What is a "trend"?

Question

It is quite popular in American speech to use the word trend or trendy to describe a thing (item, clothing, hairstyle, etc.) when what is accurate is "in fashion". A trend is NOT a thing.

Answer 1

A "trend" is a DIRECTION or movement of consumer acceptance or rejection.

When something (any noun, like a hair style, a type of jeans, a song, a celebrity) is accepted by the mass population, it begins to TREND and is TRENDING.

Therefore a person can not "be" a trend (direction). Instead, a popular person can be called popular, in fashion, or currently TRENDING.

Answer 2

From a statistical standpoint, a trend can be assessed through patterns in certain appropriate datasets. In Fashion for instance trends are correlated with sales numbers for example, especially when assessed against specific design attributes. In essence fashion trends hinge on popular design attributes or aesthetic components. Looking at sales numbers against those attributes will generally yield clear distinctions for which aesthetic components are being purchased more over others, but these trends are most evident when the assessment is narrowed to a particular population category, usually demographics. Different things trend in different age or gender demographics, among others. A trend is therefore a pattern of response from a wide audience or body of people, that is generally positive towards a particular thing.

Trend can be expanded to simply awareness of a particular thing, which gets to be a bit more of a nebulous understanding of the term. This as well can be tracked with evidence via discussion on the topic. These days social media and hashtags help to demonstrate that, as a trending topic will have a trending hashtag that will result in again, higher usage rates. An example of this would be ChatGPT; it is being widely discussed with mixed feedback, but I think it would be valid to say that it is something that is "trending".