Culture Predictions for 2026

Speaking of: “chic” has reached its final form as a lazy, meaningless catchall. Candidates for the term’s replacement include “advanced,” “progressive,” and “considered.”

Scrolling will be viewed as a vice, in the same impropriety quadrant as vaping. In an attempt to mitigate brainrot, which has already become the norm, expect an appetite for more satisfying, longer forms of consumption as we move away from shortform video and AI slop: longform narratives, books, and other media that make our smooth brains work a little harder. This will become more pronounced when American TikTok rolls out its new and presumably less addictive algorithm.

I spend far too much time texting with Jake Woolf about this, but in menswear, skinny jeans won’t so much stage a comeback as they will re-enter the zeitgeist as a marker of advanced dressing (see: Hedi Boys). The current state of men’s shoe-pants interactions, however, means that the tapered, skintight silhouette of the mid-aughts—in which skinnies look good with Chelsea boots, Chuck Taylors, and not much else—will give way to a slight flare at the bottom; think less the Strokes and more early At the Drive-In.

The mass adoption of GLP-1 will trigger a reckoning with skinny as a desired aesthetic, especially as celebrities continue to shrink. (Karl Lagerfeld is currently turning over in his grave, not eating anything.) But rather than a return to the body inclusivity movement of the 2010s, we’ll see new and arguably healthier status markers. The defining aesthetic of the late 2020s will be Genderless Swole: muscles, strong shoulders, crushing thighs. Less Hedi Slimane’s runway models of the aughts and more Willy Chavarria’s current fleet of beefcakes. What says luxury like having the time and space to hit the weight room?

Unfortunately, that also means everything at the supermarket—Pop-Tarts, soda, whipped cream—will still have added protein jammed into it, with creatine warming up on the sidelines, waiting for its moment in the limelight.

Emoji have gotten too complex, too visually stimulating. They are the apotheosis of millennial cringe. (Which is different from your standard variety cringe; see below.) Expect to see a return to T9-style emoticons, like Ü, <3, ._., and a favorite for real ones, &hearts;

Online, we will see a return to COVID-era aesthetics: lo-fi, DIY, and self-made expressions of art and digital media, often taken through Photobooth. Campaigns that are too ritzy and polished will be instinctively ignored.

As the critic and journalist Max Berlinger pointed out a few months ago, sagging and low-rise bottoms will soon be everywhere, part and parcel of the runway trickle-down. “There’s always a new erogenous zone in fashion—the legs, the breasts, the stomach, the shoulder,” he wrote earlier this year. “This season, there seems to be a real emphasis on the hips.”

Clothing brands will continue to move away from the use of synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester (high in microplastics, which disperse in the wash) in favor of high-vibration natural materials like organic cotton and wool. Better for the environment and your aura.

Ms. Rachel will continue to be our most important celebrity.

We will see the culture move away from traditional hottie influencers, especially of the travel and foodie variety. Privilege, specifically the unexamined kind, will skew as particularly noxious. Expect a Great Unfollowing.

Cringe will be embraced, because to be cringe means to try. As the past year has shown us, our time is increasingly fragile and limited, so there’s little excuse not to.

Chris Gayomali is the editor of SSENSE.