The Row Is More Powerful Than They'd Like You To Think.
and more findings from Lyst's Q3 2025 index
(some) of what we’re discussing behind the paywall: Olsen Twin PsyOps; How the media continuing to sell us Minimalism as Quiet Luxury is optically dense and reductionist to women’s evolving consumption patterns :D; The evolution of hedonism, and more…
I’m rinse and repeating Q2’s intro because it still holds true: my background is in strategy, where I spent years advising up to a FAANG CEO on multibillion dollar growth. Which is perhaps important context to engender ur trust ahead of this analysis, but not rlly why we’re here: The Q3 LYST Index dropped this AM, which for those unaware, is a VERY BIG DEAL.
I’ve gone on record time and time again to say that The Lyst Index = fashion’s equivalent of The DOW.
Why? They have the biggest public facing dataset in fashion (over 160M users) with an incredibly robust methodology. It’s SOOOO important to track and understand the contextual, macro framing of these shifts (and emergent patterns) because it informs SO MUCH about consumption at large — sentiment, pricing demand (luxury vs affordables), resonant trends, and more.
Lyst was kind enough to give me a VIP Preview, so I’ve had a couple days to chew on these insights. Also, just so we’re all on the same page — a lot of lyst analyses that I see are.. not analyses. They are regurgitations of either what the Lyst team gives as “important insights to know” (extracted from the dataset that’s publicly viewable) or effectively re-stating the big moves (Saint Laurent is #1!; The Row holds steady in the top 5!)
That’s cool, but not why we’re here. There are plenty of sources you can turn to for a digestible line or two on what’s happening on the surface (which is still important media to consume!)… this is more about digging deeper to map micro-macro consumer dynamics (patterns) that reflect the why… we’re expanding, we’re looking around corners, and we’re distilling what matters in a consumable lens. Therefore, I’m going to act like I’m sending this up to my old CEOs (written in.. the TM version lol). Let’s rip;