THE YEAR IN YEARNING: 2025

What we wanted. What we bought. Who we wanted to be.

TL;DR: We’re desperate to think for ourselves in a culture that won’t stop trying to think for us.

Hi!

I’ve been waiting all year for this.

If you want to know what a society fears at any given time, look at its horror movies.

If you want to know what it yearns for, look at its shopping patterns.

Because we experience culture in our own hyper-personalised micro-realities, the big year-end consumer behavoiur reports and data drops are especially interesting because they give us a chance to see what everyone else is doing.

Reading some of the biggest and most robust, I think there’s a pattern that could explain a lot of what we’re going to be seeing in 2026.

2025: a hall of mirrors

It was hard to know what to trust this year. Synthetic images in our feeds. Synthetic fabrics at luxury price-points. AI hallucination. UPFs dressed up as health foods. Dishonest influencers. Soundbite politics. Inflation and insult pricing at the supermarket. We couldn’t even trust Black Friday.

Back in Feb, in his annual meta-analysis of many many reports and forecasts, cultural strategist Matt Klein talked about the “junk-ification of our information.

As the year ends I think there are indications that a lot of people are falling out of love with that…and with being spoon-fed, nudged, influenced, manipulated and served things.

I think that feeling’s becoming clear in our fashion shopping patterns, the way we spend our downtime, what we read, the way we eat, even our travel plans for 2026.

Let’s start with fashion. Like we always do.

LYST sits on the biggest data set in fashion, by a country mile. Its users are legion, and include some of the most committed, discerning fashion shoppers on Earth (many being insiders or pros with access to knowledge, and with taste levels, that the typical shopper does not).

So LYST’s data drops are big and deep, but also indicative - this is the aggregated shopping behaviour of 160m+ well-informed fashion shoppers. So the brands and the specific products they see being searched for, wishlisted, shared, and bought can tell us about more than just what’s going on now with these shoppers. It can help us see what’s probably coming next for the more mainstream and laggard subsets our culture.

Taken together, what LYST has charted as the past 12 months’ hottest, most-wanted pieces might seem like a slightly random high-low assortment (5 dollar Uniqlo socks in Q1, 800 dollar flip-flops in Q2 followed their twenty dollar Havaianas dupe in Q3; logoless COS cashmere in Q3, and all year, classic loafers from Saint Laurent and The Row…and also the Massimo Dutti versions).

But I think they tell a coherent story: a turn toward integrity, coherence and clarity. And a decisive turn away from gimmicky micro-trend spikes.

Sure, the SKIMS nipple bra made a brief appearance in Q2, but overall the louder, weirder, or more logo-driven items we’ve seen peppered into some of LYST’s lists in recent years really fell away in 2025. The average price points continued falling, too. What 2025’s products seem to have in common is high integrity, rather than high price or high in-the-moment relevance.

Probably the most interestingly styled couple of the year has been Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz. LYST’s Year in Fashion 2025 report crowns them “the cloutiest couple of the year”, despite “a grand total of 0 red carpet couple appearances”. Their shared style was described by Grazia in Feb 2025 as “a perfect mash-up of impeccably-made low-key pieces that just work”. Their understanding of quality, integrity and lack of flash in their fashion choices - what Vogue calls subdued - is what gives them their clout.

In Rome this week

LYST’s brand of the year was Miu Miu. A label rooted in the idea of the interesting thinking woman: ironic, slightly bookish, culturally literate, ever witty, never joyless.

It wasn’t just the clothes people wanted to put on, it was the persona: Miu Miu has done such a great job of world-building that the idea of the Miu Miu woman is extremely palpable - we understand that she has an inner life. Hidden depths. She feels. She thinks. In a year of chronic ambient shallowness and mindlessness, Miu Miu represented depth. Being seen wearing one of the brand’s many logo-ed pieces (in a year we didn’t wear many visible logos, let’s be honest) was a nod to that urge to signal our depth, maybe our capacity for critical thought. Our anti-mindlessness. That’s no mean feat for a 21st century luxury brand to achieve.

Interestingly, Vogue’s People’s Vote 2025, its third annual end-of-year industry survey also placed Miu Miu as one of 2025’s top three most covetable brands. The other two being similarly high-integrity, quality-driven, thoughtful/anti-mindless (plus woman-led and -owned) businesses: Phoebe Philo and The Row.

Interesting for other reasons was John Lewis’ 12th annual drop of its How We Shop, Live and Look report. While at these upper altitudes of the fashion system we have LYST and Vogue sharing those kinds of findings, the high street is reporting something different.

The JL data reads like a tick-list of populist social media micro-trends. Their customer’s shopping highs of the year were things like ‘Nowstalgia’ (the 90s revival, e.g. baggy jeans and parkas. Sales of Oasis-inspired bucket hats were up 40% during the band’s summer tour dates). And ‘Sleepmaxxing’…the self-optimisation movement (that I called it self-surveillance in my piece last Spring, Cool Girls Don’t Self-Optimise, in which I explored how optimisation culture is falling out of favour among the cultural ‘elite’ and tech insiders) was clearly still going strong among the British mainstream: “Screenless wearables soared, with the WHOOP Peak 5.0 selling out”, reported John Lewis.

These reports of how we shopped in 2025 show us a line in the sand that we should pay attention to: the high street is still chasing what’s trending in the moment. The more culturally-astute customer isn’t.

But what about how we spent our time in 2025?

I think it’s telling that the hit TV show of the year (Halloween costume of the year, too) was a programme about thinking for yourself, and not being fooled by illusions and trickery. The Traitors was the most-watched UK television title of 2025 across all genres.

Major appointment-view TV is of course rare these days but this show gathered simultaneous audiences in the double-digit millions (that’s twice what the next most popular show was able to gather). And unlike typical reality TV formats, where the public votes people in or out, The Traitors relies on independent thought. Contestants observe, deduce, and form their own opinions. Viewers decode what they’re shown and make up their own minds. If you’re fooled, you fail.

It’s a format that closely mirrors a contemporary (but also quite gothic) anxiety: the fear of being fooled in a world of confusion, illusion, fake news, slop, inauthenticity.

The same pattern was clear, I think, in our reading.

One of my own most-read pieces this year was about the rising cultural heat around reading among certain types of people.

Why is reading so damn cool right now?

83% of U.S. adults aged 18-29 say they’ve read at least one book in the past year - the highest among all age groups surveyed [Pew Research]. And young people seem to prefer print over ebooks. Among UK book buyers aged 13 to 24, hard-copy print accounts for 80% of their book purchases [Nielsen BookData].

Reading shouldn’t, by logic, be rising in popularity. It’s slow, friction-y, wildly inefficient (if you want to learn/understand something), and incredibly low yield (the attention economy detests a book…there’s nowhere to put an ad, no data points to track).

But all the social platforms and all the podcast platforms are bursting at the seams with content and conversations about (increasingly obscure) books. Forget new year’s resolutions or bullet journalling…a TBR and a personal curriculum are the things to have heading into 2026.

Spotify Wrapped included audiobooks as well as music for the first time in 2025. Its data shows that nearly all of 2025’s most-streamed audiobooks were backlist titles - older classic books, not the trending hot new releases. And long books. Almost the whole top ten are 400-600 page doorstops that take 20-30 hours to listen to.

And, if we have any collectively-agreed defining song of the year, it was Taylor Swift’s The Fate of Ophelia. A song that references classic, complex literature became by far the biggest hit of the year: number 1 in 26 countries, lead track on the year’s number one album.

Two Ophelias

But, all this happened against the backdrop of James Marriott’s post-literate society discourse. His September essay “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” sparked a massive discussion by aligning newly-released findings on the sorry state of America’s declining reading habits and proficiency (reported by the OECD for the first time this year) as something far more worrying than we may think. Marriott argued that without the reading habits that underpin basic critical thinking, our societies risk becoming “as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking.”

In 2025, reading became countercultural.

What about our eating habits?
In October, California signed into law the first legal definition of ultra-processed food. The Real Food, Healthy Kids Act passed with unusually overwhelming bipartisan support (40-0 Senate, 79-1 Assembly) and will phase out the most harmful UPFs from California schools by 2035.

This is, I think, part of the same yearning for integrity, clarity and coherence. A desire to think for ourselves and decide for ourselves. Because it’s the first major example of legislative action responding to consumer demand for honesty and transparency in an industry - Big Food - that has been allowed to operate for so long without much of any of that. Yes, people what to know what they’re eating. But they also don’t want to be misled and manipulated anymore.

And how about our travel plans - where are we yearning to go?
Expedia’s Unpack ‘25 report (surveying 25,000 travellers across 19 countries) found 63% of people said they’re hoping to visit an off-the-beaten-track destination in 2026…under-the-radar alternatives to over-touristed hotspots. It also found that 76% of respondents under 40 are planning independent trips in 2025, avoiding package holidays.

We want to think for ourselves again.

Our trust is stretched, our patience for manipulation is straining, our appetite for clarity and integrity is rising.

I think this yearning we’re seeing is the beginning of something bigger.

I know only fools predict in public, but I’ll have a go: I think the second half of this confusing decade, starting in a matter of days, will be defined by a rising desire to think for ourselves, in a culture that won’t stop trying to think for us.

I think were going to start hearing songs about it.
Reading books about it.
Seeing more new business models emerging around it.
And seeing existing brands working out how to be on the right side of it.

How else can we explain the culture-wide rise of the intellectual influencer, and/or the experienced practitioner who has real skin in the game? The board-certified derms and cosmetic chemists, the nutritionists talking to camera in between client appointments, the realtalk from academics and psychologists and stylists and screenwriters and photographers and all sorts of other experienced practitioners offering honest-feeling knowledge. Deep cuts, not hot takes, from people who are in the arena, as Zoe Scaman says, not just heckling from the cheap seats (or the green screen).

I think everything we’re talking about here comes back to this thing I have said so many times: status sentience over status symbols. Not just what we have, but what we know, what we think, and who we actually are.

Happy Christmas to you, thanks for reading me in 2025.
See you next year.

Beth