Is film like fashion?
After reading Brett Byers’ article “Is Virality Killing Authenticity: Internet Culture is Destroying the Fashion Trend Cycle,” I’m beginning to think so. In the piece, Byers argues that social media has affected the fashion world. According to his research, the fashion trend cycle has five stages: introduction, rise, peak, decline and obsolescence. This cycle used to take years or decades to complete, but now, Byers claims, it expires within mere weeks. He attributes the shorter lifespan to internet culture — like fashion blogs, Instagram, etc. — which allows for the quick dissemination of information.
Film discourse may be suffering from the same issue.
The Dune franchise and “Challengers” are likely the best examples of this phenomenon in action. If you trust the internet, “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two” seemed like the biggest film releases of the past five years. Memes about the franchise’s score, desert setting and sand worms dominated social media. It reached such heights of popularity that “The Fall Guy,” an action film released two months after “Dune: Part Two,” parodies the franchise. A new type of beautiful, Academy Award-worthy blockbuster was apparently on the dusky horizon thanks to director Denis Villeneuve’s vision of Arakis. Now, we hardly hear a blip of it, and Hollywood has gone back to its typical, mindless blockbuster ways (“A Minecraft Movie,” “How To Train Your Dragon,” “Lilo & Stitch,” “Jurassic World Rebirth”).
Another prime example of this trend cycle was “Challengers.” Starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, the film was a cultural phenomenon — at least, for a few weeks. Everyone was talking about the film. Trent Reznor’s memorable score lent itself to hilarious reenactments. Brook Barnes, a writer for The New York Times, thought the period of Hollywood chastity was over and that new, braver films were on the way. Hell, even I thought the success of “Challengers” and some of the films released before it (“Poor Things,” “Tár”) meant that 2025 was set for an indie revival — a new wave of Hollywood films akin to the ’90s sex noirs. Unfortunately, the loud boom around Luca Guadagnino’s tennis thriller has died out. The releases this year and the dry box office hits seem to indicate that if there is a revival, it’s definitely been postponed.
The fact that fashion and film trend cycles follow the same pattern — of huge popularity, of being the “it” thing and then disappearing off the face of the globe — can’t just be coincidence. In the same way that the “clean girl,” “cunty country,” “leopard,” “mob-wife,” “blokette” and “office siren” aesthetics suddenly boomed and then died, so did everyone’s obsession with “Saltburn,” “Anyone But You” and “It Ends with Us.” It seems that the film trend cycle starts with its promotion, analogous to the introduction and rise of Byers’ framework. A famous celebrity may star in the film (Barry Keoghan, Sydney Sweeney) with a household name directing it (Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve). It could be part of a famous intellectual property (a superhero franchise, a video game, a book series) or simply concern a famous individual (biopics). Then, the peak hinges on the film’s potential for virality. If it’s plainly enjoyable, expect some buzz and then crickets (“Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Anatomy of a Fall”). If any part of the film is memorable, everyone on the internet collectively obsesses over it for a few weeks. And then, the decline and obsolescence: All the talk dies.
This pattern in fashion micro-trends and the current state of film discourse reflects social media’s impact on us and the art we consume. Where Byers talks about how micro-trends kill authenticity by putting us on the conveyor belt of the next cool thing (not allowing us time to explore our style), the film trend cycle kills critical thinking. By reducing films into a shareable moment or a punchline, audience members, who perpetuate the trend cycle, drown out arts criticism, making it harder to critically engage with the art we love.
Art without interpretation is wallpaper. And I believe that this uncritical, obsessive, micro-trendy way in which we increasingly talk about film or, in the case of fashion, wear clothes, commodifies it.
Music is facing the same problem, so much so that rapper Pusha T begged for more arts criticism in an interview promoting the Clipse album Let God Sort Em Out.
“(Let God Sort Em Out) is just all an ode to rap and rap journalism and music journalism and being critiqued and putting out your music, letting people hear your shit,” Pusha T said. “And I think that’s something that we miss. I think I asked about two weeks ago, like, man, I wanted to see the reviews. Gabe came as a PR, he came back and was like, ‘it’s only like three publications still doing that type of thing. I want to see all that.”
It’s true that film criticism, like music criticism, has taken a back seat in recent years. However, I’m not arguing that the way we bring arts criticism back is by having every article be a meaningful deep dive — that doesn’t bode well either. Journalist Charles Taylor wrote an article alluding to this and the internet’s impact on criticism as early as 2011.
“Part of the problem is the thing often cited to prove the strength of film criticism: the sheer number of people online who are doing it. But to use this as evidence of a new golden age is simply to play a new version of equating how good a movie is with its box-office receipts,” Taylor wrote. “There are too many critics writing too many pieces. And even the ones who have reacted against the shallowness of the current conversation, the ones who turn out long, detailed considerations of films have found a way to make themselves close to irrelevant.”
Instead of attributing the devolving state of film discourse to social media as I do, Taylor blames the decline on the internet critics themselves, who, he claims, write for other internet critics instead of a general audience. His attribution is not wrong, and it’s a reminder that just because film criticism is in a trendy state does not mean we should swing too far the other way. Memes and jokes have a place in film discourse, but we should carefully consider how we engage with film (and art generally) so that we generate meaningful conversation and stop this terrible cycle where obsession and the “next big thing” distract us from the art.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
