09 Jul What’s Behind a Microtrend?
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If you’ve ever wondered about the next big decor moment or debated dipping a toe into TikTok, AD’s Senior Digital Design Editor Sydney Gore is the expert you want to talk to. Whether it’s predicting Tomato Girl Summer or charting the rise of butter-yellow interiors, she is always three steps ahead of the rest of us when it comes to spotting a trend. But what makes Sydney’s reporting so incisive is her ability to weave together disparate parts of culture—fashion, movies and TV, memes, and other consumables—and create a mirror back onto the larger moment we’re living in. I sat down with her earlier this month to find out what, exactly, sets off her trendspotting spidey sense, her thoughts on the microtrend cycle, and more.
Lila: You joke that you’re chronically online. You are probably our most “on Twitter” editor.
Sydney: I feel like one of the last men standing on there. The tiny design community that exists [on X] is really interesting to me. It’s nice to have a place where I can put my thoughts out and actually hear what people have to say, what they’re talking about. What I see from the design world on Twitter, I don’t see on Instagram—on Instagram, it’s all very focused on vibes and aesthetic.
True. One of the things about X is that it’s actually critical—for better or worse. What about TikTok?
There’s a lot going on with TikTok. I appreciate that with that platform specifically, you don’t have to be a creator; if you want, you can totally just be there as a lurker, and you can observe. I know some people treat Instagram that way, too, but it feels different to me. During the pandemic, I made a separate Instagram account for when I was trying to learn more about design specifically.
You’re referring to your @spoiledgoods account?
Yeah. That was purely for me, purely for vibes. The root of it was I kept missing all of these drops for vintage furniture because my feed was only showing me my friends’ content. I wanted to create a separate space where I could keep track of drops, but also learn, figure out my aesthetic, find inspirations, and fill gaps that I had in my own knowledge.
[Around that time] I found myself again, chronically online, noticing different trends—many of them happening across different markets, but no one was talking about the fact that they were intersecting. I started to do trend reports where I was taking an observation and bringing it all together.
The first one of these I did was on mushrooms—specifically, the Murano mushroom lamp, because every influencer suddenly had one in their home. And I was having this moment where I was like, I keep seeing this thing. But do I actually like it, or am I just feeling influenced to like it? I wanted to interrogate that. And I also wanted to explore why mushrooms were very much like having a moment in fashion, and even in beauty and wellness.