Why Fads Have Flourished in America

To much of the world, the United States can appear to be 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,” The Economist magazine noted in 1986, “but there is no place like America for fads, no society where so many can make so much money, and others derive such pleasure, from a passing fancy.”

But that wasn’t always the case. Early Americans imported most fashions from Europe, and most were too busy scraping out a living to indulge in passing crazes. As author Nancy Hendricks writes in Popular Fads and Crazes Through American History, “When the American nation was born in the late 1700s, the national pastime was called ‘survival.’”

So what changed? Historians point to a combination of industrialization, rising prosperity, mass media and a succession of large youth generations that continually reinvented popular culture.

The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s 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. Industrialization made goods cheaper and faster to produce, while new communication technologies—including mass-circulation magazines, the telegraph and telephone—helped spread them with unprecedented speed.

The word “fad” entered the English language in the mid-19th century, but its origins remain unclear.

Just as Great Britain led the Industrial Revolution, it, along with France, long dominated the world of fads. 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, Americans slavishly imitated fashions from abroad,” author and artist Douglas W. Gorsline wrote in his 1952 bookWhat People Wore: A Visual History of Dress From Ancient Times to Twentieth-Century America. By the 1920s, 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, with one style replacing another, while fads tend to appear suddenly and fade just as quickly. The raccoon coats that were all the rage among 1920s college men might be considered both, since they reflected a broader fashion for men's overcoats. The pet rock fad of the 1970s, on the other hand, came out of nowhere—and went back there in short order.

Joel Best, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Delaware and author of Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads (2006), sums up a 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 early 20th century, fads had become significant enough to study. In 1914, University of Southern California sociologist Emory S. Bogardus began tracking them by repeatedly polling students and teachers about the biggest fads of the moment. Their lists included such soon-forgotten sensations as fake moles on women’s cheeks, feathers on men’s hats and the phrase “Ain’t we got fun?”

His findings, published a decade later, revealed that about 80 percent of the fads disappeared within a year, and fewer than two percent 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, like bicycles and television, ultimately proved to have staying power.

The 1920s, often characterized as the Roaring Twenties in the U.S., became a fertile period for fads. Passing national obsessions ranged from the Charleston and mahjong 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 those 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.

Not for nothing did the 1920s 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 the 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 to receive many more in return. 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 “bobby-soxers” became known for both their footwear and their habit of swooning over singers like Frank Sinatra. Soldiers joined in as well, most notably by scrawling “Kilroy was here”—accompanied by a cartoon of “Kilroy”—on walls and military equipment wherever they went.

The 1940s also saw the introduction of the term “teen-ager”—and saw their rise as a distinct cultural and economic force driving popular trends.

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 1950s, boomers drove crazes for hula hoops, pogo sticks, Sea-Monkeys and a talkative doll known as Chatty Cathy.

In the 1960s, 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 decade’s biggest dance craze, the Twist, cut across generational and class lines; even the otherwise dignified First Lady Jacqueline 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, shag carpets, waterbeds and fern bars.

As boomers began to have children, new fads followed. While the boundaries often blur, each generation has left its own imprint.

Generation X (born roughly between 1965 and 1980) helped turn Cabbage Patch Kids, Rubik’s Cubes, jelly shoes and slap bracelets into national crazes. They made Valley Girl speak—think phrases like “gag me with a spoon” and “as if!”—briefly into a pop-culture dialect.

Millennials (1981 to 1996), meanwhile, fueled fads like Pokémon card collecting, Beanie Babies, flash mobs, cupcake shops and avocado toast.

Members of Generation Z (1997 to 2012) have cycled through slime videos, TikTok challenges, Stanley tumblers and cottagecore, along with countless viral products and aesthetics.

Younger cohorts, sometimes labeled Generation Alpha and Generation Beta 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 any particular one isn’t. They extend well beyond pop culture, cycling through academia, business and even science and medicine.

What has changed is how quickly fads spread, thanks to ever-faster forms of 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 TikTok and Instagram.

“We’re a country established on the principle that we were going to try something new,” says Best. “Americans are open to change; we have an ideology of progress.”