Exhausted? Try 'Bed-Rotting' and 'Therapeutic Laziness.'
As Ali Wong said, “I don’t wanna lean in — I wanna lie down.”
In her 2016 Netflix special, comedian Ali Wong did a bit about how she married a Harvard Business School graduate because she didn’t want to work. “I don’t wanna lean in,” she said. “I wanna lie down.” Well apparently, lying down is one of the biggest trends for 2025, according to forecasters at WGSN.
Earlier this year, WGSN told us how brands will respond to the “Great Exhaustion” of 2026. This refers to the widespread feeling of burnout around the world as a result of our jobs, domestic responsibilities, politics, and the intrusion of technology on our daily lives.
This week, WGSN released its trend forecast for 2025, and as it turns out, brands need not wait until 2026 to capitalize on our tremendous tiredness. The fashion and beauty industries can meet us where we’re at today by recognizing: our yearning for laziness; our apathy; and our desire to reject the tedium of wellness fads that have become popular over the last 15 or so years.
If you think about post-election vibes in the U.S. and where we’re headed as a country, it’s not hard to understand why consumers want to lie down. While younger women — most of whom voted for Kamala Harris — had to endure Trump winning as adults for the first time, many millennials and older women reacted with numbness and apathy. And it’s women, particularly the younger ones and moms, that the fashion and beauty industries rely on for much of their profits. What seems clear after November 5 is that all those gray, boxy, eighties business suits were a sign of things to come. It’s just hard to imagine, in the thick of a worsening gender divide, an overwhelming demand for sex appeal, opulence, and exuberance from the fashion and beauty industries. Amid so much uncertainty and gloom, it’s also hard to imagine women having the same bandwidth for “wellness,” which has been commodified into countless luxury goods and practices that often require immense effort and privilege to implement.
And so, the number one trend in beauty for 2025, per WGSN, will be “therapeutic laziness.” This is an “anti-wellness” trend anchored around skincare and something called “bed rotting.” Though this sounds like your husband lost his sandwich in the duvet, it refers to rejecting productivity in favor of intentionally spending time in bed. Rather than just let us waste away in our sheets at no additional cost, brands will try to sell us things to enhance our rotting, like sheets “imbued with nourishing ingredients and scents that bridge the gap between skincare and sleep.” I thought night serums did that, but sure.
Products that blur the line between cosmetics and skincare, like foundation made with skincare ingredients, are a big area of growth for beauty companies. I have to imagine this is the relentless pursuit of an impossible-to-obtain, filtered-looking complexion. But it also feels like a form of therapeutic laziness — you feel like you’re doing something good for your skin while merely wearing your usual makeup.
WGSN also predicts the travel industry will capitalize on laziness with sleep tourism experiences that could include “AI smart beds” and “prescription-scented lullabies.” It’s not entirely clear what that is (room spray?) but something seems deeply broken in the world if so many people are willing pay a premium for a good night’s sleep that “sleep tourism” even exists.
As for 2025 fashion, WGSN named as the number-one trend “day-jamas,” which are basically pajamas as clothes. Pajama trends have come and gone, and day-jamas don’t seem to differ a whole lot. But now, they’re being pitched to consumers as a sweatsuit alternative. “Our data shows sleepwear outperforming dresses and swimwear within the resortwear mix over the past two-year period,” WGSN reports. As with the bedsheets that care for your skin, some dayjamas portend to do the same via fabric fibers infused with collagen, hyaluronic acid, and CBD oil.
I can understand why the trend forecasters describe this as “anti-wellness.” Rejecting a pervasive and in many ways damaging and financially draining cultural movement is innately appealing, particularly when anti-vax pseudoscience proponents like RFK Jr. — a hero of the wellness movement — stand to be awarded appointments to lead the nation’s healthcare. But it sounds more like a rerouting of wellness focus for a certain privileged demographic from, say, gut health and “clean” this or that to removing the effort of day-to-day living that drains people so, so much.
Take, for instance, the below, from a New York Times article on the “health trends that are defining 2024.”
The water wars are here, and they are vicious — thanks, #Watertok. There’s a fierce online community extolling the benefits of hydration and igniting debates over just how much water people need to drink each day and whether plain old H2O is enough.
So how — and how often — should you refill your water bottle? There’s no one right answer for everyone, and most people can stay hydrated by just reaching for water when they feel thirsty.
Like, we can’t even drink water without it being a whole thing? No wonder all we want to do in 2025 is laze around and rot in our beds in hyaluronic dayjamas without a lick of guilt.
Loose Threads
Hearst, which publishes Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, laid off dozens of employees Thursday. “Technical difficulties” relating to calendar invites apparently complicated the process.
I linked this above but it bears highlighting: Business of Fashion has an excellent story on how RFK Jr. could impact the wellness industry if he’s confirmed as the secretary of health and human services. He could further deregulate, for instance, supplements, which are already poorly regulated thanks to powerful lobbying interests.
Lauren Sánchez, who’s planning her wedding to Jeff Bezos: “I have to say, I do have a Pinterest — I’m just like every other bride, so I do have a Pinterest board.”
Travis Kelce wore the Elder Statesman Patchwork jacket to the Chiefs’ game against the Bills on Sunday that, social media pointed out, looked like the Microsoft Windows logo.
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It's about time that a trend rejecting all this wellness thing raises up. Don't get me wrong, I love self-care and believe many practices are beneficial but, as everything else, it became an obligation/something to humble brag/another way of spending more money on simple things. Take skincare for example. The whole 'regimen' of 150 products + layering + masks + essences + 'clean beauty' and so on is exhausting. It's no longer a pleasure, it's just another chore. Whatever brand understands is time for 'less is more' and provides guilty free solutions will win the market
How do you wash a fabric that’s infused with HA, CBD, or anything like that? Or do you just wear the thing until you’ve rotted enough and then throw it away? 🤔