Morning Brew Daily - Toby’s Trends of 2024: Dry January, Ankle Socks, Solo Dining and More

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

Episode 485: Neal and Toby recap the most memorable trends of the year including the rise of dry January, along with the rise of weed drinks. Then, ‘romantasy’ novels were all the rage as book sales skyrocketed thanks to #booktok. Also, nostalgia was a major contributor to sales as consumers make purchases with their emotions. In fashion, it was all about vintage clothing and the mob-wife aesthetic, while a generational war arose over which socks were ‘in.’ Lastly, loneliness increased in 2024, causing people to turn to AI, decorate their fridges, or simply sit on the couch and watch their favorite TV shows.  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning brew daily show. Phil Freyman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, a trip down memory lane as Toby relives some of his favorite trends of the year. From fridgecaping to Moodang and everything in between, this is the Toby's Trend Show. It's Monday, December 30th. Let's ride. Man, I am really excited for you all to hear this show. We go through so many Toby's trends in a year, but some are just flash in the pan things. Remember our queen, Moodang, the Pygmy Hippo, but some have a more lasting impact on the year. And it's those trends that Neil and I are going to talk about today. Yep, as we are right on the cusp of 2025, it's the perfect time to look back at 2024 through the lens of these trends, because

as you start to put them together, some larger themes start to emerge. You're right, Neil. As I was looking back through each week, I notice a lot of these topics ladder up into bigger trends. It's like a Russian nesting dolls of Toby's trends. So let's have a little fun to end the year and dive on in. figured the best way to kick things off is to go all the way back to the beginning of the year to talk about the rise of dry January. Two trends stood out to me here. One, people are drinking less.

Sales at three of the largest U.S. liquor stores hit a post-pandemic low during the first months of the year. Meanwhile, Google searches for dry January reached an all-time high, doubling from a year ago. But what also stood out to me about dry January is that marijuana sales spiked during the month as the alcohol industry's loss was the cannabis industry's gain.

So, Neil, it wasn't just a dry January this year. It was also a high January. Yeah, we're looking back 11 months ago to dry January, saying it was the biggest one ever. Google searches for dry January doubled. We're coming up on a new dry January. You have to expect that it will only grow from there. You mentioned at the top that some trends are just a flash in the pan. Some may have a longer, may reflect just longer term changes in our society. I do think that what we're seeing with people drinking less alcohol, focusing more. on wellness is one of those things that could extend years, if not decades. I mean, just look at

the rise of non-alcoholic beverages. Non-alcoholic beer, wine, and liquor jumped 32 percent from 2023 over 2022, while total alcohol sales were essentially flat. And then if you look at what Whole Foods is selling, which is maybe one of our trendier supermarkets, the top selling beer there as of earlier this year was non-alcoholic, was athletic brewing. Right. I do want to drill into the marijuana portion, though, too, because when we did that Toby's friends all the way back in January, we were like, oh, wow, the amount of teenagers that are smoking weed versus, you know, drinking alcohol is a lot higher, not teenagers, but 18 to 25 age group,

was a lot higher over the past year. But then recently, there's been a little bit of a stop in the legalized weed movement on the state level because Florida voted. low no to legalize weed this year. So maybe the weed industry will run into a little bit more headwinds than we're expecting. But I am curious to see if that Google trend data starts to search up again as we move into this next iteration of dry January. And we just do this whole trend all over again. It'll be, we, I'm sure we will in a few weeks. And it'll be curious to see what the next Trump administration, how it's going to deal with weed. We know that the Biden

administration moved to classify it as a much less harmful substance. than it is now. And the wildcard here could be RFK Jr. is going to be the Health and Human Services Secretary. He is very pro-cannabis. He, on the campaign trial, when he was running for president, he said he was going to legalize cannabis. But yeah, I would say he is a wildcard here. There's going to be a lot of attention on him and see how he deals with a federal cannabis policy and also psychiatric drugs, which he said he's very, he promotes. My next trend, that is slightly related to the one above because it might involve some wine. was the rise of Romanticie novels.

This was the year that some steamy, sultry fantasy novels with dragons and fairies, oh my, dominated book sales. Series like The Fourth Wing from Rebecca Yarrow and A Court of Rose and Thorns by Sarah J. Moss sold like hotcakes. Sales in the romantic book category rose 45% last year to nearly 20 million copies, even as the overall U.S. book sales fell 2.6%. Just to put that 20 million copy number into perspective, Neil, James Patterson, Stephen King, and John Grisham only sold six million print books in

23. So the book industry was just completely overtaken by Romantici books this year. And I think it speaks to the power of book talk. You know, a lot of these books gain popularity and awareness on TikTok with people hosting book clubs and offering reviews and all this speculation. I think this is a particular type of genre that lends itself to talking about it and speculation. And so I think you can't decouple the rise of book talk, people talking about books and giving recommendations on TikTok and other forms of social media and the rise of Romanticy. But it is clearly taken over book sales in general at one independent bookstore in Chesapeake, Virginia Novel Grounds. They said Romanticy accounts for about 70% of sales.

And you're starting to see romance-only bookstores pop up all around the United States. They don't sell anything else. There's about two dozen of them. with the first one in Culver City, California in 2016. It got so big that I was like, I'm not, I'm doing a disservice to our audience if I don't go and read these books. Uh-huh, that's the rationale. So I read Fourth Wing and it is, it was just as like steamy dragon as people said. And then I read a court of Rose and Thorns as well, also very good.

I mean, these books do draw you in and you, I ended up reading them in literally like 24 hours. So it is one of those things that you can just flip through. It's a page turner. you just want to get on to the next one in this series. So I was fully wrapped up in this trend this year. You, not so much, but I have the book. I would. Yeah, no, I will.

I will, if you give it to me, I will absolutely read it, like, on the beach or the next plane ride. Is this a trend, do you see going into the future? I think it's only going to get even bigger because this was really the year that book talk exploded. I mean, I don't know if this was the first year it happened, but it really, 20 million romance novels being sold compared to those other, like, A-list authors. It truly is the book industry at this point, so I think it's only going to snowball from here. Now let's head to the fashion world where nostalgia was the trend de jour.

One brand I want to highlight again is A6. A6 is a 75-year-old Japanese running shoe company, but a stock price has quadrupled over the past two years, as it's ridden this wave of popularity in both running and fashion circles. First, it capitalized on the pandemic running boom quite well, but it is also seeing success on the backs of its ugly dad sneakers. Some of its more classic silhouettes like the Gelcayano have become fashionable as the quote-unquote ugly shoe wave continues to rip. As Nike has stumbled this year, Neil A6 has done very well, and part of that is this return towards nostalgic silhouettes. Yeah, I think nostalgia is very powerful in marketing, and it's always been around.

I think brands are getting very good at it, especially in 2024. It just makes you feel better about, it makes you think about the past. And often when you think about the past, you feel like it was. better times than it is now. I think A6 is one brand that has done a great job of capitalizing on this. And especially in the resale market on Stock X in 2024, trades of A6 products were up 1,000 percent year over year. So to say this is a spike is an understatement. I mean, just walking around New York City, you can see it happening in front of your eyes. I mean, I go to the gym. I look at half. I look people in the eye, Toby. I don't look at their

I go straight to the sneakers. What's ironic about this trend, though, this return to nostalgia is that Nike, its stock had a very bad year down about 25% as the time that we are recording this. Part of the reason that it had such a bad year is that it relied too heavily on its nostalgic silhouettes like the Nike dunks, like Jordan, and it didn't innovate enough. So it is one of those things where you can get too far sucked down the nostalgia rabbit hole. But I will say A6 isn't all nostalgia. It also has this very forward-looking running shoe division. Their running products are as comparable, if not better than anyone other.

anyone else in the game right now. So I do think it is navigating the tightrope of let's remember our heritage, but also let's look forward into the future with our running tech as well. But on this topic of nostalgia, another fun trend in fashion was the emergence of the mob wife aesthetic. This was mostly a TikTok thing that involved serving up looks that have big furge codes, lots of leathered animal prints that don't really match big hair and of course stacks of gold jewelry. Just think sopranos because that's pretty much exactly what it was inspired by. was the 25th anniversary of the show. And, you know, even though this wasn't one of the longer trends of the year, what this really

shows is the circular nature of some of these fashion trends. And also the fact that people just want to look like Camelso Pran, who is one of the best characters on TV. I think this was maybe a rejection of that quiet luxury trend that happened in 2023. But again, it's probably nothing new. It's just a rebrand and slapping a new, buzzy name on something that people wear all the time and this one did not last, at least on TikTok. Right.

It was, I think what I do want to just call out about this is that I can take just such a small trigger to just like make something erupt into the, I mean, call it mainstream culture just for a little bit. And I think that trigger was obviously the Sopranos 25th anniversary. I also do want to nail down the fact that this trend was not just about what you were wearing either. A lot of it was about how you carry yourself, just the confidence that you carry yourself with.

Yeah, I think you taught me the word Hutzpah at that point when we were talking about it. earlier this year. So it was just one of those things that TikTok sent into the ether. It calmed back down a little bit, but I think it does speak to this trend of nostalgia that we are talking about. And then another trend that goes hand in hand with both the return of nostalgia and the rise of this mob wife aesthetic is how big vintage shopping was this year. Business has been so good in the vintage shopping game. There are over 25,000 resale stores now in the U.S. and secondhand apparel sales were up 11% last year. Apparel resale in the U.S. grew at 3,000. seven times the rate of the broader retail sector to reach $43 billion, you know, just six years

ago sitting at about half of that. So vintage is clearly in these days. It is. And big brands are obviously capitalizing on this Banana Republic when it's opening its new store in Soho has a small section dedicated to resale H&M has done the same thing. So you're starting to see larger apparel companies dip a toe into vintage because it is one of the fastest growing areas in this entire sector. And when we spoke about this trend earlier this year, what we said was that downtowns love resale stores because brick and mortar is still just their, you know, bread and butter, brick and mortar is their bread and butter? Because yes, you can go on real, real, yes, you can go on DIPA, but nothing, you know, recreates the experience of going into a venture store, trying all the

things, because they're all idiosyncratic things. Like, you don't know how things are going to fit. So they've been propping up some downtowns because they are really one of the only tenants that still need brick and mortar retail space. Yeah. I mean, do you think this stuff? Alja is unique to 2024, or has it always been here and we're just talking about because we're podcasters now? It could be that we're podcasters now. And it's not like vintage really popped up. But fashion is cyclical.

I think that's the biggest takeaway from this entire category is that maybe vintage will start calming down again. We will be looking forward to new styles going forward. But maybe it's because we got a mic in front of us. But I do think that there is something here specifically in 2024 in the air that people wanted to look back in history. Okay, final note on fashion trends, remember the sock war between millennials in Gen Z? Oh, yeah.

I'm going to put you on the spot. Do you remember which type of sock Gen Z prefers and which sock millennials prefer? I do because I'm very self-conscious about it now. I feel like millennials got teased by Gen Z for wearing the ankle socks instead of the ones that go up a little more on your calf. So I don't, you won't catch me wearing ankle socks ever again. See, you do look at people's ankles, Neil, because you started. Look at mine. You look at your own ankles.

Yeah. I realize that I, because I'm right on the cusp of Gen Z and millennial, and I kind of realize I wear mid-level socks. Like, they are not exactly ankle socks. They're not the no-show socks, but they're also not like the high, you know, tube socks. So I think that perfectly encapsulates where I sit, which is straddling generations. We're going to take a quick break, but more Toby's trends coming up next. Study.

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Neil, dining alone went from being something that was almost scoffed at and used as a punchline in a lot of movies to now being totally normal. Maybe people are embracing their loneliness here. I think it speaks to maybe the lack of a third place. And this is not new. It's been going on for a while. But, you know, the concept of a third place is the fact. that you have work, you have home, and then there's always that next, you know, club that you

join as part of a, you know, social gathering to meet people outside of work and home. And that seemingly has gone away or moved to digital spaces, which could be, you know, a whole other discussion. But people are certainly, you know, certainly embracing their loneliness and the rise of eating alone. I know we would talk about whether you actually do it or not has is certainly emblematic of that. I think it is emblematic. And remember, restaurants started leaning into this trend, too, because we're like, all right, we have all these reservations for one coming through the door.

How can we cater to them? And they started offering more bar seating instead of table seating. They started offering more tasting menus for people coming in alone. I think a do, a big part of it, too, is the rise of fast casual chains. Kava, sweet green Chipoli. These are places where it's very normal to go at lunchtime, grab a bowl, sit and eat by yourself. I mean, like, I do that all the time because it is just a brief respite in your busy. busy day. So I think you can go as deep into it like maybe people are lonely or maybe people are

just being more convenient and really engaging with these fast casual chains. But another, also on this topic of loneliness, that was another trend we did where we covered America turning into a nation of home bodies. Even coming out of the pandemic, census data shows that Americans are spending more time at home than ever before. The American time use survey showed that time spent at home increased by an hour and 39 minutes a day from 2003 to 2022. Obviously, a rise in work from home contributed to those numbers, but also things like education, eating and drinking, and religious activities have moved into the house. Largest shift actually did come from religious activities. Fifty-nine percent occurred at home in 2022, up from just

24 percent in 2003. So we really did move a lot of our lives indoors. Yeah, and in response to that, there's been this phrase that has become way more popular, which is go touch some grass. And I think that has been another trend of 2024 that we didn't talk about, where there's an urge from people online to others who are spending all of their time online. So maybe people in glass houses. But certainly people are saying, go touch some grass, you know, be a part of the real world, especially when it came to this electoral season where a lot of discussions were happening online with that may not have mirrored what was happening in the, you know, in the actual real world.

So that reminds me of just saying, you know, go touch some grass sometimes, got to get outside. Put on your ankle socks and go. outside. But another trend that this also reminded me off that I think we did was about the rise of huge televisions. Oh yeah. Which was the fact that there was a tenfold increase in massive televisions of 90, at least 97

inches or bigger this year over last year through the first nine months of the year. So if people are spending more time at home, which they are, they're, you know, they're doing it up. Make this face look good. Again, this is another trend that it reminded me of a trend within

a trend of moving things into home, fridge-scaping. Remember, people started decorating their refrigerators in these aesthetic ways, and then posting them on Instagram. Think colored Tupperware tops, label-free, mason jars, even some non-edimal elements, like flowers, would bring themes out, like they were dressing them out as the Hobbit or Bridgeton. So that was certainly boring of spending more time in the house as well. Yeah, that one doesn't have a long shelf life. Oh, I see what you did there. People were actually mad about this, though, because they're saying, like taking dairy products out of their sealed containers and putting them into different containers,

like messes up the pasteurization. So that one was probably valuing aesthetics over, you know, actual practicality there. But that was a big trend of moving more life indoors. One business idea that emerged out of this rise in loneliness too is the emergence of AI products being built to address loneliness. We talked about one company, friend.com, who is designing this wearable pendant that listens to you throughout the day and is always there to just chat, it's meant to keep you company, not make you more productive because we are seeing tons of Google search interests already in AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends. People are more isolated than ever, so having someone to talk to that understands you because it's been listening, there's probably

a big market out there for a device like this and others. Absolutely. I mean, we're just over two years into the quote, unquote, AI revolution launched by chat, GPT in November 2020. And it's clear, you know, one of the biggest use cases for AI is being your friend or having a companion, which was predicted really by the movie Her and also, you know, AI boyfriends, girlfriends. There was this study that came out that analyzed a million chat GPT interactions, found that the second most popular use was sexual role-playing. So clearly people are using AI for intimacy. And also just to converse with bots, one of these companies is character.

It's one of the biggest AI It's one of the biggest AI companies out there Last year raised $150 million. This is an absolute behemoth. So if you're looking at, you know, if you're asking questions of like, okay, two years in to chat, CBT, what are people actually using it for?

This companionship one is definitely one of the biggest. Right. Friend AI created a dependent that you interact with in the real world, but I do think that even just chatbots on your computer will be something that we will be monitoring going forward this year and the next year to come. And then finally, that is some of the best trends of the year that I remember. But Neil, I want to turn it over to you a little bit.

What were one or two trends that stood out to you as some of your favorites? Well, I've got a couple. Since we just talked about AI, the one I want to bring up was all of those AI-created marketing ploys that fell flat on their face. Remember, Apple had this commercial that they debuted where the classical tools of the way people created art, were crushed and what emerged was a sleek iPad, and Apple introduced its Apple intelligence and features in its new products. And the response to it, I've never seen anything draw such backlash to it. Well, I think you're talking about two separate things there,

because one, the Apple ad was talking about crushing creativity. And then the Coca-Cola one was actually built using AI. But I think you are right. Google had another ad where it was talking, a dad was helping. Oh, the Olympics one. The Olympics one, their daughter write a leather to her favorite athlete. And he was using, like, Gemini AI to enable that. So there was this big class between, like, human emotion and AI tools, as well as, like, that actual, the Coca-Cola ad was a more recent thing where it looked like the uncanny value because it was generated using AI.

So I think you're definitely right. That is a trend we'll look at going forward. And another one, I don't know if this is a trend, but it's certainly in the cultural sphere. And I don't know if I have any deep analysis of it. But certainly, like, the rise of the three pop stars, Chapel Roan, Sabrina. Carpenter and Charlie X-EX over the summer, especially Brat's summer, was a big trend, at least on social media, which is where you pick a lot of your trends from, and kind of dethroning the music royalty of 2023, which was Beyonce and Taylor Swift. So those three pop stars

were absolutely, you know, they were everywhere this summer. And again, I don't know what it means in the broader scope of things, but it shows that people are always looking, as much as they like nostalgia, they are looking for fresh, new innovative ideas, which I think all those three did, except, you know, a lot of them did borrow from nostalgia and make it their own. Charlie X-E-X borrows a lot from, like, you know, dance club beats from decades ago. Sabrina Carpenter channels the 70s in her music. So that mixing of, you know, old, old themes in music and like putting a new spin on it was absolutely big in the cultural sphere. What's fascinating, too, about that is that Sabrina Carpenter and Charlie XEX had been around for a long time.

They dropped multiple albums, but this year for whatever reason, I think it could have been the nostalgia. Like, you might have just explained it very well there that people liked that it evoked a time in the past. And then, I don't know, Chapel Roan is just like incredible. So, like, of course, she was just going to do well no matter what. But yeah, that is, that's a good one. I think that maybe we'll get a new crop next year. And we'll be talking about a new crop of pop stars in 2025.

The final trend that I just liked that I couldn't fit into any bigger, wider, explanation was, remember raw-dogging flights where people, mostly guys would just go on seven hour, eight-hour, nine-hour flights and just look at the seat in front of them or look at the flight map in front of them. That didn't speak to anything, but I just remember that was very fun. I thought about trying it on a recent long flight I had. I made it like 10 minutes. How did you actually try? Were you going in with the attempt like, I'm not going to do anything? Well, I didn't like fully commit myself to it, but I, tried and then what started happening, I was sitting nice to the bathroom. People kept going by

me, kept breaking my conversation. I got tired. So I don't know if people were just lying about that on social media, but it definitely was a thing that guys were like, let's just work on this. We're going to go inwards in our thoughts. So not really speaks to anything bigger, but that was one of my friends. Are you allowed, if I had a window seat, could I look out the window? I don't think so. I think you've got to shut it. That would be tough. You're not allowed to go to the bathroom. Like you literally just have to like straight ahead. It's off for me. But that term, which is, you know, a sexually explicit term that has become a part of our vocabulary now. And people kind of, you know, don't really think about its origins.

That has, that has staying power. And I think people will still use that to describe any effort at doing something without the comfort. So I've heard people use it a million times over to describe any single thing. There's videos going around. I know that we watch about golf where he's like, I'm. yeah, I'm doing this with golf and I'm just in a forest and I'm just hitting a ball randomly. So I do feel like that could be maybe not doing this for flights, but it has certainly permeated the culture of that really monastic lifestyle.

That was peat. And challenging yourself. Yeah, that was peak Toby's trends. No huge bigger meaning to it all, just you versus you. And that is all the time we have. Toby, thank you for those trends. I'm excited to see what 2025 has to offer. And thank you so much for starting your morning with us.

have a wonderful Monday. For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Miliron is our executive producer. Raymond Loo is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Yucenoa Ogu is our technical director.

Billy Minino is on audio. Hair and makeup is also feeling wistful about the past. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show, Daniel. Let's run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th,

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