When a parent or grandparent sets out to shop for stylish clothes for the teenage children in their lives, they often have trouble determining which trends to follow. Today, it seems that there are numerous trends at play at the same time. Haute couture lines have their definition of fashion. There is conventional fashion, which tends to appeal more to adults than to teenagers. And then there are youth-focused trends like skinny jeans and snapback hats.

It used to be that the latest fashion trends were pretty well documented in glossy magazines, but today that is not necessarily the case. Now, the fashion dynamics have changed drastically; Fashion magazines are still the foils of the high fashion industry, but that industry is getting a run for its money from a newly established style vanguard.

Boyish style, and youth culture in general, has been largely taken over by a few entertainment moguls who have correctly estimated the power of spreading the drawing power of a celebrity across a variety of product lines. The star effect has been well known for a long time: if an attractive young star is out for a highly visible evening with friends and is carrying your bag, your bag will be the next big thing before the paparazzi have finished uploading all their videos. images to the net.

Taking advantage of the star effect has been a great success. Instead of handing out all that free publicity to a bunch of small brands, stars slap their names on the products they love, allowing their brand to profit when sales soar. Because young people tend to be more easily swayed by celebrity behavior, those who run these celebrity brands have become locked into youth culture.

Basically, they have taken over. Youth culture belongs almost entirely to that group of young, ultra-famous celebrities who have parlayed their fifteen minutes of fame and turned it into a brand with their fingers in every pie, from clothing to fragrances to jewelry.

Stars don’t design clothes any more than they mix fragrances. And those who do the design have discovered a market that is immensely easy to penetrate. Fashion choices are always about self-expression to some degree, and the bottom line most teens want to communicate is how they are different from their parents, teachers, and the rest of the establishment. All a fashion trend needs to be is different. It doesn’t have to look good. You just have to break with tradition.

The mechanics of printing new fashion options into culture have nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the design or the quality of the build. Frighteningly, they have more to do with running bee swarms than using a sewing machine. A new fashion concept is simply placed in enough places that it suddenly becomes ubiquitous; as soon as you do, you will be successful.

Most of the time, when a parent or grandparent spends money on clothes for a teen, they want the teen to look good in those clothes. However, they have to accept that youth fashion is about something completely different. A snapback cap can look good; skinny jeans may not look good; but those values ​​are essentially irrelevant. The key to shopping for clothes that the teens in your life will like is to take them to the store and let them pick it out.