2025 Saw the Death of Vogue and Everything En It
The idea of a consistent “monoculture” has been dying for the past couple of decades, but 2025 saw the absolute death of the monoculture.
With the rise of the internet and, especially, social media providing people with a space to remotely incubate and experiment with different subcultures, people no longer have to stick with the trends that have been curated by the few for the masses. Whether that means exploring different styles of fashion, different genres of music or different forms of visual media, people have more options than ever before.
This creates a sort of everything everywhere all at once situation with trends. When everything is ‘trending’, how do we know what to follow?
Major institutions, like Vogue Magazine, no longer hold any water in terms of trend-setting. It’s as if the magazine that literally defined fashion for decades has decided to hang its trendy hat up. With an article titled “Here’s What Vogue Editors Hope Will Trend in 2026”, they seem to relinquish all semblances of power they once had over fashion trends. They simply throw out tons of ideas and hope a few of them land among the masses.
There is no “en vogue.”
The trendsetters of today aren’t reading magazines, they aren’t listening to “Today’s Top Hits” and they aren’t turning to the institutions they once turned to for knowledge. Instead, they’re scrolling for hours upon hours on TikTok.
In this increasingly conservative creative climate, TikTok seems to be the most popular outlet for creatives because it gives them the ability to curate echo chambers that align with their own creativity. The app also allows them to explore and share various political ideas freely, while major cultural institutions are bound by political censorship and advertiser influences.
The institutions that once served as the cultural curators are not keeping up with creatives like they once did.
If you’ve listened to a contemporary hits radio station for at least one hour in 2025, I’m sure you would have heard the song “Ordinary” by Alex Warren; it did sit atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 10 weeks last year, after all. If you haven’t heard the song, there is really no need to; everything you need to know about it lies in its title.
In fact, the entire top 10 of Billboard’s 2025 Year End chart consisted of songs released in 2024 or prior, of course, aside from Alex Warren’s atrocity.
“Where were the creatives this year,” you may ask.
They’re still here; they just aren’t being recognized.
With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the institutions that are supposed to curate our culture have found it cheaper to recognize non-human work than to actually pay creatives. Take Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, for example, the “Architects of AI.”
Another example of this phenomenon is the “Ghost Artists” on streaming services like Spotify. In an attempt to reduce the already slim dollar figure that goes toward paying actual artists for their work, various streaming services have been filling their less popular playlists with music made by AI ‘artists.’
Even the prestigious Vogue Magazine has been running AI-generated advertisements in its print editions.
This AI takeover comes as no surprise to those who have been closely following U.S. politics as of late. Conservatives seem to love AI, or at least love the economic upsides of AI.
Congress, which currently holds a Republican majority, has only passed one bill regarding AI regulation. Aside from that, Donald Trump has done the exact opposite of this by signing an executive order restricting state governments’ ability to pass laws regulating AI.
After all, AI videos and images have become a large vehicle of far-right propaganda. For example, the unjust murder of Renée Good (by a federal ICE agent, mind you) was widely documented and shared across the internet, but many noticed some videos told a different story than others. Far-right ‘activists’ used AI video-generating software to make it appear that Good was the aggressor in this scenario, some videos even making their way into established newspapers.
These major cultural institutions are starting to incorporate AI more and more in their curation, but the general public isn’t too keen on AI usage, especially in creative fields. This creates a dissonance between these institutions and the general public they are supposed to serve. Thus, leading to the search for other creative outlets, like TikTok and the increasingly popular social writing platform, Substack.
Anybody can post a TikTok or publish an article on Substack and consider themselves an expert on culture.
This leads to another phenomenon: when everybody can be a curator or a critic, what happens to the people with actual expertise? This phenomenon ultimately ends in a complete oversaturation of ‘experts’ with drastically opposing opinions.
This isn’t necessarily a negative thing, however, but it really drives the nail into the coffin of the monoculture.
Who knows? Maybe we’re better off as a society without these outdated institutions dictating every piece of clothing we put on our bodies, every song we listen to and every movie we watch.
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