Beech Tree News Network

To much of the world, the United States is a country of fads-where fashion crazes, trendy diets and other fleeting obsessions aren’t just a pastime but a major export.  

“The British invented the word but there is no place like America for fads, no society where so many can make so much money, and others derive pleasure from a passing fancy”, England’s Economist magazine noted in 1986.

That wasn’t always the case.  In the nation’s early days, most fads were largely imported from Europe-and most people were too busy scraping out a living to indulge them.  As author Nancy Hendricks writes in Popular Fads and Crazes Through American History, “When the American nation was born in the late 1700’s (July 4, 1776, to be exact), the national pastime was called “survival.”  So, what changed? Historians have been asking that question for decades.

The Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s didn’t just transform production.  It helped create a market for fads. “Fads were far less common, perhaps rare or even nonexistent during the preindustrial period”. Leisure studies historian Jon Griffin Donlon writes in the 2009 book Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America.  But industrialization made goods cheaper and faster to produce-and easier to promote and spread.  At some time, new communication technologies-from mass-circulation magazines to the telegraph and the telephone-helped accelerate that spread.  The word “fad” soon entered the English language.  The Oxford Dictionary calls its origins “unknown” but cites examples from as far back as 1834 and 1867.

Fad or Fashion?

Just as Great Britain led the Industrial Revolution, it, along with France, long dominated the world of fad.  That shifted after the First World War, when the U.S. emerged not only as a global power but as a cultural force, especially in fashion.  “From the early 17th century until World War I, American’s slavishly imitated fashions from abroad”, author and artist Douglas W. Garsline wrote in his 1952 book What People Wore: A Visual History of Dress From Ancient Times to Twentieth Century America.  By the 1920’s, he added, “Paris, New York and Hollywood had become the three major style centers” with one thing in common: an emphasis on continuous change.

While fads and fashions often overlap, scholars distinguish between them.  Fashions evolve over time, while fads tend to appear suddenly and fade just as quickly.  The racoon coats that were all the rage among 1920’s college men might be considered a fad, but they were also a fashion in that later college students still wore coats of some kind.  The pet rock fad of the 1970’s, on the other hand, came out of nowhere-and went back there in short order.

Joel Best, professor emeritus of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Deleware and author of Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads(2006) sums up the fad’s life cycle in three words: emerging, surging and purging.  Fashions, on the other hand, can be visualized as a series of such curves, each overlapping the one before.

By the end of the 20th century, fads had become significant enough to study.  In 1914, University of Southern California sociologist Emory S. Bogardus began tracking them by polling large numbers of students and teachers several times a year about what they considered the five biggest fads of the moment.  Their lists included such soon-forgotten sensations as fake moles on women;s cheeks, featherson men’s hats and the phrase “Ain’t we got fun?”

His findings, published a decade later, revealed that about 80% of the fads disappeared within a year, and fewer than 2% lasted three years.  Those that endured-like men’s wristwatches and tortoise shell glasses-were probably not fads at all.  And many innovations first dismissed as fads, from bicycles to television, ultimately proved to have staying power.  The 1920’s, often characterized as the Roaring Twenties in the U.S., became a fertile period for fads, passing national obsessions ranged from the Charleston and majhong to endurance spectacles like dance marathons, chair-rocking contests and flagpole sitting.  Most of these fads originated with the era’s “flaming youth”, who were eager to break with their parents’ taboos and traditions.

But these same fads often trickled up to their elders-at least those who weren’t easily embarrassed.  A 1926 magazine cover by a famous cartoonist of the era, John Held, Jr., showed a young flapper dancing the Charleston with a tuxedoed gent old enough to be her grandfather.  Both seemed to be enjoying themselves.  Not for nothing did the 1920’s come to be called “the era of wonderful nonsense.”

Americans had less appetite for nonsense, wonderful or otherwise, with the arrival of the Great Depression and Second World War.  But the nation didn’t completely give up on fads-especially those offering a sense of hope or escape.

Chain letters surged in 1935 with the “send-a-dime” scheme, as millions mailed coins to strangers hoping other strangers would soon be sending many back to them.  Eating contests, in which competitors gorged themselves, drew crowds, even as many spectators struggled to put food on their own tables.  In 1939, goldfish swallowing became a brief fad on college campuses.

Even World War II didn’t entirely dampen the fad trend.  Women took up leg painting when stockings became scarce, while teenage “bobbysoxers” became known for both their footwear and their habit of swooning over singers like Frank Sinatra.  The 1940’s also marked the introduction of the word “teen-ager” and their ascendance as a distinct cultural and economic force.  Soldiers joined as well, most notably by scrawling “Kilroy was here”-accompanied by a cartoon of “Kilroy”-on walls and military equipment wherever they went.

The postwar years brought new prosperity to the U.S, along with a baby boom that added some 76 million young people to the population between 1945 and 1964.  It wasn’t long before they became a driving force behind the nation’s trends.  In 1955, many children became obsessed with Davy Crockett, a 19th Century frontiersman-turned-tv hero by Walt Disney.  Coonskin caps (usually fake fur) and a flood of related merchandise followed, while the show’s theme song spawned multiple hit records, reportedly selling some 10 million copies.  

“Fads used to be started by young adults and then spread up and down to older and younger people”, Landon Y. Jones writes in his 1980 chronicle. Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.  But the fads of the Fifties were creations of the children.  They flowed up.”

He attributed the shift to both the boomers’ sheer numbers and the growing influence of television and advertising.  Like many fads, Crockett mania faded in less than a year, only to be replaced by other fads.  Later in the 1950’s boomers drove crazes for hula hoops, pogo sticks, Sea-Monkeys, and a talkative doll known as Chatty Cathy.

In the 1960’s, as many boomers reached their teens, their music and dances-think fads like the Watusi and the Mashed Potato-dominated popular culture, injected into the zeitgeist by new tv shows like “American Bandstand”.  The decades biggest dance craze, The Twist, cut across generational and class lines: even the otherwise dignified First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy made headlines in 1962 when she danced it with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara at a White House soiree.  In the decades that followed, boomers would be linked to such fads as streaking, disco, shag carpets, waterbeds, fern bars- and eventually, pickleball.

As boomers began to have children, new fads followed.  While no generation is homogeneous and many overlap, each has left its own imprint.  Generation X (born between ’65-’80) turned Transformers and Cabbage Patch kids into must-have toys, revived skateboarding and embraced new sounds like grunge and hip-hop.  Gen Xers found a fresh way to consume their music-the music video-earning yet another nickname: the MTV Generation.  MTV Classic airs those videos and shows now.  One of my favorite channels.

Millennials (1981-96) may forever be associated with faddish phenomena like Pokémon cards, Beanie Babies and rollerblading-and later emojis, body-piercing and avocado toast., Members of Generation Z (1997-2012) have been linked to Bratz dolls, TikTok challenges, cottagecore and micro tattoos.  Younger cohorts, sometimes labeled Generation Alpha-2010-2024) and Generation Beta (2025-2039) are only beginning to make their mark-but are likely to continue the American tradition of creating and abandoning fads.  

Given America’s long infatuation with the latest thing, fads seem here to stay-even if one isn’t.  They extend well beyond pop culture, cycling through academia, business (team building exercises, anyone) and even science and medicine.  

What has changed is the speed at which fads spread, driven by advances in communication.  In 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler argued that fads could explode on the scene virtually overnight-and vanish just as quickly, fueled by the well-oiled machinery of marketing and media.  That was half a century before Tik Tok and Instagram.  “We’re a country that was established on the principle that we were going to try something new”, says Best.  “Americans are open to change; we have a new ideology in progress”.

That openness may be rooted in the nation’s cultural makeup.  “In comparison with other societies, we are such an amalgamation of cultures,” says Janet Chrzan, a nutritional anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets.  “We’re largely an immigrant society, lacking the clear rules of a country like France”.  In that kind of environment, new fads are all but inevitable. (www.history.com)