Skinny jeans are back. Apparently.
After several years of boyfriend fits and barrel legs fashion is starting to change shape again. Inevitably, just as we've all finally accepted that our skinnies belonged on Vinted.
But that's culture for you.We overdo things. Get bored of them. Then rediscover the thing we rejected five years ago and decide it feels fresh again.
Which got me thinking about AI.We're rightly excited about what AI can do. We're using it, experimenting with it and watching it change how brands communicate at extraordinary speed.
But whenever something becomes dominant in culture, it's worth looking in the opposite direction at counter trends too.And there are signs of something interesting happening there.
Vinyl. Film cameras. Printed books. Craft nights. Running clubs. Supper clubs. Listening bars. Phone-free events. People meeting people, in rooms, sometimes without documenting the whole thing.
None of this means we're turning our backs on technology. I certainly don't think we're all about to bury our phones and live by candlelight.But perhaps the more digital our lives become, the more value we put on things that feel real.
What happens when content becomes infinite?
AI is making it possible to create more content, more quickly and at a scale we couldn't have imagined a few years ago.
That presents a huge opportunity for brands. But it also creates a problem.If everyone can make more, does more continue to be valuable?
When another beautiful image can be generated in seconds, the handmade thing becomes interesting. When there are millions of songs instantly available, owning a record feels special. When you can access almost anything from your sofa, being invited somewhere starts to matter.
There's a basic cultural truth in here and that is, abundance has a habit of changing what we value.And I think brands should be paying attention to it.
Because while AI is making scale cheaper, it may also be making brand intimacy more valuable.
It's relatively easy to reach a large audience of people. Getting 30 hyper-interesting people into a room who genuinely want to be there? That's harder.And possibly much more powerful.
The rooms people want to get into
Some of the communities with the most energy around them right now aren't particularly big.They're WhatsApp groups, running crews, supper clubs, book clubs, niche fandoms, local networks and gatherings that spread because somebody tells somebody else 'you'd love this'.Perhaps brands need to start thinking about creating more of those small worlds.
A retailer opening its doors after hours to people who share an obsession. A wallpaper brand bringing together the people who can't stop doing things to their houses. A hotel becoming the unofficial home of a city's writers and makers. A food brand putting interesting people around a table and seeing what happens.
The important bit is that the brand shouldn't always be the most interesting thing in the room.
It takes a community to raise a brand
That's something we think about a lot at Tigerbond.
The strongest brands aren't simply broadcasting to audiences. They have people around them.
Customers, journalists, creators, employees, experts, enthusiasts, neighbourhoods and niche obsessives. People who introduce the brand into conversations and communities it could never credibly march into itself.
That's what we mean when we say it takes a community to raise a brand.And, strangely enough, AI makes that idea more relevant, not less.
We can use AI to find those communities, understand what's occupying them, spot cultural shifts earlier and take an awful lot of the heavy lifting out of our working lives.
But then what?
I'd argue that some of the smartest brands will use the time, intelligence and efficiency AI gives them to do more things that aren't particularly scalable.
Meet people. Listen to them. Give them somewhere to go. Create things they'd actually miss if they disappeared.And maybe stop worrying that everything has to reach millions of people to matter.
There are a few questions I'd be asking if I were a brand right now.
- What are people in our world getting tired of?
- Where are they already gathering without us?
- Could we contribute something genuinely useful or enjoyable to that community?
- And what could we create for 50 people that they'd still be talking about a week later?
Because everyone is going to have access to the same extraordinary technology.
The interesting question is what we choose to do with it. Skinny jeans won't be the answer forever. Give it a few years and we'll presumably all be back in our jorts.
That's how culture works. As the world races towards AI, brands might find there's a lot of value in occasionally heading the other way.
