Open TikTok on any given day, you might scroll past a video warning of looming tariffs and market collapse, followed by a girl in an expensive-looking fur coat sipping martinis. The next clip? A bleak update on Gen Z’s growing debt levels. Then suddenly, it’s back to Euro summer: someone sunbathing in the South of France, spritz in hand.
This is the split-screen reality Gen Z is living in. This generation has come of age amid compounding crises: a pandemic, economic recessions, a climate emergency, unaffordable housing, mounting student debt. Wages have stagnated while the cost of living has increased. In this environment, saving for the future can feel naive, or worse, irrelevant.
So, instead of clinging to long-term plans that no longer feel plausible, like buying a house or securing a well-paid job, many are overspending in the present and living beyond their means as a form of emotional survival — money is no longer about building wealth, it’s about feeling better. Be it a $25 Hailey Bieber smoothie from Erewhon, a Labubu fluffy toy to hook to their bags, a £300 Prada keychain clipped onto a £50 Uniqlo jacket; or, stretching their budget to rent a Miu Miu mini skirt or to buy an archival Louis Vuitton x Murakami bag on resale. Purchases are mood-altering. Shopping is emotional regulation. Financial logic has splintered, and in its place, a new consumer mindset is emerging.
“I definitely splurge on small things that make me feel luxe, like I’ll get a £5 Blank Street matcha and a [£7] Joe the Juice green juice in the same morning if I’m having a bad week,” says Ophelia, a 24-year-old London-based creative producer. While she can’t afford designer clothes at full price, she regularly searches Vinted for secondhand luxury, recently scoring an Acne Studios bag “for a steal [£60]”, which she now wears with the viral Coach cherry keychain she “splashed” on earlier this year (£95).
“There is a recklessness to this behaviour, but there’s also something very protective in Gen Z’s need to have good things happen. Uncertainty is a cultural constant for them,” says Jackie Cooper, global chief brand officer for PR firm Edelman and founder of the Gen Z Lab. “They want beauty, they want experience, they want to feel like they matter, that they count. When everything around you feels vulnerable, you definitely need to feel in control of something,” says Cooper.
Reduced spending power, more recklessness
According to a TransUnion study, Gen Z individuals aged 22 to 24 earned an average of $45,493 in 2023. In contrast, millennials of the same age a decade earlier earned $51,825 when adjusted to inflation. This indicates that Gen Z is earning approximately 12 per cent less than millennials did at the same stage of life. Additionally, Gen Z faces higher living costs, spending 31 per cent more on housing compared with millennials of the same age. And as of 2024, Gen Z carries an average credit card debt of $3,456, marking a 5.95 per cent increase from the previous year, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Centre for Microeconomic Data.
“I used to be more mindful of saving, but last year I was applying for hundreds of jobs and getting ghosted, living back at home, watching everything get more expensive. At a certain point, you just want to feel good in your day,” Ophelia says. “Now, I don’t save as much, but I’d rather spend a bit to feel like myself again.”
This is economic nihilism: not a rejection of money itself, but of the broken systems and the deferred milestones that once gave financial behaviour its structure. As a result, ‘lifestyle creep’ (where consumers emulate a lifestyle that’s beyond their means) is on the rise, fuelled by a desire for emotional relief.
When it comes to fashion and luxury, this creates a consumer who still craves the joy, identity and status that luxury offers — but accesses it through more unconventional means. Dupes, buy-now, pay-later services like Klarna and resale platforms make luxury feel temporarily attainable, but they also untether the consumer from traditional brand loyalty, replacing long-term investment with impulse, experimentation and emotional fix. Brands are left navigating a delicate balance. How can they offer aspiration without encouraging overextension? And can they turn impulse shoppers into lifetime customers if or when they reach affluence?
The boom boom aesthetic
While many Gen Zs are living beyond their means, some are using fashion to create the illusion. Take the ‘boom boom’ aesthetic — as coined by trend forecaster Sean Monahan — a hyper-glossy, luxury-coded, maximalist style that cosplays the wealth of the roaring ’80s and ’90s, which is trending heavily among younger consumers. From Saint Laurent’s power suits for Autumn/Winter 2025 (which have been copied by fast fashion players), to the surge in ties, glossy blowouts, oversized sunnies or logo-heavy accessories, the look is less about owning real wealth and more about performing the image of affluence — with irony, parody and nostalgia.
“[Gen Z] gravitates towards aesthetics that offer an escape from their lived reality and allow them to adopt a new unattainable one, with a sense of humour and authentic parody,” says Thom Walters, CEO and co-founder of influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, on the aesthetic’s rise. “For Gen Zs, it’s a chance to reimagine a past generation’s aesthetic that they were adjacent to, but unable to fully participate in — claiming it as their own by applying a unique twist.”
For brands, this opens the door to playfully aspirational aesthetics, adjacent to movements like The White Lotus hype: wealth, leisure and detachment — but with an ironic wink. “Brands are also collaborating with creators, using their humour to ironically cosplay the wealth that the ‘boom boom’ fashion trend espouses,” adds Walters. “This allows them to produce content that feels both aspirational and attainable for a Gen Z audience, which has less disposable income than previous generations.”
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TikTok creator Emma Winder exemplifies this approach. She’s built a following of nearly 150,000 with her lavish-yet-ironic style, whether it’s an archival Chanel suit to mosh at a 2hollis concert or an ’80s Saint Laurent cigarette suit to rave at Coachella. She’s already collaborated with H&M, Mulberry and Zalando on content that taps into this same absurdist-luxury vibe — high fashion, lo-fi context, deeply shareable.
Educating consumers on responsible shopping
As luxury labels continue to raise prices, engagement in resale is rising sharply. Platforms like Ebay and Vinted are expanding into high-end categories to meet growing demand. According to Ebay’s most recent spring trend report, released in May, Louis Vuitton and Armani were two of the top fashion players being searched on the platform.
Ebay shoppers are also using resale to buy into boom boom. “Power dressing is having a resurgence for shoppers who are turning to Ebay to find pieces that channel authority with a modern twist,” wrote the platform’s UK pre-loved style director Amy Bannerman in the report. Search is up for key boom boom items like “cinched blazer” (209 per cent), “Prada work tote” (220 per cent), “Miu Miu regard glasses”(204 per cent) and “oversized suit” (87 per cent), for the latter, Balenciaga and Miu Miu are the most popular brands.
To facilitate luxury shopping for price-sensitive Gen Zs craving wealthy aesthetics, brands and retailers are also exploring their own resale capabilities. Hugo Boss launched its own resale platform, Hugo Boss Pre-Loved, in 2022, allowing customers to buy and sell secondhand items for significantly less than retail — a move that supports circularity while broadening access to the brand’s core offering; it’s aiming to expand the service to the UK, the US and Germany this year.
“Our intention is to make secondhand and circular items as exciting as buying new,” says Sara Wong, director of accessories at Reselfridges. Launched in 2020 as part of the retailer’s Project Earth initiative, Reselfridges brings together resale, rental, repair and refill across its fashion, beauty and lifestyle verticals, with the goal of reimagining luxury for the more conscious consumer. Meanwhile, Selfridges’s long-term rental partnership with Hurr allows customers to borrow high-end pieces for four to 30 days — a model that supports experimentation and access without long-term financial commitment.
“With our pre-loved offer, it’s all about rarity and provenance,” Wong says. “We work with a community of resellers to source pieces that pique the interest of collectors and fashion enthusiasts and create a point of view that is unique to us — pieces that maintain their value and can either be resold or passed on. This enables them to access designer goods at a lower entry point — and in many cases, resell or repurpose them later.”
The platform also encourages a mindset shift: to love and to extend the life of what customers already own. Through partnerships with repair specialists like The Handbag Clinic, Sojo and Sneakers ER, Reselfridges offers restoration and reworking services that align with Gen Z’s growing appetite for personalised items and experiences.
What brands must understand
In an age of economic nihilism, how do you pitch products to an audience that has serious grievances with their reality — but still craves beauty, pleasure and status?
“A lot of brands are rethinking what ‘aspirational’ even means. For Gen Z, it’s not about flashy wealth or exclusivity, it’s about emotional honesty, self-acceptance and depth. We’re drawn to things that feel soulful, not status-y,” says founder of eponymous fragrance brand Oscar Emil. “That’s a big cultural correction. We’ve grown up seeing the downsides of performative luxury. Now, the dream is about feeling whole, not looking perfect. The most aspirational brands are the ones that feel real and reflect people’s inner lives, not just their highlight reels.”
It’s why the most successful brand activations right now are those that create immersive, escapist experiences around everyday (more affordable) pleasures, like food and small luxuries. When food company General Mills launched its Loaded cereal brand, the campaign leaned fully into maximalism: plush robes, jewel-toned cereal bowls, a GRWM-themed digital rollout. It was absurd, luxurious and joyful all for the cost of breakfast (£5). It hit the sweet spot of fantasy and accessibility, and it also sold out.
As consumers tire of forced relatability, brands are embracing fantasy, spectacle and world-building to captivate audiences.
Similarly, Korean beauty brands Laneige and Innisfree launched the ‘Glow On The Go’ tour last month, a mobile, immersive brand activation that brought skincare experiences directly to consumers across nine East Coast cities. The centrepiece was a vibrant, pink glass truck transformed into a luxury skincare haven, offering interactive product displays, complimentary glazed donuts and photo moments that seamlessly blended everyday indulgence with aspirational beauty. The aesthetics invited Gen Zs to share their experiences online and align with the luxury lifestyle the activation conjured; it received over 80,000 likes on its round-up reel, making it one of their highest performing posts of the year so far.
“We’re seeing a huge shift where brands are leaning into emotional storytelling and sensory experiences rather than just surface-level perfection. Especially for Gen Z, there’s fatigue around sterile, overly curated aesthetics. Escapism now looks less like ‘fantasy-equals-unattainable’ and more like ‘fantasy-equals-emotional truth’,” says Emil. For him, perfume was the starting point, “but I’m dreaming about everything from beauty to paper goods to objects that feel like keepsakes. Stuff that turns the ordinary into something poetic.”
This escapist mood is driving brands to expand into more sensory, ritual-based product categories, and driving fashion brands to launch fragrances, lifestyle objects, and even poetry zines or playlists, because people want to feel something, not just own something. “It’s about turning everyday actions — lighting a candle, spraying a scent, writing a note — into small acts of emotional connection. That’s why so many brands are blending beauty, wellness and home into single narratives.” For example, fragrances, candles and home scents became a core part of Loewe’s identity under former creative director Jonathan Anderson. The brand’s plant-inspired home fragrance range (with scents like Beetroot or Tomato Leaves) blends nature, domestic ritual and high design, while helping to inform his collection designs.
“Brands are moving away from traditional displays of wealth, instead positioning luxury as a path towards personal meaning, emotional depth and cultural relevance,” agrees Anna Wallander, co-founder of jewellery brand Akind, pointing to Bella Hadid’s Orebella fragrances as another great example of luxury objects promoted as wellness and spiritual tools. (This follows a broader trend of spirituality in fragrance, from Charlotte Tilbury’s Law of Attraction range to Yasmin Sewell’s Vyrao).
The model’s fragrance brand is coming to the UK with Selfridges. Hadid breaks down her journey as a founder so far and what’s next for her ‘skin scent’ brand.
“At Akind, we recently introduced 14-karat gold paired with cords — creating necklaces and bracelets that blend bohemian ease with luxurious materials,” she continues. “For Gen Z, luxury is becoming more symbolic and intimate. Instead of status, it’s about storytelling — which is why many brands, including ours, are offering customisable elements like charms or layered styles that invite emotional connection and self-curation.”
Gen Z is already fluent in economic extremes. They’ve seen multiple recessions, and have built emotional resilience — and a new kind of consumer logic — to survive. So brands should prepare to meet them where they are; not just with product, but with care, agility and an understanding of how identity, aspiration and financial precarity now move as one.
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