The world is furious. Here’s what luxury should do about it.

When Oxford University Press named “rage bait” its Word of the Year for 2025, it wasn’t merely flagging a linguistic trend. It was diagnosing a cultural condition. Rage has become not just a feeling but an economy, a content strategy, a political instrument, and, increasingly, the dominant emotional frequency of public life. For luxury brands trying to build lasting relationships in this environment, that diagnosis carries real strategic weight. After devouring thousands of trend reports, hundreds of podcasts, and perspectives gathered across our network at Beyond Luxury, our conclusion is this: the social mood of 2026 is one of sustained, unresolved anger — and the brands that understand it will be the ones that endure. Consider what follows a lens for how to respond in ways that resonate rather than trivialize, turning fleeting emotional experiences into meaningful, lasting ones. The emotional landscape A growing sense of powerlessness defines how many people experience the world today. Constant exposure to conflict, uncertainty, and social fragmentation has transformed that feeling into something physiological: anger that was never designed to run without rest. What makes this moment distinct is not the anger itself but our awareness of it. Real-time access to every injustice, every destabilizing event, has created a condition in which people are acutely conscious of how little control they have. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow states suggests, humans need emotional equilibrium to function. Right now, that equilibrium is under enormous pressure. The data reflects it. According to VML’s Future 100 2026 report, the experiences people say they want more of are peace and joy. The emotional pendulum is swinging hard toward relief. For luxury brands, this matters enormously. Emotional resonance sits at the heart of contemporary luxury positioning — the ability to make someone feel something specific at a moment when feelings are both overloaded and underresolved. Three distinct strategic responses are already emerging in culture. Fuel the rage The first option is perhaps the most counterintuitive: validate and amplify the anger rather than soothe it. Timothée Chalamet has arguably been doing exactly this throughout the press campaign for Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, the A24 film in which he plays a 1950s ping-pong prodigy defined by toxic ambition. The actor who once embodied a gentler kind of masculinity — thoughtful, emotionally open, beloved by precisely the audience most suspicious of bravado — leaned deliberately into an image of arrogance during the film’s promotion. His press tour included a viral Zoom-call parody pitching increasingly absurd marketing ideas and culminated in an actual orange blimp flying across the U.S. Audiences were sharply divided. Whether the result was character bleed, calculated positioning, or a combination of both, the effect was the same: Chalamet became a lightning rod for the very outrage his film critiques. In an environment where rage drives engagement, that is not an accident. Heal the rage The opposite approach — and perhaps the more broadly applicable one for luxury — is to move anger toward something restorative. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez pursued this deliberately with their Fall/Winter 2026 collection for Loewe, their second for the house. As they wrote in the show notes, “As we began conceptualizing our second collection at Loewe, we were struck by a simple truth: for us, the act of making is, at its core, an expression of joy — an intellectual, process-driven pursuit charged with playfulness.” Featuring inflatable parkas, whimsical latex silhouettes, and artist Cosima von Bonin’s animal sculptures filling the front row, the collection felt less like fashion and more like a permission slip to be absurd. To have fun. To refuse seriousness, at least temporarily. Miu Miu has taken a parallel approach. Its Spring/Summer 2026 campaign, titled “On Cloud Nine” and featuring Olivia Rodrigo, constructs a visual world suspended far above the city. Shifting skies move from rose pink to warm gold, representing a mood the brand describes as optimism contrasted with pragmatism. Photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth from dawn until dusk, the campaign reaches for that suspended state of untethered bliss, as its title suggests. In a cultural moment defined by gravity, Miuccia Prada is offering lift. Break the rage There is a third option: interrupt the anger entirely, pulling people out of the emotional loop by confronting them with something disorienting. Rimowa’s campaign for its Original Backpack deploys this logic with precision. Shot by photographer Nigel Shafran, the images show actor Nicholas Braun doing yoga with the aluminum backpack strapped to his back, eating cereal from it, and even painting a door while wearing it. By treating a luxury travel object as a security blanket, the campaign places it in contexts where it has no obvious place. The absurdity forces a double take, and in that moment of productive confusion, the brand lands. Freelance photographer Amadeo Bellini achieved something adjacent when he shot the Saint Laurent Fall/Winter 2026 show from outside the venue through the windows. Without an invitation, he produced images that resonated more widely than much of the official coverage. Stepping outside the expected, it turns out, is itself a way of pulling people back into feeling. The takeaway Luxury, at its most fundamental level, is about how a brand makes someone feel in a world that regularly feels out of control. The emotional landscape of 2026 — defined by rage, powerlessness, and a profound hunger for their opposites — is not a backdrop for brand strategy. It is the brief. Knowing when to amplify, when to soothe, and when to interrupt before that emotional charge becomes something people can no longer hold — that is the real work. Carlota Rodben is a luxury innovation specialist and author of “Beyond Luxury: The Promise of Emotion.” She previously led innovation at Chanel and now advises luxury brands on strategy and transformation.

The world is furious. Here’s what luxury should do about it.

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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The world is furious. Here’s what luxury should do about it.

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag