Okay, it’s probably happened
For the last couple of years, we’ve seen runways and Insta-feeds drowned in millennial pink, a baby pink meets salmon shade which offers an ‘un-girly’ take on the infamous hue. But, as of recently, millennial pink is all but dead and gone. Now, according to basically every fashion publication, it’s time for ‘Gen Z yellow’ to shine.
It all started when Beyoncé smashed up her trifling lover’s car in that Cavalli dress, and then escalated when Kylie Jenner ate a banana wearing a yellow crop top. It was at this point, in August of last year, that fashion blog Man Repeller coined the term, using it as a catch-all to describe a variety of shades ranging from mustard to sunshine. Since then, ‘Gen Z yellow’ has worked its way into every trend report that matters. But why, and what does it mean?
According to trend forecaster and fashion lecturer Louise Stuart Trainor, the colour’s popularity lies in its various, maleable connotations – she argues it can be linked to the sun and “easy vibes” just as easily as it can be to depression and anxiety. According to Trainor, the colour’s various messages are contradictory and hard to put in a box: “yellow is a difficult colour to pin down, and so is Gen Z.”
She’s not wrong: today’s youth are more fluid, more resistant, and undeniably queerer than ever before. But the complexity of this argument rarely rings through trend pieces listing the hottest ‘Gen Z yellow’ nail polishes, which often come across as nothing more than a frenzied attempt to make arbitrary links between fashion and culture in the name of commerce. “The desire to capture the spirit of youth and to understand younger generations’ motivation is driven by both curiosity and commerciality,” says Trainor. She cites a generational gap between researchers and their subjects: “Older researchers find it difficult to capture the qualities of the next generation and to compare them to their own, because they seem so different. They want to quantify these qualities in order to package goods and sell them to young people.”
“The desire to capture the spirit of youth and to understand younger generations’ motivation is driven by both curiosity and commerciality” – Louise Stuart Trainor
Collating personal data for financial gain is one thing, but the recent Guardian profile of whistleblower Christopher Wylie showed that motives can be more sinister. While studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, Wylie came up with a plan to create hundreds of thousands of psychological profiles of people based on their Facebook pages. This led to the creation of data analytics company Cambridge Analytica, which subsequently became the “psychological warfare mindfuck tool” (as described by Wylie himself) that he says was partly responsible for the election of Trump and the success of Brexit.
By manipulating the language of trend forecasting and demographic profiles, Wylie built a powerful weapon which effectively undermined democracy and exposed repeated data regulation policy breaches by Facebook. That said, without even taking the Cambridge Analytica fallout into account, the amount of legally collected information that exists about us as individuals is difficult to comprehend: a quick look through Dylan Curran’s informative Twitter thread highlights just how much of our data is silently recorded.
Forecasting harmless trends like ‘Gen Z yellow’ is one thing, but it’s worrying to see how effectively Wylie parlayed his skills into brainwashing voters. Like politics, fashion is all about convincing consumers by sending a series of subtle messages over a period of time. Wylie makes the surprising but fitting parallel between Trump and Uggs, or Crocs: “How do you get from people thinking, ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them?” Fashion fans will notice that both styles have made unexpected appearances at Sacai, Y/Project, and Balenciaga in recent seasons, with the latter's ('Gen Z Yellow') iteration a shock sell-out upon its release in January.
According to Wylie, it all comes down to identifying the early adopters. “If you can find them, then you can start a trend,” he explained to the House of Commons in a mammoth four-hour long meeting this week. Speaking to Dazed, Wylie broke down how he went from forecasting fashion to building psychological profiles of people based on their data. “I looked at personality traits because we often use the same kinds of words to describe our style as we would our personality, and I wanted to unpack that and see if there was anything to that,” he said. Turns out, there was – different personality traits pointed towards a preference for different brands. It was this research that went on to inform his work with Cambridge Analytica, where “psychological warfare” tactics were employed to influence people’s mindset and decisions based on the content they engaged with on Facebook.
“If you actually like yellow, then great – wear it. But in a time when our personalities and habits are being studied and the results leveraged against us to such a far-reaching and potentially dangerous extent, it’s worth examining our desires and our own personal style in order to continually maintain our autonomy”
There will likely be consumers swung by the persuasive language of ‘Why You Need To Buy An Entirely Gen Z Yellow Wardrobe Like Right Now’ related content – as well as brands making everything in the shade. If you actually like yellow, then great – wear it. But in a time when our personalities and habits are being studied and the results leveraged against us to such a far-reaching and potentially dangerous extent, it’s worth examining our desires and our own personal style in order to continually maintain our autonomy. Do we seriously need to buy everything in a colour just because some experts have told us it's So Hot Right Now? Probably not.
With trends like these, it’s like the old metaphor of the chicken and the egg – there’s a link between cause and effect. The coverage of millennial pink sent its popularity soaring, meaning it became huge because people said it would. It might seem tempting to succumb to ‘Gen Z yellow’, but like everything in fashion, its reign will be both cyclical and pre-determined by industry experts. It’s likely that, in 12 months’ time, the hue will be just as dead as millennial pink is now.