Tumblr Fashion Trend 2024: Tumblr Outfits & Their History, Decoded

The modern-day discussions about the Tumblr Girl focus heavily on her Tumblr outfits and her Tumblr aesthetic. Fashion magazines have been running headlines since 2022, promising the return of “Indie Sleaze” or the return of “Tumblr Fashion” or the return of soft grunge. You think about the pastel hair, the fishnet tights, the oversized band T-shirts, the complete redefining of the word “aesthetic.” You know what it looks like, you’ve seen a thousand pictures from that era, you’ve probably read an essay or two attempting to explain the visual language.

The truth is you can’t talk about what it looked like without talking about what it felt like. Before the Internet became a stage, for a brief blip in time in the early 2010s, it used to be a place where young people could realize and express their private selves after long days of performing public selves at school, at work, with their families. They were introduced to radical politics and queerness and subculture. On Tumblr, people were sneaking away from their hometowns to immerse themselves in faraway places like New York City or London. Tumblr girls, as we now know them, weren’t dressing to impress people at school anymore; we were dressing to impress a scene, only that scene was online. The escapism came first, the clothes came second.

People guarded the existence of their blogs from anyone who knew them IRL, an acronym that once used to feel like code, never meant to be as ubiquitous as it is now. Following and follower counts weren’t displayed on your profile, no status printed next to your name. That plus the anonymity meant that the experiment could continue, that the strange, angsty, semi-erotic, teenaged engine of self-discovery could keep running. And that was sacred to people. You didn’t want to be found.

But at the same time, you so did. The clothes were quiet references to the culture online, signaling to others who you were. You identified as hipster or indie, though you had the self-respect to never actually call yourself that. You were dressing like the guys in The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys and One Direction as much as you were dressing like the girlfriends. You were writing Lana Del Rey lyrics on the rubber of your sneakers almost hoping someone might know what they were, hoping they might read your code and understand you to be the same kind of weird as them. The fashion, as vast and diverse as it was, almost became a uniform.

That’s why it’s hard to truly encapsulate what Tumblr fashion means to people who just narrowly missed the phenomenon. The fashion was the byproduct of a rumble beneath our feet that only a pair of Dr. Martens could absorb. I often joke that Tumblr was our generation’s Woodstock, but I’m actually dead serious. It was a once-in-a-millennium moment in time where people stumbled into an online Wonderland, eager to reinvent social conventions in real time. Today’s most mainstream pop music, nightlife culture, photography, and television are wholly shaped by those kids online, so of course the fashion was good. Euphoria would never have happened without Petra Collins, a former Tumblr girl and probably the most ripped off visual artist of our time. Before Halsey was Halsey, she was a girl named Ashley from New Jersey who ran a One Direction blog, where she went viral for a jealousy-fueled cover of “I Knew You Were Trouble,” directed toward Harry Styles’ then-girlfriend, Taylor Swift. She’d later start posting short poems that would go on to be lyrics to her songs. Frank Ocean came out in a post he wrote about falling in love with a boy at 19, a letter so vivid, I felt like the love was mine. And most of this is just oral history shared amongst the people who witnessed it because social media was still too frivolous for tabloids to pay attention to. “You had to be there” doesn’t even cover it.

I think that’s the crux of why people have such a romantic idea of Tumblr, and their best idea is to distill it into the fashion. And I completely get it. A decade later, the Internet we live on is a completely different one—we don’t have a place online where we aren’t performing our asses off. The online world used to be the club, and now it’s a highway with a constant stream of billboards on either side. Today’s online-informed style would not be dissimilar from the one you’d get shopping at the mall in a bygone era. I don’t blame young people for searching for a different version of it, whether it’s the one they’re nostalgic for or one they never got to experience firsthand. There is such a dirty glamour to that time, and the fashion is the most accessible artifact. But the artifact needs the rest of it to make sense. “Tumblr fashion” was created and worn by people carpooling across state lines to go to concerts with people from the Internet with whom they shared their first brushes of vulnerability. The clothes have such a strong emotional trigger because of the backdrop around them, because of the music playing on the aux.

1. Alexa Chung

This picture is from Glastonbury in the summer of 2008. Alexa and Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner were a couple before the window of time that we think of when we refer to Tumblr (2012-2015, give or take,) but their relationship was one of those dreamy things everyone blogged about. A gamine-ish model and a lanky lead singer of a popular band—they were no cheerleader and quarterback, and that was their charm. One of the most iconic pieces of their lore is the love letter that Alex wrote Alexa, which was only found because she accidentally left it at the bar.

Alexa just became a total style icon. She was the portrait of a girl in a photobooth film strip. People emulated her simple makeup and took pictures of her to hair salons, trying and failing to get the bangs she effortlessly had. She wrote a book called “It” that went multi-platinum on Tumblr, everyone posting aesthetic photos of them reading it.

2. Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey is kind of known for being a bit of an anti-fashion style icon. She’s worn dresses from the mall to red carpets. In her day-to-day life, she’s regularly wearing jeans and a zip up hoodie. Even growing up, she was so unfashionable, that when she started becoming famous, her sister told her, “I swear to god if you become a fashion icon, I’m gonna kill myself.” But she really popularized that romantic baby doll uniform with flower crowns.

3. Harry Styles

If you ask a former 1D stan about 2013 Harry, you may see a wave of nostalgia just flash across their eyes. Harry Styles was, without a doubt, one of the biggest style icons of the era. His skinny jeans, Chelsea boots, and drapey T-shirts were so ubiquitous of the time. After Harry was seen in the photo above, people across the indie pop scene copied the hell out of this, making replications on Redbubble or buying plain white T-shirts and hand drawing them on. His hair was starting to get long and he was constantly wearing bandanas in his hair to hold it back.

4. Lorde

Lorde has changed her look so many times and with such success that I almost anticipate her new releases for the clothes as much as for the music. That being said, Lorde’s sense of style when she first came on the scene with “Pure Heroine” is still so unmatched for me. It was a very lip gloss culture at high school during this time, so I felt brave for just wearing red lipstick. Lorde coming out, fresh faced with indigo lips and big, imposing hair made such a statement about who she was, and it’s no wonder why so many young people flocked to her. She cloaked herself in all black and stomped around on stage in platform heeled boots.

5. FKA Twigs

Twigs is one of those artists, it seems, who makes her work precede her celebrity. One of the most beloved indie pop girls of that era and beyond, some of FKA Twigs’ best looks have been ones she wore to perform in. Her sartorial taste was a fusion of punk and club and fantasy.

6. Cara Delevingne

Cara’s magic was that even when she technically did have to dress with good manners, as seen in the photo above where she’s dressed for her sister’s wedding lunch, she still kept that notion of being relaxed and unbothered with her glamorously unkempt hair. Otherwise, she was always showing up breaking the 2012 norms that most supermodels were abiding by. Pulling faces, making scandals, and wearing whatever she wanted.

7. Eleanor Calder

Eleanor Calder was Louis Tomlinson’s girlfriend, and while she hasn’t stayed in public eye much since then, her paparazzi photos used to be some of the most shared images online. Perhaps that was, in part, due to fans who shipped Louis and Harry and accused her of bearding, but even Larries couldn’t deny this woman’s influence on style. She used to run a fashion blog on Tumblr with her friend, Max Hurd, called the Trend Pear.

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