What styles were men looking for the most in 2021?
According to Trendalytics, the top trending searches among men this year included crossbody bags, work shirts, shackets and baggy jeans, but the trending searches were led by varsity jackets.
“Varsity jackets have been adopted by the fashion industry, appearing in recent collections by Tyler the Creator’s label Golf Wang, Off-White, Vetements and Saint Laurent,” the report said.
Seems varsity jackets never fell out of style. Hedi Slimane introduced the Saint Laurent black varsity bomber jacket with white shoulder details that has appeared in different iterations at different brands, but more colorful collegiate styles at contemporary, premium and fast-fashion brands helped push the trend.
Trendalytics tracked general global Google searches through the year to find what has been on men’s minds the most when it comes to style. They measured the top trending searches by search volume and percent increase over last year. For instance, searches for varsity jackets grew 149 percent over 2020 and was 3 million over last year’s searches.
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Crossbody bags were among the next highest searched items, having increased 63 percent over last year, as well as work shirt searches that increased 185 percent, shacket, or shirt jacket, searches increased 316 percent, and baggy jeans searches increased 81 percent.
Trendalytics explained that crossbody bag searches might have increased due to an evolution in utilitarian styles and elevated streetwear, and credited “gorpcore,” or outdoor styles as the driver for work shirt and shacket search increases.
Finally, baggy jeans is seen by Trendalytics as a casual, comfortable style seen to transition out of sweats and apparel worn often during lockdown, but also a callback to Y2K fashion that is emerging as a new trend among Gen Z consumers on TikTok.
Some other top searches for the year outside of men’s wear included Telfar bags, “Squid Game” and NFTs. The Bushwick Birkin would be a trend topic on Twitter almost every Thursday this year when there was a new drop, and searches for the style increased 253 percent over 2020 (6 million searches); “Squid Game,” the popular Netflix series, was the top culture search topic with more than 181 million searches, and searches for NFTs, another culture search topic, increased 2,098 percent over last year (a growth of 4.3 million searches).
Trendalytics is a predictive data and retail analytics platform that uses Google search trends, social media and e-commerce market data to predict emerging and stagnating trends.