The algorithm dressed you today

Even within crowded coaches bursting at their hinges, I can clearly spot members of my echelon — sporting variations of a t-shirt and thick-soled sneakers, and unmistakably, a pair of wide-legged denims. I have seen entire berths occupied by the denim creed. This leads me to think — when was this uniform issued, who originated it, and why did my contemporaries adopt it so readily?

Part of the answer could be obtained from a simple observation — almost everyone is hunched over their screens, scrolling industriously. Algorithms have eroded our attention spans but have ironically caught the remnant shards in a chokehold. It is fascinating how a singular device now dictates not just how a generation acts, but also the fates of entire business models.

$14 Billion Chokehold

The business aspect is deceptively simple. The first layer is the rise of fast fashion — glaringly obvious and all-consuming, literally and otherwise. The digital native naturally buys their fare from digital marketplaces, which are now physically manifesting at pace. A generation’s homogenised individuality is, according to a Deloitte report, a $14 billion industry as of 2025, growing at roughly 17% annually. More strikingly, Gen Z emerges as the outlier on almost every metric compared to millennials and Gen X — be it discovering fashion trends online, the growing proportion willing to purchase clothing directly through social platforms, or their preference for fast-changing styles over long-term wardrobe staples.

Muslin Disease to the Sabrina Blush

The more grounded explanation, however, is that humanity has always been driven by imitation. “Monkey see, monkey do” may be inelegant, but it is remarkably accurate — and where fashion is concerned, people have occasionally gone to extraordinary lengths to conform. Consider late 18th-century France, where physicians reportedly spoke of a phenomenon dubbed “muslin disease”. Parisian socialites, enamoured with the flowing drapery of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture, took to wearing thin muslin gowns that offered little protection against the winter cold.

Fashionable they may have been, but the resulting respiratory illnesses proved rather less so. Or take Queen Alexandra of Britain. Following an attack of rheumatic fever in 1867, she developed a noticeable limp and was reluctant to appear in public. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on one’s view of influence — she was one of the most admired women of her age. Society ladies soon began imitating the “Alexandra limp”, with some even modifying their shoes to create uneven heels in pursuit of authenticity.

My generation is hardly immune. A stroll in any public space reveals its own forms of collective self-expression. It is not uncommon to encounter conspicuously pink cheeks — a look that gained popularity as singer Sabrina Carpenter rose to prominence sporting a heavily blushed aesthetic. While Carpenter alone cannot account for the surge in blush sales, Nykaa’s Beauty Rewind 2025 report captured the scale of the phenomenon neatly: “Blush sales hit such heights this year that if they were paint, Jaipur wouldn’t need a refresh for the next century.”

An iconic fashion editor from a certain movie franchise has a famous monologue that breaks down exactly how the fashion industry works — and how a certain initially dowdy employee is not exempt from the choices the industry makes for everyone. Even the lumpy cerulean sweater, worn to signal that she took herself too seriously to care about what she put on her back, was fished out of “some clearance bin” — but only after it had first appeared on runways and been selected by the very people the self-proclaimed individualist snickers at.

That was the 2000s. In the 2020s, the process remains largely the same, only faster. Decisions once filtered through magazine editors and department stores are now made by marketing teams and algorithms, amplified by influencers, and turned into microtrends for a digital generation perpetually in search of the next new thing.