2026 arrives: where did the identity of this era go?

By: Karl Manrique

 2025 was a complicated year for many; personally, for me it was especially challenging. With incredible situations, but others that were completely unfamiliar and complicated, for this reason I had to take a mandatory end-of-year break to reformulate old projects while I finally opened myself up to giving voice and face to my words about Fashion. Meanwhile, Fashion Thinking also had to remain on a forced pause due to physical issues I was going through, for which I am grateful for your patient wait.

But 2026 has already arrived and we have officially crossed the midpoint of the 2020s decade, with a year that began with one of the most anticipated news items for many: the capture of Maduro by the United States, an action that will impact the entire planet in various ways and keeps us expectant.

With this beginning, something that is easily perceived is how the world, our world, continues to change faster and faster and, in terms of fashion, trends have become more volatile on the surface, but with a firm feeling that does not change as they pass: the desire for calm, certainty, and stability.

We live in a time in which trends arrive and leave with such speed that they do not even manage to settle firmly enough to define the decade, which feeds that lack of identity that invades younger generations and leaves adults with a longing for yesterday.

Have you noticed how today’s trends have not marked an identity of the era as happened in other decades? Previously, each decade and each period was visually defined through body types, makeup, music, clothing, and hairstyles, but today, and since the 2010s, trends do not seem to have a fixed identity in any of these aspects.

If we observe trends in the street, in stores, and in advertising, there is only a strange, undefined mix of diluted styles, with a flat and boring air, and to realize this it only takes a glance at Pinterest.

Nowadays we are clear that fashion trends are not only about colors, collections, and runways, but the truth is that they must reflect the mood of the era. And this era feels soulless (which is reflected in fashion and campaigns), not only because of the complicated social, economic, and global issues of today, which have also existed in other decades, but perhaps as a result of the dehumanization in which this digital and increasingly technological era keeps us, where human ideas are replaced by the abilities of AI and where experiences have no value if they are not accompanied by a photograph on social media that generates interactions.

Ideologies and beliefs also continue to change and no longer run in the same direction; they have split into drastic opinions driven by social media, and it is here where trends now seem to be expressed, through digital opinions and not in the street. Perhaps this is also why fashion is in crisis today, as it is an industry intrinsically linked to human expression and now it is so complicated to understand what the consumer truly wants, beyond the empty desire to simply consume.

In film and TV, Frankenstein and Stranger Things marked 2025 as stories taken from a purely fantastic reality that carry a terrifying element that, although full of hope, integrates an uncertain dimension in which the terrible side of human beings and science is revealed, which, when combined, open the door to the dark side of ourselves and of society. A nice premise for the future?

In 2026, although there are some bets on the table regarding the trends proposed for this year and the ones to come, a nostalgia for the 2010s is revealed, or the last era we lived fully before the digital break.

In general, in 2026 the consumer remains with a firm desire for calm and for not moving away from the human side, but with an intense curiosity for what new things AIs will offer us in their constant evolution.

In Mexico and around the world, everything seems to continue changing and economic instability refuses to leave us, all of this linked to the emotional instability that will be reflected in more changing and unstable trends and desires at the moment of consumption, which can only be countered by conveying confidence and security to the consumer through discourse and REAL value in our brand.