The Solution to Trend Culture: How Prada’s Nylon Bag Re-Edition Sets An Example

This blog, including photos and reference links, is available on my Medium, but the writing itself is available here for easy viewing.

Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking.

Any fashion lover would instantly recognize that quote from the cult classic, still heavily referenced film The Devil Wears Prada. While a casual viewer might focus on the unintentional humor and blithe attitude Meryl Streep delivers her lines with as the fictional Runway Magazine editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly, the line speaks to something still true nearly 20 years later: Fashion is cyclical. Even in a world where niche micro-trends are flooding TikTok and Instagram explore pages everywhere.

A major topic of discussion in recent years across the fashion, economic, and sustainability industries is fast fashion. As Vogue Student Editorial Contest Winner Evelyn Wang explains, “Fast fashion is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the 1990s, retailers began to introduce trendy, cheaply-priced, poorly-made clothes on a weekly basis, intending to match the breakneck pace at which fashion trends move. Style became cheap, convenient and consumable.”

By manufacturing dozens of new micro trends every year, fashion retailers keep their profits up while leaving consumers stuck in a cycle they can’t really afford to be in. I say these trends are manufactured because, in the modern age, brands don’t just design clothes because they think they look good. They design and produce products they think will sell — and they use data to figure that out.

In 2019, fashion lover and woman in STEM Madé Lapuerta began analyzing fashion trends. The result? The Data But Make It Fashion Instagram account that has now amassed over over 400,000 followers at the time of this blog’s publishing.

Completely independent from any fashion brand or retailer, Lapuerta has been able not just to predict trends but to find cyclical patterns in what consumers are shopping for. Using publicly available data from Pinterest and Google, she was able to showcase that Ugg boots are once again a winter clothing staple for many after they first reached peak popularity in the 2000s.

Some things don’t change, and some things just make sense. In the spring and summer, you can expect your favorite influencer to start wearing sundresses, florals, and linens. In the fall and winter, leather, burgundy, and furs come out of closets across the world. As The Devil Wears Prada’s writers noticed even in 2006, this happens every year almost without fail. As much as consumers crave new clothes, there are certain things they come back to time and time again.

If an individual can track consumer decisions to this level without the infrastructure of a corporation, the brands you know and love are doing it too. Enter luxury fashion brand Prada.

In 1984, the Italian fashion house debuted a nylon backpack called the Vela, creating an obsession that’s still going strong more than 40 years later. The brand’s nylon bag styles were their claim to fame from the 90s through the early 2000s, showing up on the arms of celebrities everywhere.

Few brands have been able to capitalize on the intersection of consumer culture, sustainability, and the vintage fashion market like Prada. In 2019, they did something we hadn’t seen yet from any brand: a mass re-edition of vintage styles they’d stopped producing years ago. Their Re-Nylon collection features 5 bags with slight modifications from their famous original designs, the most popular being the Prada Re-Edition 2000 and the Prada Re-Edition 2005.

Rather than tell you how popular they are, I’ll let the data speak for itself. In their 2022 Year in Fashion report, fashion mega site Lyst named the Prada Re-Nylon Re-edition 2000 as its bag of the year after they found searches for the bag style skyrocketing 131% in one summer in tandem with rising interest in 90s fashion.

So why exactly is this bag in particular so popular, and how did Prada even know to re-release it? My answer is a major shift in consumer culture as thrifting becomes the norm and “We’ve gone toward fewer trends, fewer seasons, more aesthetics.”

As much as brands want to make profits, the average consumer has become burnt out mentally and financially when it comes to keeping up with these never-ending trend cycles. Most people can’t afford to buy every piece of clothing or trendy style they want directly from a retailer, and they've turned to secondhand shopping to meet their needs. Even if shoppers can afford to buy something new, what they want might not be in stores. As the original Gossip Girl TV series gains popularity on TikTok, so do Blair Waldorf’s now discontinued dresses from nearly 20 years ago. Personally? I’m still on the hunt to replace Madewell’s perfect white denim overalls with a zipper and rope bow belt that I stained years ago, which I coincidentally thrifted in the first place.

Between 2021 and 2023, the value of the global secondhand clothing market grew from $138 to $211 billion and is expected to reach $351 billion by 2027. The biggest competitor to major brands these days isn’t other brands, it’s the consumers themselves who have the power to sell directly to their peers at a price retailers never would. In the digital age, this takes on new meaning.

Before the internet, consumers were limited to brick-and-mortar stores if they wanted to shop secondhand. Now, with the rise in popularity of sites like ThredUp, Poshmark, Depop, and more, online resales account for $20 billion of the overall U.S. secondhand market.

While there’s limited data available for Prada’s nylon bags before their major 2019 re-release, Rosie Davenport notes in Harper’s Bazaar that “The nylon bag in particular had a renaissance in the 2010s, thanks to the rise of streetwear and niche Nineties trends sparked by resale sites like Depop and Wavey Garms. Soon, celebrities and influencers were showcasing their vintage bags on Instagram and at fashion weeks across the world. In fact, in the past three years alone, searches for Prada nylon bags have increased by 815 per cent.”

Looking at creators like Madé Lapuerta/Data But Make It Fashion, it’s easy to guess that analysts at Prada noticed its rising popularity and saw a moment of opportunity. By re-releasing styles slowly going viral online, they were able to recapture their customer base, meet the shopping desires of consumers worldwide, and make a sizeable amount of money in the process.

The point of this article is not to praise Prada endlessly, but to call out something that brands of all kinds, from Target to Zara to Gucci, should consider. Rather than produce endless products each season that shoppers quickly realize they don’t actually like and send to their local Goodwill, it might be time to bring back old styles people know and love. The best companies sell products that don’t just make money, but make consumers' lives better. This is the fashion industry’s moment as a collective to learn how to become great brands.

For those who made it to the end of this blog, I’ll leave you where we started: another reference to The Devil Wears Prada. In a monologue too long to quote here (but you can stream online or catch on YouTube), Miranda Priestly claps back at a new assistant downplaying the importance or value of carefully selecting your clothes.

This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you… that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”