youthful, femme-forward energy with vanilla girl, tomato-girl summer, bimbocore, and barbiecore. Escapism is also inherent in the year’s trends. Two—Europecore and tomato-girl summer—tried to capture the spirit of a luxurious vacation. A headscarf to wear à la Grace Kelly is cheaper than a flight to Cannes, after all.
Many of these follow a similar life cycle: A term pops off on TikTok, fashion commentators and journalists write about it, it becomes the buzzword of the moment, and then, invariably, mentioning the term in earnest becomes kind of cringe. And so, below, explore and (re)discover the online fashion trends that defined 2023.