Six years ago, “Ted Lasso” reminded us that many winning TV shows are the result of the right sentiment landing at the right time — or, in this case, a terrible time. In 2020, the weight of pandemic lockdowns and an especially rancorous presidential election made life feel mean.
Enter Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis’ folksy Missourian loaded with cornpone wisdom, positivity and kindness. Against all good sense, Ted, an American football coach, moves to England to coach the AFC Richmond Greyhounds, a men’s soccer team, despite knowing nothing about the sport.
That suited Greyhounds owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) since she intended Ted, his assistant coach, Willis Beard (Brendan Hunt), and her team’s players to fail. Instead, Ted’s emphasis on personal growth and camaraderie rebuilds the Greyhounds from their league’s demoralized joke into its comeback kings, powered by their yearning to Believe.
In 2020, “Ted Lasso” made us feel like that motto, “Believe,” was all we needed. In 2026, introducing a women’s football team changes that pitch. The fourth season sees Ted, Rebecca, AFC Richmond’s PR specialist Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) and the organization’s Director of Football Operations Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) attempting to transfer their proven winning methods over to the women’s team and are blocked by the sexism baked into professional sports at every step.
Data-backed analyses predict the Lady Greyhounds’ doom before they’ve even begun to race. Keeping the sponsors’ faith is challenging for Rebecca, who reminds one that a company that backs military actions shouldn’t hesitate to support a women’s football club.
“Wars are profitable,” her skeptic replies coldly. Women’s sports, not so much. So instead, Rebecca rewrites the call to “Believe” into a prayer for a chance.
“That’s what sport is. That’s what life is, isn’t it? A series of chances,” she says. “We took a chance, creating this team. Yes, for little girls to see amazing, athletic women doing incredible things on the pitch. But equally important, so that little boys . . . can grow up in a world where they don’t know any different. And to do that, we need to be given a chance. By you.”
To me, speeches like this have a dual purpose: Rebecca is obviously speaking to a specific character, but Waddingham’s passionate delivery makes an effective case to viewers. Even in the wide world of sports movies and shows, men and women are treated differently. For the reasons Rebecca spells out, they shouldn’t be.
As a recent story on Togethxr.com delineates, the heyday of movies about women in sports ended by the close of the aughts – pretty much spanning the time between the first film in the “Bring It On” franchise in 2000 and the fifth in 2009.
On TV, actors Rob Mac and Ryan Reynolds’ excursion into the wild world of British Premier football, “Welcome to Wrexham,” recently expanded to include a women’s team, the Red Dragons. In the 2023-24 season, with their star owners’ backing, the Dragons became the first Welsh women’s club to operate on a semi-professional basis.
(FXX) Maria Francis-Jones and Ava Suckley in “Welcome to Wrexham.”
And Netflix recently greenlighted “The 99’ers,” a biographical drama about the U.S. Women’s National Team’s victory over China at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Meanwhile, there is no shortage of films and shows about male sports icons and legendary men’s team. Recently, a new season of “Hard Knocks” premiered, HBO’s behind-the-scenes journey through one American pro football team’s pre-season training camp. This run of episodes features the Seattle Seahawks—my home team—which I find less compelling than the prospect of seeing where the Lady Greyhounds end up.
I assure you this is less about sisterly solidarity or my lingering affection for “Ted Lasso” or even a love of soccer – er, football. Sports and I are largely incompatible, sorry to say. I am, however, the kind of curious and not judgmental person who wants to see what has and hasn’t changed about these stories since “Bend It Like Beckham” became a sensation in 2002. That movie’s heroines Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightley) saw the opportunity to play at the university level in America as the ultimate dream. America, they thought, took women’s football seriously.
The diminishment of Title IX protections tells another story. Disparities in pay and resources are still a battle in both women’s professional sports and at the collegiate and Olympic levels, as publicized advocacy by athletes such as Megan Rapinoe has revealed.
In 2020, “Ted Lasso” made us feel like that motto, “Believe,” was all we needed. In 2026, introducing a women’s football team changes that pitch.
More recently, the Trump administration’s snubbing of the gold-medal-winning women’s hockey squad at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan broadcast a shameful message about the common disregard for female athletes and their achievements.
And in Britain, Ted’s adopted stomping grounds, the BBC recently published a collection of anecdotes from women in football, whether they be professionals or fans, describing a strain of misogyny so brutish that one woman stopped taking her daughter to live men’s matches. “I wouldn’t feel safe and I certainly wouldn’t want to expose my daughter to sexism,” she told the BBC.
The fourth season of “Ted Lasso” doesn’t entirely frost those bad vibes with its happiness and hopium. The Lady Greyhounds confront doubts about their talent in pubs, from the stands and in the media.
This being “Ted Lasso,” every determined push downfield strides on a turf green with optimism. That starts in the fourth season’s kickoff, when Rebecca, Keeley and Higgins journey to Kansas City to re-recruit Ted.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
One of my favorite moments in their adventure shows Higgins finding his way to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. He enters reluctantly, since he knows nothing about baseball, and leaves fired up by the heroism of men like Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson.
“You know, their story is quite similar to how women in England weren’t allowed to play football for years,” observed Higgins, netting a doubtful reaction from the museum’s forbearing docent. This sends the oh-so-polite Higgins into a stammering fit: “Not similar. Sorry. What happened here was much worse. Much, much worse. Much, much, much, much, much, I can’t stop saying much for some reason.”
But when Higgins explains that women weren’t allowed in England’s professional leagues until 1971, even the museum guide couldn’t help blurting, “Damn – that’s recent as hell.”
Yes. It’s still new enough for us to understand that getting the Lady Greyhounds to believe in themselves was always going to be the easy part. Getting a nation and a world to believe in the women of AFC Richmond and female athletes in general? That’s always been the whole game.
New episodes of “Ted Lasso” stream Wednesdays on Apple TV.
Those anticipating HBO’s series adaptation of “Watchmen,” the classic comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, may have divided opinions of the 2019 version conceived by Damon Lindelof, co-creator of “Lost” and “The Leftovers.”
The first episode, the only part of the nine-episode season HBO made available to critics, introduces the story’s ostensible protagonists: Tulsa’s Police Force. And the enemy? It’s a white supremacist organization whose members wear masks inspired by the iconic “Watchmen” character Rorschach.
“What, in 2019, is the equivalent of the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the United States?” Lindelof posited Wednesday during a press conference, referring to one of the key political flashpoints examined in the original comic. He answered, “It just felt like it was undeniably race and policing in America.”
Until now HBO has kept the details of “Watchmen” cloaked in mystery, teasing audiences with disconnected snippets. Reporters assembled for HBO’s press conferences at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour screened a preview of the first episode on the condition that we refrain from posting reviews until the drama’s scheduled premiere in October.
You won’t find smartphones or references to social media in the story, either — a thoughtful detail from Lindelof, the man who quit Twitter after he’d weathered enough vitriol over the “Lost” finale. Also absent, at least initially, are direct descendants of The Comedian, Nite Owl or other familiar heroes from the original’s 12-issue arc. Jeremy Irons has apparently taken on the mantle of Ozymandias, although HBO’s press notes only describe him as “the aging and imperious Lord of a British Manor.”
We can, however, describe Oscar winner Regina King’s role. She plays Angela Abar, a devoted wife, mother of three and bakery owner who ostensibly has retired from the Tulsa Police Force. But in this new world, cops hide their faces for their own protection (with the beat cops outfitted in colors associated with Silk Spectre) making Angela’s job as a lead detective a secret identity.
This aligns with the alternate history of Moore’s original “Watchmen” comics, released between 1986 and 1987, in which people with superhuman abilities emerged between World War II and the 1960s, changing the trajectory of history and granting the United States the upper hand during the Cold War.
Vigilantes and unaffiliated heroes are outlawed, and a few superheroes that haven’t retired go to work for the government. In Moore’s reality, America wins the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon was never forced out of office. Term limits are abolished, in fact, allowing Nixon’s presidency to last well into the 1980s.
In presenting white supremacy as the main antagonist of these new chapters, Lindelof told the industry reporters assembled for HBO’s presentations at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour, currently underway in Los Angeles, that he’s selected a crisis to which there is no simple answer or grandiose solution.
“In a traditional superhero movie the bad guys are fighting aliens. And when they beat the aliens, the aliens go back to their planet and everybody wins,” Lindelof said. “There’s no defeating white supremacy. It’s not going anywhere. But it felt like it was pretty formidable foe.”
The Watchmen are an inversion of Golden and Silver Age archetypes, revised to fit a dystopian extreme of what Moore and Gibbons imagined America could become with but a few minor tweaks to the timeline. It’s an incisive vision of unchecked imperialism that questions our culture’s reverence of might.
Lindelof stressed that the new “Watchmen” will not alter the original series in any way: “We explore the past…but it’s canon,” he said. “Everything that happened in those 12 issues could not be messed with.”
Instead, he contemplated how the history kicked off in those comics might have progressed from where the story leaves off. Lindelof explained that he was inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ story in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” which lead him to read about Black Wall Street and the massacre of black families by white racist mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921.
As a result, he connected Moore and Gibbons’ “Watchmen” past to his version of that world’s present. He explained to critics that Nixon remained president through the late ‘80s and died in office. Then Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, only to be defeated in ’92 by Robert Redford, who remains in office in alt-2019.
“One of the things that we’re interested in exploring is what would happen if a very well-intentioned white man, a liberal white man, was president for way too long?” Lindelof said, referring to the fictional Redford presidency.
As Lindelof explained to critics, racism isn’t presented as a simplistic evil in “’Watchmen” but rather as a strain of white supremacy born out of a white liberal version of good intentions. Later in a conversation with a small group of reporters, Lindelof put a finer point on it.
“Watchmen” isn’t merely interested in flaming racists, he said. “This show is trolling the white savior.”
For these reasons and others, it probably goes without saying that a segment of viewers will be predisposed against embracing his vision. Foremost among them would be Moore, but that’s to be expected. Moore has a reputation for being against any adaptations of his work, and not even Lindelof’s reverence for the source material enables him to win an exception.
“I have made personal overtures to connect with [Moore] and explain to him a little bit of what we were doing, and he made it clear that he didn’t want that to happen. And I want to respect that as well,” Lindelof said. “… So, the wrestling match will continue.”
Lindelof added that he admires Moore’s “punk rock spirit,” saying that he imagines that “if you told Alan Moore in 1984 or ’85 or ’86, ‘You’re not allowed to do this because Superman’s creator or Swamp Thing’s creator doesn’t want you to do it,’ he would say, ‘F**k you, I’m doing it anyway.’”
He added in conclusion, “And so I’m channeling the spirit of Alan Moore to tell Alan Moore, ‘F**k you, I’m doing it anyway.’”
The tech that wants to help you get dressed. | CreativaImages/Getty Images
The influencers have started to promise me that they know how to get me to stop shopping: I just have to enter every garment of clothing I own into an app, one by one. “I digitally cataloged my ENTIRE wardrobe,” theyswearonvideos, routinelypulling in hundreds of thousands of views.
The selling point of these apps (Indyx, Whering, ACloset, OpenWardrobe, and many more) is seductive; they promise to help users understand exactly what they already own so that they shop less. In theory, that means saving money — and slowing the steady damage the fashion industry is wrecking on our planet.
“Collectively, we are buying and then throwing away more than ever before,” Indyx warned on its website, before reciting dire statistics about how many clothes are produced now and how many of them end up in landfills. Luckily, it said, “We’re here to break the cycle.”
That idea appealed to me. I am not a fashionista, but I enjoy clothes enough to buy more than I really need, despite what I know about fashion’s impact on the planet. My intellectual understanding of climate change can’t always stop me from clicking “add to cart” when I see a dashing pair of wide-legged trousers, even though there’s a hard limit on the number of times a person can wear wide-legged trousers in one week.
Still, to make these apps work, you have to individually enter photos of everything you own now and everything you buy in the future, which sounds like a tedious, laborious process. (You can take the photos yourself or hunt down product pictures from the brand.) And because so many influencers are pushing this, it’s hard to tell how life-changing it really is and how much is just marketing speak and hype. So, I decided to test one of these apps — Indyx — for you. I also talked to wardrobe cataloging enthusiasts and experts on sustainable consumption to see what I could learn from them. I wanted to know: Could cataloging our wardrobes actually make us shop less? And, if it can, would it be worth the effort?
Key takeaways
Experts estimate the fashion industry accounts for between 2 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Wardrobe cataloging apps are presented as a strategy for buying fewer clothes, helping to minimize fashion’s impact on the planet.
Some people find these apps to be a constructive way to redirect their shopping energy.
But the initial setup process for the apps is highly labor intensive, and they require constant tending over time.
Wardrobe apps may be right for you if you find yourself reflexively browsing clothes in your spare time, and you want to direct that impulse elsewhere.
They may be wrong for you if the idea of photographing everything you own individually fills you with a powerful dread.
“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less”
Wardrobe cataloging apps did not always advertise themselves as being good for the planet.
In 2023, the journalist Avery Trufelman investigated the nascent wardrobe cataloging app industry for her podcast series Articles of Interest. She found that a lot of the apps flopped. The issue was the business model, which was based on revenue generated from affiliate links. The idea was that people would click to purchase items they saw within the apps, and the company would take a cut of each sale. But when the apps were well designed, Trufelman reported, users felt less of a need to buy more clothes.
The current generation of wardrobe cataloging app developers has turned this from a bug into a feature. They now market their wares as the solution to overshopping, and they make their money by charging for either the app itself or for its extra content. (Indyx itself is free, but you have to pay a $75 yearly subscription for its enhanced features.)
What the marketing gets right is that the fast fashion problem is real. “Anywhere from two to 10 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with fashion,” said Brie Berry, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.
Fashion’s emissions are generated by the factories that manufacture clothing (the water and the fertilizers for growing cotton, the oil for developing synthetics) and the consumers who wear these garments (the slow shed of microplastics from yoga pants, the water and the energy consumed by washing and drying). When we get rid of old clothes, much of it ends up in landfills or incinerated. By some estimates, the fashion industry contributes more to climate change than the aviation industry.
“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less,” said Katia Dayan Vladimirova, a researcher whose consulting firm Post Growth Fashion focuses on alternatives to growth in the fashion system.
To buy less, it helps most people to know what they already own, said Alyssa Beltempo, a slow-fashion content creator and educator. Beltempo makes videos guiding viewers through the process of “shopping their own closets” to help them buy less stuff, but she’s found in her work that a lot of people aren’t clear on the contents of those closets. Because of that confusion, they end up buying stuff they don’t need.
That’s where cataloging can be helpful, Beltempo said. “These apps reduce that hurdle of not seeing the clothes you have,” she said.
Personally, what I was looking for wasn’t enhanced clarity so much as a barrier. I wanted to erect a wall between my desire to own a new piece of clothing and the click of the buy button. A searchable, scannable lookbook of everything I owned, I thought, might well do the trick.
How to catalog every piece of clothing you own
Indyx has been hyping up its new AI feature, which transforms a picture of a garment hanging limply off a hanger into a neat flat lay photo. It sped the process up, but it was also buggy; it garbled text on the front of T-shirts, misread colors, and had a tendency to interpret loose threads as ornamental bows while leaving wrinkles (I am not an ironer) untouched.
I was also concerned that the process inserted AI, with its insatiable need for water and energy, into a project sold as a way of reducing my environmental impact. But the sustainability experts I spoke to were both skeptical that this sort of light AI use was such a big deal.
“Taking photos and then asking an app to think about how to arrange your clothing into outfits is probably one of the lighter uses of AI that I could imagine,” Berry said. Vladimirova agreed that using AI for this task is unlikely to be as bad for the planet as buying even one new garment. “But then, there is also no proven causality between using this app and reducing overconsumption,” she added as a caveat.
It’s possible to input your clothes into Indyx without using the AI feature, but the truth is: I don’t know that I could have made myself go through with the whole rigamarole without it. I ran out of free AI processing about 80 percent of the way through and, overwhelmed at the thought of having to do my own flat lays, paid $75 to buy more without hesitating.
All told, it took me about five hours and many old episodes of Top Chef to photograph my summer clothes, not including shoes, jewelry, or accessories. My time spent cataloging did not include the process of entering additional data about each garment (including its initial cost, its fiber composition, where I bought it), a herculean task that I have been tackling much more slowly than the initial entry process.
Doing the shoot properly would have taken longer. Angela Goodman, a 51-year-old marketer from Seattle with a background in product photography, says she ran her own cataloging session like a pro shoot, using art lights and folding and refolding each garment to lie perfectly. It took her 10 hours spread out over multiple weeks.
As an exercise, photographing every piece of clothing I owned was clarifying, although not significantly more clarifying than going through it Marie Kondo-style. It left me with a small donation pile of items I no longer wanted and a fretful awareness that I own too many white T-shirts. In theory, that’s the kind of insight a wardrobe cataloging app produces by the spade.
“I’m not shopping. I’m building.”
Vladimirova, the sustainability consultant, said that, even though she has a better idea than most of how destructive the fashion industry is, she struggles with over-shopping. She thinks a lot about why people buy so many clothes; her best guess is that it’s a way to self-soothe.
“A lot of consumption happens in the evening when we feel vulnerable and tired, and we’re trying to reward ourselves with this shot of dopamine,” she said. For some people, these apps can replace the dopamine hit that comes from scrolling through other people’s outfit photos with the dopamine hit of scrolling through your own clothes, neatly folded and filtered until they look like aspirational fashion inspo.
Part of the satisfaction here is the infographics. After you’ve given Indyx all your fashion data, the app crunches your numbers and tells users how much you’ve bought new versus secondhand, as well as the share of natural fibers as opposed to synthetics in your closet, so that you can track the environmental impact of your shopping habits. (Synthetics tend to have a higher carbon footprint than natural fibers.) It tells you what their cost per wear is on each item to help you track which expensive garment was worth the splurge and which was a waste of money. Users can also plan outfits. You can share your wardrobe with stylists who will plan the outfits for you (on Indyx, the service ranges from $25 a month to “the low hundreds”). It’s like playing paper dolls with your own wardrobe.
For Goodman, the former product photographer, all this data takes the place of recreational shopping. She describes getting a marketing email from one of her favorite brands about a sale. After a quick scroll through their offerings, she found that she felt no urge to buy.
“I was like, ‘I do not need more clothes. I’m going to go update my Indyx, because I’m a couple of weeks behind,’” she said. She started inputting the last few outfits she’d worn into one of the Indyx services that is supposed to allow users to track their patterns and see which clothes they actually wear and what they like in an outfit. “I’m playing with clothes,” she said. “But, like, I’m not shopping. I’m, you know, building.”
Over time, all this data is supposed to inform future shopping choices. “There is something very clear about seeing two pieces that you’ve owned for the same amount of time — one that you’ve worn 57 times and one that you’ve worn twice,” said Alexandra, a 29-year-old consultant in Northern Virginia who requested her last name be withheld. She thinks tracking her clothes has given her “a little bit less buyer’s remorse.”
Cataloging your wardrobe can’t prevent a compulsive need to buy, though.
“I don’t think it cured me of my undiagnosed shopping addiction,” Alexandra said. “You can very quickly go from ‘I’m cataloging what I have’ to ‘I’m seeing a bunch of gaps in my wardrobe that I should fill immediately.’”
“There just wasn’t incentive anymore”
The main question I had about these apps was whether, with such a labor-intensive process, there comes a time when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Alexandra says that she gradually stopped using her wardrobe app last year, after she moved out of her own apartment and back into her family’s suburban house in the midst of a career transition.
“I was separated from a lot of my belongings for a very long time, and then, as I started to get things back, it didn’t feel worth the effort anymore,” she said. Who was she going to see in one of her curated outfits? “My job’s on a computer. When I leave the house, I go to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the bookstore,” she said. “There just wasn’t incentive anymore, compared to when I was closer to the city and doing things more regularly.”
Beltempo, the slow fashion content creator, said she doesn’t bother to add every new purchase to her own catalog.
“I really use it more for my packing,” she said. Before she travels, she makes a list of likely candidates for her suitcase and enters them into the app. “And then, I’ll play, and I’ll make outfits,” she says.
Vladimirova, the sustainable consumption researcher struggling with overshopping, gave the apps a spin. She tried three of them and found that she was only able to stick with each one for a matter of months. “In the beginning, when the novelty of the app is there, it’s very satisfying,” she said. “It records your outfits in vivid colors. It can crop out the ugly background and keep it very neat, create fancy capsules. They look so lovely.”
But over time, they all began to bore her. “And now, I forget to update when I buy something new — usually from secondhand sources — and it kind of lost its meaning for me,” she said. “But the premise is good!”
My own experience seems to be closest to Vladimirova’s. I keep having to remind myself to enter my outfits into Indyx. Every time I put on a piece of clothing, I think with dread, “Oh god, if I don’t look up how much I paid for this, I’ll never know my cost per wear and, then, what’s the point?” I keep giving my shoes guilty looks and thinking about how I should really photograph and catalog them — if I’m doing this right.
“It’s a project,” said Lauren Ludwig, a 41-year-old who has been using her wardrobe apps for the past three years. “But it’s a fun one for someone who enjoys clothing.”
Indyx and its brethren are slick, and their infographics are beautiful. For dedicated wardrobe hobbyists, they’re probably a great option. But for most people who just want to cut down on their clothes shopping, it’s hard to say that the $75 annual subscription is worth it. The free version will give you the same paper doll effect if you are willing to do your own flat lays, or you can recreate it by dragging phone camera pictures of your clothes onto a Google Slides deck.
If you find, as Vladimirova theorized, that you shop when you don’t feel good, you can try replacing that habit with a “dopamine menu” of small acts that bring you joy, like hugging a pet, doing a puzzle, or going for a walk. And if your closet is filled with brand new clothes you never wear, you’re racking up debt buying clothes, or you just have the nagging sense that your shopping has spiraled completely out of control, therapy is not a bad idea.
Personally, I found that Indyx could not give me what I really crave when I want to play with clothes: the understanding of the way fabric drapes against my body, the knowledge of its texture against my skin. There is no substitution for the slow analog process of walking into my closet, touching my clothes with my human hands, and learning with my five senses that what I have is already enough.
If you live in America in 2026, and you’re not so wealthy as to be absolutely shielded from daily life, you’re probably aware that everything is really expensive now. Gas and milk are both above $4 a gallon. Fresh vegetables are up almost 10 percent over this time last year, even though they will maybe give you explosive diarrhea. The median home in this country now costs almost half a million dollars.
A lot of people — even those with relatively high-paying jobs — are very, very stressed about money.
In some ways, our current unaffordable era is starting to evoke the years right after the Great Recession. Unemployment was high, the economy was bleak, and a lot of Americans, myself included, were searching for ways to do more with less.
One distinctive product of these harsh conditions was an entire blogosphere that emerged to give readers chatty, relatable advice on saving money.
It was a kind of the golden age for personal writing on the internet, and these writers melded advice and personal narrative in a way that foreshadowed today’s influencers, but with a more lo-fi, DIY aesthetic.Starting in about 2008 and continuing for the next decade, these authors reached thousands of readers a day with tips on how to spend less and sock more away. There was Mr. Money Mustache, a brash “financial magician” who had retired at age 30 and believed ordinary people could save half or even 75 percent of their income. There was Trent Hamm of the Simple Dollar, an Iowa dad who shared his story of getting out of debt alongside recipes for cheap meals and homemade laundry detergent. There was my niche favorite, An English Major’s Money, by a young woman who shared my less-than-lucrative career path but who was nonetheless determined to achieve financial stability.
It wasn’t just old-school personal finance advice, it was a whole philosophical universe dedicated to the idea that by living on less, you could liberate yourself from the uncertainties of the economy and experience true freedom.
Collectively, I like to think of these writers as the frugalsphere.
Today, most of them are no longer blogging about saving money — some have gotten jobs in traditional media, while others have gone on to other careers entirely (or are simply enjoying early retirement). But their movement feels newly relevant today, as Americans struggle to afford necessities and face mounting anxiety over their economic future. SoI decided to track down a bunch of frugality writers from that time, and see what they had to say about 2026.
One thing I wanted to know was why I wasn’t seeing the same outpouring of money-saving advice I’d seen in the wake of the 2008 crash. But I was also curious for bigger insights: What, if anything, is the equivalent of the frugalsphere in today’s inflationary era? And couldthe ethos of those optimistic coupon-clippers give us smarter ways to think about the unsettling new place we find ourselves in 2026?
What I found is that the frugalsphere still has lessons to teach us, but they’re not about reheating leftovers or washing out Ziploc bags. Instead, they’re about how to claim a sense of autonomy, even when our lives are buffeted by forces beyond our control.
The short, influential arc of the frugalsphere
The idea that you can achieve prosperity by carefully watching your spending is far from revolutionary, and self-help authors were extolling the virtues of frugality long before the Web 2.0 era. In the 1990s, for example, editor Amy Dacyczyn published a print newsletter called the Tightwad Gazette, teaching readers frugal tricks (Dacyczyn herself favored reusing aluminum foil) for the low price of $12 per year.
But amid the upheaval of the Great Recession, when more than 15 million Americans found themselves unemployed in the worst crisis since the 1930s, a new generation of bloggers started offering advice about saving money, often directed at millennials starting their careers in a decimated job market.
“People were looking for something they could do,” Nicole Dieker Finley told me recently.
What Finley did was to start posting all her earnings and expenses on Tumblr around 2012, when she was trying to make it as an independent musician in Los Angeles. She soon caught the attention of the editors of The Billfold, a website launched the same year to cover money with a personal, relatable tone befitting the times. Billfold editors Logan Sachon and Mike Dang shared their student loan and credit card debt; Finley tracked her net worth and spending and wrote about her quest for financial independence. She later went on to a freelance career writing about money (including for Vox).
Kara Stevens, meanwhile, started the website the Frugal Feminista around 2012 while facing down student loans, credit card debt, and a tanking credit score: “It clicked to me that if I didn’t do something about it, I would be in this position of not being able to move forward in my life,” she told me.
Based in New York City, she shared tips for finding free events, cheaper dupes of popular brands, and deals on fancy hotels. “It was like, how am I living my Sex and the City life on a budget?” Stevens recalled.
As time went on, more bloggers joined the space, some of them already starting from a position of financial freedom. Kristy Shen and her husband Bryce Leung started the site Millennial Revolution after retiring in 2015 at age 31 with a seven-figure investment portfolio.
“After 2008, people started freaking out and thinking that no job is safe,” Shen told me. “I think that’s when people started being more interested in finance.”
The message of the frugalsphere was that if you could leave cheaply enough and save enough money, you could weather any layoff — and eventually, not have to work at all. The bloggers of the era — many of them millennials aiming their advice at other millennials — tended to share a can-do attitude, a sense that with the right mix of care and planning, almost anyone could improve their financial situation.
Also, they wanted to stick it to the man
The frugalsphere also had a tinge of rebellion about it. “Americans tend to have a very up-down relationship with consumption,” said Helaine Olen, a longtime financial journalist and the managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank. After 2008, the pendulum started swinging against buying stuff, and the frugality bloggers were leading the swing.
Their implicit message was often that by refusing to buy expensive things, you were pushing back against corporations that wanted to control you. Frugality was, at least to some degree, about sticking it to the man.
At their peak, some personal finance blogs were reaching thousands of readers a day and breaking through into mainstream media. Shen told me that Millennial Revolution got 15,000 page views the day after a post about the virtues of renting a home was picked up by the CBC. Shen and Leung, as well as Trent Hamm and other bloggers, got book deals and started to reach a broader audience.
But the culture soon began to shift. The written personal blog began to die out, replaced by more visually driven social media – and an influencer ethos that rewarded the acquisition of new possessions, rather than showcasing ways to do without. Today, social media is much more about celebrating consumption than questioning it.
On TikTok and Instagram, “it becomes about showing perfection and showing a good life,” Olen said. “And part of a good life, as we define it in the United States, is spending money.”
How frugality lost its shine
Today, some frugality influencers have found a home on TikTok, and the deinfluencing trend of a few years ago shows there’s still an appetite for anti-capitalism, even in the age of short-form video. But overall, the cultural and economic winds have blown against frugality, frugalsphere writers and observers told me.
As inflation rose in the 2020s, necessities cost more, but saving also became less attractive. More people made the calculation that “if I don’t take this trip this month, it’ll be more expensive next year,” Olen said.
Upheavals like the Covid pandemic gave some Americans “a grim outlook on money,” Stevens said. Their feeling was, “there’s no chance that any of us can be wealthy. What’s the point of saving anything?”
Today, tips like making all your coffee at home instead of going out for a little treat don’t resonate the way they once did. This time is fundamentally different from 2008: The economy is nominally “good” now, and unemployment is low, but everything from eggs to real estate feels more unaffordable than ever.
“People say, The cost of living is so high, I need some joy,” Stevens said. “Like, You can’t deny me everything.”
What the frugalsphere can teach us now
When I talked to frugalsphere writers about today’s situation, I ended up realizing that even if some of their specific tips are no longer as applicable, their mindset still is.
At its best, frugality advice was always about adapting to your situation, whatever that might be. When rice is cheap, buy in bulk. When basil is expensive, use the leftover pesto you froze in an ice-cube tray. Nothing is cheap right now — and, to be honest, I have never had the energy to freeze pesto — but the basic idea stands.
“Frugality to me means intentionality.”
Kara Stevens
“Be flexible,” Shen says. Millennial Americans once worried about their jobs being outsourced. Now workers all over the world are worried about getting replaced by AI. No matter what, though, “you have to change with the times.”
For Gen Z, that might look like entrepreneurship and investing rather than a traditional career and saving for a home, Shen said. I can’t yet imagine what it will look like for Gen Alpha, but there’s something reassuring about the idea that flexibility is a skill we can learn, one that can help carry us through even the most macro of macroeconomic shocks.
One big thing that’s changed since 2008 is the politics of personal finance. In the 2010s and 2020s, many critics of the frugality approach began to point out that without systemic change to lower the costs of housing, health care, and education, all the coupons in the world weren’t going to make much difference. Today, affordability isn’t just an individual concern — it’s the cornerstone of a lot of political debates.
But even as we look to systemic solutions, there’s another big lesson Americans today can take from the frugalsphere: Control what you can.
For Stevens, that looks like acknowledging that “within any system that has a bias toward corporations or the wealthy, we understand that things may not be fair,” she said. “That also doesn’t mean that you don’t have personal agency.”
Exercising that agency might mean being more mindful around retail therapy rather than cutting it out entirely, Stevens said: “If I know that I need these little quick boosts to make me feel good because work is stressing me out, can I carve out a part of my budget that allows me to do that without completely disrupting my financial goals?”
Stevens, for instance, cares a lot about her skin, so she spends money on skincare products that really work for her, and cuts back on things like purses that don’t matter as much.
“Frugality to me means intentionality,” Stevens told me. It’s about “living more aligned with your values.”
In today’s era of polycrisis, it feels downright insensitive to promulgate the idea that anyone can get rich with the right combination of tips and tricks. But most Americans make at least a few choices every week about where our money is going.
If we can make whatever choices we do have in a way that’s intentional, in line with our larger goals for ourselves and the world — maybe that’s a 2026 version of financial independence.
It’s a beautiful day to go outside. | Vinnie Neuberg for Vox
If you’re Gen Z and it feels like something is different this summer, you’re not alone.
I’ve spent my career documenting — and living — this generation’s coming of age through reporting, focus groups, and surveys. More than anything else, and especially for younger Zoomers, it’s been characterized by the experience of the pandemic, which left many still feeling bitter and isolated even years later.
After years of post-pandemic malaise that saw young people’s mental health plummet as they opted for online engagement over offline opportunities, embraced a politics of doubt, and channeled their frustration into nostalgia for simpler times, nature is finally healing. A cohort whose coming of age was stunted by the chaos of 2020 is finally coming out of its shell.
We’ve seen it packed movie theaters and record-smashing ticket sales for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. We’ve seen it in sports, especially in New York City, where joyous people filled the streets for weeks shoulder to shoulder, first for the New York Knicks’ championship run and later for the World Cup that concluded just across the river. For the young adults whose defining life experience to this point was being trapped inside, the images of impromptu mass gatherings and fan celebrations resonated far beyond the five boroughs.
But sports aren’t the only thing that has communities coming together in person as of late. Doves of young people have been lining up for froyo on any given night of the week, Love Island-obsessed observers have gathered in bars to watch the dating show, and despite dwindling patriotism, communities nationwide celebrated the country’s 250th birthday with hot dogs, fireworks, and fanfare.
As one 25-year-old from Illinois told me, it’s the season of “summer-maxxing,” which means “enjoying every bit of summer and the perks that come with it.”
In my own conversations and research, there’s a burgeoning sense that — for the first time in their lives — young people are driving the cultural moment themselves rather than having it inflicted upon them by older adults and events outside of their control. Some of the comments in this piece were shared in focus groups. Others came from a qualitative survey sent out to Gen Z-ers.
And while hope is a fragile thing, the implications could be profound. Through my work, I’ve tracked Gen Z’s loneliness and the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic for years — examining how the damage has shown up in school, work, and politics, and even split my generation in two. The national conversation about young people has been just as dark, featuring stories overwhelmingly about what they aren’t doing: Hanging out with friends, hooking up, taking risks.
A generation dismissed as terminally online is taking its politics offline as well, making their presence loudly known in primaries by walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and turning out voters.
In recent years, post-pandemic trauma expressed itself in a craving for simpler times that fueled Gen Z’s nostalgia era. Young adults daydreamed about how good things must have been back in the 1990s, or in the early 2000s, or even within their own lifetime, before the pandemic, before the 2016 election, and especially before smartphones, social media, and AI took over the world. This nostalgia even helped power some young voters’ rightward shift in 2024, as they embraced a candidate who ran on a campaign to bring back the pre-pandemic past.
But this summer, the summer of 2026, is a moment of its own, and it involves engaging with the present rather than wishing we were somewhere else.
Take the movies, an industry that doomsayers warned was in danger of extinction after the pandemic trained a generation to stay inside with streaming devices.
Instead, this summer has seen two massive box-office hits — Obsession and Backrooms — that were made by young people, for young people, and saw young audiences turn out in droves for repeat in-person viewings. Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, drew on Gen Z’s anxieties about dating and intimacy. Backrooms, directed by 21-year-old Kane Parsons, drafted off a YouTube horror meme about people trapped in (generational metaphor alert) a never-ending indoor space.
It’s probably not a coincidence that these movies came out at a time Gen Z was confronting their post-pandemic fears of isolation head-on. Again and again in focus group conversations across the country, I’ve heard from young people who are looking to log off their devices and spend time together in-person.
“People seem a lot more interested in experiences rather than just like going out to go out,” a 17-year-old girl from Arkansas said. “People want to go…to concerts, go play pickleball, go to farmers market[s], go thrifting, go hiking, go on a coffee run. I think it’s just kind of more looking for community as opposed to entertainment.”
There are other signs of behavioral shifts. After years of data showing Gen Z drinking less than their adult peers, they are now keeping up with older generations: 74 percent of Gen Z reported drinking alcohol in March 2026, almost on par with the 76 percent rate for boomers, according to an IWSR report released in July. The report also found something very telling — rather than drinking to unwind, as has been the case for older generations, Gen Z is drinking more to socialize and to be with others.
In cultural events around the country, you can see this appetite for in-person gatherings that force young adults to unplug. The generationally beloved Phoebe Bridgers hosted phone-free concerts where she required her fans to put their devices in Yondr pouches. And there are impromptu “lie down” gatherings meant to encourage a collective, communal pause that are happening in Central Park. To keep up with this shift, Tinder — the epitome of online dating — will launch in-person dating events in 26 cities by the end of September, signaling that any business interested in capturing Gen Z must now have an in-person component.
A generation dismissed as terminally online is taking its politics offline as well, making their presence loudlyknown in primaries by walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and turning out voters. When I ask focus groups about which politicians catch their attention, they’ve brought up figures like James Talarico, Jon Ossoff, and Marco Rubio, who they identify as having a more energetic and optimistic approach. Young people have often mentioned New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a model politician, and one of the traits I hear consistently that they like about him is that he is out in the street and easy to bump into. His online videos also emphasize him out in the world, interacting with constituents, or walking down the entire island of Manhattan.
“I think there’s a stronger presence of people coming together, whether it is for their favorite sports team with the NBA Finals and World Cup (let’s go Knicks!), stronger political activism, especially with primaries coming up in states like New York, and simply attending events like Pride parades,” one 30-year-old man from Brooklyn said.
There’s no doubt that we’re experiencing something new. The question then becomes whether it’s a momentary trend: Where does the IRL energy go when it gets cold, dark, and college kids are back in school?
As the reality of fall intrudes, the vibes could certainly shift. And it will take time to see whether these nascent cultural trends show up in hard data — one thing I’ll be watching is whether Gen Z’s trademark self-reported anxiety, unhappiness, and loneliness start finally reversing.
But I do see a world in which some of the Gen Z summer trends persist — perhaps we’ll see more in-person NFL watch parties or fantasy football drafts, community organizing for midterm election candidates, and more energy around in-person celebrations for Halloween or Friendsgiving.
My bet is the post-nostalgia era is here to stay. Just as Boomers were permanently changed by the “Summer of Love” — a period some history-minded young people have compared this season to — this is going to be a core memory going forward. It’s our time now, and we’re not going back inside.
White drugs. Underage drinking. Absentee parents. Nonstop parties. Oh, to be a rich teenager in the 1980s, says “The Shards” in so many words. Too many, I’d say, but slapping droning voiceovers atop expository visuals isn’t for me. Piling too much on too much is both Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis’ signature, however, as seen in this TV collaboration between auteur and author.
“The Shards,” an adaptation of Ellis’ 2023 autobiographical novel, rewinds to his pre-“Less Than Zero” adolescence, when he was just Bret (Igby Rigney), a high school senior in lockstep with his hedonistic friends. When they aren’t snorting narcotics, everyone but Bret ignores evidence that a serial killer is circling ever closer.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
Ellis’ eroded faith in the safety of adults is a recurring theme in his work, but “The Shards” cynically wraps that in horror, celebrity, luxury brands and needle drops like the Pretenders’ “Bad Boys Get Spanked.” Pop singer Hayes Warner portrays Bret’s girlfriend Debbie, whose father and mother (Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood) share their loveless relationship with a psychosexual lich (Broadway producer Jordan Roth).
That two of Bret’s other pals are played by Cindy Crawford’s daughter, Kaia Gerber, and Richard Gere’s son, Homer Gere, is also a classic Murphy move: The offspring of previously married ‘80s icons starring in a story about the era their parents ruled? Fabulous! So what if Gerber looks like she’s repeating 12th grade for the tenth time? Realism is not the point.
Instead, think of “The Shards” as a View-Master reel designed to give Gen Z a glimpse at the lost age of excess they’re pining for. Cocaine and smoking are back, after all, along with outsize glamour. Bret may lament childhood’s demise, but if you had helicopter parents, these throes probably look less like trash than fire.
New episodes of “The Shards” premiere Wednesdays on FX and Hulu.
“This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills . . . This is the ‘woman’s pluck’ story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, the Mildred Pierce story, the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail, show the men; the story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men.”
That prose could describe Lorraine Lyon, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s indomitable Queen of Debt and the true showstopper of “Fargo.” She seems the type, descending her spiral staircase into our lives (which she’d describe as “sad,” “little” or both) with an imperious purr of “I’m here,” before demanding a do-over when her lawyer on call ruins her entrance.
Lorraine makes the men around her nervous because she has little use for them. For what use are men to a woman with billions in the bank, six governors on speed dial and a personal liaison at the Federal Trade Commission? Her son and husband might as well be pets. She wears her power like a second skin and speaks a mid-Atlantic accent similar to the one Leigh used in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” only mellowed by casks of rare scotch and impatience with unrefined dullards.
Lorraine is not a hero, nor a pure villain, but one of the rarest forces in nature – a woman billionaire who can afford to buy respect or purchase punishments for those who don’t show her a healthy fear when she fires a warning shot.
One also gets the sense that Lorraine had to earn a good share of that influence, though. Maybe she was born rich, but not with the type of money she has. Her multibillion-dollar debt consolidation company is cruelly named Redemption Services. Redemption implies salvation or forgiveness, two graces Lorraine lacks for strangers and barely bestows on loved ones. Looming behind her office desk is a behemoth of a painting bellowing what we presume to be her motto: “No.”
By now you may have deduced that the passage quoted above is not about Lorraine. Joan Didion wrote that for The New Yorker about Martha Stewart, although the line that comes next in that paragraph could have easily been written about Lorraine’s Bisquick-mixing daughter-in-law Dorothy (Juno Temple). “The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power,” Didion writes, “of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”
Assuming Lorraine is around the same age as the actor playing her, she would have learned plenty from the example set by Stewart’s public rise and fall, and her precarious choice to make her identity and image her brand. Didion’s essay was published four years before Stewart’s pristine if prickly image was undone by her implication in an insider trading scandal, in which she was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators.
Stewart’s empire was built on elevating the art of homemaking, winning the gratitude and millions of dollars of support from of underappreciated women everywhere. As many have written since, Stewart’s main sin was being a successful older woman. She was around 63 when she was sentenced to five months in prison.
Lorraine would have vowed to never go out like Stewart did, making her money by becoming the person who takes the good life for granted instead of toiling to create it.
What use are men to a woman with billions in the bank, six governors on speed dial, and a personal liaison at the Federal Trade Commission?
She barely tolerates Dorothy until trouble comes knocking, threatening her son and her granddaughter, an intentional friction constructed by series creator Noah Hawley. Their rivalry continues the “Fargo” tradition of burdening women with having to constantly fight for every inch of the life they’ve won and the slightest esteem of the men surrounding them.
Lorraine’s battle readiness is the type one learns by competing against men – and it is mostly men in the billionaires’ club – and not only winning but routing them every single time. It’s the arrogance of a woman who never received respect or sympathy and therefore appears to have none to give.
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Richa Moorjani in “Fargo” (FX)One of the most satisfying subplots of the season involved a sexist pair of bank executives with whom Lorraine sits down, only for them to initially refuse to deal with her until she sets them straight by informing the two that she intends to buy their bank.
Even then, the bank’s top executive fears Jon Hamm’s sheriff Roy Tillman more than Lorraine, because what’s the worst a woman can do? Roy threatens the man to stop him from making the sale to Lorraine, simply because he doesn’t want “that woman” to profit on his territory.
And that makes Scandia police officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) braver and more stalwart than she realizes.
When Lorraine first meets Indira, several episodes before she sits down with those good old boys, all she can see is a civil servant in debt up to her eyeballs.
“What is your function?” Lorraine asks Indira when they first meet in her office. “The police. I mean, why do we need you? . . . You’re gatekeepers standing outside the walls, keeping the rabble from getting in. But in here, inside these walls, you have no function. You should remember that.”
Women like Lorraine pride themselves on rarely being surprised, which works in Indira’s favor. She’s also constantly underestimated, leaving her with nothing to push back with except for her anger. So when Lorraine tries to shut her up by saying, “I don’t like your tone,” Indira replies, “Tough s**t. Some of us work for a living and go home to empty houses. Or houses that should be empty bedrooms filled with the dirty underpants of our man-child spouses. Your problem is you think that you’re rich because you’re better than me.”
Then Indira lists all the ways the two women are alike – more to the point, how alike Lorraine and Dorothy are, despite Lorraine’s dismissive refusal to look at her daughter-in-law’s police file showing the harrowing abuse she survived. In a single conversation Indira moves Lorraine from the conservative “People claiming to be victims are the downfall of this country” to offering Indira the job of heading her security team.
Who doesn’t love a fairy godmother who can make a few calls to reduce your problems if not make them entirely vanish?
Moments after Indira walks out of Lorraine’s office, Dot’s mother-in-law gets on the phone with that banker who thought denying her was the safer choice. She opens that conversation with, “Are your balls in your belly looking for a safe place to hide? Good.” Mrs. Lyon then opens her devouring maw, listing all the ways she’s arranged to destroy the man’s life. These are not empty words but actions that have already been set in motion. “You want to know what your mistake was? It was thinking death is the worst thing that could happen to you.”
Lorraine’s epic chilliness contributes mightily to the delectability of this season of “Fargo,” offsetting its grim themes of spousal abuse and marriage as a chain of indebtedness. But her relative warming to Indira and Dorothy in the season’s second half makes her more compelling, moving what starts as a pair of adversarial relationships toward a team of women who understand each other, with one offering others a chance to succeed where bureaucracy and lazy men have failed them.
Helpfully we can see some version of this in reality. As Taraji P. Henson spills the details of how poorly treated the cast of “The Color Purple” were, she’s returned to mentioning that Oprah Winfrey’s intervention helped her get better pay and other benefits casts of primarily white productions receive, like drivers to the set.
“They [Warner Bros.] gave us rental cars, and I was like, ‘I can’t drive myself to set in Atlanta,’” the Oscar-and Emmy nominee told The New York Times. “This is insurance liability, it’s dangerous. Now they robbing people. What do I look like, taking myself to work by myself in a rental car? So I was like, “Can I get a driver or security to take me?” I’m not asking for the moon. They’re like, ‘Well, if we do it for you, we got to do it for everybody.’ Well, do it for everybody!”
Since Henson first went public with her career-long struggles to get paid what she’s worth and treated with the same respect as her white peers, people have reverted to blaming Winfrey for failing her, playing into the classic tendency to pit high-profile women against each other.
But of Winfrey, one of the movie’s main executive producers, Henson posted on her Instagram, “She told me personally to reach out to her for ANYTHING I needed, and I did! It took ONE CALL . . . ONE CONVERSATION . . . and ONE DECISION-MAKING BLACK WOMAN to make me feel heard.”
Richa Moorjani in “Fargo” (FX)Who doesn’t love an aspirational power figure and fairy godmother who can make a few calls to reduce your problems if not make them entirely vanish? Hence the satisfaction of witnessing Lorraine’s steady shift from Mommy Dearest to vindictive she-dragon protecting what’s hers, including the two women she views as equals in gladiatorial terms if not financially.
Even so, Lorraine is a dangerous type of savior, playing into our culture’s poisonous trust of oligarchs and corporate titans hailed for their innovations and insufficiently questioned for their wrongdoing. And that may be intentional on the writers’ part, since presenting society as it is and not necessarily as we wish it were is the “Fargo” way.
Indira accepts Lorraine’s offer because it’s better pay than what the Scandia police can offer and a job with actual power and resources to save Dorothy – another woman who, like her, never asked for a handout and fought for the meager life she wants.
Indira achieves that by hitching her career to someone who benefits from the common person’s suffering, and that should not be lost on us. Neither should the new power she may wield as Lorraine’s new right hand, functioning as the single commodity the Queen of Debt needs but lacks: a conscience.
Login
