By Mariam Karagianni,
One of the biggest indicators of recession is also reflected in beauty and fashion. There’s been a major shift from glamorous looks and clothing toward minimalism and comfort. Sky-high stiletto heels, bedazzled nails, and elaborate makeup are being replaced by kitten heels, bare or short nails, and clean makeup. Business casual paired with sneakers now doubles as club wear. Thrifting is more popular than ever—but it’s been rebranded as something cool and niche to do. This U-turn from extravagance to endurance, as the economy tightens, signals a serious, nonsense attitude. People may not have the luxury of dressing up, but they still need to appear put-together for uncertain professional and social times. When you feel like you can’t control the world around you, a common coping mechanism is to focus on yourself; it gives a fleeting sense of security. On a broader cultural level, memes now thrive on bitter irony and shared pain, reflecting economic exhaustion, despair, and job precarity. Entertainment—from music to cinema to books—is either soaked in bleak themes or pure escapism.
Those who don’t aesthetically gaslight themselves into faux luxury cling to the fantasy of “escaping the matrix.” Popularized by Andrew Tate, this term echoes among crypto evangelists, self-help gurus, hustlers, and masculinity influencers. It reflects a paranoid awareness that the system is broken—and because there is no collective solution, the only way out is a hyper-individualistic path to salvation. This rhetoric promises a Land of Cockaigne: a fantasy where one lives off passive income, jet-setting around the globe, paraded by beautiful women. It’s just another illusion capitalism has sold back to us. Two-hundred-dollar drop-shipping courses, murky financial schemes, protein-loaded diets, and dunking your head in an ice bowl at 3 a.m. won’t guarantee you freedom. Unless, of course, you find a genie.
To me, there’s something bleaker and more concerning here than TikTok algorithms and lackluster outfits. Prolonged instability and economic hardship create perfect conditions for authoritarianism to rise. Fascism doesn’t emerge in times of comfort and peace. It takes root when everything is uncertain—when people crave strongmen and traditionalist politics that promise “order,” “security,” and the “safeguarding of traditions.” Conservatism and far-right ideologies thrive in downturns and harsh class divisions, as they find convenient scapegoats: immigrants, queer people, the woke, ethnic minorities. It becomes easier for society to shut the borders, trust father-figure politicians, and consume propaganda like oxygen. Look at the U.S. right now—teetering between neoliberal rot and soft fascism. Under the Trump administration, ICE raids, environmental rollbacks, abortion bans, and healthcare cutbacks were all enabled. Then there’s China’s techno-authoritarianism, Russia’s censorship and imperial nostalgia, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni rising as an openly far-right leader, and Israel’s continued devastation of Palestine cloaked in defense rhetoric. It’s a grim tableau. One that eerily echoes the world post–Great Depression, right before fascism took hold—and yes, antisemitism is making a chilling comeback both online and offline.
It feels like we’re living in the Roman Empire all over again—fed panem et circenses (bread and circuses), just as Juvenal described. The masses are distracted while the empire quietly crumbles. No one seems to be focusing on the fact that we’re not just entrenched in a recession—we’re hurtling toward a depression. The stock market stumbles, people delay major life events like marriage or home ownership, inflation spikes, and geopolitical tension simmers. But our collective attention is elsewhere: scrolling through TikToks, binge-watching irony-soaked memes, glued to distractions.
While this all sounds incredibly bleak, I believe it’s also a call to a collective awakening. History shows us that unless a meteor hits Earth, collapse is never truly the end—it’s an invitation. An invitation to resist, to rethink, to rebuild. We can’t thrift, aestheticize, or soft-launch our way out of a systemic collapse. There are not enough Birkin bag hauls to undo years of political cowardice, environmental neglect, and the slow decay of a society addicted to spectacle. But maybe—justmaybe—change can begin in our everyday choices:
Stop performing.
Stop looking away.
Stop mistaking aesthetic survival for actual freedom.
And perhaps in that choice—to even briefly pause the submissive doomscrolling while our rights are stripped away—something more dangerous than collapse might shine through: clarity.
