Who Knew Redding is the New Global Fashion Capital

Written by Chriss W. Street

American apparel advertisers plan to spend about $26.1 billion on digital channels in 2024, a 20.4% year-over-year increase.  But a full-on fashion vibe-shift is now taking shape with young men that rejects the urban robot-rigged Google search and social media “popular look,” in favor of unscripted old school “normcore” that is standard garb in rural communities, such as Redding, California.

Sean Monahan of 8-Ball Marketing gets paid the big bucks to identify vibe-shift emerging trends for major apparel fashion houses.  He comments that retailers now invest considerably more on digital advertising than other industries, with nearly 264 million people, or about 77% of the US population, having viewed digital video content in 2023; and 268 million expected to view digital in 2024.

But Monahan argues that Zoomers, age 12-27 that have known digital all their lives, are now beginning to reject the rigged-authenticity of Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok in the same way that Gen Z and Millennials lost all trust in the authenticity of mainstream media.  He identifies a new “vibe-shift” driven by indie media podcasts, newsletters, zines and printed newspapers.

For target markets that 8-Ball studies, Internet and social media advertising to Zoomers and Gen Z once met “high signal to noise” levels of effectiveness that made the world ever more transparent and legible. “The old hipster paradigm of leveraging insider knowledge for cultural capital was the person who knew about the newest restaurants. The coolest clubs, the best vintage stores, the hardest to find Music no longer mattered that much. Just use Yelp, Instagram, Google or Spotify.” Monahan named this “the flight from the special to the authentic niche.”  Who needs cultural capital when the world can be ordered instantlyby Instagram followers.

But during especially long periods of Covid-19 social distancing, Gen Z and Zoomers became aware that “algorithmic sorting and content moderation was obscuring what we are looking at on social media — and why we are looking at it. Nobody had any idea what was real online anymore.

Monahan is calling a new vibe-shift to a new hipster paradigm of “scene cool” in; “Internet cool” out.

The rural normcore street fashion vibe-shift includes mid-price Nike Frees and vintage dad New Balance are the new stapleshoes for students, emerging artists, company interns and, every once in a while someone on their way to the gym. Hip business wear now imitates people who actually produce things in places like Redding, CA., with the rustic authenticity of Red Wing boots, the distressed texture of selvedge denim, and Old Navy sweatshirts.