The Endcore

“Human relationships are a luxury good” is my message from the astrology app Co-Star on the morning of Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. That morning is also the 39th time Trump has posted on Truth Social claiming that Iran and the United States are about to end the war that the Trump administration—and Israel—began on 28 February 2026. Outside the White House, preparations are underway for a different kind of battle: a special edition of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, held in a purpose-built arena on the South Lawn. “Maybe we’ll never, ever take it down,” Trump said wistfully in a video on his official TikTok account, comparing the construction’s beauty to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The comments section said it was straight out of the 2006 film Idiocracy. When world leaders visit him to discuss matters of war and peace, the meetings are televised against the gaudy, neo-Baroque backdrop of the renovated Oval Office, where Trump added gold statues and ornamentation, echoing his proposed “Arc de Trump” in Washington DC: a 250-foot (76-metre)-tall, turbo-charged Temu version of Paris Arc de Triomphe. The reign of terror that is Trump 2.0—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention facility, the Iran war—is accompanied throughout by deliberate abominations of taste. For many, such crimes against taste reflect the ego of a man capable of other, more serious crimes against the world.

If this endless tragicomedy feels like the end of the world, that’s because we’re in the Endcore now. That’s the name I give to this era after the end of eras, marked by a shared sense that a final, historical ending is in sight, even as such an end never actually arrives. All around us are crises that come to us as collapsed narratives: under Trump, democracy envies dictatorship, global warming is a hoax, and the use of Calibri was a “wasteful” diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) policy, now replaced by Times New Roman in all official correspondence.

All things considered, it’s a strange time for luxury, taste, and the rules-based world order. When I tell Martti Kalliala (one half of brand consultancy and forecasting studio Nemesis) that I am writing this piece, he immediately describes “Luxury Apocalypse” to me: a “collapse of the luxury fashion model of the past decade, which was propped up by the upper middle classes”. Taste is under attack from multiple angles: Margiela Tabis—once a fashionista signifier for haute level taste—are now available as cheap replicas on Shein, while “quiet luxury” finds its apogee in a Blank Street Coffee interior. (The 21st-century beige den has replaced the 20th-century white cube.) Meanwhile, international institutions and laws—the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the Paris accords, and the Genocide Convention—are displaying unprecedented weakness as the postwar rules-based order is stress-tested by a belligerent Trump 2.0 United States and an increasingly multipolar world.

In this geopolitical reordering of the powerful and the impotent, three Gulf states have stood out in recent years: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. For the past decade, Dubai in particular has redefined the facts and fantasies of luxe life. A billion TikToks on supercars, megacribs, and crown prince-endorsed croissants have all turned Dubai into the epicentre of want. International estate agent Knight Frank found that more homes worth $2.5m to $10m were bought in Dubai than in any other city in the world at the end of 2025—ahead of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. In 2023, Dubai Mall was crowned “the most visited place on Earth”, with 105 million people passing through. Indeed, prior to the Iran war, the Middle East—accounting for roughly 5% of global luxury consumption—had been “one of the luxury industry’s rare bright spots”, according to the head of ‌ European luxury goods research ⁠at Barclays, Carole Madjo, “reporting double-digit annual revenue growth in recent years”.

LUXE ICK

In the same way that the technocracy—the founders of Silicon Valley’s tech giants—were the first generation to eschew collecting contemporary art as a marker of social status, Gen Z seems to be the first to violently “ick” at legacy luxury fashion. When I read that a Dior handbag that cost €53 to manufacture was sold at €2 600, my own honorary Gen Z brain balked at such profit hubris. No wonder, then, that when my friends visit me in Dubai, the place they most want to go is Karama: a distinctly south Asian area crammed with stores (oddly, named “Blackpool”, “Salford”, or “Del Boy”) selling designer “fakes”.

I put that word in quotation marks because at the start of Trump’s 2025 tariff war—which saw duties on Chinese imports reach 145%—the same factories in Shenzhen producing the Karama “fake” Balenciaga and Loro Piana claimed they also supplied the actual brands. They invited us to go straight to the source, at discounts of at least 90%. This factory whistleblowing made it clear that luxury is no longer inherent in the quality of the item (say, one handmade by a skilled nonna in Arezzo, Italy, drawing on ancestral craft traditions), but that luxury is now mostly defined by exorbitant price alone. For this, among other reasons, Kalliala predicts that “fashion won’t be the main theatre of luxury for the time being”.

Given that reality itself is now often regarded as the greatest conspiracy theory of all, for Gen Z and under, luxury fashion as we have long known it has become the real deepfake scam. That’s why buying the actual deepfake fakes from my Iranian acquaintances in Karama is, paradoxically, truly authentic. As my friend Mari declared after her haul: “Shumon. That was better than sex!!!”

DUBAI LUXE

One of the most sustained critiques of Dubai in the 20 years I’ve been visiting and living there, is that: “It’s so fake.” There’s the indoor ski slope, the man-made islands, the ubiquitous air con. But the critique has also been directed at the people: Botox everywhere, butt lifts, lip plumps, and boob jobs. “It has no soul” ran a recent social media furore, instigated by ex-expats and Dubai haters. “Soul” may include everything from bucolic parks to robust public transport to piss-stained streets and neighbourhood drug delivery guys in their Toyota Camrys. An obsessive need to keep outdoor spaces clean, along with the democratisation of calorific intake (where desert has been replaced by dessert), has denied Dubai any right to be real.

Earlier this year, Dubai became too real in a way no one had predicted. It was a Saturday morning, 28 February 2026, halfway through Ramadan; I’d arrived at my friends’ house in a small gated community in central Dubai. Within hours of America and Israel striking Iran (killing at least 120 children in a school in Minab), Iran retaliated with drones and ballistic and cruise missiles across the Gulf: from Saudi Arabia to Oman, Qatar to the United Arab Emirates. We heard sonic booms. Or were they interceptions? My friends had moved here for the same reasons many families had: for Dubai’s unmatched safety (no petty theft, idyllic for kids) and security (provided by US army and naval bases across the Gulf Cooperation Council).

But now, bombs were falling from the sky, aimed at those US bases but also at Dubai icons, such as the Burj Khalifa and Burj Al Arab. The sense of forever-security on which Dubai was built shattered within hours, as footage of smoke from missile interceptions spread on socials. Gulf airports—some of the busiest transit hubs in the world, located in Doha, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi—were forced to close. A number of influencers, who had made Dubai their business base and brand USP, fled across the border into Oman, tears streaming down their fear-ridden faces. Dubai didn’t feel secure anymore. It was a war zone now.

Soon after, western schadenfreude peaked. Finally, a moment to celebrate Dubai’s demise. Sodom, Gomorrah, Dubai: the law of karma is a bitch.

You see, from the beginning of the 21st century, Dubai had already become a war zone of taste. People who self-identified as arbiters of ‘good taste’—whether from the art, design, or fashion worlds—saw Dubai as a uniquely deliberate concentration of ‘bad taste’. “Money can’t buy you class,” the idiom goes, where class and taste stand interchangeably for refinement.

What I would notice, in conversations with liberal intellectuals and left-minded journalists, was how often two ideas became fused: aesthetic excess and human rights abuses. The often-abusive plight of labourers—on construction sites, as domestic workers—who migrated primarily from south and east Asia, has been well reported and documented by investigative reportage and human rights organisations. If Dubai were crystallised in words and deeds, it was as a place where dictator-chic interiors meet modern capitalist slavery. Two sides of the same aberration.

Why is it that Las Vegas luxury is seen as good, while Dubai luxury is framed as an evil paradise? The first represents the godly obesities of western democracy. The other, Islamic hypocrisy? I would claim this asymmetry is one of the latest iterations in a long history of Orientalist-coded racism.

What if, in reality, the west’s disgust with Dubai veiled a hidden disgust with itself? Dubai has acted as a kind of narcissistic, mutating mirror to the emerging anxieties of the west exactly as western hegemony reaches its endgame after 600 years. Perhaps there’s a sense that Dubai’s searing skyline is what the west had predicted for its own future back in the 1950s and ’60s. Dubai, Singapore, Shanghai—they’ve built what the west once dreamt of, only to abandon that vision in favour of a fatal compulsion towards its own lost “Great” past.

When I asked creative director Ferdinando Verderi—responsible for some of the most influential recent campaigns for Prada, Versace and Stone Island—about these shifts, he said: “For much of the 20th century, the idea of ‘luxury’ as we know it was tied to a relatively narrow cultural narrative. Today, there is no longer a single definition of desirability. Luxury has become plural.” According to Verderi, our new postwestern, polycentric geography of consumer power means that “the codes that once universally signalled status, sophistication or taste no longer hold the same authority”. Questions of questionable taste remind us that taste is never really good, bad, or even taste at all. Tastes are ideas in contrarian camouflage.

TECH LUXE

Now that tech is taking over the role culture once played, tech’s next frontier is taste. It’s arguably why we saw Meta founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the front row of the Prada Autumn/Winter 2026 women’s show, with his wife Priscilla Chan. But, the aggregational nature of large language models (which drive today’s AI) produces what I would call a “midification” of taste.

I asked Caia Hagel, author of ANON: The Future of Love and Friendship in the Age of AI, about the impact of digital technology on the luxury market, and what Silicon Valley has completely misunderstood. “Silicon Valley has started appearing on fashion’s front row, with the conviction that sci-fi aesthetics, wearable technology, and convenience are the highest human aspirations,” she says. Against this, Hagel adds, luxury will “double down on austere tactile intensity” to “realign with scarcity and sensuality—things like craftsmanship, provenance, trust, and time”. Will AI be a luxury, or a utility, the way Sam Altman of OpenAI has framed it? “My book ANON explores how love and friendship are already becoming luxuries in a culture gripped by loneliness,” Hagel says. “I’m sure the ubiquitousness of synthetic abundance will inspire luxury to shift away from scarce objects towards scarce realities. Luxury won’t be about achieving youth in endless seas of agelessness; it will be about having the agency to choose how much technology participates in your identity—even if that means the radical choice to grow old and die.”

FINAL LUXE FRONTIER

I attend the Prada Spring/Summer 2027 men’s show in Milan. There’s a single silhouette. It’s skinny. Raf Simons—co-creative director, with Miuccia Prada—says backstage that “in this collection, there is a break with the conventions of luxury”. For over a decade now, with the advent of Demna at Balenciaga, trouser widths have widened as resource wars across the world—for barium, lithium, graphics processing units (GPUs), and water—have intensified. Naomi Klein said that developed countries now start permanent wars over these scarce resources to preserve “security without peace and justice”. Meanwhile, Ozempic and Mounjaro medically suppress appetites in the rich, glamorous, and famous, producing bodies cosplaying emaciation. Fashion media has been wondering what effect this will have on the luxury fashion market. Voluntary appetite suppression as a luxury flex is an example of “Anorexic Ruins”.This is a term the philosopher Jean Baudrillard introduced in 1989, which I repurpose to describe the detritus we produce and consume in Endcore.

A few weeks before the Prada show, Prada and Axiom Space unveiled their next-generation Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment for NASA’s Artemis IV lunar mission, with space becoming Prada’s new frontier. Either the luxury market on Earth is so saturated that new astral markets need to be invented, or the “Luxury Apocalypse” is so irreversible that the only way out is Mars.

What was once considered a “basic”—the right to life, a dignified life on Earth—is now an elite luxury out of reach for many, if not most, of us. Every morning, we wake up, and the world has changed yet again from when we went to sleep a few hours earlier, in ways we couldn’t have imagined. This is the New New Normal. Which begs the question: is “normal” the ultimate luxury that’s been taken away from us forever? ♥

All images generated using artificial intelligence (AI)