“TikTok has allowed everybody to be their own fashionista,” Maragos said. “I have become free. I am going outside the box.”
Casey Lewis, a trend analyst based in New York who previously worked as an editor at Teen Vogue, said TikTok's clout in the fashion arena first became apparent to her when videos about Birkenstock’s Boston clogs overtook her “For You” feed in 2022.
Lewis thought it was odd since her brother, whom she described as a “frat boy” and not a fashionista, wore the cork-soled comfort shoes in college. As the number of TikTok videos exploded, some creators took to advising their followers where they could find the suddenly sold-out clogs.
“I’m not a psychologist, but I’m sure there’s some psychology where your brain goes from thinking like, ‘How weird? Is that fashion?'" she said. "And then suddenly you’re obsessed with it."
Eventually, two other out-of-style shoes, UGG boots and Crocs, also saw their sales rebound after gaining a foothold with young consumers, Lewis said. The pace with which TikTok-shaped trends popped up — many of them tagged with the suffix “core” in a reference to the wearer’s style — was so dizzying that Lewis devoted much of her Substack newsletter to them.
In the last year, the hot pink ensembles of “Barbiecore” coexisted with the down-to-earth, deliberately unsexy looks of “dadcore” — think chunky white sneakers, baggy jeans and polo shirts. The oversized cardigans and linen separates of “coastal grandmother,” meanwhile, gave rise to “eclectic grandpa” a unisex aesthetic featuring sweater vests, loafers and mismatched prints.
Looks based on the reimagined aesthetics of mob wives and Gilded Age author Edith Wharton also had short-lived moments. While the rotating cast of "cores” may not drive their adherents to buy entire wardrobes, they’re “influencing spending in small ways, and that adds up,” Lewis said.
“It's easy to dismiss them as simply micro-trends that aren’t actually meaningful when it comes to consumer spending,” she said. “But often, they actually are more meaningful.”
Daniella López White, 21, who graduated from Emerson College in Boston this year and is on a tight budget, said TikTok influencers have helped her with tips on how to find affordable clothes at places like H&M and thrift shops. But the platform also connected López White to plus-size creators who feature fashions for larger-bodied women, which made her more confident in trying out new styles.
“Those TikTok trends really helped me figure out what parts of my body I want to accentuate and feel cute in and still incorporate my sense of style,” she said.
After trying the “dark academia” trend, a blend of vintage fashion, tweed blazers and turtleneck sweaters, and “cottagecore,” she has moved onto the “office siren” look, which combines corporate clothing with form-fitting pieces like pencil skirts and cinched blazers.
With easy-to-follow cooking videos and clever hacks, TikTok became a go-to spot for home cooks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform made humble ingredients a star but in the process earned endorsem*nts from some of the stars of the food world.
"Every day, honestly, I am blown away by the creativity from the FoodTok community,” restaurateur and chef Gordon Ramsay said in a TikTok video late last year.
Like the clothing styles of earlier eras, foods that had fallen out of fashion were resurrected via TikTok. U.S. sales of cottage cheese jumped 34% between April 2022 and April 2024 after videos promoting cottage cheese ice cream, cottage cheese toast and other recipes racked up millions of views.
Ben Sokolsky, the general manager of sales and marketing for Dallas-based dairy company Daisy Brand, said cottage cheese is seeing its highest sustained growth in nearly 50 years. The curdled milk product used to be a “secret sensation,” but social media helped expose new customers to the protein-rich, low-carb food, Sokolsky said.
The trend has had real impacts for Daisy Brand, which saw its cottage cheese sales double over the last five years. In April, the company announced a $626.5 million investment to expand a manufacturing facility in Iowa with at least 106 new jobs.
Some topics that went viral on TikTok even spawned analog equivalents. Last summer, TikToker Olivia Maher posted what she called her “girl dinner” of bread, cheese, pickles and grapes. It was a hit, with more than 1.6 million views. A handful of “girl dinner” cookbooks soon followed.
But the eagerness to try trendy foods had its downside. A 14-year-old in Massachusetts died after trying an extremely spicy tortilla chip popularized in so-called One Chip Challenge videos on TikTok and other social media sites. An autopsy of the boy, who had a congenital heart defect, found that eating a large quantity of chile pepper extract caused his death. Paqui, the maker of the chip, pulled it off the market.
