In Fashion and Style Trends of 2013, "Thrift Shop" and Miley Cyrus Mashups It was an unexpected goofball hit that caught music industry pundits dozing in their rocking chairs. It was an exuberant success celebrating the sartorial joys of pajama bottoms worn as daywear, Grandpa's plaid cardigans and moth-bitten leopard-print mink. It was "Thrift Shop," of course, the ode by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis to the democratic joys of the bargain bin, where "one man's trash is another man's come-up." For a generation of digital natives accustomed to ransacking the Internet for goods and ideas floating free from a contextual matrix, "Thrift Shop" was more than a chart topper. It was a metaphor. We live in a thrift shop culture, compelled by daily, hourly and constantly refreshed trips to the Goodwill outlet that is the web. There we find all the stuff for assembling the "curated" selves who experts say are the new American trendsetters, D.I.Y. solipsists. Like Macklemore, we repurpose, we mash up, we grab things off the sale rack and try it on for size. Nowhere was this clearer in 2013 than in the evolution of style. Despite the best efforts of luxury-goods manufacturers and their attendant lap-dog press, fashion seemed to have mislaid the capital "F." Sure, Fashion happened. Designers threw up tents in Milan and New York and Paris and mounted their accustomed circuses. Yet the shrewdest among them - Marc Jacobs, who telegraphed his impending retirement from Louis Vuitton with a show of dark lace and feathers and ratted-up jeans suggestive of Courtney Love on her way to a black mass; and Rick Owens, who imported four spirited American stepping groups populated by women of all shapes and sizes to perform on his Paris runway - seemed intent on sending admirers a secret message. Fashion stales when it becomes too hermetic and top-down, when it shuts out compelling news from the wider world. You could see the truth of this on any street of any great fashion capital, or distilled in slide shows by gifted paparazzi like Tommy Ton. Just discernible amid the blurring loop of Mr. Ton's images from 2013 was a stealthy through-line, an edited overview of how fluidly consumers have absorbed the myriad lessons of the last decade of fashion. The particulars are as fuzzy-familiar as an old afghan blanket. They are the institutionalization of high-low dressing, ripped jeans worn to take the mumsy edge off a $5,000 jacket from Chanel; a catholicity of reference that somehow makes sartorial sense of guys in Brunello Cucinelli parkas sporting "Duck Dynasty" beards; and, as always, a respectful nod to designer goods, though worn with a knowing wink. A picture springs to mind of Joan Smalls, currently ranked as the No. 1 model by the website models.com, darting through the Tuileries gardens in Paris clad in chic Balenciaga boots, a roughed-up motorcycle jacket and glorified gym shorts from the urban label Hood by Air. Best about the image was the bravura nonchalance people like Ms. Smalls (and also Rihanna and ... well, it's a short list, since the majority of celebrities remain in the employ of major labels or in the clutches of Rasputin stylists) brought to the show, and the way an innately style-savvy performer like Miley Cyrus turned fashion to her own exuberant freak-show purposes. It was as though, in the past year, beleaguered consumers decided to take back fashion, to follow Macklemore's lead and scour the cultural sale rack for what's already hanging around. In the process they rediscovered the durable qualities of Made in U.S.A. labels like Filson and also only-in-America garments like Daisy Dukes. That company's designer, Shayne Oliver, openly draws inspiration from microcultures like the voguing ballroom children, naming as sources people like Willi Ninja, a dancer who, while he inspired Madonna's "Vogue," was unlikely to be name-checked by that particular magazine. And that's too bad, since it seems more than ever uncool to "quote" street culture without noting your sources, to reference brands like HBA - as the designer Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy seemed to last year - without crediting them. How much wittier it seemed when Virgil Abloh, Kanye West's creative director, revealed to Style.com that the point of departure for Mr. West's Off-White label was a personal obsession with Martha Stewart and preppy Nantucket style. His collection, which sells at Colette in Paris and in Miami at the Webster, included espadrilles. "No one wears espadrilles in the hood," Mr. Abloh said. But they will. And looking back on some of the most influential street fashion produced in 2013 - oddly proportioned, ostentatiously graphic, playfully toying with conventions of gender and class - a remark Mr. Oliver made to Garmento magazine seemed oddly prophetic. "How not fashion can your piece be," he asked, "but still be really fashion." As a mission statement his was not so far from Macklemore's faux-macho boast in "Thrift Shop" that his swagger was so bold he could even rock 99-cent Pro Wings from Payless and wow the sneaker heads. "We're in a period where people who are interested in fashion can be so, without feeling restricted by any sort of overarching trend dictation or norm," said Annie Georgia Greenberg, style editor of the lifestyle site Refinery29. People her age, said Ms. Greenberg, who is 24, "feel more free to have their own interpretation of fashion. The Internet has made that possible. Just as the weirdest finds can look suddenly right in a thrift shop mirror, illogical, oddball pairings make visual sense in the value-neutral sphere of the web: Ms. Cyrus's teddy bears and mini backpacks worn with Chanel bags; onesies and jailbait shorts; a haircut that seemed swiped from "Butch," Kanithea Powell's photographic study of lesbian style; and a cropped Minnie Mouse T-shirt worn with Manolo Blahnik pumps to the Marc Jacobs show during New York Fashion Week.