Five delights: High Summer 2026
In no particular order, let’s get real (and a little surreal) with five especially relevant, high summer signals worth tracking this season across culture, fashion, technology, and nature.
Image: Whole Earth Soft-Tech issue
SIGNAL: Done is better than good (ai doomsday-ism, honour & righteousness, ai optimism)
1: 🌍 Got the Whole Earth in My Hands #archivingthepastsasanactforthefuture
As AI’s data-mining builds our collective future, seems like providing good data would be an important.
Like, the most important, perhaps?
But. We do tend to be a little cart-before-the-horse. Humanity, I mean. And the internet is great, right? We already did a great job there. So, we’re good.
For the sake of argument and the lessons already learned via The Library in Alexandria, archiving is a smart use of time. Anyone following Five Delights will also know I often utilize archives in my professional practice.
In fact, I am presently partnering with a very chic craftsman on a very delicious archive. Stay tuned to sample.
Enter: the Whole Earth Index. High five long-term thinkers! The archive of the Whole Earth Catalog, originally published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002, includes some incredible 90’s/Y2K graphic design, cultural and political opinion, and articles focused on the natural-world. The tagging is done well. Here’s a link to my favourite issue.
“The power of landscape to restore and strengthen, to mend a spirit in turmoil, rests primarily on one thing: a receptivity to the medicine it has to offer.”
Image: The fantastic life choice the Picker Wheel just helped me make; turns out I am moving to “the middle of nowhere”.
SIGNAL: The continual rise of lofi tech (nostalgia, distrust of ai, fear of human obsoletism and irrelevance)
2: 🎱 Life is lyf-ing #lifeyouarealiar
I’m assuming you have a pretty healthy-toxic-on-again-off-again relationship with ai already? I do. We are years into our courtship and it’s not going great.
Since we all need a little break to clear our head at times, allow me to share a lovely LOFI decision-making tool.
Enter your own criteria. High risk or low: it’s 100% up to you. Then you spin the wheel of mutha-f-in chance.
There. Now doesn't that feel better?
Image: Charlotte Stevenson
SIGNAL: Are lichen the next mushrooms?? (lichen colour, lichen as a food industry fave, lichen cellular leather)
3: 🍄 Forest bathing is still a thing, right? #Ilichenyoutoalichen
If you are sick of hearing about/ talking about/ thinking about ai: here is nature.
Lichen is one of those things that you don’t see in an office. Or a house. Or in the city, despite there being a lot of it in the city. We don’t notice lichen until we are in the forest.
Ahhhhh lichen. So textured. Gritty. Pillowy. Feathery. Crumply. Sandy. Sandy? Oh, yes: sandy. This hunting hike is a good digital place to start.
Nice to know that nature will overtake us all in the end.
Well, nature lead by their ringleaders, the butterflies; see Surfridge and Hoppers.
Image: Still from James Bond with rear projector
SIGNAL: Playing wth reality as memory (increased value with fake BTS fluff, irl memory fiddling, flipping, & reversing, new memories for the right price)
4: 🇰🇷 BTS, not BTS #dreamdreamdream
BTS is trending. I mean Behind the Scenes. BTS is also, always trending. (The pants paired with responsible economic support do it for me.)
As we imagine that everything in the magical future world is possible, we also think back to the nostalgic things we wished could have been possible. What if we were behind the scenes, on set during the Terminator, The original Hulk, Ben Hur…? [Okay, well, some of the things we loved.] This notion of reimagining what we have factually already lived is catching.
BTS is cropping up across platforms, fed by people who have a lot of time to play with ai. (My personal fave is the uncanny twins operating a single camera behind Lou Ferrigno. Very authentic and not uncanny at all.) This is not a new concept, just newly toyed with by a playfully, imaginative new group. It’s been a part of filmmaking since the first Director wanted to do a wild things. Birdman, 2014, was a great early signal for this trend.
The recent release, Obsession, which we are all obsessed with. Their low tech, behind the scenes fun supports the film’s stratospheric youtube-come-hollywood rise.
For those of you still reading and with me, here is a gift: 🍰 BTS BTS.
Image: Kateye Gnarly single art
5: 🌓 Get yucky #disheveledisthenewsheveled
Not to brag, but I DID predict this postmodern plunge into the surreal putrid in 2023*.
⭐ A bedtime story: While at Twilio, I lead a big Brand revamp program. (Naturally, I started from data, since feelings are highly suspect.) In my big, juicy Insight Futures report, I called out macro-to-medium trends that would influence the upcoming years of design**.
One of the trends I spotted was a draw towards surrealism and ugliness. The obscure and ironic somehow feel grounding. We seek the misshapen vegetables to prove that they once grew in actual soil in the actual ground.
Examples of this in current culture are everywhere:
Katseye, darlings of K-POP-but-make-it-american, are giving us snot sandwiches.
Satisfy running is dreaming of closetsful of moths.
Vogue tells us our home is too serious and we needed to lighten the F up.
Pretty, famous men are wearing big, bitchy bags and that’s fun.
Art gets a fresh infusion, via Latin American talent.
Food and the trompe l’oeil: Wallpaper on the arty food history. Then, there was that insanely beautiful Arket carousel at Milan’s Giardino delle Arti. Still upset that I have YET to ride in a pear. What am I actually doing in life??
This trend concept has been in the milieu for a while. As Ellie Violet Bramley points out, care of a fantastic deep dive for the Guardian, fashion and music have been playing the the mud, then selling it, since the 1980’s punk era. Vivienne Westwood and Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo shaping the high fashion space, with Dutch designer Martin Margiela, a personal fave, bringing those ideas into the mainstream through “le mode destroy”. The noughts brought us grunge through music, cigarettes, and floppy cardigans. The last 2010s brought the trend of ugly back again, and we felt great about it. I met Jaclyn Smith, former Charlie’s Angel and current badass, for the first time in 2018. She was in Golden Goose sneakers and told me about her collection of hundreds [see them all over her insta]. She is not the only celebrity I have heard this from. I guess we all like a little dirty in our clean lives.
Then covid. And things were so, so dirty and dirty meant sick and we needed clean.
This year: perfection vs. the uncanny valley seems to be the full, allowable spectrum. Like with the thoughts and feelings in 1924, in the aftermath of WW1, people were asking what it was all for.
What is it all for?? The freedom to challenge conventional realities feels pretty, dang good right about now.
To makers, shapers, and builders: a thought experiment—
"[one could combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects]… a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power and poetic reality."
-surrealist originator & poet Pierre Reverdy
____________
I recently went on an adventure to one of my favourite places: an old Museum-meets-arcade called Museé Mechanique. It’s a collection of carnival attractions, games, tricks, and vintage arcade games. The whole place has this satisfying lived in feeling. Like old denim. This aged smell. Which might be the 50 years of caked on dust. I digress.
It’s a weird place and the games are mostly creepy and ugly. But in the ugliness comes such beautiful charm. It’s honest: not telling me what I want to hear or how I am already doing everything right. Instead, it comes in the form of a 3-story brothel, complete with dancing ladies at the entrance and a john on the nearby corner, constructed wholly of toothpicks.
*Hit me up if you want to read the report or hire me as a strategic partner for your next project.**Luckily, has only exaggerated these trends, as more people with more culturally-connected-brains are feeling empowered to use AI to draw when they don’t have the skillz to. My analysis is more correct than it was post universal AI surge. Hoorah!