Between 2020 and 2024, a whole generation of brands learned to dress beautifully for the internet. In 2025, the hangover hit. The ones with nothing underneath the aesthetic are still trying to figure out what happened.
There’s a screenshot that circulated on brand strategy Twitter around mid-2024 — a mood board from a D2C skincare startup’s rebrand deck. It had: a cream linen flat lay. A single eucalyptus sprig. A Sans-serif wordmark in warm beige. Soft shadows. A window. The light.
It was, genuinely, beautiful. And it could have been any of about three hundred brands.
This is the problem I want to sit with. Not that the aesthetic was bad — it wasn’t. Not that the visual language was wrong — it was technically accomplished. The problem was that it communicated absolutely nothing specific about what this brand believed, who it was for, or why it existed. It communicated a vibe. And a vibe, it turns out, is not a brand.
✦
How we got here: the aesthetic internet and what it taught brands
To understand 2025’s brand identity crisis, you have to understand what happened to visual culture between 2019 and 2023. Tumblr gave way to Pinterest gave way to TikTok, and somewhere in that transition, aesthetics became a primary way people organised identity online. Not values, not beliefs — aesthetics. A set of colours, textures, references, and objects that signalled belonging to a tribe.
The names are familiar now almost as punchlines: dark academia, cottagecore, coastal grandmother, quiet luxury, Barbiecore, mob wife, clean girl. Each arrived with its own colour palette, typography mood, and set of objects. Each lasted roughly a season before being replaced. Each, crucially, was adopted wholesale by brands trying to stay culturally current.
2020
Cottagecore
Linen. Mushrooms. Pastoral softness. Brands affected: every wellness startup, at least 40 food brands, several home goods companies. Duration as dominant aesthetic: ~14 months.
2021
Dark Academia
Oxfords. Candles. Brown leather. Latin marginalia. Brands affected: fragrance, stationery, publishing, fashion. The problem: beautiful to look at, nothing to say.
2022
Clean Girl / Quiet Luxury
Slicked bun. Gold hoops. Beige everything. Brands affected: beauty, fashion, interiors. The most commercially successful aesthetic of the cycle — and the one that collapsed fastest when it became too accessible.
2023
Barbiecore / Mob Wife
Maximalist, pink, fur, leopard print. A reaction against quiet luxury. Brands affected: fashion, accessories, events. The cycle accelerating — brands barely had time to update their feeds before it was over.
2024–25
The Hangover
No dominant aesthetic. Consumers increasingly suspicious of brands that dress themselves in cultural moments they didn’t earn. What survived: brands with something underneath the visual language.
Every one of these aesthetics offered brands a shortcut: adopt the visual language, get the cultural currency. And brands took it. Frantically, repeatedly, often without any consideration of whether the aesthetic had anything to do with what they actually were.
The result is an entire generation of brand identities that look like they were designed by the same person — because, aesthetically, they kind of were. The same warm neutrals. The same editorial photography. The same Canela or Freight Display or Söhne. The same sense that the brand had absorbed whatever was on the mood boards that season.
“An aesthetic is a borrowed atmosphere. It’s what the room looks like when someone else lit the candles. A visual identity is what the room looks like when you live there.”Something I wrote on a sticky note in 2023 that turned out to be the whole argument
The brands that survived the cycle — and why
Here’s the interesting thing: not all brands got flattened by the aesthetic internet. Some of them thrived through it, emerged from it, and are stronger in 2026 than they were in 2019. The difference isn’t what they looked like. It’s what they believed.
Take Abercrombie & Fitch. In 2016 they were named America’s most-hated retailer. By 2024 they posted $4.95 billion in revenue — the highest in the brand’s 133-year history. The standard reading of this story is that they rebranded: dropped the shirtless greeters, embraced inclusivity, found their audience on TikTok. All true. But the more important thing is what drove the rebrand. It wasn’t an aesthetic pivot. CEO Fran Horowitz, who took over in 2017, said she wanted the brand to stand for a feeling: “every day should feel like the start of a long weekend.” That’s not an aesthetic. That’s a belief about how life should feel. The visual language followed from that belief — and because it did, it was specific enough to be theirs. The Sloane Pant, the Curve Love jeans, the wedding guest edit — these weren’t trend-chasing. They were expressions of a coherent worldview about what their customer’s life actually looked like.
$4.95B
Abercrombie & Fitch revenue, 2024
Up from being named America’s most-hated retailer in 2016. The turnaround wasn’t aesthetic — it was philosophical. They answered the belief question first. Everything else followed.
Compare that with Glossier.
In 2019, Glossier was perhaps the most aesthetically successful brand on the internet — the pink bubble wrap pouch, the millennial pink, the “skin first, makeup second” editorial photography, the community-as-brand-strategy. It was genuinely innovative. And then the aesthetic moved on, and Glossier — which had built its identity largely on the surface — found itself having to pivot, then pivot again, eventually relaunching with a completely different visual identity in 2023 that felt, to many of its original fans, like a betrayal. The aesthetic had been so central to the brand that when it changed, the brand felt like it had changed.
Built on aesthetic
Glossier
Identity was the pink. The bubble wrap pouch. The editorial photography. When the aesthetic moved, the brand had to move with it — and lost the community that had formed around the original visual language. What was underneath the aesthetic? Less clear than it should have been.
Built on belief
Abercrombie
“Every day should feel like the start of a long weekend.” That belief drove product decisions, sizing decisions, campaign decisions. The aesthetic changed — from exclusionary to inclusive, from dark to warm — but the feeling underneath it was consistent. The aesthetic served the belief. Not the other way around.
This is the distinction I keep returning to in briefs. An aesthetic can be changed. A belief can only be abandoned. And consumers — even if they can’t articulate this — can feel the difference.
✦
What a visual identity actually is
A visual identity is the physical form of a belief. Every real design decision — the typeface, the colour, the way images are cropped, the amount of white space, the texture of the packaging — is an argument. It’s saying: this is what we think matters. This is what we think beautiful means. This is the world we think you should want to live in.
The brands that understood this were unaffected by the aesthetic cycle, because their visual language wasn’t borrowed from the culture — it grew from something specific to them. Bottega Veneta under Daniel Lee didn’t chase aesthetics. It deepened into its own belief — that the most refined things leave no trace of effort, that the craft disappears and only the quality remains — and the visual language was an expression of that. Aesop has looked essentially the same for 30 years because its belief — that rigour and curiosity and a kind of intellectual seriousness belong in personal care — hasn’t changed.
The question I ask at the start of every brand brief is not “what should this look like.” It’s: what does this brand hold to be true? What would it refuse to do? What would it protect, even if no one was watching? The visual identity comes after those answers. Always. Because if it comes before, you’re designing an aesthetic. And aesthetics age. Beliefs don’t.
This matters especially now, in 2026, because the consumer relationship with brand aesthetics has shifted fundamentally. The audiences that grew up on the aesthetic internet are now fluent in it — which means they’re also fluent in its shortcuts. They can tell, faster than ever before, when a brand’s visual language was assembled from a mood board versus grown from something real. The tolerance for borrowed atmospheres is lower than it’s ever been. The reward for genuine conviction is higher.
So what do you do with this?
If you’re building a brand in 2026, the aesthetic internet is still useful — not as a source of identity but as a vocabulary. The visual codes that aesthetics produced are a shared language. You can use that language. You just can’t let it be the thing you’re saying.
The sequence matters. Belief first. Then visual language as expression of that belief. Not: aesthetic first, belief retrofitted later to explain the choices. That sequence produces brands that look beautiful for 18 months and then have an identity crisis.
The brands I find most interesting right now are the ones that seem to have figured this out intuitively — that are using contemporary visual codes fluently while having something underneath them that is genuinely theirs. They tend to be smaller. They tend to be founder-led. They tend to have arrived at their aesthetic through a process of working out what they believed rather than a process of working out what was trending.
They also tend to be the brands that are still standing when the next aesthetic cycle comes through. Which, given the pace at which they cycle now, is probably already happening.
The cream linen flat lay is beautiful. The eucalyptus sprig is beautiful. The warm beige wordmark is beautiful. None of it tells me what you believe. And in 2026, that gap — between looking beautiful and meaning something — is the gap where brands go to disappear.
✦
Brand Strategy.Visual Identity.Cultural Read.Aesthetic Internet
References:
Business of Fashion · Abercrombie & Fitch FY2024 earnings · Glossier rebrand reporting · TikTok aesthetic trend analysis 2020–2024
