Spotting microtrends is one of my more niche skills. What is a microtrend, you ask? Trends can be born from many places—the runway, social media, street style, and so on. Microtrends are smaller offshoots of these bigger trends that come from said places. By the time a microtrend emerges, it’s usually involved months of distillment from the overarching moments, and what we’re left with is perhaps one of then most impactful ways to wear it.
Take the long pencil skirt for example, which, (spolier alert) appears my edit below. It would have started out life as just one of the many puzzle pieces that make up ’90s trend that’s dominated for the past few seasons. It’s only some time later, when other pieces have been tried, that dressers will start to hone in on the items they like most, and you’ll begin to see those everywhere. Now, just about every influencer I follow owns a long pencil skirt; a piece that you could argue sparked the whole Office Siren fashion movement. Such is the power of a microtrend.