Handmade items are all the rage these days online for a number of reasons. For one thing, having a sort of casual and informal style has come back into fashion. There is a 1990’s grunge revival underway by this point. Lots of people are interested in being able to turn their informal styles into fashion statements in a world in which a lot of people go to thrift stores for economic reasons. If thrift store shopping is fashionable anyway, the people who are into it for economic reasons will become invisible in the crowd.
Handmade items are a natural part of that entire trend, since these are items that are going to lack that professional polish that might actually look artificial to a lot of people. Handmade items have a satisfying amateur quality that a lot of people are going to like in a world where many people are completely sick of all of the capitalist and consumerist products that have been released in recent years. The handmade items that people can find online are part of a fashion trend, but they also reflect the modern political climate. The highly artificial styling of the 1980’s was reflective of the era’s endorsement of capitalism. The naturalistic styles of today symbolize this era’s repudiation of the exact same principles.
There is also the fact that handmade items became popular through increased and accelerated technological change. People would have to go to craft fares and flea markets twenty or thirty years ago in order to find out all of the new crafting items that people might be willing to sell. Today, people are able to easily go online in order to find pretty much everything that they could possibly want from the people with the online crafting stores. Many people are enthusiastic about being able to see what all of the amateur crafting producers have to offer. They would not have been able to do so before the Internet, and they certainly would not have been able to do so from the comfort of their own homes.
Buying jewelry that was made by hand online by someone who is not famous allows people to truly stand out in a way that just is not possible in a world where all goods are completely mass-produced. People who buy everything from the same stores are going to have a hard time standing out in any way. However, these days, almost everyone online has his or her small but devoted following of fans. This small following is going to be able to appreciate all of the offerings from someone’s Etsy store, and the fans are going to be able to stand out among the crowd in their own right. A lot of people cannot make their own crafts, which is going to limit how they are able to stand out in that way. However, individual Etsy stores are never going to be as popular as places like Hot Topic. Handmade items allow people to truly find their own style among the chaos of fashion trends.