Camo Hoodies and Cargo Sweats: Back-to-School Special
after school weekend edition
Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition, a not-so-brief trends debrief for paid subscribers. Your support keeps this newsletter going! 💫
Today we’re talking about:
A deep dive into back-to-school hauls and the top 10 purchases
RushTok 2024 (and a trend report FROM MY MOM!)
The resurgence of the “arm party”
The next “it” Ugg sure lives up to its name
The new dating app taking over my FYP
The rise and fall of “demure”
The new Gen Z boy haircut of choice (broccoli perms are so last month, apparently!)
The return of pressed powder
The shirt of summer isn't a shirt at all
What “getting Augusted” means
Plus everything else that happened this week in style, beauty, and culture and what I’m buying/reading/listening to. First, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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It’s back-to-school season! If you’ve been reading After School for a while, you know what that means.
If you’re new here, every fall I spend hours watching hundreds if not thousands of back-to-school hauls on TikTok and tally up the most frequently mentioned purchases. Here’s last year’s. And if you’re unfamiliar with the premise of a back-to-school haul, it’s a popular TikTok (and YouTube) format where people take the viewer through their purchases, item by item.
I spent 10 hours, maybe 15, watching back-to-school hauls over the last two weeks — my brain’s doing great, thanks for asking — but I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface. I watch one haul, only to find ten new ones I haven’t seen. TikTok’s data suggests there are indeed more hauls this year than in previous years — the hashtag #backtoschool2024 has 42.3K posts, compared with #backtoschool2023 with 30.5K posts and #backtoschool2022 with just 15.8K posts.
What’s interesting about this data is that the vast majority of back-to-school hauls on my FYP did not use the #backtoschool2024, and many didn’t use hashtags at all.
WHAT GEN Z IS BUYING FOR BACK-TO-SCHOOL
First, a couple of observations:
Denim is, in fact, very big this year. Last year, twill cargos were really huge (the Garage Remi Straight Cargo, in particular, was one of the top bts purchases), and so were leggings, but this season, it is all about the denim. I saw tons of denim shorts, skirts (specifically minis — I didn’t see any maxis), and jean jackets, which seem to be making a comeback. I can’t recall seeing a single haul that didn’t have at least one pair of low-rise baggy jeans.
Sweatpants are the new leggings. They’re worn low-slung and baggy, like jeans, and often paired with baby tees and camisoles.
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