A brand isn’t a logo, a colour palette or the way an Instagram feed looks this month. It is the collection of signals, behaviours and associations that become recognisable over time.
The strongest brands understand that recognition is built through repetition. Luxury and heritage brands perhaps understand that better than anyone. Their value often comes from consistency: a typeface, a colour, a symbol, a packaging detail, a particular way of speaking or presenting themselves that has been reinforced for years, sometimes generations.
They don’t need to reinvent themselves every time culture changes direction.
In fact, part of what makes a brand feel established, premium or culturally significant is its ability to exist alongside trends without being defined by them.
Luxury brands don’t necessarily reject trends. They have enough identity to absorb them.
There’s a big difference between absorbing what’s happening culturally and reshaping a brand to resemble whatever happens to be fashionable.
And perhaps heritage isn’t the opposite of relevance at all. Used properly, heritage can be what gives a brand the confidence to remain relevant without becoming generic.
Heritage doesn’t stop a brand moving with culture. It gives it something to hold onto while it moves.
Protect the magic. Modernise the rest.
M&S is an interesting example.
It isn’t a luxury fashion house, but it’s a British heritage brand that has become noticeably more fashionable again. Its style credentials have strengthened, younger shoppers are entering the brand and in 2026 it will mark 100 years in fashion with its first appearance on the official London Fashion Week schedule.
Yet the philosophy behind its wider transformation is remarkably simple: protect the magic of M&S while modernising the rest.
M&S hasn’t become relevant by pretending its history does not exist. It is increasingly using that history as source material.
For its 2026 trench, for example, its designers went into the company archive and examined designs spanning from the 1920s to the present day, then used that history to inform a product intended for today’s customer.
At the same time, M&S isn’t pretending fashion trends don’t exist. Its new The Love That Drop programme is explicitly designed to respond more quickly to emerging style trends and catwalk influences. But M&S describes those collections as staying grounded in the quality and value customers already expect from the brand.
That is the difference between following a trend and translating one.
One asks: How can we look like what is fashionable now?
The other asks: How would what is fashionable now look if it came from us?
The second question protects the brand.
Heritage is accumulated brand equity
An old mark might be imperfect by contemporary design standards.
A packaging detail may not be what a branding agency would invent today.
A colour might not appear on this year’s trend forecast.
A particular tone might not sound like TikTok.
But those things have value because they belong to that brand.
Heritage, in that sense, is accumulated brand equity. Years of recognition have been deposited into those assets.
There’s an irony here. Brands spend enormous amounts of money trying to manufacture distinctiveness, while established brands can be tempted to discard genuinely distinctive assets simply because they’ve become unfashionable.
The alternative isn’t to freeze a brand in time. It’s to understand the difference between evolution and erasure.
Contemporary doesn’t automatically mean distinctive.
The trend cycle is getting faster
Knowing what to evolve and what to protect gets harder when brands are surrounded by new trends every day. Social media has accelerated that pressure.
Brands are now exposed to a new aesthetic, format, phrase, sound or cultural moment almost daily. A visual language can move from interesting to inescapable in weeks.
One minute everything is minimal.
Then minimalism becomes bland.
So brands become expressive.
Sans serif becomes serif. Polished becomes lo-fi. Digital becomes analogue. Perfect becomes imperfect. Corporate becomes conversational.
The problem is that each rebellion eventually risks becoming another uniform.
For years, the design industry has talked about “blanding”: brands simplifying themselves into similar geometric sans-serif identities in the pursuit of something clean, modern and digitally functional. Design and Art Direction has pointed specifically to the way fashion branding converged around increasingly similar sans-serif wordmarks.
Now the pendulum is moving again.
In 2026, Canva describes a major creative movement towards work that feels rawer, more tactile and more obviously human: scrapbook aesthetics, imperfect layouts, analogue textures and unfinished visual elements. Its trend research calls it “Imperfect by Design”.
Elsewhere, designers are documenting the same move towards hand-drawn typography, scanned textures and deliberately handmade-looking brand identities as businesses search for ways to feel more human in an increasingly AI-generated visual world.
Culturally, the shift makes complete sense.
But there’s a risk hiding inside it.
If every brand responds to digital perfection by adding the same handwritten typeface, scribbled arrow, film grain and imperfect collage, imperfection becomes another template.
We escape one form of sameness by collectively running towards another.
Instagram and the problem with fashionable distinctiveness
Instagram’s 2026 identity refresh makes the tension particularly clear.
The platform introduced a refreshed script wordmark alongside Instagram Pen, a new handwriting typeface, while reducing the dominance of its famous gradient within the wider system. Instagram says its designers explored hundreds of possibilities, including abandoning script altogether, but repeatedly came back to it because the crafted script still felt uniquely connected to Instagram.
There are two ways to look at that.
The first is that Instagram’s move towards handwriting arrives at exactly the moment handmade, expressive and imperfect typography is culturally fashionable.
The second is more interesting.
Instagram could have discarded an established brand code in pursuit of something newer. Instead, it recognised that script was already part of its history and chose to reinterpret it.
That doesn’t necessarily amount to trend-following.
It may actually demonstrate the principle strong brands should be aiming for: take what culture is doing and find the version of it that already has a reason to belong to you.
The irony is that once an influential brand does something successfully, everyone else begins borrowing the surface of it.
And that’s where the cycle begins again.
Social has the same problem with voice
Visual identity is only half of it.
Brands can lose their voice just as easily through language.
One brand becomes successful by being irreverent.
Another becomes successful by behaving chaotically.
Suddenly every social feed is sarcastic, self-aware, mildly unhinged and speaking in exactly the same internet dialect.
“POV.”
“It’s giving.”
“We’re in our ‘x’ era.”
“Consider this your sign.”
None of that language is inherently wrong. Problems start when the language of the platform becomes louder than the language of the brand.
Ryanair is a useful contrast.
Its irreverent social personality works because it originates in something genuinely connected to Ryanair. Its own marketing team describes the brand as self-deprecating, disruptive and direct, and much of its social humour plays with perceptions that already existed around low fares, extra charges and the experience of flying with the airline.
The trend is a delivery mechanism.
The joke still belongs to Ryanair.
Duolingo works in a similar way. It participates relentlessly in TikTok culture, but Duo the owl remains the recurring brand asset at the centre of it. The team found that existing jokes about the persistent owl could become part of its social personality, then used trends to amplify that character rather than replace it.
That leaves us with an important distinction.
Strong brands bend trends around themselves. Weak brands bend themselves around trends.
When authenticity becomes an aesthetic
The same thing is now happening with authenticity.
Polished brand content began to feel too corporate, so social moved towards lo-fi.
Phone footage. Behind the scenes. Founder videos. Staff content. Film grain. Mistakes left in the edit. Copy that sounds deliberately casual.
Much of that shift has been positive.
But once everybody receives the same brief to “make it feel organic”, authenticity itself starts becoming art directed.
That creates a strange contradiction. A brand can manufacture the appearance of spontaneity just as carefully as it once manufactured perfection.
And when every business does the same thing, the result is no more distinctive than the pristine feeds it replaced.
When every brand adopts the same version of authenticity, it quickly stops feeling distinctive.
Relevance should be an expression of the brand
None of this means brands should ignore trends. Doing so would be equally limiting.
Culture moves. Language evolves. Platforms change. Audiences develop new expectations. Brands should respond.
M&S should understand what people want to wear now.
Instagram should evolve the way its identity works.
Ryanair should understand TikTok.
The question isn’t simply whether a brand participates.
It’s what survives when it does.
Can you use a current aesthetic without surrendering your visual identity?
Can you participate in a meme without borrowing someone else’s personality?
Can your founder make an informal Reel without suddenly sounding like every other founder?
Can you follow a fashion trend while still producing something recognisably yours?
The goal isn’t rigid consistency. It’s recognisable flexibility.
The brands that endure have an anchor
Perhaps that’s the role heritage really plays.
It provides an anchor.
That doesn’t require a century-old archive or a historic logo. Newer brands can build heritage too. It begins every time a business chooses to repeat something distinctive instead of replacing it with something temporarily fashionable.
A colour.
A phrase.
A symbol.
A photographic style.
A point of view.
A particular way of behaving.
Repeated for long enough, those choices become associations. Associations become recognition. Recognition becomes brand equity.
Social media constantly asks brands what’s new.
Brand building asks them to remember what should stay the same.
The strongest brands learn to do both.
Relevance doesn’t come from reshaping a brand every time culture changes direction. Sometimes the most relevant thing a brand can do is know exactly what not to change.
Keep your brand recognisable as it evolves
Moving with culture can put pressure on brands to change quickly. New platforms, formats and trends create opportunities, but without a clear sense of what makes your brand distinctive, it’s easy for its identity to become diluted along the way.
Our branding services can help you define the visual identity, voice and brand assets that give people something to recognise and remember. If your foundations are already strong, our social media services can help you translate them into content that feels relevant to each platform while still sounding and looking like you.
Make your brand unmistakably yours, wherever it shows up, and talk to us today.
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