The Future of Luxury. The Future of Work. The Future of Hospitality. The Future of Retail.

On LinkedIn, everyone seems to know what’s coming next.

On TikTok, every aesthetic is declared “the next big thing” before it has even happened.

The future has become an industry.

Hell, in my own way, I’m part of the BIG TREND industrial complex myself.

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Does it all stem from Covid?

We didn’t became obsessed with trends because we became better at predicting the future. I think we became obsessed with trends because the future became much harder to imagine.

COVID wasn’t simply a health crisis. It was a crisis of certainty.

Entire business models disappeared overnight. The agency I worked at at the time lost 80% of revenue overnight.

Consumer behaviour changed in weeks instead of years. Every assumption about work, travel, retail and hospitality was suddenly negotiable.

When certainty collapsed, strategy changed with it.

Instead of asking: What do we know?

Businesses increasingly started asking: What might happen next?

That’s when trend reports stopped being niche documents and became the currency in every marketing, strategy, and commercial meeting. The less predictable the world became, the more valuable the promise of prediction appeared.

But therein lies the paradox

What happens when millions of people start reading the same predictions?

But was that inevitable? Or did enough people believing the prediction make it true? Sociologist Robert K. Merton called this the self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief can alter people’s behaviour in ways that eventually make the belief come true.

Stories have explored the same paradox for centuries.

In Harry Potter, the prophecy itself isn’t what determines the future. It’s Voldemort’s decision to act on it that sets the events in motion.In Oedipus Rex, every attempt to escape fate becomes another step towards fulfilling it.

The prophecy doesn’t simply describe the future. It changes the behaviour of the people who hear it.

Perhaps trends work the same way.

The Zeigeist before the Algorithm

Of course, none of this is entirely new. Cultures have always had a zeitgeist.

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modernism, postmodernism.

These weren’t trends in the social media sense. They were broad shifts in how societies understood themselves. The difference was that they were only visible in retrospect. Nobody living through the Renaissance called it “The Renaissance.” The pattern emerged after the fact.

Today, something has fundamentally changed. For the first time, we’re trying to name the zeitgeist while we’re still inside it.

We’re constantly asking: “What’s the next aesthetic?” “What’s the next consumer shift?” “What’s the next generation?”

The present has become obsessed with narrating itself.

What the algorithm can't do

Social media, and now AI, have accelerated this process.

Algorithms are extraordinary pattern recognition machines. In many ways, they’re already better than humans at identifying emerging clusters, spotting weak signals and surfacing patterns across millions of conversations.

A language model can tell you that “girlification” appears alongside “girl dinner”, “girl maths” and “girl hobbies”. It can tell you those terms are increasing in frequency. It can even predict where they might spread next.

But recognising patterns isn’t the same as understanding them. It can’t tell you why those ideas suddenly resonate. It can’t explain what they reveal about status, identity or culture, because that leap isn’t statistical. It’s interpretive.

And that’s where strategy begins. Perhaps this changes what we should expect from strategists altogether.

For years, we’ve behaved as though our job was to predict the future. To identify the next trend, the next consumer or the next aesthetic. But prediction is becoming abundant. The real scarcity is meaning.

The strategist of the AI era won’t be the person who spots the pattern first. They’ll be the person who creates the framework that gives the pattern meaning. Because signals become patterns, that become narratives, that shape decisions. And decisions, made by enough people, have a habit of becoming reality.

Maybe that’s the real paradox.

The future isn’t written by the people who predict it. It’s written by the people whose interpretation becomes the story everyone else decides to believe.

/ Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

I’m writing this from San Francisco: a city of billboards and billionaires.

The drive from the airport feels like passing through an open-air gallery of technological optimism. AI startups promise to reinvent work. Venture-backed companies advertise products so abstract they often border on incomprehensible. Some signs don’t even explain what they do. They simply project confidence: a logo, a cryptic slogan, a declaration that they are building the future.

It feels strangely appropriate.

If Paris was the city of cafés, and New York the city of skyscrapers, San Francisco has become the city of the speculative future. And nothing documents that future quite like its billboards.

Which raises an interesting question. Why are billboards still here?

For twenty years we’ve been told that the internet would make them obsolete. Why rent an enormous piece of roadside real estate when Meta can target precisely the right person at precisely the right moment? Surely the billboard belongs to the same category as fax machines, Yellow Pages and DVD rental stores.

Except it doesn’t. In fact, it feels as though billboards are enjoying a renaissance.

Why?

Billboards have never really been about advertising.

A few weeks ago, I came across a quote at Tate Modern:

“Billboards capture and encapsulate ideology, the social, economic and political climate at any given time.”

They’re one of civilisation’s oldest public mirrors.

Every society needs somewhere to project itself. Somewhere to announce what it values, what it fears, what it aspires to become. Long before advertising agencies existed, before ATL or BTL, public walls performed exactly this function.

Ancient Rome covered its cities with painted notices announcing political campaigns, gladiatorial games and commercial transactions. The surviving walls of Pompeii reveal election slogans, business advertisements and public declarations scratched directly into architecture. Medieval Europe nailed royal proclamations and religious notices to church doors because churches were the closest thing society had to a shared public feed.

Public communication has always required public surfaces - not a hyper-personal surface like your phone.

California gave us the billboard

Paris gave us the poster, when, in nineteenth-century Paris, printing advancements allowed artists like Jules Chéret or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to define a new medium.

A few decades later, California gave us the billboard. The rise of the automobile fundamentally changed how cities were experienced.

Los Angeles became one of the first major cities designed around the car rather than walking. Buildings no longer communicated primarily with pedestrians. They communicated with drivers travelling at forty or fifty miles an hour.

Architecture suddenly had competition. The sign became more important than the building itself.

Few people understood this better than architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. In Learning from Las Vegas, they argued that cities like Las Vegas had replaced traditional architecture with symbolism. Buildings had become signs. Communication mattered more than form.

The casino wasn’t memorable because of its structure, it was memorable because of its neon.

The billboard wasn’t simply an object placed beside architecture, it had become architecture.

An architecture of attention.

Artists understood this before marketers did

Throughout the twentieth century, artists repeatedly returned to the billboard because they recognised its extraordinary cultural power.

Andy Warhol didn’t paint Campbell’s Soup because he loved soup. Pop Art wasn’t celebrating advertising. It was acknowledging that advertising had become impossible to ignore.

Barbara Kruger later appropriated the bold typography and visual grammar of advertising to question consumerism, identity and power. Works like I Shop Therefore I Am borrowed the confidence of commercial slogans only to turn them back against the culture that produced them.

Jenny Holzer did something similar with language itself. Her famous Truisms appeared on LED displays, billboards and public projections, replacing sales messages with unsettling philosophical observations. “Protect me from what I want.” “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.”

Suddenly the billboard wasn’t selling anything. It was asking questions.

Perhaps the most interesting example came from Félix González-Torres. His enormous black-and-white billboard photographs appeared among commercial advertisements with no branding and no explanation. A photograph of an empty bed following the death of his partner became one of the most quietly devastating public artworks of the twentieth century.

The city itself became the gallery, the billboard became the canvas.

Then the internet happened

For years we assumed digital media would replace outdoor media.

But, instead, it transformed its purpose. The billboard no longer exists primarily to reach passing traffic, it exists to become content.

Rhode’s giant skincare billboards circulate online far beyond the streets they’re on.

Alix Earle, one of the internet’s most recognisable creators, launched her latest business not with an post but with a cryptic billboard that sent fans into detective mode.

At Coachella, the roadside billboards have become almost as anticipated as the festival itself. Artists compete not simply for visibility but for the most photographed billboard on the drive into the desert.

The billboard isn’t the media, the photograph of the billboard is.

The economics of scarcity

I don’t think this is really an advertising story. I think it’s an economic one. The internet solved distribution: everyone can publish (case in point). Everyone can create, everyone can advertise.

When something becomes abundant, something else becomes valuable.

So what’s the antithesis of the screen? Physicality. Scale. Presence.

A billboard occupies space in a way no Instagram post ever can. It interrupts your journey, it casts a shadow, it temporarily changes the city itself. It exists whether you choose to engage with it or not, which is very much the opposite of the way algorithms work.

Ironically, the internet has increased the value of physical experiences because physical experiences have become scarce. We’ve spent two decades looking down at screens and feeds.

The billboard asks us to perform the now unnatural act of looking up.

The Future Archaeology of Billboards

I increasingly wonder whether billboards function less like advertisements and more like archaeological evidence. Imagine an apocalyptic scenario that sees our civilisation almost fully erased. Future historians probably won’t study our TikTok algorithms, but they’ll study what we chose to make physically visible.

Today, our billboards are full of AI, selling longevity, productivity, startups, the promise of infinite optimisation.

Twenty years ago they were full of mobile phones, thirty years ago they sold cigarettes and soft drinks.

Each generation covers its walls with its mythology. The billboard survives because mythology survives. Perhaps that’s why it has outlived so many supposedly superior technologies.

Billboards aren’t really competing with digital media, they are documenting civilisation.

Every era leaves behind monuments - cathedrals, statues. Ours builds billboards.

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/ Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

It’s a chore coat. Unlined, boxy, patch pockets at the chest. The kind of thing worn by line cooks, market traders, workshop technicians - people who work with their hands in environments where you need to be able to move freely and not care too much about the fabric. Functional, unpretentious, with a long history in the service and agricultural industries of France and Japan before workwear became a subcultural signifier.

This one has a small logo on the chest. It says Palantir.

Palantir Technologies is one of the most powerful and feared data and AI companies on the planet. Named after the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings, founded with CIA seed funding, it is a company whose core business is building surveillance and intelligence infrastructure for governments and militaries. They process data at a scale and with an opacity that makes most of Silicon Valley look transparent.

They chose a chore jacket as their cultural signifier. Not a hoodie or a a branded fleece. Not the default tech company merchandise of the last thirty years. A workwear piece, borrowed directly from the service industry.

And they’re not alone.

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AI Pivots to Physical Objects

OpenAI has a rice cooker (amongst hundreds of other physical merch drops). Lockheed Martin, the defence contractor that makes fighter jets and missile systems, dropped a streetwear collection.

The most powerful technology and defence companies in the world are suddenly obsessed with physical, tangible, human objects. Objects with texture. Objects associated with domestic life, service work, craft. Objects that communicate the opposite of what these companies actually do.

There’s a word for what they’re doing: taste-washing.

Lockheed Martin streetwear

Taste-washing is the strategic use of cultural credibility to make an institution feel more human than it actually is. Not greenwashing (the performance of environmental ethics); not woke-washing (the performance of progressive values). Taste-washing is more subtle and in some ways more interesting. It’s the deployment of aesthetic intelligence to soften power - the chore jacket as PR.

The question is: whose taste are they borrowing? And why does that particular taste carry credibility right now?

The Jacket’s Long Journey

Before we talk about what Palantir is doing with this jacket, we need to talk about what the jacket has already been.

The chore coat has one of the most politically loaded histories of any garment in existence. And everyone who has ever worn one has borrowed something from everyone who wore it before.

It begins in utility. The French bleu de travail - the blue work jacket - was the literal uniform of agricultural and industrial labour in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hardwearing cotton or linen, indigo-dyed because the dye was cheap and the colour didn’t show dirt. This is where blue-collar comes from. Not a metaphor - an actual colour, worn by actual workers, to do actual physical work. The jacket as pure function, before it meant anything beyond itself.

Then it became a symbol. The Soviet Union elevated the dress of the worker to the dress of the revolutionary. Workwear as ideology - the aesthetics of labour made political. And nowhere more completely than in Mao’s China, where the Cultural Revolution made the zhongshan suit, the Mao jacket, into a uniform of deliberate egalitarianism. Seventy million people in the same silhouette. The elimination of class distinction through clothing, enforced by the state. The work jacket as political project.

Then the artists got hold of it. Picasso wore worker’s clothes as a statement of solidarity; the painter as comrade, not bourgeois. Post-war European intellectuals adopted the vocabulary of working dress as anti-establishment signifier. The smock, the work jacket, the apron. Making things with your hands as moral position. The jacket borrowed from labour and lent to art.

Then the hipsters got hold of it. The 2000s workwear revival swept through Williamsburg and Shoreditch and every other neighbourhood in the process of gentrifying. Heritage brands - Carhartt, Dickies, Engineered Garments - became cult objects precisely as the industries that originally produced them were collapsing. The coal mines were closing; the chore coat was on the mood board. The lumbersexual aesthetic peaked in cities where nobody had touched an axe. Workwear as nostalgia for a working class the wearer had never belonged to.

Then the luxury houses got hold of it. Lemaire, Margaret Howell, A.P.C. The chore coat refined, in deadstock Japanese selvedge cotton, for three hundred and fifty pounds. The garment of manual labour, elevated into the vocabulary of quiet luxury. Aspirational austerity. The jacket as the thing you buy when you want to signal that you’re too sophisticated to signal.

And now Palantir.

Each iteration borrowed the credibility of the one before it. Each step further from the original meaning. Each wearing of the jacket a kind of translation - something carried forward, something lost, something added. The worker’s jacket becoming the revolutionary’s jacket becoming the artist’s jacket becoming the hipster’s jacket becoming the luxury piece becoming the AI company’s merch drop.

This is the latest in a very long line. But it might be the most revealing moment in the jacket’s history. Because every previous appropriation at least maintained a plausible relationship to the values the garment originally encoded - labour, craft, making, solidarity. The artists were making things. The hipsters were romanticising making things. The luxury houses were fetishising the materials of making things. Palantir just happens to make surveillance infrastructure.

The New Digital Tastemakers

For most of the last two decades, cultural influence flowed in a fairly predictable direction. Luxury brands set the agenda. Celebrities amplified it. Influencers distributed it. Aspiration moved downward - hauls, home tours, holidays, curated OOTDs - and the dream was always about acquisition. Having more. Looking like you’d arrived somewhere.

That era is ending.

The cost of living crisis made aspirational content feel tone-deaf at best, offensive at worst. The eat-the-rich discourse made displays of wealth politically complicated. And after years of the same recycled aesthetics cycling through the same content formats, audiences developed a finely tuned sensitivity to inauthenticity. They can smell performance from a distance.

Into this gap walked a new kind of tastemaker. Private chefs building devoted audiences around the intimacy of cooking for strangers. Bartenders becoming cultural figures. Baristas with cult followings. Sommeliers, ceramicists, florists, market traders.

Service workers. People in physically demanding, often poorly paid, frequently precarious employment - carrying something that no amount of digital polish can manufacture.

The sense that someone has actually lived something rather than aestheticised it.

In a world drowning in AI-generated everything - images, copy, music, ideas - that embodied credibility is becoming the rarest thing of all. You cannot prompt your way to a bartender’s knowledge of a room. You cannot generate the authority of a chef who has burned themselves on the same pan every service for three years. Experience that lives in the body, accumulated through actual labour, is precisely what the attention economy cannot replicate.

Aspiration said: look at what I have. Taste says: look at what I know. And increasingly, the people who know things in the most legible, immediate, human way are the people who work with their hands.

The Part We’re Avoiding Talking About

Here’s where it gets darker. The AI companies are absorbing knowledge work fast. Legal research. Financial analysis. Code. Copywriting. Entire categories of white-collar employment are being compressed, restructured, or eliminated. The professional class is nervous in a way it hasn’t been before, because the disruption that used to happen to other people is now happening to them.

Service work gets discussed as the safe alternative. You can’t automate a haircut. You can’t replace the presence of a skilled bartender. The embodied, relational, physically-located nature of service labour seems to offer some protection.

But there’s a question nobody really wants to sit with. Service work depends on customers. It depends on people having enough disposable income to eat at restaurants, book private chefs, sit at bars. If enough knowledge workers lose enough income, if the professional class is genuinely hollowed out - who’s actually showing up for the experiences that are generating all this cultural credibility? Who’s booking the table?

The very thing being borrowed - the credibility of skilled, embodied, service labour - depends on an economic ecosystem that AI is actively destabilising.

The Cosplay Question

So when the most powerful AI companies in the world dress in the visual language of the workers their technology is displacing, what does that actually mean?

Is it reverence? A genuine recognition that embodied knowledge is the thing their systems cannot touch, and an attempt to pay tribute to it?

Is it guilt? The chore jacket as unconscious apology, a corporate id reaching for something to offset the cognitive dissonance of what the company actually does?

Or is it just very expensive cosplay? Aesthetic intelligence deployed in service of nothing more than making a surveillance company feel artisanal.

I think all three are probably true simultaneously, which is what makes it interesting. The people making these decisions at Palantir are not stupid. They understand culture. They have taste. The chore jacket was not an accident.

But good taste deployed in service of power is still power. The jacket doesn’t change what the company does. It changes how it feels to encounter the company. That’s exactly what taste-washing is. And the fact that it works - that we find ourselves debating the jacket rather than the data - is perhaps the most telling thing of all.

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/ Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

Not literally, you’re reading, keep going. But notice what you were doing before this. The thumb movement. The half-second pause before the swipe. The low-level scan for something interesting, something that catches, something worth slowing down for.

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You’ve been doing this since 1850.

The Flâneur

In 19th century Paris, the poet Charles Baudelaire described a new kind of urban figure that industrialisation had made possible. The flâneur. A person, almost always imagined as a man, which is its own essay, who drifts through the city without destination or purpose. Absorbing, observing, moving through crowds. Not going anywhere in particular, just experiencing.

The street was infinite content. The crowd was the feed. The city was an algorithm of chance encounters and visual stimulation, delivering novelty at an unpredictable rate: a beautiful shop window, a strange face, an argument, a performance, a moment of unexpected grace. You never knew what was coming next, and that was the point.

The flâneur was a product of a specific historical moment: a city dense enough to generate constant novelty, a class with enough leisure time to consume it, and a built environment - Haussmann’s boulevards, the grands magasins, the covered arcades, explicitly designed to reward wandering. Paris engineered the conditions for a new kind of attention. Purposeless, open, perpetually stimulated.

The flâneur didn’t disappear. We just gave them a phone.

The scroll is the street. The feed is the boulevard. The infinite swipe is the flâneur’s walk compressed into a rectangle, available at 3am, never ending. Same psychology, same neurological reward loop - the variable stimulation, the not-quite-knowing what’s next. Just a different architecture.

The Fun Palace

In 1961, a British architect named Cedric Price had a vision that I would argue was the most radical built idea of the twentieth century.

The Fun Palace.

Commissioned by theatre director Joan Littlewood, who wanted a building for the working class of east London that wasn’t a theatre or a museum or any fixed cultural institution - just a place where people could do whatever they actually wanted to do. Price designed something that had never existed before; a building with no fixed programme, no permanent walls, no predetermined function. A vast open framework of cranes, platforms, escalators and screens that could be reconfigured continuously in real time, responding to whatever the people inside it wanted at that moment.

Learn something. Make something. Watch something. Rest. Play. Dance. Think. The architecture would bend around you, not the other way around.

It was, Price said, a laboratory of fun. Not fun as entertainment delivered from above, but fun as the state of being fully, freely, unexpectedly engaged. The building as enabler rather than container.

It was never built. Planning permission, funding, the sheer structural ambition of the thing - it never made it off the page. But the idea it contained was too good to die. A space without destination. Responsive to human desire. Generating experience rather than housing function.

That idea became the internet.

The early web was genuinely a Fun Palace. Unstructured, weird, responsive to whoever was in it. No predetermined architecture. No fixed programme. You could go anywhere, find anything, stumble across something you had no idea you were looking for. The hyperlink was the flâneur’s drift made digital - one unexpected connection leading to another, the destination always a surprise.

Except the internet bent the other way.

The Continuous Monument

In 1969, an Italian radical architecture collective called Superstudio proposed something they called the Continuous Monument.

A single infinite grid structure, wrapping the entire earth, marching across every landscape, subsuming every culture, flattening every local difference into one endless, undifferentiated surface. The same grid everywhere. The same logic applied to everything with no variation or surprise.

They meant it as a critique and a warning. This is what happens, they were saying, when architecture stops serving human experience and starts serving its own logic. When the system becomes the point. When efficiency, standardisation and scale become the values that override everything else.

Superstudio was talking about modernist urbanism, the concrete-slab housing blocks and ring roads that were consuming European cities in the name of progress. But they drew it as something stranger and more absolute: photomontages of the Monument rising out of the Arizona desert, crossing the Alps, bisecting Manhattan. The same relentless grid, indifferent to context, consuming the world.

They could not have known they were describing the internet in 2026.

We Built The Continuous Monument

Look at your feed. Then look at someone else’s feed. Then look at a brand’s feed. Then look at a competitor’s feed.

The same format. The same dimensions. The same rhythm of hook, argument, payoff. The same grid, applied everywhere, flattening every difference into the same undifferentiated surface.

We are living inside the Continuous Monument. An infinite, homogenising grid of content. Every feed looking like every other feed. Every experience documented into the same rectangle before it’s finished being experienced. Every restaurant, every landscape, every intimate moment processed through the same interface and delivered in the same format to the same scroll.

The flâneur drifted through Paris looking for the unexpected. The Fun Palace was built to generate it. The Continuous Monument replaced both with a single infinite surface that looks the same from every angle.

The tragedy isn’t that we built the attention machine; we’ve always built attention machines, that’s what cities are. The tragedy is that the most radical, responsive, human-centred design vision of the twentieth century became the infrastructure for something that is almost its exact opposite. Cedric Price imagined a building that bent around you. We built a platform that bends you around it.

The Question

The question for every designer, architect and brand building environments right now - physical or digital - is simple.

Are you building the Fun Palace? Or another panel of the Monument?

/ Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

There is an object in the British Museum that has been described as a portal to another world.

It’s a mirror. Circular, about the size of a dinner plate, made from a single piece of polished obsidian - volcanic glass, black, reflective and perfectly smooth. It belonged to John Dee, court astrologer to Elizabeth I, who used it to communicate with angels. Before that, it belonged to Aztec priests, who called it tezcatl, the smoking mirror, and used it in rituals of divination and sacrifice.

The obsession with the obsidian mirror likely stems from the fact that it doesn’t quite show you yourself. The dark surface pulls light in rather than bouncing it back cleanly. You see a version of your face, recognisable but not quite right. Enough to hold you there, enough to make you lean in.

Renaissance painters used them as compositional tools. The Claude glass, a dark reflective surface held at arm’s length to frame and darken a scene, to make a landscape look like a painting before you’d painted it. You looked into the mirror instead of the world and the world looked better.

The item you are likely reading this on, your phone, is the new version of the obsidian mirror, of the tezcatl, of the Claude Glass.

The Attention Machine

We spend on average seven hours a day looking at screens. The smoking mirror went mainstream, and we lost ourselves inside it, hours spent in front of the infinite scroll. The algorithm, a distortion of both ourselves and a false mirror of the lives of others.

Infinite scroll, invented by Aza Raskin in 2006, who has since publicly apologised for it, removes the natural stopping point that page breaks used to provide. Variable reward, the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive, means you never quite know if the next post will be interesting, so you keep going. Notification design is calibrated to interrupt at the precise frequency that keeps you checking without triggering conscious irritation. None of this happened by accident. It was engineered.

We built the attention machine.

The Masterclass in Time Suspension

The casino figured this out before Silicon Valley did.

Walk into any casino and notice what’s missing. No clocks. No windows. No natural light. No spatial reference to time passing whatsoever. The carpet - and this is documented - is deliberately ugly, designed not to be looked at, which means your eyes stay up, scanning the floor rather than the exit.

The sound design layers ambient noise at precisely the frequency that maintains alertness without triggering anxiety. The layout is a labyrinth, every path leads back to the gaming floor. Exits are obscured. Entrances are everywhere. There is no natural endpoint, no moment where the architecture suggests it might be time to leave.

A casino is a machine for suspending time. For removing the contextual cues that would otherwise tell your nervous system: you’ve been here long enough, it’s getting late, you’re tired, the evening is ending. Strip those cues out and people stay longer and spend more, almost without realising it.

The casino understood what the attention economy later industrialised: that the most valuable thing you can engineer is the feeling that there’s no reason to stop.

A Desire for the OG Vision

The pioneers of personal computing at Xerox PARC in the 1970s had a vision they called ambient computing. Technology so seamlessly integrated into the fabric of life that it becomes invisible. Interfaces that disappear. Tools that serve without demanding attention in return. Computing that lives in the walls, the surfaces, the air - not in a rectangle you carry everywhere and cannot put down.

The vision was beautiful - technology as infrastructure, like electricity. Present, essential, but largely unnoticed.

And there is a real, measurable desire for a return to that vision. Screen fatigue has moved from personal complaint to public health concern. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that sustained back-to-back screen time produces measurable stress responses in the brain - cognitive load that compounds across the day in ways that feel like exhaustion but are actually closer to sensory overload. Searches for “digital detox” have increased year-on-year for the past decade. More tellingly, the products and spaces explicitly designed around screen-free experience have become some of the fastest growing consumer categories of the last five years. We are not simply tired of our phones. We are beginning to understand, collectively, that we were sold something that didn’t quite deliver what it promised.

The Antidote

Something interesting is happening. People are seeking spaces that create a physical barrier between them and their screens.

We’re seeing a huge popularity for saunas, which are becoming social spaces, much like their original version in Roman times. No screens, no signal, no choice but to be present. Forced stillness in intense heat, and people are paying significant money for exactly this experience. Global sauna market growth is projected at over 4% annually through 2030.

The wellness industry understood before hospitality did that presence is the premium product. You cannot be anywhere else. The architecture makes distraction physically impossible. That is now a selling point.

The cinema has had a surprising resurgence with Gen Z, who are now the most frequent cinema goers, with 87% saying they have seen at least one film in a cinema in the past 12 months. It is, I believe, not due to particularly good films coming out but a deeper behavioural desire. It is one of the last truly collective attention rituals. Darkness, scale, sound - a deliberate architecture of immersion. They even tell you to put your phone away. The phone-free experience as value proposition, which would have seemed absurd twenty years ago and now makes complete sense. People will pay more for the guarantee that nobody in the room is going to shatter the spell.

The most interesting designers are starting to build this intentionally. Restaurants with copper interiors that interfere with reception - not a glitch, a design decision. Hospitality spaces with phone-check rituals at the door. Not because phones are rude, but because the experience they’re selling requires your whole attention, and they’re engineering the conditions for that to happen.

There is even a growing community of designers building what they call cyberdecks - retrofitting obsolete hardware, old keyboards, analogue displays - as a deliberate act of reclamation. Not Luddism, but a design philosophy. The slow interface as protest to the attention-sinking scroll.

Presence as Premium Product

The original vision was technology that disappears into life. What we built instead was life that disappears into technology.

The obsidian mirror and the smartphone are the same object - a dark reflective surface that holds your attention longer than you intended, shows you something not quite real, makes you lean in rather than step back. The difference is that Aztec priests knew what they were doing. They understood the mirror as a ritual object with deliberate power. They treated it accordingly.

We handed the same object to everyone and called it connection.

The spaces that understand this, that engineer for presence rather than capture it, will become the most valuable environments we design in the next decade. Attention is now a scarce resource in a way it has never been before. People will seek out the spaces that give it back to them.

The architects of presence will be the most important designers of our time.

We built the attention machine. The antidote needs to be constructed.

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/ Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

Lidl released a croissant perfume. One hundred bottles. People lost their minds trying to win one. Miu Miu launched Fleur de Lait, a milk and mango gourmand scent, by sending influencers a cooler bag packed with what looked like gelato. You had to physically scoop through ice cream to find the bottle underneath. Juliette Has a Gun released a banana scent. Maison Margiela’s Coffee Break is one of the best-selling niche fragrances in the world. Perfumes designed not to smell beautiful, clean, or sexy, but edible.

And the gourmand category is exploding. Gourmand perfume launches are up 24% this year. Social engagement for food-scented fragrances up 266%. Searches for caramel perfume alone projected to grow 42%.

The question is why now, why this specific cultural moment?

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The Context Everyone Is Ignoring

At the exact same time that gourmand fragrance is having its cultural moment, we are living through the fastest mass adoption of an appetite-suppressing drug in pharmaceutical history. GLP-1s: Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro.

One in eight Americans has now taken one. These drugs don’t just reduce hunger, they reduce the craving itself. The desire for food, chemically managed at scale.

We are entering a culture that monetises restraint. The body as status symbol, thinness as aspiration, discipline as the ultimate luxury signal. Consumption is being quietly removed from the menu.

And yet, we cannot stop wanting.

The Theory

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about what he called the Simulacrum; the moment when the representation becomes more culturally powerful than the thing it represents. The copy replaces the original.

We are, I would argue, watching this happen in real time with food. We don’t eat the croissant, we wear it; we don’t consume sugar, we aestheticise it. Butter in art direction, tomatoes in fashion, and desserts as interiors. The imagery of indulgence, everywhere, precisely because the indulgence itself is being suppressed.

Desire, when you remove its primary outlet, doesn’t dissolve. It migrates. It finds another channel, and right now that channel is olfactory.

We are wrapping ourselves in the smell of the food we’re no longer eating. And the market is worth $35 billion and growing.

What This Means For Brands & Experience Designers

If smell is becoming the primary channel for food indulgence, if the nose is inheriting what the stomach has given up, then the entire sensory architecture of brand experience needs rethinking. The opportunity isn’t to serve better food, it’s designing for the full sensory register of indulgence without requiring consumption.

Hotel lobbies that greet guests with warm brioche from the scent system rather than the kitchen. Retail environments built around gourmand scent trails. Hospitality venues whose entire emotional atmosphere is constructed from edible fragrance - for a guest who may not be eating at all.

Scratch-and-sniff invitations. Menus designed as objects before the food arrives. Tablescapes that deliver the visual and olfactory experience of indulgence independently of what’s actually served.

The Miu Miu gelato tub is a prototype for this thinking - the experience of scooping ice cream, the ritual of discovery, the scent of milk and mango, without a single calorie consumed.

The appetite hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s waiting for a new form. And the brands and experience designers who understand that first will build the most resonant work of the next decade.

Final Thoughts

I have been thinking about the Lidl croissant perfume for weeks.

Not because it’s funny, though it is, but because of what it reveals. That somewhere, a room of people decided the most compelling thing they could offer was the smell of something you might not be eating.

We are not moving away from desire. We are redesigning how desire is experienced.

/ Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

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Jeff Bezos co-sponsored the biggest fashion event in the world on Monday night, and then didn’t show up to the red carpet. We got ONE boring tuxedo shot of him with his sister-in-law from deep inside the event.

Meanwhile, activists plastered Manhattan with anti-Bezos posters. Ticket prices quietly dropped. Cultural commentators declared it image laundering. And the internet spent the evening oscillating between outfit commentary and moral outrage.

Everyone had an opinion about whether Bezos should be there, but almost nobody asked what we should be demanding in exchange for letting him in.

That, I would argue, is the more interesting question. And to answer it properly, we need to go back to Florence. 1434.

The Original Playbook

The Medici were bankers. Very new money, with no aristocratic title, no inherited legitimacy, no divine right to cultural authority. Just enormous wealth accumulated through the Medici Bank, the most powerful financial institution in fifteenth century Europe.

And they had a problem that will sound familiar, especially if you are part of a newly minted tech-oligarchy class. Money, at a certain scale, stops being enough. It needs to become something else - legacy.

So the Medicis funded art. Not because they loved art (though some of them did) but because culture was the most powerful thing money could buy. Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned Brunelleschi’s dome. He built Florence’s first public library. He funded Donatello, Fra Angelico, Botticelli. His grandson Lorenzo introduced a thirteen-year-old Michelangelo to the family collection and changed the course of Western art. The Florentine Camerata, a group of poets, musicians and intellectuals funded by the Medici, accidentally invented opera.

The Medici didn’t just buy art, they bought civilisation, and, in doing so, they purchased something no bank account can hold directly: permanence.

Nobody remembers the Medici bank, but everyone remembers what they funded.

The Current Signals

The backlash to Bezos at the Met is emotionally understandable. We are living through a period of extreme wealth concentration. Amazon warehouse workers on poverty wages while their founder sponsors galas.

But the outrage, however justified, is strategically counterproductive.

If cultural sponsorship becomes publicly toxic, if showing up at the Met makes you a villain rather than a patron, you don’t dismantle power. You simply remove the incentive for power to invest in culture. The money doesn’t disappear. It just goes elsewhere. Somewhere less visible, less accountable, less subject to the social pressure that might actually shape how it gets spent.

The Medicis weren’t criticised for funding the Renaissance. They were celebrated for it. That celebration was the incentive structure. It worked for three hundred years and it produced some of the greatest art in human history.

The Inconvenient Comparison

Bezos isn’t a Medici, he’s not even close.

The Medicis gave with abundance and commitment. Their identity, their legacy, their city - all of it was channelled into cultural production. Jeff Bezos has given away approximately 1.6% of his net worth in his lifetime. His ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has given away 36%, much of it to community arts organisations.

A Met Gala co-sponsorship is not the same as funding Michelangelo’s career. Showing up to the most glamorous party in the world is not the same as building Florence’s first public library.

The Real Question

The Medici model works. History proved it definitively. But it only works when the investment is genuine, transformational, and sustained, when the patron isn’t just buying access to the room but actually funding what happens inside it.

For those of us who work at the intersection of culture, creativity, and commercial power, this matters enormously. Because the opportunity isn’t to keep billionaires out of culture, it’s to raise the price of entry.

What would it look like if Met Gala co-sponsorship came with a requirement to commission three emerging artists? To fund a permanent acquisition for the collection? To endow a residency programme that outlasts the photo opportunity?

The Medicis didn’t just attend the cultural moment. They created the conditions for culture to exist. That’s a completely different proposition, and it’s one that cultural institutions, experience designers, and creative strategists are uniquely positioned to architect.

We know how to build worlds. We know how to create the conditions for meaning. The question is whether we’re using that expertise to simply execute the brief, or to raise the brief entirely.

Final Thoughts

The Met Gala ‘26 will be forgotten, the outrage will fade, the posters will come down, the fake urine bottles will long be chucked in the bin. But the Sistine Chapel ceiling is still there. The Duomo is still standing. Botticelli’s Venus is still in the Uffizi.

The Medicis understood something we seem to have forgotten: that the most durable form of power is not financial. It’s cultural. And that culture, at its most potent, is not bought. It’s built slowly, deliberately, and with something that looks a lot more like commitment than a co-sponsorship.

We don’t need to keep billionaires out of culture.

But we do need to raise the price of entry.

- Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

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The Body as The New Luxury Object

For most of human history, a well-fed body signalled wealth. Abundance was aspirational. Thinness was poverty.

That inversion is now complete. But to understand why, you have to understand what happened to luxury first.

Dupes became convincing. Fast fashion absorbed designer aesthetics within weeks of the runway. The secondhand and rental markets exploded. Instagram made everything look equally aspirational regardless of price point. A filtered flat lay costs nothing. A convincing Birkin dupe costs £40.

When everything can be faked, the signal migrates to the one thing that can’t.

The body.

You cannot dupe six hours a week in the gym. A maintained, disciplined physique signals time, money, access and sustained commitment in a way that a luxury handbag no longer reliably does. Conspicuous consumption gave way to conspicuous restraint. The body became the premium product.

And then GLP-1s complicated everything. One in eight American adults has now taken Ozempic or its successors. Goldman Sachs projects 15% of the global population could be using appetite-suppressing medication within a decade. The backlash is visceral precisely because the body was supposed to be the last authentic luxury signal - the one thing you couldn’t buy quickly. GLP-1s feel like cheating.

The luxury arms race always finds a new frontier.

But here is the paradox nobody is talking about loudly enough. At the exact moment appetite is being medically managed on a mass scale, food has never been more aesthetically dominant.

So Why Is Butter Everywhere?

Here is the paradox. At the exact moment food consumption is being chemically suppressed on a mass scale, food has never been more aesthetically dominant.

Butter is on tablescapes, in fashion editorials, in beauty campaigns. Rhode, Hailey Bieber’s beauty brand, built an entire visual identity around the colour and texture of whipped butter, and it became one of the most shared aesthetics of the year. Beurre Bordier, an artisanal French butter, has a three-month waitlist and more press coverage than most fashion launches.

Tomatoes are on everything. Loewe made a candle, then a clutch. Chloe made a chair. The chair. A tomato-shaped sculptural seat that sold out and generated more cultural conversation than most runway collections.

Pantry staples are aspirational objects. Le Creuset is a status symbol. A well-stocked larder is a lifestyle signal. Food has become a visual language - and the vocabulary is overwhelmingly indulgent.

Enter Žižek

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has a theory he explains in The Plague of Fantasies - he describes the logic of the chocolate laxative, a product engineered to give you the full sensory experience of chocolate while chemically negating its effects. The taste, the ritual, the comfort, but none of the consequence. He uses it as a lens for something he sees everywhere in late capitalism: the systematic removal of the “bad” part from every pleasure. Decaffeinated coffee. Non-alcoholic beer. Fat-free cream. We want the experience, stripped of the thing that made it what it was.

It is, he argues, not satisfaction we’re after. It’s the simulation of satisfaction.

Apply that logic to what’s happening now and it becomes uncomfortable quickly. The butter aesthetic you absorb scrolling at midnight. The tomato candle that smells of Capri summers you’re not having. The gourmand perfume layered over a breakfast you skipped. The carousel of oversized lemons you photograph and post.

You have been in the presence of food. You have processed it visually, olfactorily, emotionally. You have not eaten it.

Baudrillard called this the Simulacrum - the moment when the representation becomes more culturally real than the thing it represents. We are not fully there. But we are closer than we think.

Desire, when you remove its primary outlet, doesn’t dissolve. It finds another channel.

What This Means For Brands & Experience Designers

If smell, sight, and touch are becoming the primary channels for food indulgence - because consumption itself is being suppressed, then the entire sensory architecture of brand experience needs rethinking.

The opportunity isn’t “serve better food.” It’s designing for the full sensory register of indulgence without requiring anyone to eat anything.

Hotel lobbies that greet guests with warm brioche and brown butter - not from the kitchen, from the scent system. Retail environments built around gourmand scent trails that guide the experience. Textiles and surfaces with tactile references to food - velvet that evokes cream, surfaces that reference dough, materials that carry the weight and warmth of bread.

Hospitality venues that build an entire emotional atmosphere around the aesthetic of indulgence, for a guest who may not be eating at all.

Scratch-and-sniff invitations. Menus designed as objects before the food arrives. Tables as still life compositions before they’re disturbed.

The appetite hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s waiting for a new form. And the brands and designers who understand that first will build the most resonant experiences of the next decade.

Indulgence hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved off the plate.

And it’s never looked more beautiful.

— Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

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This Week’s Syllabus

Simulacra and Simulation (1981) - Jean Baudrillard

The Plague of Fantasies (1997) - Slavoj Žižek

Babette’s Feast (1987), directed by Gabriel Axel

I’ve spent over ten years working in creative agencies, and if there’s one shift I’ve seen accelerate over the past few years, it’s this: we’re still chasing originality, but the system we operate in is no longer designed to reward it.

Most platforms today optimise for attention in a very specific way. Distribution is driven by watch time, retention, and how quickly something is understood. Internal guidance from platforms like TikTok and Meta consistently points to the first few seconds as disproportionately important in determining reach, while broader industry analyses suggest that content which is immediately legible can drive significantly higher completion rates. At a cognitive level, this makes sense - familiar content is processed faster, and what is processed faster is more likely to be watched, shared, and amplified.

The result is not the death of creativity, but its compression. We are seeing a convergence towards formats, structures, and aesthetics that feel instantly recognisable. Not because ideas are weaker, but because recognition reduces friction. In fact, a large proportion of high-performing content now follows repeatable formats or trends. Virality, increasingly, is not about inventing something entirely new, but about working within patterns that audiences already understand.

What’s more interesting is that this doesn’t just shape content - it shapes culture.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord described a world in which social life becomes mediated through images, where representation overtakes lived experience. What feels newly relevant today is how algorithmic systems accelerate that process. The spectacle is no longer something we observe at a distance; it is something we continuously reproduce. We don’t just consume images - we align ourselves with them, repeat them, and in doing so, stabilise them into norms.

You can see this in what might be described as a kind of contemporary “spectacle loop,” where a single aesthetic or narrative moment begins to ripple outward, not just across feeds but into behaviour. A recent example is the resurgence of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy as a reference point. Through a combination of series-driven storytelling and algorithmic amplification, a very specific visual language - minimalism, restraint, headbands, clean silhouettes - re-entered the mainstream almost overnight. It wasn’t a new idea. It was a recognisable one, resurfaced and repeated until it became dominant again. The outcome wasn’t just engagement; it was replication.

The same pattern applies in brand experience. Take the recent overlap between Rhode and Rare Beauty. What made that moment land wasn’t radical originality, but a very precise combination of elements: a shared environment, a familiar format, and a small but powerful hook in the form of simultaneity. Two brands, similar worlds, appearing at the same time. It created a sense of contrast inside sameness - something just different enough to notice, but familiar enough to process instantly. The setting itself - ski trips, curated rooms, heightened but believable lifestyle moments - added an aspirational layer, but again, one audiences already understood.

And that, increasingly, is the structure of effective ideas. The most successful work now tends to sit at the intersection of familiarity, a clear hook, and a point of difference. Familiarity allows for instant recognition. The hook interrupts behaviour. And the difference, often subtle, is what sustains attention and creates memorability.

This is where I think we’ve been asking the wrong question. For years, especially in agency environments, the focus has been on whether an idea is “ownable.” But increasingly, the more relevant question is whether it is legible and transferable. Not “is this uniquely ours?” but “does this move easily through culture?” Not “can we claim it?” but “will people carry it?”

For creatives, this doesn’t diminish the role of originality - but it does reposition it. Originality is no longer the entry point. If an idea isn’t understood quickly, it doesn’t travel. And if it doesn’t travel, its originality is irrelevant. But once attention is earned, originality becomes the multiplier. It’s what makes something distinctive, ownable, and ultimately memorable.

The work that breaks through now tends to follow a pattern: it feels familiar at first glance, but reveals its distinctiveness on second look. It is recognisable enough to be processed instantly, and original enough to reward attention.

So originality isn’t dead. But it has moved.

- Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

Over the past six weeks, I’ve been doing something very out of character.

I’ve been showing up online. Consistently. On camera. Sharing thoughts in 30–60 second bursts.

Not as a pivot. Not as a rebrand. And not because I want to become a “content creator.” But because it started to feel like a high-frequency creative training ground.

A side quest, if you will.

And increasingly, I think more creatives should be treating it that way.

Because in a moment where our industry is being reshaped - by AI, by speed, by shifting expectations of what creativity looks like - this has quietly become one of the most efficient ways I’ve found to sharpen my skills

Here are 10 things I’ve learned so far:

1. Storytelling is becoming more valuable, not less

There’s a quiet shift happening.

We’re seeing “storyteller” emerge as a job title. Reports suggest roles using that language have doubled in the past year, with more growth expected.

And it makes sense. In a world where execution is increasingly automated, meaning isn’t.

Narrative, context and point of view are still deeply human - and becoming more scarce, not less.

2. It forces clarity

Trying to land a thought in under 60 seconds is a ninja skill.

There’s no space for filler. No safety net of a 100-page deck. No hiding behind complexity.

Just:

• What is the idea?

• Why does it matter?

• Can someone understand it instantly?

It’s probably one of the most unforgiving - and valuable - creative exercises I’ve done in years.

3. It becomes a living portfolio

Not the polished case study six months later but the thinking as it happens.

How you see the world. What you notice. How you connect dots in real time.

It’s not about showcasing finished work, and more about making your mental model visible.

4. You get to test, fail, and iterate again

This is something I’ve realised I rarely get in agency life anymore.

Budgets are big (but never enough, somehow!). Timelines are tight. Expectations to deliver the right idea without fail are unforgiving. There’s very little room for experimentation.

Content creation brings experimentation back.

You try something. It lands - or it doesn’t (usually!). You adjust. You go again.

Fast cycles, low stakes, high learning.

5. It’s the closest thing to pitching energy

And I LOVE pitching. It’s a dopamine rush, all big ideas, blue sky thinking.

There’s a familiar feeling to content creation. You put something out into the world - and it either resonates, or it doesn’t.

No over-explaining. No room to defend it.

Just instinct → execution → reaction.

And then you do it again. It’s slightly addictive, I have to admit.

6. The connection is real

Especially on TikTok.

There’s something uniquely direct about the conversations happening there - particularly with younger creatives or people just starting out.

The questions they ask are often the same ones we all had at some point.

It’s a reminder of where people are, what they’re thinking about, and what actually resonates beyond our immediate industry bubble.

7. It’s creatively fun again

This one surprised me the most. Scripts, formats, edits, visuals. Even choosing outfits.

It becomes a small, self-contained creative playground.

There’s a lightness to it - a sense of play - that can sometimes get lost in more structured, high-pressure work.

8. It gets you out of your shell

Being on camera is uncomfortable. Not over-perfecting is uncomfortable.

Letting things go out that aren’t “finished” is uncomfortable.

But that discomfort is doing something important.

It’s building a different kind of creative muscle - one that’s less about control, and more about momentum.

9. It accelerates skill acquisition

You learn fast.

New tools. New formats. New ways of structuring ideas. New instincts around what works and why.

But more importantly, you start to understand how attention actually works.

Which is increasingly one of the most valuable skills in itself.

10. It feeds back into studio work

This might be the most practical outcome.

The pace of testing and iteration has already unlocked ideas, formats, and ways of thinking that I’ve brought back into projects.

It’s not separate from the work. It’s becoming part of how my work evolves.

I’m not doing this because I want to become a content creator.

I’m doing it because it feels like one of the most efficient ways to sharpen the exact skills our industry is moving towards.

Clarity. Speed. Storytelling. Connection. Instinct.

So if you’re seeing a bit more of me for a while - that’s why.

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Side quest in progress 🪄

The models were hyper-enhanced - exaggerated proportions, lifted faces, plumped up with Botox, fresh from plastic surgery. Not quite human, not quite artificial.

Some models wore banknote masks. Others looked clinically engineered rather than dressed. Bryan Johnson - the poster figure of longevity culture and Netflix techbro freak, appeared not as an outlier, but as part of the cast.

It read as satire - a grotesque vision of biological excess, but it was also undeniably seductive.

Because underneath it all sat an uncomfortable question: if you could afford it, wouldn’t you?

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Luxury has always relied on distance - restricted access, gate-kept knowledge, a pathological fear of dupes, and, of course, cost.

But that distance is collapsing. Luxury goods are 1 click away, on a Klarna payment plan. Our feeds are full of cultural knowledge - what’s the best new bar, the coolest new chef, the new designer you need to know.

Last year, I found myself wandering through the bazaars of Istanbul. Fakes were everywhere - not one or two displays, but entire walls stacked floor to ceiling. Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton. Or at least something indistinguishable from them, convincing enough that you have to look twice. These aren’t bad copies. They’re indistinguishable from the OG.

Luxury hasn’t disappeared. It’s just lost its ability to signal what it once did.

But status doesn’t disappear - it migrates.

When objects become easy to copy, value shifts towards what remains difficult to replicate. The Final Frontier, the Body

The New Status Economy

We are seeing the emergence of a new status economy built around the optimisation of the self.

From GLP-1s and designer peptides to longevity protocols and biomarker tracking, the body is no longer just lived in - it is engineered, maintained, and refined.

Spaces like Remedy Place turn recovery into a members club. Erewhon turns consumption into performance. Their free botox with their membership has become the new “it accessory”.

For a mere 1 million dollars / year, you too can get experimental gene therapy and young blood transfusions in South America, as part of Bryan Johnson’s Immortals program. Because immortality is now on a subscription plan.

“Looksmaxxing” - once confined to obscure online forums, is now entering mainstream discourse, as people attempt to reverse-engineer the results of high-end optimisation culture. What was once the domain of clinics and specialists is being translated into DIY routines, hacks, and content.

The signal is no longer what you own. It’s how you operate.

The Countercurrent

But cultural shifts rarely move in a single direction.

Alongside the drive towards optimisation, there is a parallel movement that treats the body not as something to perfect, but as something to push.

You see it in strength culture becoming not just fitness but identity - often carrying a quiet political undercurrent. The “lift weights, fight fascism” meme isn’t really a joke. It frames the body as readiness, as resistance, as something that can be trained not just for aesthetics, but for agency.

At the same time, there are early signals of a return to hedonism - club culture, rave culture, spaces built around collective physical release rather than individual optimisation are making a comeback. Even institutions like Barbican Centre are starting to program rave nights and dance parties.

This is not wellness as purity or control. It’s wellness as intensity and release.

Two Responses to the Same Condition

These movements may appear contradictory, but they are responding to the same underlying condition.

We are living through a moment defined by acceleration, instability, and real geopolitical danger (as I write this, we are 3 weeks into war raging in the Middle East for no apparent reason).

In that context, the body becomes one of the few remaining things in our control.

Both responses - control or hedonism, are attempts to reclaim agency in a world that feels increasingly out of control.

For Brands

For brands, this represents a significant shift in where value is created. It is no longer enough to focus purely on objects. Increasingly, value will sit in:

• systems and protocols

• rituals and routines

• access and knowledge

• transformation over time

The next generation of luxury may not be something you wear. It may be something you practise.

Closing Thought

Standing in that market in Istanbul, surrounded by perfect copies, it felt like luxury hadn’t disappeared - it had simply lost its ability to signal what it once did. And when that happens, culture doesn’t abandon status. It reinvents it. Right now, that reinvention is happening through the body.

Part of my Culture Pulse series - decoding the undercurrents shaping what’s next (and what it means for brands).

✦

Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

I shamelessly borrowed the logic and repurposed it for experience design.

If you want to build worlds that people actually remember, you need moments at four different scales:

Small. Medium. Large. Extra Large.

Each scale anchors memory in a different way. When they work together, an experience stops feeling staged and starts feeling coherent.

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Memorable experiences aren’t built at one scale.
They’re built simultaneously at four: touch, atmosphere, orientation, and spectacle.

✦ Small / The Haptic Anchor

Small details matter because the brain remembers things we physically interact with more strongly than things we simply observe.

Neuroscientists call this sensorimotor encoding. When touch is involved, memory recruits additional neural pathways - the sensory cortex, motor cortex, and hippocampus all activate together - making the moment more durable in recall.

Research increasingly shows that fidgeting can improve concentration and memory. Gnawing a pen, squeezing a stress ball, playing with a fidget spinner - help regulate attention because movement and touch keep the brain engaged.

Le Corbusier developed a proportional system called the Modulor, based on the measurements of the human body. Even something as mundane as a brick follows similar logic: its dimensions evolved to fit comfortably within the human hand.

The same principle applies in experience design. The objects we touch - the pen we sign with, the glass we hold, the weight of a menu - become haptic anchors.

They ground memory at a physical level.

✦ Medium / The Atmospheric Anchor

Medium-scale elements shape the emotional atmosphere of a space.

Environmental psychology shows that light, colour, and spatial perception directly affect mood and attention. Subtle shifts in these conditions can change whether a place feels contemplative, energising, or tense.

Few artists explore this more precisely than James Turrell.

His installations manipulate light so carefully that the boundaries of space begin to dissolve. Visitors often describe a strange calm or altered perception - not because anything dramatic happens, but because the atmosphere itself is doing the work.

Medium-scale design rarely becomes the headline of an experience.

But it quietly determines how a place feels.

✦ Large / The Orientation Anchor

Large elements help the brain construct a cognitive map of space.

Humans navigate environments by identifying major spatial cues - landmarks that orient the body and structure movement.

The spiralling ramp inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York is a perfect example. It doesn’t just move visitors through the building; it reveals the entire spatial logic of the museum the moment you enter.

But in large-scale environments like festivals or temporary cities, these anchors become even more important. At Coachella, the Red Bull Pyramid - designed by our studio last year, worked as a gravitational centre for the entire activation area. You could spot it from across the grounds. People instinctively moved toward it, gathered around it, and used it as a meeting point.

Large anchors do more than organise space. They create spatial gravity.

They answer the quiet question every visitor asks when entering a new environment: Where am I in relation to everything else?

✦ Extra Large / The Spectacle Anchor

Extra-large moments operate on the level of collective memory.

These are the images that travel beyond the experience itself — the moment that becomes the story.

Disney understands this instinctively. A full day inside the park culminates in a nighttime fireworks show exploding above the castle. The experience lasts hours, but the image that lives on in memory is that single moment of spectacle.

Spectacle compresses an entire narrative into one frame.

It isn’t the experience itself.

It’s the mythology that remains after it ends.

The Takeaway

When all four scales operate together, something interesting happens.

Small details ground the experience in touch, medium elements shape atmosphere, large structures orient the body, extra-large moments create mythology.

Individually they are design decisions, but together they become worldbuilding.

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Next week: why surprise is neurologically irresistible - and why the brain remembers the unexpected.

✦

Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

Because before portals, before surprise, before world-building, there is rhythm - and without rhythm, nothing lands.

Most experiences aren’t boring. They’re flat. They may be beautiful, expensive, immersive. But emotionally, they sit in one register.

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The Neuroscience of Contrast

Human memory is not linear; it’s emotionally weighted.

Daniel Kahneman’s research on the Peak-End Rule shows that we don’t remember the average of an experience. We remember its emotional peaks and its ending. But a peak can only exist relative to something quieter.

The nervous system encodes change more strongly than consistency. Flat experiences fail because they stay in a single register.

When I design an experience, I design against this arc:

Each phase has a physiological signature, and as such, design implications.

1. Anticipation

Anticipation begins before entry.

Dopamine rises in advance of reward: the brain prepares for pleasure. This is why a velvet rope works. Why a glimpse through a doorway works. Why a host greeting you by name before you’ve fully entered feels disproportionately pleasurable.

Think about the the queue at Berghain. The will-I-won’t-I tension of admission becomes part of the experience itself. The uncertainty stretches anticipation over hours. By the time you enter, your nervous system is primed.

Anticipation is not decorative. It is chemical.

2. Tension

Tension narrows attention. The sympathetic nervous system activates. Uncertainty sharpens engagement.

Disney Imagineers understood this deeply. Their queues are not waiting areas; they are compression chambers. Spaces narrow. Ceilings lower. Details increase. The body is subtly primed before the ride begins, so the eventual high feels larger.

At SoulCycle, the changing rooms are engineered for tension. They are intentionally narrow. The timing between one class finishing and the next beginning is choreographed so that incoming riders witness flushed faces, sweat, endorphins, exhaustion. You step into a liminal corridor between depletion and anticipation. The energy transfers before you’ve clipped onto the bike.

Without tension, the reveal feels hollow.

3. Risk

Risk introduces stakes - adrenaline increases. You feel excitement when things could go either way.

In Beyond the Waterfall - an experience I designed inside Westfield, guests were asked to step into a small dinghy and row themselves across a lake built inside the shopping centre. They moved underneath real falling water, protected only by an umbrella, to reach the main space.

The physical act of rowing, of committing to movement, pulled them out of everyday passivity. The experience was no longer something they observed. It was something they risked.

Risk transforms spectators into participants.

4. Reveal

The reveal is the spike. During moments of heightened emotional arousal, the amygdala strengthens memory encoding. These are the scenes that you remember a long time after they end.

For Grey Goose, I designed a journey that began with curated airport pickups, luxury buses, and a foraging walk through open fields. The climax was not the bus. It was the first sight of a pavilion emerging in the French countryside - its architecture shaped like outstretched wings, welcoming guests into “The Nest.”

That first glimpse was designed as the peak.

5. Reward

Reward follows modulation, endorphins rise, social bonding deepens.

In Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara describes how Eleven Madison Park built an internal culture of listening. A guest mentions missing a New York hot dog? A refined version appears at the end of the meal. Expectant parents? A teddy bear fashioned from tea towels arrives as a keepsake.

The object isn’t the reward. The timing is.

Reward resonates because it follows tension.

6. Release

Release is often overlooked, but it may be the most generous phase.

The parasympathetic nervous system engages. The body resets.

This might look like a quiet lounge after a high-intensity event. A thoughtful goodbye ritual. Or, as at the now-closed but very dear-to-my-heart BlackTail in New York, a menu designed as a postcard that guests are encouraged to take home. What might normally be theft becomes ritual. The exit becomes part of long term memory.

The Takeaway

The Roller Coaster is the emotional architecture.

If you don’t design rhythm deliberately, everything else becomes decoration.

- Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

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In this piece, I’m unpacking the first of the 5 Laws of Experience Design: the Anticipation Portal.

Every powerful experience compresses before it expands.

Dark vestibule → cathedral
Tunnel → roller coaster
Tease → reveal

This isn’t a poetic metaphor. It’s neurochemistry.

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Anticipation Is Neurological

Dopamine does not spike at reward, it spikes in anticipation of reward.

Research in affective neuroscience shows that dopaminergic activity increases when the brain predicts something pleasurable but hasn’t yet received it. The build-up is part of the pleasure.

This is why:

• Trailers are thrilling.
• The rollercoaster queue feels as intense as the ride itself.

Anticipation stretches the emotional arc.

When designers skip the portal, revealing too much too early, they flatten the experience.

Without delay, there is no ramp-up and without ramp-up, there is no awe.

Compression Before Expansion

Architecturally, compression amplifies scale: Frank Lloyd Wright used low ceilings before expansive rooms, cathedrals use dark narthexes before vaulted light. Disney Imagineering speaks explicitly about “transition zones” before major reveals.

Contrast intensifies perception. The nervous system notices difference more than it notices beauty. Remove contrast, and the extraordinary feels ordinary.

Why Most Brands Get This Wrong

In the age of social media, brands reveal everything upfront.

The entrance is the hero shot. The spectacle is visible immediately. There is no threshold.

But when everything is visible at once, nothing feels earned.

The Anticipation Portal is about restraint.

And restraint feels countercultural in an economy obsessed with instant exposure.

Why Most Brands Get This Wrong

Ask yourself: where does the ordinary end and the experience begin?

Is there a moment of compression? A narrowing? A tonal shift? A ritual crossing?

Even digital experiences can create portals:

• A loading animation

• A holding page

• A sonic cue

• A narrative prelude

The portal primes the nervous system.

It tells the brain: something is about to happen.

The Bigger System

The Anticipation Portal is just the first of the 5 Laws of Experience Design.

Next week, I’ll unpack the Roller Coaster - how emotional rhythm sustains engagement.

Because experience design isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about engineering anticipation, arousal, memory, and release.

Emotion is not accidental. It’s engineered.

- Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

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I trained as an architect. I loved the theory - the manifestos, the diagrams, the debates about form following function or function following form. But I didn’t feel connected to architecture as a profession in its conventional sense. The process felt too slow and structured for me - never mind the low pay and terrible work-life balance.

What I was obsessed with was how spaces shape behaviour. Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts formalised an idea that lodged itself in my brain: architecture isn’t just about form - it’s about the events that unfold within space. Pushing that to the extreme, space actually causes events to occur within it. For instance, if someone throws themselves through a window, is the architect actually the murderer?

If we think like this, we understand architecture not as space, but as a script causing a sequence of events. And once you accept that space scripts behaviour, you realise something that spaces can create emotion.

That’s where my work lives. I didn’t want to design buildings; I wanted to design emotional journeys.

So, at some point, I started introducing myself differently. When clients ask what I do, I still say I’m a creative director. But then I add: “But really, I’m an Emotional Engineer.”

Because I sit at the intersection of design and behavioural neuroscience - thinking about anticipation, relief, reward, comfort, confidence. About dopamine loops and sensory cues. About pacing. About thresholds. About what happens before the ‘wow’ moment, not just the moment itself. Like a stage director, I think in sequences, not static compositions. How do you design for heightened emotions: for joy, for belonging, for anxiety, for reward, for relief, for compassion, or for rage?

Or maybe these really are just the confessions of a lapsed architect in search of a LinkedIn identity.

Mini Syllabus (if you fancy going down the rabbit hole with me)

Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long - The Mollecule of More

Bernard Tschumi – The Manhattan Transcripts

Ellen Lupton – The Senses: Design Beyond Vision

Donald Norman – Emotional Design

What The Numbers Say (And What They Don’t)

We’re constantly told Gen Z is partying less, and broadly, the data supports this. Reports from Gallup and the Office for National Statistics show sustained declines in alcohol consumption among younger demographics. Meanwhile, a 2023 survey by Morning Consult found that nearly half of Gen Z Americans identify as non-drinkers or occasional drinkers.

On paper, wellness looks dominant. But culture doesn’t operate in spreadsheets.

It operates in emotion. And emotionally, something is shifting.

The Emotional Climate Right Now

Wellness culture didn’t emerge randomly. It was a reaction to chaos: Covid, burnout, digital overload and economic instability. Control became aspirational. But every dominant cultural movement eventually creates its own counterforce.

We’ve seen this pattern before. In Britain in the late 1970s, under Margaret Thatcher’s economic restructuring - deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and housing pressure- young people responded not with mindfulness, but with noise. Punk wasn’t just music. It was rage, DIY rebellion, anti-polish aesthetics and community built from frustration. It wasn’t about optimism. It was about release.

The same dynamic played out in Weimar Berlin, post-war Paris and the early UK rave scene. When systems feel oppressive or unstable, culture doesn’t retreat quietly. It gets expressive.

Cultural Weathervanes

We may not see the shift fully reflected in alcohol consumption data yet, but culturally, the signals are already emerging.

In Paris, venues like Mishmish are transforming wine bars into dancing-on-tables nights out.

In London, 2026 will see the much-anticipated reopening of Printworks - although it will disappointingly and rather expectedly also feature a co-working area. The Barbican Centre has just announced it will be hosting monthly Anyone Can Dance club nights that will see their hall transformed into a dance party from 11pm-3am.

In the US, New York Magazine has documented the rise of hyper-produced private themed parties - expensive, theatrical social worlds built around spectacle and collective fantasy.

These aren’t isolated moments. They’re emotional pressure valves.

Futuregazing

This isn’t a return to reckless excess. It isn’t anti-wellness. It’s emotional rebalancing. People still care deeply about health, but they also crave joy, music, and collective release. The next era isn’t wellness versus hedonism. It’s designed indulgence: emotionally intelligent pleasure and high-aesthetic escapism. As sociologist Sarah Thornton argued in Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (1995), nightlife functions less as consumption and more as identity-building ritual - a framing that feels especially relevant now.

What This Means For Brands & Experience Designers

The opportunity isn’t “party harder”.

It’s designing environments that:

• Enable emotional release

• Encourage social connection

• Create safe escapism

• Feel meaningful, not hollow

Experience is becoming the new currency.

Not sterile wellness spaces, nor chaotic nightlife, but emotionally engineered worlds that allow us to feel alive again.

Final Thoughts

The emotional temperature of the world is rising. And when pressure builds, we don’t disappear. We gather, we dance, we create.

The next era won’t be quiet. It will be expressive, collective, sensory, and human.

And very, very interesting to design.

- Your Creative Fairy Godmother 🪄

This Week’s Syllabus

• Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (1995) by Sarah Thornton

• High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World (2019) by David T. Courtwright

• Cabaret (1972), directed by Bob Fosse