Fashion Is in its Try-Hard Era
In a way, the Burberry video released in October 2024 was an early indication of things to come. In the nine-minute clip, footballer Cole Palmer goes fishing in the countryside. Nothing particularly interesting happens. Instead, we’re asked to sit in the discomfort of stillness, to share with Palmer a fragment of time in nature.
A similar message surfaced months later from Bottega Veneta. In March 2025, the house launched its “Craft Is Our Language” campaign marking the 50th anniversary of its signature Intrecciato weave. Using hands as a central motif, the campaign foregrounded human touch as a carrier of an unspoken shared language, whether in weaving leather, shaping artwork, or expressing thought. For design houses, craft has always mattered. Yet, amidst a steady stream of quality control scandals and more scrutiny on production, consumers have begun to feel like they’re being duped into buying luxury goods that don’t live up to their name. So, brands such as Bottega have started to emphasize just how difficult — and human — it is to do what they do.
On the surface, neither of these things seem related to Rosalía’s album Lux. But, stick with me. Where the artist’s earlier work leaned toward pop maximalism, Lux featured German opera and lyrics in 13 different languages. The album’s sheer complexity might have relegated it to the fringes. Instead, Lux propelled Rosalía to global commercial success, reaching number one in the US, the UK, and Spain, while also earning the artist her first Top 10 debut on the Billboard 200.
Taken together, these moments suggest something in the air. Across music, fashion, and art, effort has become desirable again.
The signs are everywhere. Multiple luxury brands, including Jil Sander, Dior and Miu Miu, have embraced the literary world even as attention spans shrink. Young Zoomers are choosing things they can touch and feel — analog media, dumb phones — over the weightless convenience of smartphones. When it comes to romance, we’ve begun aspiring to multi-year “yearning” as an alternative to quick hookups. We see it, too, in the exploding popularity of a mentally challenging game like chess, and in the renewed thirst for toned arms, which are exponentially more difficult to achieve than, say, losing weight with the aid of a GLP-1.
Why now? What is all this friction (or the appearance of it) for? On one hand, visible effort can make something feel important. We love our clothes hand-stitched, our gym visits properly selfied, our work accomplishments hard-won. On the other hand, not all effort is valuable. Sometimes, friction is simply inefficiency and nostalgia; a visit to the DMV will never actually be romantic. Inconvenience alone is not a moral good.
The culture oracles among us think it’s because we’ve reached a tipping point in our relationship with technology. Recently, writers and commentators have positioned friction as the counter to technological overreach. After all, ours is a reality organized around the removal of resistance. Click here, tap there. *Apple Pay ding.* The designer and artist Ruby Thelot described the uncanny experience of sitting in a driverless Waymo as the end state of the technorati’s tendency to treat humanity as an inconvenience. Likewise, cultural strategist Eugene Healey argued that algorithmic slop has rendered content consumption so passive that only ragebait can provoke a visceral reaction. In January, The Cut told us that we all need to be “friction-maxxing” as parents, lest we face a generation that lacks the wherewithal to stand up to Silicon Valley’s sinister flattening of the human experience. Online, a class of "friction influencers" talk about how embracing life's necessary textures, such as moving to a new city, or using the grocery store check-out, leads to a more meaningful, or at least cooler, experience of life (often bordering on varying levels of nonsensicality; per @eugenestrat,"Principle 1 is don't be afraid to niche down and gently gatekeep").
Fashion is no exception to the slide toward cultural weightlessness. As writer Tora Northman pointed out, garments these days are designed not for bodies but for screens. It doesn’t matter so much how an item of clothing feels or behaves on skin, but how it photographs — and how quickly and legibly it can be absorbed via six-inch 4K glass brick. Much of contemporary design isn’t meant to be truly wearable, Northman argued. Writing about that Coperni FW23 show, she asked: “Everyone and their mother had seen Hadid wearing the spray-on dress. But what filled the rest of the Coperni collection that season? Do you remember?” Experiencing clothing as an image trumps the logistical hassle of how someone puts it on, takes it off, or walks around in it for more than 30 seconds.
These critiques point to a growing unease with effortlessness as the default cultural condition. The unspoken goal of modern life is to eliminate imperfection so completely that we never have to experience it at all. Only recently have we started to realize that, in the process of optimization, the texture and substance of actual meaning have been stripped away, too.
The antidote? Meaningful friction. Meticulous provenance. Highly technical craftsmanship. An album that requires fluency in more than a dozen languages to fully appreciate. Carefully documented evolutions and plenty of “proof” of the process at hand.
Still, friction isn’t the be-all-end-all solution. Stopping the discourse there would be too, well, easy. Rather, our idea of friction is a convenient proxy for true meaning. It’s appealing because it reintroduces proof of human presence. Experiencing something that’s difficult to parse or that demands our attention reassures us that a person was once here, wrestling with material, language, or form. Friction restores a sense of encounter. It asks something of us, and in doing so, confirms that there is still something there to be met.
Even in more down-to-earth corners of culture, effort is making a return; there’s a clear hunger among audiences to do a little legwork in their consumption. When streaming services arrived on the scene, it didn’t take long for TV binges to become the norm. Never again would we have to wait a week between episodes — or so we thought. Then came Heated Rivalry, which dropped one episode a week for six weeks. Rather than frustrate viewers, this slow-burn strategy only intensified their obsession.
Fans’ love for Heated Rivalry bordered on religion. They memed, GIF’ed, and rewatched (known as “reheating”), and each time their adoration grew. They thrilled at dissecting episodes down to the micro-expressions of the characters. In one shot, Ilya Rozanov’s fingers dance nervously on a bartop as he tries to figure out whether the object of his fixation, Shane Hollander, is available. Later in the series, tears on Shane’s lash line as he and Ilya finally confess their feelings can only be seen in a screenshot at full brightness. The feverish reaction to Heated Rivalry suggested something that was perhaps counterintuitive: We had fallen back in love with appointment viewing.
Meaningful friction promises to re-anchor us in significance. It brings back time, labor, and consequence: qualities that have been sanded away by platforms designed remove them wherever possible. The audience yearns for subtext and revisitations. The cultural products that succeed will be able to thread this needle.
This year, brands, designers, and institutions will no doubt rush to reintroduce texture, effort, and constraint. We’ve seen Chanel, Tekla, Sandy Liang and others double down on hand-drawn illustrations as a human counterweight to the onslaught of computer generated slop. Earlier this month at Prada’s Fall/Winter 2026 menswear show, recurring details such as dirtied oversized cuffs and cracking rain coats evoked the beauty of patina and the passage of time — a sense of something earned — in contrast to our current superspeed fashion cycle.
The question isn’t whether friction will continue to trend; it almost certainly will. Instead, what we should ask ourselves is whether what we’re seeing amounts to genuine resistance, or inconvenience masking as depth. There’s a world of difference between a challenge that ignites the spirit and a hassle that simply wastes our time. Waiting two hours for a table at the latest overwrought downtown It spot won’t suddenly make the mediocre food taste any better. A bad album released on vinyl is still a bad album.
Still, we don’t want “friction-core” as a microtrend that dissipates as quickly as it arrives. We are right to reject the hollow ease of the digital age, but we shouldn’t confuse difficulty for meaning. The goal of meaningful friction isn’t to make life a struggle; it’s to make life felt. If we are going to work for our culture, let it be for something that feels good. Otherwise, we’re just trading the effortless void for a difficult one.
