What's Rising: Week of February 15

Introducing What's Rising, our new, agency-wide initiative reporting on trends as they’re happening, before they become mainstream. Each week, we'll bring you a weekly drop of cultural moments, creative work and breakthrough trends from across the internet landscape.

• Catalog Comeback...Our entire world has become digital. But some are pushing back, opting for a slower, more lo-fi approach. Botegga Vanetta famously erased its digital footprint, and now, fashion catalogues are seeing a resurgence.
  
  

• Food Convenience...Cooking mid-pandemic seemed like a great thing at first, back when we were baking sourdough and making linguine from scratch. Now that we’re all foodtigued, recent cooking trends on TikTok are making food fun again. Easy, quick and few ingredient “one pot” recipes such as the trending Feta pasta have gone viral. We have also seen kitchen appliances such as an air fryer, crock pot and mini waffle maker trending with people making easy, few ingredient recipes in.

• Color energy...Some social media users are finding compatible energy between seemingly unrelated, random things. Multiplication equations have the same vibe as days of the week (5x5=25 has Friday energy) and cities, colors, and cocktails can all share a similar feeling.

• WeARable Fashion...As footwear brands continue to rival one another with new and innovative products, some have started releasing digitized sneakers. That’s right, sneakers that you can’t actually wear have become weirdly popular. For instance, Buffalo London recently teamed up with The Fabricant to offer consumers a virtual version of one of its more popular shoe models that can be worn on DressX – the first multi-brand retailer of digital fashion clothing. This is also off the back of the earlier release of streetwear’s answer to Pokemon Go.

• “Sorry, Can’t Talk”...As we enter our second year of lockdown, celebrities continue to make fun at-home content for fans. The most recent celeb trend shows FaceTime videos of celebs calling their friends as a joke, usually saying something like “sorry can't talk right now I’m busy” and filming the confused reactions of their celeb friends.