🟣 TREND RADAR #5 :: HUMAN DRIVERS

Humanwashing is here

Hi everyone! It’s been a while; apologies for the pause in posts. I was in Seoul, South Korea for a wedding and stayed for Frieze art fair, which was very fun and very exhausting.¹ Also, I had my face injected 50+ times with DNA extracted from salmon. For research! My skin looks great, in case you were wondering. Anyway…

This week’s Trend Radar kicks off another cycle of scanning and mapping cultural signals across the framework, beginning with the Human drivers space that includes three macrotrends: Analog Soul, Spiritual Healing, and Hyper Pleasure. Below, I’ll recap some of the relevant signals tracked in the database over the past two months since we last reviewed these macrotrends.²

Macrotrend Framework

Analog Soul

Offline Escape

• Board games continue to be a popular option for offline socialization, with recent stories discussing backgammon, mahjong, and UNO.

• Living Room Cafes romanticize the simple concept of having friends over for coffee, elevated by creative menus and themed decor.

• The literary revival persists with no signs of slowing down: From Ikea’s Outdoor Library in Paris to the rise of “reading retreat” vacations, the emergence of “read dating,” and the concept of the “status galley.” Miu Miu’s Miutine fragrance campaign and Brunello Cucinelli’s fall fashion campaign both incorporate library visuals, while Warby Parker announced a Book Fair in partnership with McNally Jackson. Yesterday, Jalil Johnson reported two instances of curated books presented alongside apparel at NYFW previews (fashion week hasn’t even started yet! expect more books).³

• And for those tired of reading about books, have you thought about sketchbooks? Hermès Drawing Academy activation over the summer is followed up by Bloomingdales partnering with Happy Medium for a pop-up this fall, bringing the art cafe concept to their NYC flagship store. I wonder if anyone at Nordstrom remembers that I told them to do this two years ago…

• London’s Chillie Kids Club offers fashion upcycling classes for children, with its success fueling expansion to five locations across the city. On this side of the pond, the New York Sewing Center reports rapid growth, with revenue up 75% since last year. . While these signals both fit most obviously in the space of “offline” activities, they also relate to the embrace of imperfection and human touch that’s part of —

Aspirational Humanity

• Town & Country covered the surging interest in hand-painted and artist-designed wallpaper, which taps into the embrace of tactile imperfection and idiosyncratic aesthetics as evidence of human touch.

• Casetify’s limited-edition headphone cover takes inspiration from the famous Girl With a Pearl Earring painting and toys with the idea of humanizing technology — making a tech product feel softer, more romantic, and more analog (in vibe).

• Dazed profiled makeup artist Emily Wood, who creates “disheveled, dreamlike, painterly” looks using a “wildly chaotic method of application” that rejects the precision and minimalism of dominant “clean girl” beauty tropes in favor of “curiosity and openness, especially to the parts of ourselves that are textured.” Shortly after, Because of Marketing discussed the “messy makeup aesthetic” in recent campaigns as a response to “the rise of AI, and resulting sea of robotic perfectionism.”

[EMERGING] Humanwashing

By now, you’ve likely read Blackbird Spyplane’s exposé uncovering J.Crew’s covert use of AI to create faux-vintage catalog images, or at least heard the ensuing uproar. I don’t think that a mainstream mass mall brand adopting AI surprised anyone. What struck a nerve was the specific use case: artificially generating images reminiscent of real vintage brand catalogs, while avoiding any mention of AI involvement. This duality taps into a deep-seated fear among the creative class, but also consumers more broadly: people were discomforted because they felt fooled by these images.

In Aspirational Humanity, I proposed that as artificial intelligence hyper-flattens mass culture, anything denoting evidence of humanity becomes aspirational. At the end of the essay, I recounted a discussion with Philip Teale where he pondered the possibility of “humanwashing,” which he described as, “Brands pretending they’re human-first, but heavy on AI use under the hood.” Think greenwashing : evidence of sustainability / as to / humanwashing : evidence of humanity. I responded that this seemed grim, yet very likely. I think the J.Crew fiasco provides an early glimpse into how brands can, and will, find devious ways to capitalize on aspirational humanity while simultaneously minimizing human involvement to benefit their bottom line. Humanwashing is here.