Every Friday, The Future Laboratory team offers an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and virals we’re all talking about. This week, senior foresight analyst Rose Coffey dives into print media reboots, intergenerational communication and the haulification of vintage fashion.
: Five years after folding, Love magazine – once known for its rule-breaking fashion spreads – is relaunching independently this September. Music to my ears! Even better, the new iteration promises a more global take on the intersection of fashion and culture.
What’s especially interesting is its shift from observer to orchestrator. ‘Today the role of a magazine should be more about creating the moment, as opposed to being on the outside, reporting on these moments,’ said creative director Juan Costa Paz (source: Business of Fashion).
As explored in our Future Forecast 2025: Pop Culture & Media, this reflects a wider shift from commentary to cultural production in publishing with magazines behaving more like brands, broadcasters and experience engines.
: In Dazed this week, writer Yawen Yuan unpacked the ‘haulification’ of vintage fashion. Using The RealReal as a case study, she puts forward that secondhand shopping – once positioned as slow and sustainable – now mirrors the same dopamine-chasing dynamics as fast fashion. In light of the fact that 88% of resale spending is now happening online (source: ThredUp), Yuan illustrates how secondhand platforms have gamified vintage shopping through likes, filters and flat-rate shipping.
: And finally, a thoughtful campaign from Tesco Mobile and BBH London caught my eye. It highlights the widening gap between parents and their digitally fluent kids, with nearly half of parents saying they struggle to understand the slang Gen Alpha use online.
The campaign decodes this digital language to help adults not only join the conversation but to recognise when it’s time to have a bigger one about digital safety.
Quote of the week
‘If you’re going to start a magazine in 2025 pretending it’s still the 90s, it’s not going to happen. It’s a very different world. Magazines today need to feel alive. Magazines need to be like a living, breathing organism’
Juan Costa Paz, creative director, Love Magazine (source: Business of Fashion)