What TikTok wants for Christmas

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With Christmas a month and change away, the latest Gen-Z TikTok trend is to post a “Christmas List” on the platform. The hashtag #christmaslist had 394.6 million views as of Thursday afternoon.

“TikTok is home to a new kind of shopping culture that’s fueled by the community’s love of product discovery,” said a TikTok representative. “We’re seeing creators sharing gift ideas and their favorite brands in a simple but entertaining way. It’s inspiring people ahead of the holiday shopping season.”

It actually is that simple. The large majority of videos are set to “Jingle Bell Rock” and feature a creator (usually a young girl) posing or dancing for the camera before launching a slideshow of what they want this year.

That said, it’s likely that their parents and relatives are not on TikTok. The point of posting, really? To serve as a way to telegraph one’s taste and trend awareness.

“TikTok has evolved as a place for product discovery, and people curating products as a way to signal their tastes is a natural extension of, say, posting your Halloween costume,” said Larry Milstein, co-founder of PRZM, a Gen-Z-focused marketing agency. “This is the equivalent, for the holiday season, of a tastemaker building their community to show their recommendations. If you have a solid enough following, people will really care what you pick.” Notably, it’s actually less about what you want to receive and more about “what you want to show to the world,” said Milstein.

As for the products themselves, I watched over 100 #ChristmasList videos to answer a simple question: What does TikTok want for Christmas? I’ll get into the specifics. But first, some general categorical trends. There’s a lot of self-care, a lot of sneakers, and athleisure is still important. Lululemon leggings, plus sweatsuits of one sort or another, pop up in countless videos. Faux fur and fuzzy socks are ubiquitous. Furthermore, “avant basic” isn’t over, and the mid-aughts obsession is still in full swing. I even clocked a number of “Please Return to Tiffany’s” items, which is perhaps the biggest-ever signal that fashion is cyclical. All in all, it seems my wardrobe circa seventh grade would have been very cool this Christmas.

Finally, there’s the question of accessibility. Though many of TikTok’s most wanted items are not super high-end, extremely pricey gifts, these videos are “happening against the backdrop of supply chain shortages,” said Milstein. He noted that “the idea of wish lists are even more powerful and profound because these items are truly coveted and some are truly difficult to get — not because of purchasing power, but because it’s just hard this holiday season to find certain inventory.”