Fashioning Ethnic Pride: Women of Color and the Outfit Transition Trend on TikTok

Abstract

This study examines how women of color on TikTok engage with the viral “outfit transition” trend to assert ethnic pride, resist cultural assimilation, and build digital communities. Our research builds on literature exploring TikTok’s affordances and digital fashion culture, focusing on how women of color use the application to challenge aesthetic assimilation and celebrate ethnocultural identity. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) and digital ethnography, we analyzed 63 TikTok videos to explore how audiovisual features (e.g., audio, hashtags, and comments) enable marginalized creators to challenge western aesthetic dominance. The findings reveal that women of color strategically use TikTok to construct a subaltern digital commons, celebrating ethnic pride while fostering solidarity across diaspora communities. These creators promote cross-cultural engagement by inviting non-ethnic viewers to learn about and respectfully engage with their cultures on their terms. This study expands on studies of digital fashion culture to show how TikTok’s outfit transition trend functions as an online space to resist Eurocentric beauty standards while centering non-white femininities and cultural aesthetics. In addition, our analysis sheds light on how these creators navigate algorithmic biases that often limit visibility for marginalized groups. Women of color creatively rework viral trends to enhance their visibility, asserting control over how they and their communities are represented online. Ultimately, the study underscores TikTok’s potential as a site for community building and intercultural exchange, where women of color challenge colonial legacies in fashion while sustaining digital spaces for ethnocultural uplift.

Introduction

TikTok’s participatory culture includes “challenges,” defined by specific audiovisual scripts or themes that demand user replication, and “trends,” which encompass a broader set of recurring formats, themes, or aesthetics. Some TikTok challenges become trends when users begin adapting the original format, introducing new variations, and circulating it beyond the initial framing (Abidin, 2020; Schellewald, 2021; Zulli & Zulli, 2020). While its origin remains unclear, the “outfit transition” trend, where creators switch outfits using in-app edits within their videos, has become a popular enactment of self-expression on TikTok. Creators often incorporate filters, music, and gesture-based transitions to reveal changes in appearance, such as new clothing, makeup, or hairstyles. Imagine, for instance, a video of a South Asian woman in nightclub attire, mouthing Doja Cat’s lyrics: “Look at me, look at me, I’m naked.” As she swings her purse toward the camera, the shot transitions. The woman now wears a sparkling pink lehenga, a traditional North Indian outfit (Roy et al., 2024), and dances to the Bollywood tune “O Saki Saki.” As of August 2025, the #outfittransition hashtag contains more than 70,000 posts and one billion views, making it a viral genre on the platform. Yet, despite its popularity, scholarship on TikTok has largely overlooked this trend and how creators use it to embody their identities online, especially in relation to race, gender, and ethnicity.

How might the outfit transition trend hold unique cultural significance for women of color in relation to their heritage and identity expression? Since the dawn of European colonization of the Global South, women of color’s public self-presentation has been heavily regulated by law, social norms, or aesthetic standards rooted in gendered racism. In 1786, Governor Don Esteban Miró of Louisiana required Afro-descendant women to cover or straighten their hair. Black women responded with ornate tignons that accentuated their textured hair (Greensword, 2022; Steele, 2021b). Such prohibitions persist in white majority nations, including France’s hijab bans and US policies targeting afro-textured hair in workplaces and schools (Abdelgadir & Fouka, 2020; Khemilat, 2020; Pitts, 2021; Rowe, 2021). Colonial legacies also shape aesthetic expectations in non-white majority nations. In 2016, Zulaikha Patel launched #StopRacism to protest an afro ban at Pretoria Girls School in South Africa (Canella, 2020). Such histories may, therefore, motivate women of color to challenge western dominance of aesthetics through the display of ethnocultural style on online social networks like TikTok.

This article evaluates how women of color affirm their ethnocultural identities and challenge western aesthetic dominance in the outfit transition trend by shifting from western styles into traditional garments. We also ask: how do such displays enable women of color to establish virtual communities within and across their ethnocultural diasporas? TikTok holds compelling cultural relevance for users of the Global South and their diasporas, making it an important site for studying racialized identity expression. People of color in the United States, TikTok’s largest user base, adopt the platform more widely than white Americans (Pew Research Center, 2024). Outside the United States, TikTok has more than 50 million users in non-white majority countries like Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico (World Population Review, 2025). Furthermore, TikTok is an emerging site of “digital fashion culture,” in which users of digital platforms develop and participate in trends and social practices of fashion creation, sharing, and consumption. This includes virtual outfits, fashion influencers, digital fashion shows, and the use of fashion to express identity online (Choufan, 2021; Norris & Cantoni, 2022). Focusing on the latter, we aim to understand how women of color use the outfit transition trend to make public space online for non-white, non-western expressions of gender.

This study investigates how marginalized creators build community through virtual placemaking, focusing on the outfit transition trend on TikTok. Building on critical digital studies, we examine how women of color shift from western to ethnocultural attire through digital ethnography and critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) (Brock, 2020; Murthy, 2008). Our findings indicate that women of color use this trend to (a) promote ethnic pride, (b) develop community and support networks, and (c) participate in cross-cultural engagement. We argue that these activities construct a subaltern “cultural digital commons” (Fuchs, 2021) on TikTok, enabling women of color to resist assimilation into the aesthetic norms of white-dominated cyberspace. As TikTok creators, they engage in gendered ethnic placemaking online, using displays of fashion to craft alternative virtual publics that foster a sense of belonging, solidarity, and inter/intracultural recognition. Ultimately, we conclude that analyzing the digital practices of women of color can help us understand digital practices of reclamation against cultural imperialism from a decolonized standpoint.

TikTok and Digital Fashion Culture: Embodying a Gendered Ethnic Identity Online

In 2021, TikTok surpassed 1 billion monthly users worldwide (TikToK, 2021). Like other mobile apps, it integrates smartphone features like the camera and GPS to support embodied content and communication (Bucher & Helmond, 2017; Davis, 2020). These “communicative affordances,” including portability and multimediality, foster seamless creation and sharing of multimodal content that drive public discourse (Schrock, 2015). Several of its in-app features enable creative audiovisual editing and networked user interaction: “Duets” allow users to create side-by-side videos with another user’s content, and “stitches” allow users to clip and integrate another user’s video into their own (Lee & Lee, 2023; Schellewald, 2021). TikTok’s memetic platform logics and design, therefore, afford an interactivity that facilitates its participatory culture through challenges and trends. Through challenges, creators replicate a specific action, like a dance or transition, while trends involve broader themes or stylistic conventions that gain traction across the platform (Abidin, 2020; Schellewald, 2021; Zulli & Zulli, 2020). This study examines how women of color use the outfit transition trend to showcase heritage fashion, create virtual publics that assert ethnic pride, build community, and endorse cross-cultural engagement.

Marginalization and the Digital Commons: Resolving Algorithmic (In)Visibility on TikTok

In contrast to property, “commons” encompass the production and exchange of knowledge, culture, and information through cooperative, decentralized action, unconstrained by conventional market forces (Benkler, 2006). Social practices of “commoning” that involve “voluntary and inclusively self-organized activities and mediation of peers who aim at satisfying needs” (Euler, 2018, p. 12) constitute the commons. Fuchs (2021) expands upon these frameworks, suggesting that different types of commons can be understood through four dimensions: nature, economy, politics, and culture. These dimensions also structure the “digital commons,” which encompasses “digital resources that are commonly controlled by humans” (Fuchs, 2021, p. 19) such as cooperative community networks or free/non-commercial software. This study operationalizes Fuchs’ articulation of the “cultural digital commons,” which addresses the enabling of friendship through “unity in diversity and common recognition and respect of everyone in digitally mediated communities”(p. 19). We analyze the outfit transition trend as commoning that women of color do to construct diverse, digitally mediated communities on TikTok shaped by unity, common recognition, and mutual respect.

Fuchs (2021) primarily focuses on non-commercial/free platforms as exemplary of the digital commons. However, he also acknowledges that not all digital commons projects will encompass all dimensions. Relatedly, Steele and Hardy (2023) argue that this framework inadequately captures the digital practices and virtual publics Black people construct amid a history of exploitation and commodification. The “Black digital commons” takes on different forms across commercial social media platforms, such as the “hustler’s corner” of TikTok in which Black creators pursue monetization and self-branding (Steele & Hardy, 2023). This tension between communal gathering and commercial exploitation online highlights the ways that the algorithmic infrastructure of social media platforms often amplifies whiteness and suppresses content by people of color (Brock, 2020; Noble, 2018). On TikTok, “algorithmic oppression” (Noble, 2018) manifests in cultural domains like dance, beauty, and fashion through recommendation algorithms that privilege white creators. For instance, in 2019, 14-year-old Black creator Jalaiah Harmon choreographed the viral “Renegade” dance, but white TikToker Charli D’Amelio gained millions of followers and media attention for performing it. Harmon’s contribution remained unaddressed until a New York Times profile 6 months later (Betlemidze, 2025; Steele, 2021a; Taylor & Abidin, 2024). Such dynamics, therefore, reveal why people of color often develop innovative commoning strategies to sustain their online presence and networks including on TikTok.

Recent research affirms that different groups of women of color leverage TikTok’s capacity for creativity, virality, and algorithmic distribution to center themselves and their communities, particularly for activism (Lee & Lee, 2023; Peterson-Salahuddin, 2024; Steele, 2021a; Zhao & Abidin, 2023). For instance, Zhao and Abidin (2023) illuminate the “gesticular activism” of East Asian users circulating anti-racist narratives to counteract the “Fox Eye” challenge popularized by white women seeking an “oriental” look. Fewer studies analyze how women of color design digital spaces through TikTok hashtags that cater to communal needs shaped by the gendered, racial, and ethnic identities of its users. Taylor and Abidin (2024) assert that while #BlackGirlTikTok offers Black women a “homespace” that addresses erasure on TikTok, it simultaneously diverts attention from Black teenage girls. Furthermore, hashtags such as #latinaempowerment (with more than 4000 posts and 2.8 million views on TikTok as of August 2025) and #southasianbeauty (featuring more than 5500 posts and 3.9 million views) demonstrate how diverse women of color construct affinity spaces on the platform. Our study contributes to this scholarship by exploring how women of color use the TikTok interface in the outfit transition trend to center themselves and showcase their cultural aesthetics.

Gendering Racial and Ethnic Aesthetic Reclamation Via Digital Fashion Culture

Much of the current research on women of color on TikTok focuses on overtly political forms of engagement, such as anti-racist activism or responses to discrimination. However, digital fashion culture may also offer a lens for understanding how women of color, particularly from the Global South and its diasporas, use social media platforms. Examining fashion-related content as a cultural digital commons could elucidate how indigenous aesthetic practices enable “the Other” to reclaim their subaltern identities in online public spaces.

Prior research explores women’s substantial role in generating web traffic and creating fashion and beauty content on social media through platform labor as influencers and consumers (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017). TikTok users engage in fashion-related trends like “outfit of the day” and “get ready with me” posts. These digital practices of creators narrating and displaying their clothing, cosmetic, and aesthetic choices to their audience demonstrate how fashion carries deeper social meaning (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017; Evans & Riley, 2023). For instance, Maureen Brewster (2024) analyzes #RushTok, the virtual space associated with young women participating in recruitment activities for predominantly white Greek Letter Organizations in the United States. Through fashion content like #outfitoftheday, these recruits’ display of their outfit choices serve to reflect and validate their gender, race, and class identities, thereby reinforcing dominant social hierarchies and cultural norms. Thus, women use fashion-related content on social media to enact representations of femininity often shaped by intertwined systems of power encountered offline (Childs, 2022; Duffy, 2017; Love, 2025; Sandhu, 2022).

Scholars also identify fashion and beauty culture on platforms like Instagram or weblogs as online public spaces wherein women of color find solidarity and support (Sandhu, 2022; Steele, 2021b). However, the visibility of women of color on these platforms is also shaped by algorithmic systems that tend to privilege Eurocentric beauty standards and white creators (Brewster, 2024; Childs, 2022; Love, 2025). While new media technologies facilitated the rise of women influencers who partner with beauty and fashion brands, these industries are still dominated by US and European corporations. Furthermore, these corporations often make products for white and lighter-skinned women of color and prioritize them as representatives in their digital advertising. By excluding darker-skinned women of color, contemporary fashion and beauty industries, therefore, reinforce a long-standing history of colorism and racism that shapes these representations of femininity (Childs, 2022; Love, 2025; Steele, 2021b).

Instead of reproducing western norms, women of color express non-hegemonic fashion and beauty in ways that support networked solidarity. In addition, women of color creators emphasize racial identity and ethnicity as part of their gendered aesthetics (Steele, 2021b; Zhao & Abidin, 2023). For instance, since Web 1.0, Black women have used different forms of digital media and social networking sites to circulate information and imagery related to styling their natural hair (Childs, 2022; Love, 2025; Steele, 2021b). Using #100sareepact on Instagram and Facebook, South Asian women display themselves in sarees, facilitating “saree pacts,” that “act as a medium for decentering and decolonizing” Eurocentric fashion and beauty ideals (Sandhu, 2022, p. 388). We build on this scholarship to examine how women of color use TikTok’s outfit transition trend to construct virtual community centered on similar practices of aesthetic reclamation.

Data and Methods

This study investigates the outfit transition trend through CTDA, a framework that examines Internet-mediated culture by analyzing the interrelations among technology, ideology, and society. CTDA also centers critical theory rooted in marginalized groups’ perspectives to analyze sociotechnical systems and digital culture, challenging a western technoculture that perpetuates racialized, gendered, and classed forms of exclusion (Brock, 2020). This study takes a multimodal approach to examine TikTok’s cyberculture through its technological features (e.g., hashtags and comments), and its practices, particularly challenges and trends. By doing so, we illuminate how women of color center non-western cultural styles of dress to construct public space within a digital fashion culture that otherwise renders them invisible.

Data Sampling and Collection

Data collection began in January 2024. Like Sandhu (2022), whose study of the #100sareepact began with a personal Facebook account, we first identified heritage fashion transitions through a personal TikTok account. We created a new TikTok account with a new Gmail address to mitigate personalization algorithms influencing the content that surfaced. We then used TikTok’s search function to explore fashion-related hashtags such as #traditional and #outfittransition within video captions. Using both hashtags in one search, we collected the first 20 videos featuring self-identified women of color participating in the trend. These videos depicted creators in their ethnoracial group’s traditional attire, historically influenced by religious, historical, or cultural factors (Aspers & Godart, 2013). This initial purposive sampling strategy is a deliberate methodological choice that aligns with our research questions regarding ethnocultural identity expression. Thus, we analyze a particular subset of the outfit transition trend rather than aim to capture its full spectrum of uses.

We then categorized videos by each creator’s ethnicity to observe how they use hashtags to communicate their ethnic affiliations. For example, South Asian content creators might use #desitraditions in the caption of their videos. Ethnic-specific hashtags (e.g., #afghanclothes) guided our second-round search, yielding 59 content creators whose videos (N = 63) met our selection criteria. We stopped after recognizing recurring patterns in self-presentation, suggesting adding more creators would not yield unique insights. This purposive, multi-phase sampling of hashtags involved collecting the first 1–16 videos per each hashtag to diversify the sample. Inevitably, this approach had limitations due to how TikTok’s algorithm personalizes content based on hashtag engagement (TikToK, n.d.). Our first-round search influenced second-round results and our inclusion of creators who stated their ethnicity on their profiled excluded creators lacking these identifiers.

Data Analysis

To code outfit transition videos, we draw inspiration from previous studies on TikTok and use grounded theory to identify patterns and emerging sociocultural phenomena that align with our research question (Abidin, 2016, 2020; Zulli & Zulli, 2020). We viewed each video and took field notes, documenting the self-presentation of each TikTok creator, including setting, clothing, facial expressions, emotional tone, props, and music choice. Using constant comparison and iterative coding (Charmaz, 1983; Corbin & Strauss, 1990), we developed detailed memos from these field notes to guide our analysis. We also conducted a multimodal analysis of each video, examining its audiovisual and text-based components to situate our interpretations within broader ideological, cultural, and technological contexts experienced by women of color. This process helped us to analyze how visual, audio, and textual aspects of TikTok content enable creators to shift from western to their ethnocultural attire during the outfit transition.

Our analysis also involves digital ethnography (Murthy, 2008), specifically an immersive non-participant observation of social interactions of users to understand cultural practices and communicative forms within the digital environment of TikTok (Schellewald, 2021). We examined each video’s captions, including hashtags and tagged usernames, and the comments that accompanied them within the TikTok user interface. We then used an Excel spreadsheet to document the creator’s username, postdate, the video link, specific hashtags used in the caption, and whether the creator enabled video downloading. We organized this documentation systematically, first by ethnicity, then by hashtag, and finally by username, ensuring that we could track patterns of self-presentation within specific cultural groups. This approach allowed us to identify cultural markers and trends within specific ethnic groups, thereby facilitating a deeper analysis of how these creators used outfit transitions to convey ethnic pride. For instance, Indian creators frequently used hashtags like #desitransitions and #sareetransition, while African creators used tags such as #africanstyle and #asoebi. Our analysis of the comments involved determining the ethnicity of these users, which we confirmed through self-identification on their profiles. In addition, we used the comments to evaluate public perceptions of the content creator’s outfit transition, particularly in relation to themes associated with ethnic pride, cultural appreciation, or cross-cultural engagement.

Finally, we took several ethical considerations, considering that these creators we focus on include young women of color, both cisgender and transgender, residing both within and outside the United States. As such, their home countries have differing legal and political orientations toward not only the TikTok platform but also to gender expression. We, therefore, present pseudonymous usernames for both creators and commentors, to maintain user privacy, despite using videos only from publicly accessible TikTok accounts. While we state the ethnicity of these creators, we take care to avoid mentioning exact locations or other unambiguous personal identifiers. Thus, we also chose to describe the findings of our multimodal analysis only in text and choose not to use screenshots from the content of any creator or commentor to protect their privacy. Finally, to mitigate bias in interpreting these findings, we had another researcher on our team evaluate our data and review the original draft of the article to provide feedback.

The Use of Ethnic Wear Among Women of Color in TikTok’s Outfit Transition Trend

This section presents findings from our CTDA of TikTok’s outfit transition trend, based on 63 videos from 59 self-identified women of color. To explore how women of color, often underrepresented in digital fashion culture, leverage TikTok to assert their identities, we analyzed outfit transition videos across a wide spectrum of ethnoracial groups. Creators self-identified as Indian (n = 16), West African, particularly Nigerian (n = 11), Bengali (n = 8), Filipina (n = 7), Afghan (n = 7), East African, particularly Eritrean (n = 6), as well as Moroccan, Indonesian, Congolese, and Chinese woman (n = 1 each).

The earliest video in our sample was posted by a Filipina creator in April 2020, while the most recent video came from an East African creator in January 2024. Of the 63 videos collected, we identified the national origin of 36 videos (57.1%) either through the video content or the content of the creator’s profile biography. Most videos with an identifiable national origin (58.3%) were posted from a western country (the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, or an EU country); the rest were posted from one of the following nations: Nigeria, Ghana, Eritrea, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Palestine, the Philippines, or Indonesia. Collectively, the videos in our data set used 664 hashtags, reflecting the diverse and strategic nature of their user engagement. While there was little overlap in the hashtags, the most frequently used were #transition (n = 28), #fyp (n = 27), #traditional (n = 12), and others signaling cultural specificity such as #afghan (n = 8), #bengali (n = 7), and #eid (n = 7). This hashtag usage reflects how creators combine ethnic markers with algorithmic cues to influence TikTok’s recommendation systems, demonstrating how women of color navigate platform logics as they pursue cultural representation.

Our analysis finds that women of color use the outfit transition trend to curate digital performances that center fashion indigenous to their ethnic groups as a form of cultural reclamation. These performances facilitate the emergence of a subaltern cultural digital commons through three key dimensions. First, using TikTok's multimedia features including video filters, hashtags, and captions, these creators reshape aesthetic trends to foreground racialized and gender subjectivities otherwise marginalized in fashion. Ethnic-specific hashtags allow creators to claim cultural specificity, while generic hashtags (e.g., #foryou and #viral) serve as tactical tools to increase visibility across broader audiences. Second, through comment threads, women of color build virtual networks grounded in shared cultural identity and cross-regional affinity. Third, these posts facilitate cross-cultural engagement that reposition women of color as cultural educators and aesthetic authorities within digital fashion spaces. This multifaceted approach illustrates how women of color navigate TikTok as both a creative arena and contested algorithmic terrain, where whiteness and western norms are algorithmically amplified (Steele, 2021a; Steele & Hardy, 2023; Taylor & Abidin, 2024; Zhao & Abidin, 2023). Taken together, these three dimensions represent how diverse groups of women of color engage in collective self-representation on their own terms. Unlike mainstream influencer content, this outfit transition trend permits them to participate in cultural placemaking that challenges the white-dominated visual order of digital fashion culture.

Using TikTok’s Multimedia Features to Promote Ethnic Pride Within Its Participatory Culture

Fashion has long functioned as a site of identity performance and sociocultural expression, particularly in relation to gender and ethnicity (Aspers & Godart, 2013; Choufan, 2021; Sandhu, 2022). TikTok affords users the capacity to perform gendered aesthetics that signal their positionality within intersectional social hierarchies (Aspers & Godart, 2013; Choufan, 2021; Sandhu, 2022). Among women of color, these digital expressions of non-western femininity emerge through embodied cultural performances that leverage the platform’s features in ways that redress historical exclusion and contemporary appropriation (Betlemidze, 2025; Taylor & Abidin, 2024; Zhao & Abidin, 2023). They transform the outfit transition trend into a mechanism for asserting ethnic pride, creating a subaltern digital commons that decenters western apparel and style as the dominant representation of women’s fashion online.

In an October 2023 video, @MiraStyles, a Chicago-based Desi creator, begins by walking away from a gym wearing a t-shirt and workout shorts, attire emblematic of normative western casualness. Above her head, the text reads: “Wish getting ready for garba was this easy,” referencing Garba, a Gujarati circle dance performed during the Hindu festival Navratri (Parmar, 2019). She raises her eyebrows and winks, signaling the upcoming transition. She then places her phone on the ground and conceals the camera lens with her foot, which she humorously acknowledges in the caption “Pls excuse my dirty sock.” Upon reappearing, she wears a vibrant lehenga, smiling directly at the camera and playing with her hair. She gestures to the lehenga’s heavily embroidered neckline and then rhythmically moves the camera to display the outfit from multiple angles. Her transformation is accompanied by “Nagada Sang Dhol,” a song associated with Navratri that is also used by an Australian-based Desi creator she tags as inspiration. The caption also includes ethnic-specific hashtags #desigirl and #navratritransition.

Mira’s transition from gym clothes to a lehenga constitutes a digital expression of Desi femininity through an orchestration of gestures, music, caption, and comment to display a non-western cultural self-presentation. Under British colonial rule, tensions between tradition and westernization became evident in the construction of Indian womanhood through their bodies and clothing choices, particularly the saree. Yet, in contemporary society, South Asian women challenge both the westernization of fashion and the whiteness of online spaces (Sandhu, 2022). Mira demonstrates this when she not only presents herself in a lehenga but also frames her self-presentation as distinctly South Asian through ethnic-specific hashtags and music. This multimodal performance repurposes the outfit transition trend and leverages TikTok’s interactivity to build a cultural digital commons centered on women’s fashion from cultures of the Global South.

Andreas Schellewald (2021) notes that in “communal videos” on TikTok, creators collaborate with friends or family, emphasizing social relationships and shared experiences in a fun and playful way. Our analysis reveals that women of color strategically use communal videos in their outfit transitions to assert authentic representations of non-western femininity in digital spaces. In an October 2021 communal video, @Laila_Mor and another Moroccan woman demonstrate this strategic use of collaborative performance. Initially, without makeup and shaking their heads at their t-shirts and jeans, they step out of frame before returning in flowing kaftans with fully made-up faces, blowing kisses to the viewer. This affective contrast of subtle dissatisfaction to playful contentment functions as an embodied critique that rejects casual western clothing to celebrate Moroccan traditional dress through enhanced femininity.

These Moroccan women’s synchronized performance draws on TikTok’s features to center North African aesthetics within a digital fashion culture that typically marginalizes non-western style. This includes the use of “Habibi x DJ Gimio Albanian remix” as background music and the choice to add #morocco alongside #transition and #foryoupage in their caption. Such choices constitute a demonstration of ethnic pride within an algorithmic system that largely privileges white women as the top-ranking creators in #transition and #foryoupage results. Their communal video, therefore, transforms outfit transitions into a collaborative effort, creating a public space that displays a style of dress that offers an alternative to western aesthetic dominance.

Comment Thread Interactions as Cultural Digital Commoning on Outfit Transition Videos

The collaborative social processes of commoning, in which peers create community to meet shared needs, can facilitate a cultural digital commons characterized by diversity, inclusivity, and reciprocity within online spaces (Euler, 2018; Fuchs, 2021). Such digital spaces provide women of color with new avenues for cultural expression and community building, countering colonial legacies that limited their public visibility and voice (Sandhu, 2022; Taylor & Abidin, 2024; Zhao & Abidin, 2023). We found that through outfit transition videos on TikTok, comment threads function as sites of cultural digital commoning that involve collectively affirming ethnic identity and sharing non-western knowledge around fashion. Through these practices, comment sections on outfit transition posts offer online public spaces for diasporic communities to exchange shared cultural experiences and engage in mutual recognition and support.

Comment threads on these outfit transition posts reveal how cultural digital commoning enables diasporic members to construct public space in which to collectively affirm their ethnocultural identity across geographic distances. On @MiraStyles’s video, which features a lehenga-clad transition for Navratri, the Australian-based Desi creator who inspired the video comments enthusiastically “LOVE THIS!” with heart eye emojis. Another self-described “brown woman,” from the northwestern United States affectionally dubs Mira her “GarBAE.” Like Black women construct a “homespace” via #BlackGirlTikTok (Taylor & Abidin, 2024), these Desi women use comment threads to construct a transnational virtual gathering of diaspora members. These comments demonstrate how digital commoning facilitated through TikTok’s affordances enables the communal practices of the Navratri traditions to transcend temporal and spatial boundaries.

Cultural digital commoning also operates through the ways that the comment threads on these posts repurpose the participatory culture of TikTok to center on shared ethnic identity and history. In October 2022, @MabuhayJoy, a Filipina creator, posted a video featuring a transition from western casual wear to a traditional “Filipiniana” dress. She lip-syncs along to Thundercat’s “Them Changes” with superimposed text about trying on her traditional dress over her head. At the lyrics “on the floor,” the screen cuts from a close-up to a low-angle shot revealing a bedazzled gown. Her caption—“where are all my fellow filipinos??” with a Philippines flag emoji—is followed by several ethnic-specific hashtags like #filipinotiktok and #pinoytiktok. In the comments, one viewer exclaims “Yes ma’am! We love Pinoy representation!,” while others state, “I really want a filipinana!!” and “FILIPINO APOSTOLICS REPRESENT!!!!!!” Such enthusiastic responses transform @MabuhayJoy’s post into a collective space centered on Filipino identity, demonstrating how comment threads functions as sites of “common recognition and respect” (Fuchs, 2021, p. 19) in an online environment.

These examples illustrate how the comment videos on their outfit transition videos reflect how women of color negotiate cultural digital commoning on TikTok as a commercial social media platform. Just as Black TikTokers negotiate the platform’s monetization imperatives to develop a “hustler’s corner” (Steele & Hardy, 2023), women of color construct an alternative digital gathering space that emphasizes intracultural community. These creators’ posts modify a popular trend, otherwise dominated by white women wearing in western fashions, into an opportunity to provide a virtual space for dialog around non-white feminine aesthetics. Their comment sections, therefore, facilitate recognition, affirmation, and knowledge sharing, transforming the TikTok post into a collaborative space that fulfills intracultural connection needs otherwise neglected in mainstream outfit transition content.

Making Space for Cross-Cultural Engagement Within TikTok’s Fashion Content Trends

Historically, the global circulation of western fashion and beauty norms through media like magazines has constructed an ideal femininity shaped by whiteness, causing cultural homogenization and assimilation among non-western women (Yan & Bissell, 2014). In the new media era, western ideals of whiteness, thinness, and bourgeois class status remain the dominant representation of fashion and beauty on social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube (Childs, 2022; Duffy, 2017; Love, 2025; Steele, 2021b). This erasure and exclusion have prompted women of color to not only demand more diverse representation but also create spaces within fashion and beauty culture that prioritize non-white identities (Childs, 2022; Steele, 2021b). We observed that through their creative adaptation of the outfit transition trend, women of color on TikTok similarly establish an alternative digital fashion culture that prioritizes connection over commodification. Unlike the exclusionary climate of mainstream digital fashion culture, these inclusive spaces emphasize non-western styles of dress and facilitate intercultural dialog through comment threads.

Traditional outfit transition videos function as a subaltern digital commons where Global South creators and audiences engage in transnational cultural dialog that decenters the Global North in digital fashion spaces. On @MabuhayJoy’s video, one viewer writes, “for some reason it kinda reminds me of The Xhosa traditional attire.” This observation links the Filipiniana to the aesthetics of an ethnic group indigenous to South Africa through a shared appreciation for vibrant beadwork (Van Wyk, 2003). Indeed, historically, women in both societies learn the craft of garment design from an early age, creating a variety of clothing that also represents the wearer’s status and identity within their communities (Nettleton, 2014; Roces, 2005). Such exchanges exemplify how women of color create alternative online networks outside established fashion and beauty hierarchies to validate and authenticate their non-western cultural identities through recognition of shared traditions (Sandhu, 2022).

Whereas western fashion and beauty brands position white women as embodying fashion and beauty ideals, women of color can reposition themselves as authorities on non-western aesthetic practices in outfit transition videos. In this way, their comment threads function as spaces to educate audiences across different cultural backgrounds on their indigenous fashions. On @Laila_Mor’s video, a white American woman preparing for a trip to Morocco asks if she may wear similar attire as “[I] don’t want to disrespect anyone.” Replies from Moroccan users clarify appropriate etiquette: “Yea as long as you respect it and wear it the right way,” and “morrocans are very happy when people appreciate their culture.” Laila also clarifies with a comment that the garments are traditionally worn for weddings and are not appropriate for everyday casual wear. Thus, this cross-cultural exchange imparts knowledge to a cultural outsider while also emphasizing the importance of respectful engagement with Global South traditions, especially when navigating within its borders.

Outfit transition videos also enable women of color to reconstruct diasporic connections that colonialism severed, challenging the paradoxical fragmentation of the Global South facilitated by western cultural imperialism. In a February 2022 video, US-based Ghanaian creator @AkosuaVibes uses Black American pop star Beyoncé’s “Hey Mrs. Carter!” intro to anchor her transition. Standing in a bathrobe and bonnet with Kente cloth in hand, she stands below superimposed text that reads “Happy Black History Monthssssss and Yearsss.” When Beyoncé shouts “Gimme some,” before a beat drop, @AkosuaVibes drops the fabric and waves her hands before the camera before reappearing in a headwrap and dress. In a way, this display reunifies Black America and West Africa, as her caption reinforces with hashtags #blackhistory and #africantiktok. In addition, while Kente cloth originates from Ghana, it also holds meaning as a symbol of ethnic pride for descendants of slavery throughout the African diaspora (Ross, 1998). The comments further reinforce this celebration of Black/African heritage as Nigerian and Black American viewers exclaim “BEAUTIFUL AFRICAN QUEEN!” and “Black is Beautiful.” Ultimately, these Black women make space for Pan-African solidarity within digital fashion culture through cross-continental affirmation of shared diasporic aesthetics.

From Outfit Transitions to Cultural Reclamation: Gendered Ethnic Placemaking on TikTok

This study investigated how women of color repurpose TikTok’s outfit transition trend into an online public space in which to assert ethnic pride, build digital communities, and foster cross-cultural engagement. Building on critical digital studies of race and gender, we examine how platform’s features (e.g., hashtags and comments) shape the formation of diverse communities within a digital environment marked by algorithmic bias toward whiteness (Betlemidze, 2025; Steele, 2021a; Taylor & Abidin, 2024). Our findings indicate that women of color use TikTok’s outfit transition trend to display indigenous fashions, thereby subverting the dominance of western style within TikTok’s fashion-related content. Despite visibility challenges, they engage in non-western cultural placemaking on TikTok that facilitates demonstrations of ethnic pride that resonates within and beyond their own communities. We, therefore, argue women of color use the outfit transition trend to practice gendered and racialized aesthetics alternative to an idealized construction of femininity on social media privileging whiteness (Childs, 2022; Duffy, 2017; Noble, 2018; Steele & Hardy, 2023; Taylor & Abidin, 2024). Through these practices, they construct a subaltern digital commons that amplifies Global South identities and cultural practices, rather than conforming to western norms of individualism and assimilation.

Traditional outfit transition videos go beyond the use of clothing as self-expression to carve out online space for aesthetic reclamation that contests the dominant norms that characterize TikTok’s fashion content. By showcasing their ethnic wear, women of color creators subvert the pressure to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards, which prioritize lighter skin, thinner body types, and modern western fashion (Childs, 2022; Love, 2025; Yan & Bissell, 2014). Rather than reinforce the individualism valorized in western fashion culture (Duffy, 2017; Norris & Cantoni, 2022), women of color use outfit transitions to highlight indigenous garments that reflect their communal values and ancestral heritage. Reclaiming non-western styles of dress within digital space directly challenges the assimilationist pressures of western colonial powers that have historically compelled people of color to abandon their indigenous cultural traditions, including clothing (Greensword, 2022; Pitts, 2021; Roy et al., 2024; Sandhu, 2022; Yan & Bissell, 2014). Our findings, therefore, offer new insights into how the appropriation of popular digital practices can enable a means of ethnoracial self-determination despite the normative whiteness of digital society.

Through a reinterpretation of the outfit transition trend, women of color reclaim their voice and visibility within digital infrastructures shaped by colonial dynamics of racialized exploitation (Brock, 2020; Noble, 2018). In contrast to historical exclusion, these spaces empower the subaltern to “speak” (Spivak, 1988/2023) through online cultural expression and community formation. By leveraging TikTok’s features, particularly hashtags and comments, these creators strategically pursue visibility, transforming fashion content into a vehicle for building affective, diasporic publics grounded in shared cultural belonging. Ethnic-specific hashtags like #filipinotiktok or #navratitransition signal ethnic identity and help creators cultivate networked publics around shared cultural experiences. These hashtags act as digital signposts that invite others from the same ethnic background to connect and participate in intracultural exchange (Brock, 2020; Taylor & Abidin, 2024). In addition, comments act as spaces of affirmation, where women of color offer each other encouragement and recognition, expressing support through simple but meaningful messages like “[Ethnic group] are beautiful!” These interactions sustain cultural connection across borders, allowing diasporic users to engage in transnational acts of identification and celebration. Taken together, these practices instantiate Fuchs’ (2021) “cultural digital commons”: cooperative, peer-organized meaning-making that sustains recognition and belonging in digitally mediated communities.

Yet, this online cultural placemaking only partially aligns with this framework, since TikTok is a commercially owned, content-focused platform that prioritizes processes of digital capitalism (e.g., monetization and self-branding) (Abidin, 2020). Thus, while we did not identify a “hustler’s corner” (Steele & Hardy, 2023), our corpus sits alongside evidence of a platform economy in which influencers, often white women, obtain fashion/beauty sponsorships (Childs, 2022; Duffy, 2017). Platform logics shape this dynamic as the search results and “For You” pages boost memetic formats and reward trend-conforming content (Schellewald, 2021; Zulli & Zulli, 2020), within algorithmic systems that frequently amplify whiteness (Betlemidze, 2025; Noble, 2018). Indeed, the more highly ranked outfit transition videos on TikTok show white women advertising clothing, makeup, and other products from fashion and beauty brands in the Global North.

Nevertheless, the videos we analyzed repurpose the platform’s participatory culture toward cultural rather than market exchanges as creators cultivate transnational publics via hashtags and comment threads that enact intercultural dialog. Thus, crafting a subaltern digital commons involves constantly negotiating platform affordances around visibility, as seen in techniques like pairing generic hashtags or trending audios with digital signifiers of ethnic identity. As such, while women of color foreground ethnic heritage in their outfit transitions, they also navigate TikTok’s attention economy to extend their reach as they center non-western representations of femininity. Our findings, therefore, complement Sandhu’s (2022) study of the #100sareepact on Facebook, demonstrating that TikTok is also a platform in which women of color “decolonize long-held Eurocentric . . . conventions of the fashion industry” (p. 403). To some degree, their digital practices, such as the use of hashtags to demarcate content centered on ethnoracial identity and culture, also mirror the signaling of identity through #BlackGirlTikTok (Taylor & Abidin, 2024). However, we are careful not to label the practices we observed as constructing a digital homespace, as this concept encompasses a wide range of content and users from one ethnoracial group. In contrast, our findings suggest that traditional outfit transition videos used women’s fashion to facilitate both intra- and intercultural connections.

While our findings are compelling, they are bounded by our purposive sampling strategy of selecting only self-identified women of color and a cross-sectional corpus of 63 outfit transition videos. This sample, therefore, excludes creators who do not state their ethnicity and may not capture the full range of practices associated with the outfit transition trend. In addition, cultural and technological variation across regions may influence how different societies use social media, potentially limiting our interpretations to regions not represented among the women we observed. For instance, all the women we identified from African countries belong to nations with the highest rates of social media adoption on the continent (Onyango, 2024). Furthermore, over half of the 59 creators identified for this analysis resided in the Global North, implying that the reclamation of indigenous fashions may be more popular among emigrants. For these reasons, future research should examine if these patterns emerge among women of color using TikTok in different geographic or sociopolitical contexts. In addition, future investigations might explore how longer-term participation in digital fashion culture shapes identity formation and resistance to aesthetic assimilation.

Our findings may also have limited generalizability beyond TikTok as different platforms, such as YouTube or Instagram, have different affordances that shape the social phenomena within a particular platform (Bucher & Helmond, 2017; Davis, 2020; Schrock, 2015). TikTok’s recommendation algorithm likely shaped what we observed during data collection, and personalized feeds may have obscured less visible creators, especially those not using hashtags (Schellewald, 2021; Zulli & Zulli, 2020). Furthermore, the ways that different algorithmic systems shape visibility have impact on marginalized groups that face bias and inequity as users of various digital technologies (Betlemidze, 2025; Brock, 2020; Noble, 2018; Steele, 2021b; Taylor & Abidin, 2024). Comparative studies to other content-focused platforms might clarify how their affordances and algorithms mediate ethnic identity expression and community building within various digital fashion spaces. Finally, this study does not consider how platform governance, such as content moderation policies, could result in the uneven amplification or suppression of content from women of color on TikTok. A study that takes up such research questions may further elucidate the circumstances under which a subaltern digital commons emerges (or fails to do so) within commercial social media platforms.

Conclusion

This study illustrates how women of color use TikTok’s outfit transition trend to assemble ethnocultural publics that subvert the dominance of western fashion norms online. Our analysis of 63 outfit transition videos by self-identified women of color identifies the concrete mechanisms by which a viral trend becomes a cultural digital commons. Through ethnic-specific tagging and captions that invite affirmational comments, these posts turn outfit transitions into spaces for intracultural bonding and intercultural exchange within a commercial, algorithmically white-dominated platform. These practices reframe digital fashion content as communal placemaking rather than individual self-branding, clarifying when and how non-western aesthetics become visible in digital spaces. Importantly, our findings show that the discoverability of ethnic-specific content through hashtags and interactions within comments sustains community cohesion within these non-western fashion-oriented publics. Ultimately, we find that women of color demonstrate resilience and ingenuity in a digital world shaped by colonial legacies, uplifting cultural traditions that history once sought to erase, one stitch at a time.