TR.BIZ: 8.7.2025

Your late-mid-week check-in 💫

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re sampling Copenhagen Fashion Week, performative males, and AI bringing people back from the dead.

Programming note: next week will be without TR.BIZ, as we’ll be treated to three Copenhagen Fashion Week special reports. TR.BIZ in this form will resume the following week.

📲 Tech Talk, I: Let’s talk about the GEO thing

Earlier this week, New York’s Intelligencer dropped a story about how SEO is dead and that we’ve entered the era of “generative-engine optimization,” where AI chatbots vomit up information versus a (Google) search engine. This was a big conversation earlier in the year tied to Google updating its algorithm in the spring, a shift away from classic search to a more AI-first model, which ignited a lot of talk about how this would make the internet unusable. If you work anywhere near marketing or have a business that relies upon search traffic, you’ve had deep talks about this. Even I’ve noticed traffic from Google to this little newsletter has been a bit slower! Thus, an emerging new economy of ways to “optimize” for AI’s sloppy wandering eye which, as Intelligencer cites, includes “being easy to cite,” creating mutli-part and easily summarized items with rankings and recommendations that sound like AI with the intention of baiting AI. In other words, you should become Axios, which sounds as joyless as you think — and a great contributor to the ongoing dumbing down of all of culture. Friend and strategist Janira Planes Frías and I were talking on Instagram about this, that this non-issue has become an issue, an item that we are forced to follow and configure into our lives when…we really didn’t have to. “I think SEO is pretty much not-dead but GEO will be very interesting to follow,” she said. “I think this could potentially become yet another echo chamber on the internet! Because most LLMs will reply to us based on the history of use we have with the service, rather than acting as curators…It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.” Onward we march further into these enshittified trenches 🫡

• What can you do about this? How soulless do you wanna get, dude? You can Axios-ify yourself, which sounds miserable. The services that seek to offer “GEO help” feel scammy, at best, and predatory at worst, considering no one really understands how this is going to shake out yet. I would keep on keeping on — and look for leaders with hard proof that their methodology “works.” I’d also maybe…start feeding your information into LLMs, speaking into the echo chamber how what you’re doing is “the best,” which is to say: start a rumor within LLMs to taint them. Why not? If you can dupe Gemini with a Calendar invite, who’s to say starting LLM rumors won’t work?

👠 Aesthetically Pleasing: Some quick CPHFW takes

I’m in Copenhagen for fashion week, running around, seeing lots of presentations and shows, soaking up the themes and happenings to offer a view of “what’s next” from one of the more innovative fashion week’s in the world. Before next week’s full coverage coming Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, here are a few standout items in brief —

• Yesterday I attended the Henrik Vibskov Spring 2026 show (FAB!!) which confirmed something I’ve noticed: clothes being worn over clothes, a la shorts worn over pants. This has popped up in a few presentations and it’s an interesting evolution of maximalism, which we undoubtedly will see going wild in coming months.

• Invest in curvature, as Vibskov had items whose edges wiggled and giggled which paired well with Nori Enomoto’s roller coaster bags. This seems to further both the very TikTok 2020s mirror trend while also taking inspiration from wavy shoes. Unstable times mean clothing that goes up and down too?

• On and off runways, lace seems to be having a moment. As tights, as upcycled goods, as a layering piece, lace is everywhere — but it’s not “pretty” lace. It’s things that look like doilies or tablecloths fashioned into wears, inspired by upcycling and often actually upcycling.

• Menswear is increasingly becoming synonymous with activewear. It’s a curious evolution from a year ago that seems to suggest brands like Satisfy have not only deconstructed the landscape to kneecap Nike but that “fashion’s most fashionable men” are just wearing high-tech joggers. I don’t love this but it makes sense: if all we do is computer, if biomarking is the new flex, then dressing for the active life you don’t have makes sense. Performative males…here’s your costume!!

• Black is the new black, as it’s all anyone is wearing to shows. This is just a statement of how classic the color is but also how even the most creative as far as dressing aren’t really doing anything that exciting as far as color choices. Trust, reader, that that will never be me.

👀 Trend Watchers: The performative male apocalypse