Last week a woman knocked on our door selling beef from a backpack. She wasn't wrong to try. Beef is wellness now. Sport is fashion's best runway. Hair is doing what skincare did in 2015. And somewhere in Chicago, Monos is building a hotel by first opening a café nobody knows is theirs. The rebrand is the strategy.

Here's what we're watching.

Beef is in everything

The carnivore diet went from fringe Reddit thread to federal health policy, realfood.gov relaunched America's food pyramid with steak on it, and Whole Foods named beef tallow its #1 food trend for 2026. The pendulum has swung hard away from plant-based, and it's taking everything with it.

• In your bowl: Meaties launched beef cereal. Ground beef. For breakfast. With milk. S/o to Hyper for putting us on. It's real, it exists, and it just sold out.

• On your face: Beef tallow is the top searched skincare ingredient by year-on-year growth in 2025, up 17,400 searches. The tallow balm market hit $277M. The pitch: its fatty acid profile mirrors human sebum. The ancestral health crowd calls it the original moisturizer.

• In your fries: Restaurants are quietly switching back to beef tallow for frying and marketing it. Talo Organic built an entire brand around seed-oil-free cooking.

Sport is fashion's most powerful runway

The industry has known it for decades. Louis Vuitton carries the FIFA trophy. Ralph Lauren dresses Team USA. Pharrell dresses Real Madrid. Now Gabriela Hearst is putting Uruguay in merino wool for the World Cup. The collaboration between luxury fashion and elite sport is a strategy.

Hearst's appointment is a telling data point in a bigger shift: American fashion is outperforming European luxury right now.

Haircare is having its skincare moment

We noticed it at Beauty Matter’s Next 50, haircare took up more floor space, more conversation, and more founder energy than we've seen in years. The global haircare market is projected to grow from $88B in 2025 to $150B by 2033, with hair loss products growing fastest at 8.6% CAGR. 

• The skinification of haircare: Crown Affair, WWD's Innovator of the Year, is pivoting toward gentler, skin-inspired formulas. 

• The GLP-1 gold rush: 54% of GLP-1 users report hair thinning and brands are racing to reach them. But the condition is often temporary. Science-forward brands will outlast the ones chasing the moment.

• The celebrity science play: Shakira's Isima launched with $12M, a patent-pending formula, and a CSO from L'Oréal.

Most "science-backed" brands don't know how to show it

There's a gap opening up between brands that use science as a claim and brands that actually communicate it. If haircare follows skincare's path, the next move is knowing how to tell it.

U Beauty is a case study in balancing luxury with credibility.

Built on SIREN Capsule Technology and a less-but-better philosophy, the challenge was never efficacy. It was translation. How do you make something highly technical feel simple without losing aspiration?

The new site launched alongside their Sephora retail expansion and drove +14% more revenue from new visitors.

The full story behind the Structured Beauty design direction is live, read it here

On our radar: Monos is building a world around a suitcase

You can only ask someone to buy a suitcase so many times.

Monos knows this. So instead of launching more SKUs, they launched Postcard,  a food and beverage lounge in Chicago, deliberately not called "Monos Café," designed to feel like stumbling into a hidden bar in Tokyo. It's retail as world-building.

The brand's long game is a five-bedroom architectural hotel. For now: coffee, community, cultural programming.

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