Style is a living, breathing response to and architect of culture. Increasingly, it’s being shaped by independent creators and everyday consumers.
This was the core idea at the heart of a lively onstage discussion at ADWEEK’s Brandweek 2025 event in Atlanta on Monday. Marketing executives at some of the largest style and beauty brands told a packed room about the trends they’re seeing develop.
Luggage and lifestyle brand Béis has seen a shift from skin-deep sheen to authenticity play out across its social feeds. A few years ago, the content “was completely different,” according to Liz Money, the company’s senior vice president of brand and creative. “We were all about aesthetics and kind of showing [an] aspirational idea of style. And now, the way that culture has changed, we’ve leaned into making our employees the face of things.”
Earlier this year, the brand spotlighted its own staff in a campaign promoting a new line of travel-ready products developed in collaboration with Gap. The brand launched another joint product line with Selena Gomez’s cosmetics label Rare Beauty on Monday.
That campaign also stars real Béis employees—an initiative of “humanizing the brand,” Money said.
Gap, for its part, has gone through its own evolution. In recent years, it’s made a strategic effort to position its brand more squarely in the zeitgeist. It’s done so by working with culture-defining stars and creators whose messages resonate with Gap’s target customers.
In August, the apparel brand made waves with an energetic, youthful denim campaign starring the girl group Katseye. It fused Y2K music nostalgia with the hyperrelevance of the summer’s culture war (playing out in competing denim ads responding to Sydney Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle spot). The campaign was an instant hit: It attracted 400 million views in three days, and, according to Gap, won over 8 billion total impressions.
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