TikTok and the Diffusion of Fashion Trends
TikTok has recently overtaken Instagram as the biggest influencer on fashion trends amongst the younger generations. With Gen Z gaining more influence in society, especially on social media, TikTok’s popularity arose due to its ability to satisfy and entertain short attention spans, as well as provide an expressive outlet where anyone, regardless of the number of followers you have, can go viral. This has encouraged users to stray from typical fashion trends and express their own style, and which results in the constant changing of what styles are relevant or not. The informality and acceptance of the TikTok community has led young users to feel comfortable diverging from the norms and starting their own trends, especially in fashion. Fashion brands have noticed this and have embraced TikTok as a way to advertise their clothing. Millions of TikTok users interact with the content of major influencers, and companies have monopolized this by establishing brand deals with the arising TikTok stars or using them as the face of their ad campaign. Small businesses have profited too from viral videos spreading their brand, and thrift shopping and up-cycling is now not only sustainable, but trendy for teens and young adults.
The spread of fashion trends through TikTok can be explained by network diffusion. Users participate in trends and adopt new modes of fashion when they realize many other people are participating in the trend too. Also, TikTok plays a big role in the creation of weak and strong ties. A user is weakly tied to users that appear on their for you page, which allows for the spread of fashions trends quickly to a wide audience. This weak tie exists because the two users may not formally know each other, yet they have the commonality of TikTok, and often the commonality of the interests displayed in the video due to TikTok’s video suggestion algorithm. Strong ties would exist between users that you trust, which would include your friends or users with a large following. Their large follower count suggests that this individual is valuable in ways you don’t know about, and also suggests that all their followers possess some private information you don’t have, and it may be valuable to copy their decision based off of this private information. Companies use these strong ties and influencers to seed ideas and new products into the TikTok network. This increases the diffusion of their product by exposing it to more users and also increasing its value by have a valuable person endorse it.
TikTok has become a very influential entity in the diffusion of all goods, ideas, and trends, especially when it comes to fashion.
Source: https://gm-fashioncareer.com/tiktoks-influence-on-the-fashion-industry/