The Tipping Point

The mini skirt is hot. Red hot. It’s the summer of 1969 and the one glance down the streets of New York reveals legs, legs, legs. The shorter the better. Mary Quant, the iconic owner of the London boutique Bazaar tells The New York Times, ‘’If I didn’t make them short enough, the Chelsea girls, who had wonderful legs, would get out the scissors and shorten the skirts themselves.” The mini skirt is radical, fresh, daring, sexy. It is contagious. Soon, it graces the pages of every major fashion magazine, and in a mere year, becomes a mainstay in the closets of the masses.

Many compared the rise of the mini skirt to that of an epidemic, the popularity swelling to critical mass just as a virus takes over a city in mere days, spreading exponentially with each person affected. Fashion trends, much like sickness, reach a tipping point, a moment in which the stars align and a seemingly contrived trend becomes the look of the season. Malcolm Gladwell, in his groundbreaking book The Tipping Point defines this phenomenon as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do”. People make careers out of defining and identifying fashion trends, marketing upon them, and bringing them to full fruition. Sometimes, it seems like they appear out of thin air, their popularity so artificial it seems silly to assign meaning to why everyone suddenly is wearing dad sneakers and mom jeans. Does our generation have some deep, onset daddy issues we’re trying to work out, reflected in an obsession with “ugly” clothing that our parents wore? Probably not.

Instead, we can turn to the rich world of social theory to begin to understand why at certain points in history everyone seems to be wearing the mini skirt, chokers, or even dad sneakers. Change, that elusive moment of flux that defines history, happens not gradually, but once in a dramatic moment, a tipping point.

Instead of working from the top down, searching for meaning in the manifestation of a trend, our journey towards understanding epidemia starts at the source. Despite an instinctive assumption that trends are the products of the masses, the movement of many, social research has revealed that a tiny percent of people do the majority of the work. Social epidemics are created by socially exceptional people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. These connectors have an innate talent for making acquaintances, for maintaining hundreds of social ties and bringing people together. They occupy many different worlds and subcultures, and as a result, the closer a trend gets to them the more power it gathers. Perhaps Mary Quant herself was one of these people, stratifying the fashion and music world, bridging distinct groups together. Or maybe there was one special Chelsea girl (a cultural subsect of trendy women in London in the 1960s) who was distinctly good at networking and deciding what was hot and what was not. In understanding the sheer power a handful of people have to dictate the fashion world, we can begin to see behind the facade of the trend formed by the masses and debunk the illusion of meaning inherent to trendmaking.

This first step of trend fabrication is only the beginning, however. Once a certain look or item has been labeled as fashionable by a connector, it must also be relevant through the power of context. People come to very different conclusions in groups that by themselves, relying on the people around them to dictate what is right and wrong in a given situation. Small, close knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a message or an idea. Beyond this, certain trends in historical context have a greater “stick factor,” meaning, they are situationally relevant. When placed historically, the popularity of the mini skirt makes sense. It was a symbol of female liberation, a moment of movement from one gender norm to another. Some trends, more than others, have this power of context on their sides and consequently grow like wildfire.

There is no way to pinpoint the exact moment when the mini skirt went from being a groundbreaking look a few trendy women riskily wore on the streets of London, to a worldwide phenomenon, a marker of the times, and a historical trend. There is no way to pinpoint who the trendsetting women were who made a bold choice, who had a circle of friends who would listen to them, and who were so well connected that what they wore was instantly replicated. All we know is that during the summer of 1969, mini skirts were seen everywhere.

Trends, despite what we assume and are told, are not arbitrary or symbolic. They are not accidental, but they are also not symptomatic. They are the result of a handful of people wearing the right thing at the right time. Trends are the brainchild of the well connected, replicated, escalated, and elevated by the masses.

Direction MADELINE RITHOLZ

Photography PATTY ALVAREZ

Styling CAROLINE HUDLEY PRIYA KRAL

Writing RACHEL HELLMAN

Models JEREMY BARNES HIBA YOUSIF STANLEY XIO MEREDITH BUSCH