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The Trend Graveyard: 31 Fads That Vanished Almost Overnight
The year is gradually drawing to a close, which means that the corresponding trends are coming back into fashion: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and then Christmas is not far away. In fact, the most obvious indicator is that Mariah Carey has started to rise from the bottom of the music charts again with her immortal song, "All I Want For Christmas Is You". Trends are our everything nowadays.
However, trends change so quickly now that sometimes you don’t have time to figure out what they were all about, as everyone has already forgotten about the recent [darn] hot phenomenon or meme. This trending (at least for now...) thread in the Ask Reddit community is dedicated to such short-lived phenomena, and Bored Panda has made a selection of its best opinions especially for you.
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#1
I got married in December of 2013. Our wedding video will always have us dancing around like idiots to Gangnam Style.
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#3
The whole 3D craze back in like 2010. Everybody thought it was the future after Avatar came out in theaters. EVERY movie tried to be 3D after that, there were 3D TVs, 3D phones, the Nintendo 3DS. And I think the craze disappeared in like a year because it gave people headaches.
If we talk about trends and how they come in and out of vogue, then the modern world, of course, moves so fast that it's simply impossible to keep up with the current leaders in popularity. Just yesterday, it would seem, nothing could compare to the fame of that adorable baby hippo Moo Deng - and where is she today?
Well, she's living a happy childhood in her zoo, but she is definitely not the number one trend anymore. And unlikely to be in the top ten. And so it is with many other "kings for an hour." From the South Korean rapper PSY, who tore up YouTube twelve years ago, to NFTs (do you still remember that such a thing even exists?), this world simply moves at an incredible speed.
#4
The summer of Pokemon Go was awesome. People were up and outside, walking around and getting exercise. Strangers met and talked, and for a brief moment, it was cool to be social. Then, if I remember right, an app update broke the game and it fell off wildly in popularity.
Iironically, 4ish years later we had COVID, social distancing, and spent all our time indoors. A complete polar opposite from that one wonderful summer of Pokemon Go.
Some trends were introduced into our lives quite artificially - for example, the boom of 3D films and TVs at the turn of the '00s and '10s turned out to be nothing more than an attempt by manufacturers to play on the stunning success of the Avatar movie. As it turned out later, there was not enough technology or content for the development of a full-scale market - and the technology itself, if overused, was quite dubious. But the trend itself took place, and that's a fact.
#7
That weird p*o thing, where every other accessory was covered in the p*o emoji. Shirts, pants, stuffed toys, figures. I’m so glad that ended. I was sick as h**l of seeing that d****** grinning s**t all over everything.
#8
Silly Bands. I worked retail at the time, and after they sold out, by the time we got stock into replace them, no one wanted them anymore and they all got clearanced out. Probably because all the schools immediately banned them.
"In fact, the world was the same a hundred or two hundred years ago - it's just that the speed at which information spread was completely different," says Valery Bolgan, a historian and editor-in-chief of Intent News Agency from Ukraine, whom Bored Panda asked for a comment on this post. "And the level of people's involvement was also significantly lower."
"That is, if something became fashionable in Paris, London or New York, let's say, at the beginning of the last century, it took days and weeks for word of mouth to spread the news. Then the newspapers wrote about it, and only after that, months later, did the popularity of the phenomenon spread to other cities and countries."
#11
Those heat-sensitive colour-changing to shirts that made it extra obvious when someone was a sweaty mess. Hypercolor. I think. .
"Today, the life cycle of a trend is measured in days, weeks at most, and often even a few hours. If we talk about this or that meme, we laughed, forwarded it to a couple of friends in messengers - and that's it, switched to something else. This is neither good nor bad, it's just a feature of the contemporary world," Valery concludes.
#14
"Hover" Boards
I remember seeing some guy downtown riding one when they first came out and he had his arms crossed with this insufferably smug expression on his face as if to say 'LOOK AT ME AND HOW COOL I AM' so I intentionally looked the other way. I'm pretty sure the ones that didn't catch fire stopped working after a few weeks.
Why else is it important to remember half-forgotten trends? Because popularity is actually cyclical. For example, just a decade and a half ago, mustaches were perceived as an absolute anachronism, and today they are nearly at the peak of men's fashion. Who knows, maybe tomorrow the yo-yo will come back into vogue (Tamagotchi, at least, is back), we will again hunt Pokemon, and arrange wild and weird performances to the sounds of Harlem Shake?
#16
It's pretty crazy how vine died so quickly, especially given how successful TikTok has been.
#18
Those crinkly popcorn shirts from the early 2000s. They looked like doll clothes and stretched to human sized when you put them on.
But until all of the above happens, let's just give free rein to nostalgia and dive into the past. And this post, like Professor Dumbledore's Pensieve, will take us back to the glorious (or not) times of the Flappy Bird game, Gangnam Style, and Google+.
Or something else that you remember well and want to share with others in the comments to this post.
#25
Those whipped coffees that everyone was making during Covid lockdowns. A Dalgona?
I feel like everyone made precisely one of those to try it out, proclaimed that it was delicious and then never made another ever again.
#26
Jeans that were more holes than jeans. It moderated back to majority jean material quite quickly.
#31
Extreme Ironing. I had a flatmate that broke her ankle doing this and the thought still sends me into the beyond.
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