What Should I Wear This Fall?

A reader asks for clarity on what seems to be a smorgasbord of casual trends.

What you are seeing is not actually a chaotic mix of every trend under the sun but two large and related overarching trends. First, the rise of self-defined comfort dressing during the last year, when most people were stuck at home, picking clothes without worrying about the judgments of other people or having to signal identity to the world. And second, the fact that as with identity politics, so with fashion: Increasingly, it’s every person for themselves. It’s the trend of no trend, to bastardize a phenomenon George W. S. Trow identified in 1980 and named “the context of no context” in a New Yorker essay that became a book.