WEEKLY TRENDS REPORT Monday 14 September 2026
Pictured: Envato
Difficult to action
Micro trend
THIS WEEK’S FORECAST Macro trend
Thanks Delores Millennial Optimism
What is that racket Trending
News you should know
On the up
Cancelled
It’s gonna be big
That’s the tea
Sustainability
Consumer habit
TikTok trend
Be quick
Puppet Masters
ADvent calendar Easy to action
Icon Glossary
Fictional world-building
FOR YOUR INFO
This week’s dates & microtrends
On our radar Resident Evil – 18 September
TV: Slow Horses S6 – 16 September Beabadoobee: Pylon – 18 September Carly Rae Jepsen: Day and Night – 18 September Miley Cyrus: Bass Persuades – 18 September Wolverine – 15 September Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave – 17 September
TikTok trends
Digi updates
Insights of the week
The most viral hot-dog buns since ever. Thanks Delores. Trending edits: the new Millennial Optimism trend, Easy Lover edits, and crank anime edits. Our fav vids: Learning Faneto, POVs from a Impractical wedding, the Adults S2 song, ranking of custard cremes and Charli with Quenlin.
GPT-6 Astra has arrived. It was nice knowing you all. We’ll see you on here. TikTok comments are getting more interactive. They’re really shoving all they can in the comments, what happened to a simple zinger?
How Gen Z experience and consume fashion. A deep-dive into what it takes to be a food influencer.
ICYMI Dyson just dropped a $500 toothbrush. What’s next? Dyson toilet? We would be first in line. The L.A Clippers were found GUILTY and they’ve went from mid with a future to mid with no future. Thanks, Kawhi!
Phrase of the week “Help! My friends won’t stop having birthdays”. Let’s all just collectively decide to just have birthdays at the pizza place with the animatronics.
Tea of the week Oreogate. Was it fiction or non-fiction? What’s even real anymore???
What we’re loving Nathan Fielder X Elizabeth Holmes X A24 documentary. We’ve already bought our tickets, front row. We NEED to go to the Lucas Museum.
Established trends
Weekly dose of cute Best pie, cat play date, serving with chemo, death metal training, Pokémon parade, Lil’ bird, the disappearing island, bear-vasion and highway fans.
Image: @Abbeymew
Rising trends The great deflate. Instagram face is being set to avoid and ignore.
No one goes “yum that looks so appetizing!” to an AIgenerated food menu. Do we base our taste on the algorithm or does the algorithm make our taste? We’re having an existential crisis! Yay!
Stat of the week
The future
One to watch
Asking booksellers if we truly are in the end of reading era.
Image: @a24
The first half of 2026 saw a 16% surge in CD sales. With the US buying 16.3 million alone. Blame K-pop and the rise of analogue.
Africa gets its true scale, r/popheads zine with CRJ, VHS dates, the end of Chicken shop dates, Backrooms 2 and a K-pop washing machine group.
Image: @emmapeterson
TREND TRACKING How some of the trends we’ve identified have evolved in recent months
What is that racket
Fictional world-building
ADvent calendar
Image: @daloya22
Image: @damian_for_dior
Image: @hiyaimalex
The biggest story out of the US open wasn’t the honey deuce, the stylish fits, nipple-gate, or even the great tennis. It’s the 100 official and numerous unofficial influencers invading the audience and disrupting the tournament. Tennis has always been a high-brow sport with a strong gate-keeping culture. The influx of new fans drawn in by the spectacle is creating a discourse of etiquette and unspoken rules. We’re seeing a lot of conversations around etiquette in general with concert, cinema and now sport events. Have we all collectively forgot how to act or has main character syndrome infected everyone. How much longer can we blame covid? Or is it a case of old man shaking fist at the sky?
This week we’ve seen a lot of fictional marketing, where a new piece of media is promoting their newest offering with fictional accounts. We first saw this with the fired from TV account, a fictional TikTok account of a struggling actor/PA trying to be friends with the cast of Adults, it blurred the lines of awkward comedy and actual BTS. For the new Teen Titans comic, they created a discord group ARG where the characters teased the events of the first issue. It worked because the new characters are all gen Z/Alphas and are all relatively unknown to readers and fleshed out their personalities. Celebrity Reddit AMAs are a hit or miss but last week’s Coyote VS ACME AMA was perfect with the titular character, Coyote responding to the “very serious” questions with images. With consumers being savvier than ever on spotting blatant marketing and being hungry for interview/BTS content on new pieces of media, fictional marketing is a powerful tool to flesh out the lore and offer an extended experience.
Quick did you buy your advent calendar yet? What do you mean its only September? Our feeds is just advent calendar reviews with users popping out all the goodies from perfumes, body care, Lego and even fidget toys. For the last few Christmases, advent calendars have become a game of finding the best value rather than the cardboard calendar of chocolate. Users are reviewing and rating the best calendar to shell out a couple hundred for. The luxury department stores and beauty products typically take the crown. How could other consumer categories leverage 24 days of products? It’s peak consumerism and it’s not going away anytime soon. We’re in the era of blind boxes and beauty. We just want one that goes all the way to 25, why does it have to stop at 24?!?
Trend: Bad Influence
Trend: Fandoms on Film
Trend: Collecting buzz or collecting dust?
This week’s long read
Image: @usatodayentertainment
PUPPET MASTERS “You Muppet!” is high praise
Puppets are and always have been cool, so we’re buzzing to see a puppet resurgence after an underserved hiatus from the public eye. In this current age of artistry versus artificial, puppets signal to the audience that everything you see is human-made. They’re like wrestlers or magicians, we know they’re fake, but we love the spectacle and if done right? It can make you believe talking animals are really running around Manhattan.
Image: @themuppets
Image: @startrek
Weber Forecast Insight Image: @sophietruax
In the age of AI-slop, puppets and mascots show effort. No more faceless brands, we’re going full circle back into the golden age of mascots. Maybe OpenAI wouldn’t be seen as evil if they had a cute puppet. Then again, maybe not…
The Muppets lead the charge as they always do. They first appeared alongside real life muppet, Sabrina Carpenter in a Grammy winning special, then performed during the World Cup halftime show, have a new Disney roller coaster and Miss Piggy is set to have her own solo film with Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone. They also just celebrated their 50th anniversary and their comment section is full of fans demanding a new season. Just don’t look at the recent homage posts, they’ll make you sob! Other famous pop-culture puppets this year included Rocky from Project Hail Mary, Grogu in The Mandalorian and Grogu, Star Trek’s puppet episode
and the collab of the century, Peppa Pig X Elmo. While not a puppet, the horror movie, Buddy played in the uncanny valley that puppets inhabit. It harks back to the creepy pastas of evil Barney. We’re seeing the advertising world take note of puppets with Twix’s puppet singing Dilemma, and Hinge destroying Hingie, their felt mascot. Just don’t do a Dolmio and use AI to bring back iconic puppets. While on social, creators are making their own puppets and creating tutorials for others to follow. The most famous Sophie Truax is muppet IRL number 2, she’s been on our feed for a while now and we love her and her puppet family. Puppets originally disappeared when CGI and tech made them almost redundant. But with AI slop covering our feeds, we’re hoping the puppets renaissance is going to stick around for a little longer.
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Pictured: Envato