Turn insights into solutions

The most-cited statistic in a decade of screen time panic — that humans now have an 8-second attention span, shorter than a goldfish — was sourced from a 2015 Microsoft Canada report citing an organisation called Statistic Brain. Statistic Brain fabricated the figure. There is no peer-reviewed study behind it. Goldfish, incidentally, can sustain attention considerably longer.

The OECD study is more careful and useful. Surveying over 14,000 individuals across 14 countries, it finds that the relationship between screen time and wellbeing is genuinely dose-dependent: moderate use (one to three hours daily) is not clearly harmful; more than five hours is. It also finds that what you do on a screen matters more than how long you do it — social connection and purposeful use behave differently than passive scrolling. Not all screen time is equal, which is the one thing the goldfish conversation was incapable of capturing.

But the OECD data doesn't let the optimists off either. Five hours of personal screen time is not an unusual day. And the category of "screen" now encompasses not just social media and streaming but AI assistants, which have their own particular capacity to occupy attention indefinitely and frictionlessly. Meanwhile, the Reverse Flynn Effect — a decline in measured IQ scores in several developed countries began reversing around 2010, which maps uncomfortably onto the spread of smartphones. The causal link remains contested as IQ tests themselves are being debated as valid cross-generational measures.

In response to all this, 114 education systems — 58% of countries worldwide, up from 24% in 2023 — have now introduced restrictions on phones in schools, according to UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report (March 2026). Australia went furthest, banning under-16s from holding social media accounts entirely, with fines up to $50M for platforms that fail to enforce it. These are not small regulatory nudges; they are structural interventions premised on a view of addictive design that the goldfish debate never quite got to. The science is still assembling its verdict. The policy moved without waiting.

Levi's didn't find Beyoncé. Beyoncé found Levi's — she named a song after them on Cowboy Carter, in part because the brand dressed Destiny's Child when high-end fashion wouldn't. The "Reiimagine" campaign understood what that history was worth: four chapters, each remaking a classic Levi's ad with Beyoncé in the role previously played by a male model, reversing the gender logic of every iconic denim image from the 1980s. The brand keeps this connection alive.

Gap's move is a deliberate attempt to create a new cultural moment that would resonate with today’s culture with little direct reference to the past. Katseye is a K-pop/American hybrid group co-created through a Hybe joint venture. The bet is that you can build the bridge to Gen Z from the ground up, installing your brand inside the architecture of a fandom before the fandom fully forms. The logic is sound: if you can't inherit cultural credibility, buy access to an audience that is still forming its loyalties. The question is whether discovery converts to anything durable, or whether the fan base follows the artist and leaves the brand behind.

American Eagle went a third way. "Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans" launched in July 2025 with the wordplay on "genes" that was called both deliberate and accidental. Either way, the result was 40 billion impressions, 790,000 new customers, a stock spike, a Trump endorsement, a counter-backlash, and another stock spike. Half of the country read it as a celebration of white identity while the other half provided the outrage that made it unmissable. That's not ambiguity but a calculated decision to profit from cultural backlash against progressive social movements.

Levi's, Gap and American Eagle are fighting the same enemy: Shein, Zara, Amazon, vintage — the complete commoditisation of denim as a product. In a world where functional product, trend-right cut and affordable price keep winning without a story attached, cultural positioning is what separates a brand from a private label. All three campaigns worked. Levi's women's business grew. Gap posted its best comparable sales quarter since 2017. American Eagle acquired 790,000 new customers in weeks. Reclamation, globalisation, restoration — each chose a different story to justify its own continued existence as a named thing in a market that would happily sell you the same jeans without one.

Luxury spent decades growing by raising prices and expanding distribution. Yet, from 2022 to 2025 the customer base had contracted from 400 million to 340 million — a return to 2013 levels — and even top spenders were telling Bain researchers they felt "betrayed." Prices soared. Creativity didn't. The aspirational middle, which had sustained the industry through several cycles, had largely withdrawn.

The brands that held through this period built their consumer relationships differently.

Rimowa introduced an unconditional lifetime guarantee in 2022 — not a warranty policy but a repositioning of what the purchase means. You are not buying a suitcase, you are entering a service relationship with no expiry date, backed by an in-store repair network across every city the brand operates.

Stone Island has never run a conventional advertising campaign. What it has done, obsessively since 1982, is reinvent fabric. Thermosensitive materials that shift colour with body heat. Ice-dye processes that make every garment unrepeatable. A stainless steel mesh jacket that oxidises differently on each body that wears it. The compass badge is recognised — but it does not signal wealth, but knowing.

Sonos built the same kind of relationship in audio. Multi-room sound that simply worked, speakers people described with real affection, an ecosystem thousands of households had invested in over years. In May 2024 a single app update broke it — volume control failed, speakers vanished mid-song, basic features disappeared. The damage was bad. What turned it catastrophic was the response: Sonos took months to restore functionality that users had lost overnight, managing the crisis so slowly that the frustration grew desperately week by week into dropout. The company estimated $100 million in revenue loss. The CEO was gone by January 2025. What made the collapse so severe was exactly what had made the loyalty so deep: people had trusted the function completely, and the function failed them.

The betrayal was proportional to the trust. The company has spent 2025 trying to rebuild — a new CEO, a public apology, a feature-by-feature restoration, a promise to "return to excellence in the core experience." Whether that arc completes is still open. But the direction of travel is telling: you cannot fix functional luxury with a campaign or a rebrand. You can only fix it by fixing the function.

Functional luxury is not a safer model than status luxury — it is a different model. Status luxury erodes when the logo is everywhere and the aspiration evaporates. Functional luxury erodes when the product stops delivering. Rimowa's guarantee is a promise about engineering that the brand has to keep every time someone walks into a store with a damaged wheel. Stone Island's next collection has to justify the compass logo’s heritage. Sonos had made the same implicit promise — and broke it from the inside. The category rewards those who build on something real and does not forgive those who fails to maintain the established trust.

The alcohol decline has been building in Japan since 2016 and is now statistically striking: a survey of Japanese people in their twenties found that 60% drink less than once a month, and nearly 50% abstain entirely, as beer sales dropped 9%. The standard explanations — health consciousness, cost, work-life renegotiation — are all real. But they undersell what's actually happening. Nomikai, the after-work drinking party, was never really about the beer. It was the ritual through which corporate Japan reproduced its social contract: you drink with your boss, you perform belonging, you earn your place. Cafés are staying open later, alcohol-free options are expanding, and socialising is becoming less about endurance drinking and more about conversation. Young Japanese aren't just choosing mocktails. They're declining a particular kind of obligation.

The nostalgia economy runs parallel. Bubble era nostalgia is a form of "safe rebellion" — consumed more as an aesthetic experience. The appeal of Showa retro among those born decades after the era ended as a desire for "light exoticism" — not nostalgia for the past exactly, but interest in eras as a "new culture" they have never experienced before. A generation raised on economic stagnation and demographic anxiety is buying access to a Japan that felt like it had somewhere to go.

What connects the two trends is the same refusal — of speed, obligation, and the social performance the older Japan demanded. Not drinking is opting out of the boss's ritual. Sitting in a kissaten with a siphon-brewed coffee and a chunky-font magazine is opting out of optimisation culture. Both are acts of deceleration dressed up as aesthetics. Between the relentless march of tech, global economic uncertainty, and the emotional drain of the news cycle, these throwback trends offer comfort and control. That's not comfort culture though. That's a fairly precise diagnosis of what's been lost.

There's a peculiar logic to Coach's resurrection: it got cool again precisely by staying affordable. While LVMH was busy telling the world that luxury means pain at the checkout, Coach was asking out loud whether anyone should really save four months of salary for a bag.

The real strategic move wasn't the rebrand or the celebrity campaigns. It was the decision to stop lying to themselves. They closed the outlet stores, killed the 20%-off-everything coupons, and admitted that discounting isn't a sales strategy — it's a slow brand funeral.

What followed is a case study in how to use heritage as an asset. The Y2K revival didn't happen to Coach — Coach happened to Y2K. They had the archive, the craft story (a baseball glove, of all things), and the patience to wait for the cultural moment to arrive. When Gen Z decided that old-is-new and customisation is identity, Coach had the charms, the brooches, and the Tabby bag ready to go.

The number that should make luxury conglomerates uncomfortable: demand up 332% year over year, double-digit sales growth for two consecutive quarters, while LVMH was reporting declines and blaming "the affordable luxury consumer." Coach is that consumer — and apparently, that consumer is doing just fine.

The risk now is the oldest one in fashion: winning so visibly that you forget why you won.