I keep a sketchbook of street style from my walks around Wynwood, and flipping back through this year’s pages tells the story better than any runway recap could. January was still all neon and micro-bags. By November, the same girls are in head-to-toe red, carrying totes big enough to smuggle a beach chair. 2023 did not move in a straight line, and that’s exactly why I loved it.
So before we all start pretending we know what 2024 holds, here are the ten trends that actually emerged this year. Not the ones brands wanted us to buy, the ones people actually wore.
1. Quiet Luxury Took Over Everything
Blame Succession. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow’s courtroom knitwear. Either way, the spring of 2023 turned “stealth wealth” into a household phrase, and suddenly everyone wanted unbranded cashmere and The Row’s entire lookbook. Vogue covered it endlessly, and for good reason: logos got quiet, tailoring got serious, and beige became a personality.
My honest take? The trend itself is gorgeous, but the discourse got exhausting. You don’t need a $5,000 coat to dress quietly. You need good proportions and a steamer.
2. Red, Red, and More Red
If quiet luxury owned the spring, red owned the fall. Sabato De Sarno’s debut at Gucci in September introduced “Ancora red,” a deep, lacquered burgundy-cherry that immediately spread to every shoe wall and lipstick counter in America. Tomato-red bags, cherry tights, scarlet trenches. Red went from accent color to entire outfit, and it photographs like a dream against Miami stucco, trust me.
3. Ballet Flats Came Back From the Dead
I swore I’d never wear them again after 2009. I was wrong. The mesh ballet flat, especially Alaïa’s crystal-studded version, became the shoe of the year, and the broader balletcore wave brought wrap tops, leg warmers, and satin ribbons along with it. The new flats are sleeker and stranger than the old ones, more costume-y in the best way. Pair them with baggy jeans, not skinny ones, and the whole thing reads 2023 instead of recession-era nostalgia.
4. Sheer Dressing Went Mainstream
Naked dressing has been a red-carpet stunt for decades. What changed this year is that sheer left the step-and-repeat and showed up at dinner. Transparent skirts over briefs, gauzy tops over bandeaus, stockings as pants. Designers from Prada to Saint Laurent sent sheer down the runway, and regular women figured out how to layer it for actual life. It’s romantic without being sweet, which is my favorite combination.
5. The Denim Maxi Skirt
The single most surprising hit of the year. Long denim skirts went from “vaguely homeschool” to the coolest thing at every coffee shop, mostly thanks to street style out of Copenhagen and a thousand TikTok styling videos. The column silhouette, ideally with a slit and a raw hem, works with everything from tank tops to blazers. I bought a secondhand one in March and have worn it weekly since.
6. Rosettes on Everything
Fabric flowers pinned at the throat, the shoulder, the hip. Sandy Liang made them a signature, and by summer the rosette had become the fastest way to make a plain outfit look intentional. As an illustrator I’m biased toward anything sculptural, and a giant satin flower on a black dress is basically a drawing you can wear.
7. Silver and Liquid Metallics
Chrome went from festival wear to daywear. Silver trousers, mirrored bags, molten slip dresses. Part of it was the lingering futurism in pop culture, part of it was that metallics are just fun after years of pandemic-era softness. The styling trick everyone landed on: treat silver as a neutral. It works with denim, with black, even with that Ancora red.
8. Barbiecore’s Last Glorious Gasp
Yes, the pink wave started before the Barbie movie, but July 2023 took it nuclear. For a few months the entire world dressed like Margot Robbie’s press tour. By fall the hot pink had cooled into softer ballet tones, but the bigger lesson stuck: dopamine dressing isn’t going anywhere. Harper’s Bazaar called the film’s fashion impact one of the biggest pop-culture-to-closet pipelines in years, and the sales data backed it up.
9. Big Bags Are Back
After half a decade of bags too small to hold a phone, 2023 swung hard the other way. The East-West tote, the slouchy hobo, anything you can actually fit a sketchbook and a water bottle inside. The Lyst Index, which Lyst publishes quarterly, spent the year tracking the hype around exactly these roomy shapes, with Miu Miu and Prada leading the charge. Practicality became the flex. Imagine that.
10. The Samba Effect
One sneaker ruled them all. The Adidas Samba, helped along by Wales Bonner’s beautiful collaborations, became so omnipresent that wearing them almost feels like a uniform now. Flat, slim, retro, and the perfect counterweight to this year’s wide-leg trousers and maxi skirts. Will they be over by next summer? Maybe. But the shift toward low-profile shoes feels permanent.
What Actually Connects All Ten
Look at that list again. Quiet luxury and Barbiecore should not coexist, yet they did, often in the same closet. The thread running through 2023 is that trends stopped being mandates and started being moods. You could be a stealth-wealth minimalist on Monday and wear a rosette the size of your face on Friday, and nobody blinked.
The fashion press, including the analysts over at The Business of Fashion, spent much of the year writing about trend fatigue and the breakneck speed of micro-trends. Fair. But from where I sit, sketchbook in hand, the speed had an upside: it forced people to pick what they genuinely liked instead of waiting for permission.
That’s the real emerging trend of 2023. Not a color or a silhouette, but the quiet confidence to treat the whole churning trend cycle as a buffet. Take the red, skip the sheer, wear the flats until they fall apart. Your closet, your rules.