What People Were Actually Buying at the End of Summer
August came with a lot of noise – Nordstrom’s Anniversary Sale running its full month-long course, Copenhagen Fashion Week feeding the algorithm with street style content – and somewhere in all that, a clear pattern of purchases emerged among Refinery29 readers. Not aspirational picks. Not editor wish lists. Actual carts, checked out, confirmed.
The dominant categories were narrower than you’d expect: drawstring and barrel-cut pants, red skirts, fruity fragrances, and limited body care sets. A Lululemon bag. A Zara perfume that nobody saw coming. A hoodie from a brand called Comfrt that went viral and then sold. This is a breakdown of where the money actually went.
The Pants That Won August
Free People’s Something Good Pull-On Barrel Pants weren’t just popular – they were the single most-purchased product among Refinery29 readers in August, and it wasn’t close. The silhouette is part of a wider shift happening in street style: drawstring waists, barrel cuts, and relaxed legs are moving through Copenhagen’s fashion week crowds and into mainstream closets at the same time, which almost never happens this cleanly.
These particular pants feature skinny stripes and a pull-on construction, which positions them squarely at the intersection of comfort dressing and something you’d actually wear outside. They’re available at Free People and are being treated as a fall transition piece – the kind of item that works through September before anyone has to think too hard about layering. That they hit number one in August, still technically summer, says something about how early people are mentally committing to the next season’s wardrobe.
Zara’s Perfume Section Has Been Hiding Something
Refinery29 Senior Beauty Writer Karina Hoshikawa hadn’t paid much attention to Zara’s fragrance line until she finally tested a range of scents for a formal review. The piece landed, readers clicked through, and two specific bottles sold. One was a tropical coconut eau de parfum, positioned as a last-gasp-of-summer option. The other was the Applejuice Eau de Toilette – a crisp, early-fall scent that readers went for harder.
The Applejuice EDT is the kind of fragrance name that should be a liability but isn’t. It reads accurately: green, slightly sweet, clean rather than cloying. At Zara’s price point, it’s functioning as a seasonal refresh for people who aren’t ready to drop serious money on a niche bottle but still want something that doesn’t smell like a department store sample. The fact that it came from a clothing retailer’s in-house fragrance line rather than a dedicated perfume brand is part of what’s making it circulate.
Fruity fragrances more broadly had a strong August, which tracks with how fragrance preference tends to lag slightly behind the calendar – people reach for lighter, brighter scents in late summer even as temperatures start to dip. The broader conversation around fall fragrance has been pushing back against heavy gourmands, and a crisp apple scent fits neatly into that counter-movement.
What Hoshikawa’s review demonstrated, more than anything, is that Zara’s perfume section has been quietly building a product line that can hold its own in a month-end bestseller list. That’s not a small thing when the competition includes brands whose entire identity is fragrance.
The Skirt and the Hoodie
The Alex Mill Maya Linen Skirt and the Comfrt hoodie filled out the apparel side of August’s list, representing two different ends of the aesthetic spectrum. The linen skirt skews toward the dressed-up, European-influenced summer wardrobe that Copenhagen Fashion Week reliably amplifies every year. The Comfrt hoodie went viral – which is its own category of sales driver, separate from editorial coverage or styling inspiration.
Red skirts appeared as a recurring category across August purchases, not just a single item. The color has been building for several seasons and hit a kind of critical mass this summer where it stopped feeling directional and started feeling like a wardrobe staple decision. That’s usually the moment a trend stops being tracked by fashion editors and starts showing up in sales data instead.
Nordstrom’s Sale and What It Means for Fall Shopping Now
Nordstrom’s Anniversary Sale ran across August and generated its own wave of reader purchases – with the retailer’s fall sale now extending the discount window, several of those items are still available at reduced prices. The sale functions as an early entry point into fall inventory, which is why it tends to surface things like transitional pants and layering pieces rather than peak-summer items.
Lululemon bags also appeared in the top purchases, continuing the brand’s expansion beyond athletic wear into accessories that people carry regardless of whether they’re heading to a workout. It’s a category Lululemon has been building carefully, and the August numbers suggest it’s working.
The body care category showed up in the form of exclusive sets – limited configurations that create purchase urgency separate from the products themselves. Whether those sets return in the same form for fall is the question sitting underneath the August data, particularly for readers who missed them the first time around.
The full Refinery29 August bestseller list spans fashion, beauty, and lifestyle products, with all picks independently selected by their editors. Many of the Nordstrom items remain discounted through the retailer’s fall sale. The Zara Applejuice Eau de Toilette is still available at Zara. The Free People Something Good Pull-On Barrel Pants are at Free People. And the Comfrt hoodie – the one that went viral – is the kind of item where stock availability tends to answer that question faster than any trend forecast.
