The Eccentric is SO back

May we see them, may we be them

TL;DR: the return of extreme individuality

Burberry FW25

Do you remember Burberry’s (perplexing, according to Tatler) medieval knight in full armour, wedged in front row between the celebrities? Just attending the show. Without explanation, no wink to camera.

I think we have a lot to learn from that knight.

Amid all this talk of intellectualism, depth and curiosity, and pushing back on all this shallowness and homogeneity and meh-ification…there is one word I keep not hearing and that is eccentricity.

Take this 2016 photo-sharing thing everyone’s doing, for example. The story that’s been covered by every mainstream media outlet over the past week.

People everywhere resurfacing pics that feel uncannily recent and impossibly distant all at once.

What strikes me about these pics isn’t the ‘innocence’ or ‘simpler times’ a lot of people are getting wistful about.

That’s nostalgic nonsense - we were no more innocent then (look at what + who more than half of the Brits + Americans in all those pictures must have voted for that year). And times weren’t simpler (2016’s word of the year was post-truth).

What stands out to me is the earnestness.

Yes, everyone’s shots are staged and Valencia-filtered. Shoes. Roast dinners. Peace fingers. Fancy dress parties. Baby bumps. Aeroplane sunsets. But the people in them don’t seem to be apologising for their own enthusiasm or pre-emptively cringing at themselves, braced for judgement (from the bean-soupers).

The pics reminded me of a lot of things (high waists, high buns) but mostly how un-humiliating it was back then to be openly into something. 2016 was Shonda Rhimes’ Year of Yes. Of ‘clean’ eating and 10k PBs. TED talks, moonshots, rocket ships, unicorns.

Ten more years of the attention economy’s enshittification seems to have made made us a lot more cynical and self-conscious. Our trust in institutions, of progress, of optimism, of each other, shot. Even having a boyfriend is embarrassing now.

The importance of not being earnest

Earnestness became unacceptably uncool. Lately we’ve loved to eye-roll at people taking things too seriously, doing too much. Appearing serious about something became an insult: it’s not that deep.

We cringe along with second-hand embarrassment at anyone who seems to have their idealistic little heart set on something. Like Taylor Swift sings on the, by numbers, biggest album in the world right now: apathy is hot.

The times are shallow and our minds are a jumble of vapid things and shocking, sinister things. Yesterday’s global news cycle - Beckhamgate vs Greenlandgate - says it all. And continuing to laugh at earnestness, depth, effort and curiosity is keeping us there.

But when any way of life becomes so all-encompassing, its opposite pole starts feeling magnetic too. Yuppies vs grunge. Office stiffs vs punks. Suburban conformists vs hippies.

Right now, seriousness is the counter-swing. Chronic unseriousness has stopped feeling adequate to reality. Like we discussed last week: extreme depth as a palette cleanser after extreme shallowness.

The best thing I’ve seen so far in 2026 is that new internet-speak word: chalant. As in the opposite of nonchalant (don’t you just love people?).

It really sums up the feeling in the air: being serious about something is starting to not feel so unbearably dull and joyless after all. And the invested, curious person doesn’t feel so much like the loser anymore. Instead maybe they feel like the one to watch. Literally - look at the stats on the rise of the expert influencer, the people who know what they’re on about.

When I say serious, I don’t mean dour. I mean impassioned, unselfconscious, energised people who don’t care what you think of them.

So what I really mean is the eccentric.

The eccentric. A blast from the past.

When I think of an eccentric my mind goes to the obsessive artist or the mad scholar. The flâneur. The dandy. The literary salon. The soapbox. The Bloomsbury Set, making thinking feel glamorous.

Or Isabella Blow. Grayson Perry. Oscar Wilde. Andy Warhol. Virginia Woolf. Hunter S. Thompson.

But actually, despite the algorithm’s best efforts, the very best and most provocative, interesting parts of contemporary culture continue to be disproportionately shaped by eccentrics. We just don’t use that word.

Jonathan Anderson. Simone Rocha. David Lynch. A24. Tracey Emin. The late Martin Parr. Many of the writers winning the big literary prizes.

(Even problematic, volatile or cruel ones like John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld, or everyone Clare Dederer covers in her 2024 book about what we should do with great art made by bad people.)

I mean check out JWA talking to an art historian on Nowness last week about the peach-shaped paperweights he made with film director Luca Guadagnino…

Or Martin Parr’s Ordinary Day campaign for Saint Laurent SS25…

I’d classify them all as modern-day eccentrics, and I’ll tell you why.

What eccentricity actually is

In psychology, eccentricity is defined as extreme individuality. Not just performative weirdness.

For his book Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, psychologist David Weeks spent years studying all sorts of people who lived outside social norms.

He found them to be largely happier and healthier than the general population.

For example, eccentrics see their doctor far less frequently than is typical. And they cope better with change, volatility and uncertainty (handy rn) because they’re less affected by the stress of conformity.

Eccentricity, he found, was less about trying to stand out than about not trying to fit in.

“By flouting norms of behaviour that most of us never question, eccentrics remind us how much of our own liberty we needlessly forfeit, and how great our capacity is to shape our own lives, if only we will use it.” - David Weeks, 1995

Eccentrics might well be braver than the rest of us (John Stuart Mill wrote that the amount of eccentricity in a society is proportional to its levels of courage; Edith Sitwell said eccentrics are unafraid of the opinions of the crowd) but they are also fragile.

The Eccentric Club has been going strong since the 1780s, when it was established to safeguard eccentric nonconformity. Its members believed then, and still now, that society pressures us to think in dangerously standardised ways, so originality must be rigorously defended.

Eccentrics unite

I don’t know about you, but when I think about the most interesting, endearing people I know (and also, interestingly, when I think about the best-dressed people I know) they are all a bit like David Weeks describes.

They are extreme individuals. Or at least, extremely individual. They have character, wit, depth, courage, creativity, non-conformity, sometimes-obsessive knowledge, and (my fave) an unhinged ability to make ordinary things really really absurdly funny.

Seriousness and silliness are excellent bedfellows. They’ve never been opposites.

All of which is to say: if now is the time of monsters then perhaps it should also be the time of eccentrics.

Because eccentrics show us where the norms are, and remind us there are other ways to be.

Protect the eccentrics.

Ridiculing non-conformity is just conformity in disguise.

Thanks for reading.

beth

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