A big-hairy fad

Ah, the beehive hairdo. Whatever the women wearing them in 1962 were trying to communicate (modernity, status, that they had recently been to a salon), the signal stopped working a long time ago, and what remains is a hairstyle that is impossible to look at without thinking about the decade that produced it. While any readers from the Beehive State might take some local pride in the iconic updo, this essay isn’t really about hair.

It’s about the fact that we collectively understand something important already. When we look at trends from far enough away, we can see what they really were. But what do we do with that knowledge in the present, when the trends around us still feel, to most people, like individual preferences rather than mass mistakes in judgment?

Crossovers and millennial pink

A trend is the phase during which something novel has become widely visible. That definition is worth sitting with for a moment. Whatever made the underlying thing valuable (non-obviousness, distinctiveness, exclusivity, or some other reward available to early adopters) is precisely what mass visibility destroys. This isn’t pessimism about any particular trend. It’s the mechanics of what a trend is.

Consider crossover SUVs. The crossover exists because automakers wanted SUV margins on car platforms, not because drivers were petitioning for a tall hatchback. The category was manufactured upstream of demand, and the demand that eventually appeared was largely the demand to have whatever your neighbor had. The result is a parking lot in which the cars are nearly indistinguishable from each other and from the cars two model years older or newer. The original promise of any one of them (signaling that the driver was more interesting and “active” than average) was undone by the fact that everyone got one.

Or consider the wave of direct-to-consumer brands that appeared between roughly 2015 and 2020. Casper, Warby Parker, Glossier, Allbirds, Away, and a hundred others all converged on the same lowercase sans-serif logos, the same millennial pink, the same friendly copy, the same website templates. The whole point of branding is to be distinguishable. The trend produced an entire cohort of brands that were not. That is not an accident or a failure of imagination on the part of any one company. It is what happens when distinctiveness becomes a trend—it stops being distinctive. The trend was so visible in retrospect that designers gave it a name (blanding), and several of these same brands have since rebranded to escape it, which is what the back half of every trend looks like.

Other people’s incentives

The natural response at this point is to say, “Fine, but I’ll just be selective. I’ll pick the good trends.” Most of us believe we can do this. And most of us are wrong, but not because we lack discipline.

The reason is that the people creating and amplifying trends are not on your team. NFTs are the cleanest recent illustration. The platforms made fees on every transaction regardless of what the underlying asset was worth a year later. The artists, influencers, and celebrities who promoted them were often paid in the asset itself, which gave them a strong interest in convincing you to buy it. Financial media covered the rising prices because rising prices are interesting. At no point in this chain was anyone’s incentive aligned with your incentive, which was to end up with something valuable. The misalignment wasn’t hidden—it was the structure. And yet, in the moment, the consensus felt like information.

This is the consistent pattern. Trends are amplified by parties whose payoff comes from your participation, not from your outcome. Real-time evaluation requires you to discount their signal heavily, but the signal is loud and the discount is hard to apply consistently, especially when the people around you are not applying a discount at all (because that’s a trend).

The only reasonable approach

So here is the rule. Avoid every trend.

Not most of them. Not the obviously shallow ones. Every trend. The rule is strictly suboptimal in theory, because some trends really are good, and a perfect evaluator would catch those and skip the rest. But we are not perfect evaluators, and neither is anyone we know. A cheap rule that we actually follow beats an expensive judgment that we apply inconsistently and under the influence of people whose interests differ from ours. The rule wins not because it is right in every case but because it is correct on average, easy to apply, and immune to the social pressure that makes case-by-case evaluation collapse.

Learn to fear FOMO

The strongest objection to the rule is the one that names a trend that turned out to be good. “Surely,” the objector says, “we don’t want to have missed open floor plans, or midcentury modern furniture, or the smartphone.” What the nay-sayer fails to realize is that we didn’t miss any of those, and we wouldn’t have, even under the rule.

Two reasons. The first is the base rate. The set of all trends is dominated by shallow ones, almost by construction, because deep cultural shifts only wear the trend label briefly before they stop feeling like trends and start feeling like the world. Open floor plans were sold as the future of domestic life for two decades. By the early 2020s, after a few years of working from home, a meaningful share of buyers were quietly wishing for walls again. That doesn’t mean every open floor plan was a mistake. It means the thing was sold as deeper than it turned out to be, which is the most common outcome for trends in general.

The second reason is the discount. If a trend turns out to be genuinely durable, you can adopt it later, after the hype has moved on, and you will almost always get it on better terms. The price is lower because attention is elsewhere. The aesthetic is calmer because the peak version has been embarrassing for long enough that the durable version has been refined out of it. Most importantly, you adopt it on your own judgment rather than the crowd’s, which means you actually own the decision rather than renting it from the groupthink of the moment.

The rule, in other words, is not excluding good things. It is buying them on a different schedule and at a discount.

One step to a better you

Following trends outsources your judgment. From inside a trend you don’t have to know why you bought what you bought, or wear what you wear, or believe what you believe; the surrounding consensus has done the work for you. This is comfortable, and it is also corrosive. Judgment, like any skill or talent, atrophies when it isn’t used.

There is a benefit to the rule that the rule itself doesn’t advertise. Refusing trends forces the question that trend-following lets you skip. Why this car, this jacket, this house, this idea? Answering that question, repeatedly, over years, is how taste develops. Taste is not a list of preferences. It’s the residue of having actually thought about each choice. Over a long enough timeline this thoughtfulness compounds into something more valuable than any individual trend you could have caught: the ability to recognize, in advance and without the crowd’s help, what is likely to last.

Timelessness, defined

There is a positive form of the rule, and it is more useful than the negative one because it tells you what to do rather than what to avoid.

Bias your choices toward the temporally ambiguous.

Temporal ambiguity is the property of being un-dateable. A piece of furniture that could be eighty years old or eight. A sentence that would have made sense to a thoughtful reader in 1950 and will still make sense in 2100. A house that doesn’t announce its decade. Temporal ambiguity is anti-trend by definition. Trends are precisely the features that date a thing, and temporal ambiguity is a leading indicator rather than a lagging one. You don’t have to wait for history to certify something as timeless. You can see, now, whether it is reaching for the present moment or standing apart from it.

Consider a beautiful brick post-war house, painted stark white with ultra-black trim. The bricks were a feature meant to last a century. The paint job, on the other hand, will be identifiable as a specific year (somewhere around 2022) for as long as the house stands or until someone strips it back down to the bricks. Or consider the wave of suburban houses from the early 2000s with stucco on three sides and a faux stone veneer in front. Both of these are the opposite of temporally ambiguous. They are tattooed with their decade. The owners, in most cases, did not think of themselves as following a trend. They thought of themselves as updating.

A note of caution: temporal ambiguity is not the same as blandness. The beige hotel lobby and corporate-neutral vocabulary are also un-dateable, but only because they are drawing on nothing at all. The kind of ambiguity worth pursuing is the kind that comes from drawing on something durable—proportion, material, function, idea. The test is whether the thing would have been recognizable as good to a thoughtful person in another era, not whether it is so empty that no era could claim it.

There are no investment-grade trends

Trends underperform structurally, because the visibility that makes them trends is the same visibility that destroys what made them valuable. Selection doesn’t work, because the people amplifying trends are not on your team and the social pressure to defer to consensus is stronger than your ability to discount it. The universal avoidance rule is cheap, easy to apply, and correct on average. The cost of following it is small, because durable trends remain available later and usually at a discount. The compounding benefit, over years, is the development of independent taste. And the positive form of the rule, the bias toward temporal ambiguity, gives you something to do rather than something to refuse.

The answer is the title. Avoid every trend.