Beyond the trend: the fourth wall

a cultural shift from spectatorship to shared worldbuilding

Welcome back to ‘beyond the trend’! I’ve always been intrigued with why behind vibe shifts and trends. More specifically, I’m fascinated by the psychology of the zeitgeist we’re living in and how it shapes the way art and design show up in the world. In this series, I want to unpack the behaviours underneath the trends, what they look like, why they’re emerging now, and how I personally see them evolving next.

In 2025, some of the most compelling marketing and media moments didn’t behave like campaigns at all. Stories moved off-screen and into the real world, taking shape as physical stunts, performances and participatory moments that blurred the line between fiction and lived experience. One of the memorable examples was Severance building a glass office box in Grand Central Station, with actors “working” inside it. Or more recently A24’s Marty Supreme, where Timothée Chalamet’s off-screen behaviour became part of the narrative itself.

These moments became extensions of the fictional story. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Meta-performance has existed for decades. What’s interesting is why it’s intensifying now and what that says about the cultural moment we’re in.

A (very) brief history of breaking the fourth wall

William Castle and the birth of participatory spectacle (1950s-1960s)

Long before “immersive” became a buzzword, filmmaker William Castle understood something fundamental about audiences: they didn’t just want to watch horror, they wanted to feel implicated in it. In the late 1950s and early 60s, Castle turned film screenings into events. Theatre seats vibrated during tense moments. Actors’ voices warned viewers that the monster was loose in their own cinema. For a brief moment, the boundary between the film and the real world dissolved. Castle was interested in belief, in making audiences imagine - even for a second - that the world on screen and their own might be the same. Castle’s films weren’t remembered for narrative sophistication, but for how intensely people felt involved. At a time when television was beginning to pull attention away from cinemas, Castle would break the forth wall for participation.

Andy Warhol’s Factory: when life becomes the artwork (1964-1987)

With Andy Warhol’s Factory, the line between art, performance and everyday life dissolved entirely. The Factory wasn’t just a studio, it was a living, breathing artwork. The people inside it became part of the narrative. Exhibitions spilled into social scenes. As Warhol himself put it, sometimes the audience wasn’t just attending the art - they were the art. This wasn’t about marketing, but it planted a powerful idea: that meaning emerges not just from what’s made, but from the world built around it. For audiences, the draw was the proximity to a world that felt unscripted and porous. People wanted to be near it, inside it, photographed with it. In an era when mass media was becoming increasingly polished and controlled, Warhol’s openness offered something rarer: the feeling of presence.

The Blair Witch Project and the internet’s first shared myth (1999)

At the turn of the millennium, The Blair Witch Project took this logic online. Its marketing campaign didn’t promote a film it fully constructed a myth. Fake police reports, missing posters and altered IMDb profiles blurred fiction and reality so effectively, that many viewers believed the story was real. What mattered wasn’t the truth of the narrative, but the collective participation in sustaining it.

This marked one of the first moments the internet functioned as a shared stage for belief, where stories took hold through circulation rather than verification. Audiences debated the film’s authenticity online, shared sightings and actively sustained the myth together. This happened at a moment when the internet was still new enough to feel unregulated, communal and unstable - conditions that mirror today’s platform fatigue and search for shared meaning.

Brands enters the chat: Molly Goddard (2015)

Fashion has long experimented with similar gestures. In 2015, Molly Goddard didn’t stage a traditional runway show. She invited friends to a life drawing class, dressed them in her clothes, handed them paintbrushes and let the world look in. It was informal, playful, deeply intentional. The clothes were presented as garments for people doing things rather than untouchable objects. The moment worked because it felt lived in, not staged for an audience. Once again, the fourth wall wasn’t smashed dramatically. It simply… wasn’t there. The presentation circulated because people recognised themselves in it.

Molly Goddard’s AW2015 presentation

What’s striking across these moments is that fourth-wall breaks tend to surface during periods of media transition and anxiety.

Why this is happening now

What’s driving this shift isn’t a new marketing tactic - it’s a change in attention. We’re starting to see early signs that social media, as we’ve known it, may have passed its peak. The Financial Times recently reported on usage data suggesting a slowdown in growth and an increasing sense of fatigue around algorithm based platforms. That matters, because for over a decade, these systems shaped not just how content circulated, but how culture itself was valued and perceived.

From my vantage point, as someone who often exist at the intersection of East and West, because of my background, this shift feels like a long time coming. Celebrity culture has always carried more distance in Europe - less reverence, more scepticism. So while the current shift in the Western world doesn’t read as a collapse of fame, but we’re less interested in billionaire celebrities and more drawn to unexpected, human presences. Trust in brands, corporations and celebrity culture hasn’t eroded overnight. It’s been slipping for years. And honestly, I think that loss of blind trust is healthy. There’s a shift in the air right now that feels like a recalibration.

Our attention has become the most valuable currency we have. And increasingly, we’re choosing better where to spend it.

As Zoe Scaman put it recently, “The sun is setting on legacy models.” I feel that everywhere. In the Western world in 2025, we saw superhero universes and endless remakes underperform at the box office. Luxury brands reported declining sales. Celebrity culture lost some of its gravitational pull. When so many dominant systems start faltering at once, it’s usually a sign that attention has moved on. What’s opened up in that space is interesting. Independent artists. Smaller filmmakers. Creators building worlds slowly and honestly. Emerging fashion brands doing their thing without hype or spectacle. People working with integrity, often quietly, while the larger systems scramble to maintain relevance. And we’ve noticed them. We are giving them attention, time and belief. If we borrow the innovation curve as a metaphor, these creators and smaller brands sit firmly in the innovator and early adopter phase. They tend to sense cultural change before it becomes obvious, because they’re closer to lived experience and less buffered by scale. The larger players - big platforms, major studios, global brands - often arrive later. Not because they’re unintelligent, we all know they’ve got them resources, but because they’re structurally slow. Their incentives are financial, not cultural. They tend to double down, throw money at what used to work and try to extend the life of familiar formulas. That lag is where friction shows up.

What we’re seeing now is the early majority beginning to move. Mid-sized brands, newer media companies, less hyped public figures are starting to adopt a different posture. They’re letting their worlds leak into real life, inviting audiences in. Allowing participation, response and unpredictability.

This aligns closely with what Future Laboratory 2026 research is picking up on. “Audiences are gravitating toward moments that feel unscripted, imperfect and emotionally grounded.” The everyday has become an arena of meaning again - small rituals, human connection, local narratives carrying real emotional weight. Media, too, is becoming more fluid. Content is turning into dialogue. Stories are co-shaped in real time by creators and the fans. Connection itself becomes both the message and the medium. We move away from spectatorship and toward something closer to symbiosis.

There’s also something deeply physical about many of these moments. Tangibility matters. I recently watched a video that breaks down why older films often feel more immersive - looking at concepts like perceptual realism, indexicality and haptic versus optic visuality. The argument is simple but powerful: immersion relies on sensory presence, not just visual stimulation. Over the past decade, we lost a lot of that. The decline of the cinema experience. Shopping moving online. The pandemic accelerating separation. And now, in a world reshaped again by AI, the desire to feel something real has intensified.

Breaking the fourth wall is an attempt to restore the feeling of immersion, presence and belief in a culture that’s been watching from a distance for too long.

Signals across culture

For the promotion of DRAMA, A24 placed an engagement announcement in a newspaper. It appeared in the Engagements section - a space usually reserved for personal milestones. The kind of listing people skim casually, or pause on briefly because it feels intimate rather than promotional. This choice is telling. Instead of introducing the film through spectacle or narrative framing, the story entered culture through a familiar real-world ritual. By placing fiction there, the film slipped into the rhythms of everyday life. The gesture relies on recognition rather than explanation. It assumes cultural literacy. It trusts the audience to understand the context and do the work of connecting the dots (we need more of that, honestly). What makes this moment resonate is its restraint. The announcement doesn’t demand attention. It waits to be found. And in a landscape shaped by constant amplification, that quietness gives it weight.

On a weekday morning in East London, Miista placed small podiums on the street. Their most recognisable shoe silhouettes were translated into 3D-printed blocks - the kind used in athletic competitions - and positioned at pavement level. Passersby were invited to step up, wear the shoes, and inhabit the moment, briefly and casually, on their way through the city. There was no announcement, no performance schedule, no crowd management. The gesture unfolded at the pace of everyday life. The podium, a symbol traditionally reserved for winners, spectacle, and elevation, was brought into an ordinary street context. Achievement was reframed as participation. Visibility became temporary and shared. The shoes weren’t presented as objects to be admired from a distance. They were activated through bodies, balance and movement, creating shared meaning. In doing so, Miista shifted the role of the audience. People weren’t watching a fashion moment unfold. They were briefly inside it, becoming part of the image as it happened.

For one of its recent releases, Paloma Wool’s clothing appeared on a group of girlfriends walking through the streets of Barcelona. No choreography or moment engineered for pause. Just movement through a familiar city, bodies in conversation, clothes carried by real rhythms of walking, stopping, turning, laughing. So simple, but powerful, it’s the context where the clothes belong. The brand world doesn’t interrupt daily life, it blends into it.

Look, I can’t write a piece about successful worldbuilding without mentioning Heated Rivalry. It’s one of the clearest examples of what happens when a storytellers stop treating its audience as spectators and starts treating them as part of the world itself. Fan edits were reposted without polish or hierarchy. Chaotic comment threads were met with replies rather than moderation silence. Jokes, reactions and memes circulated openly, gaining visibility through amplification. At times, the actors themselves stepped into the conversation, responding directly to fans’ messages and references. What’s striking here is how little distance exists between the story and the audience. The world of the show doesn’t end when the episode does. It continues in comment sections, DMs and shared language. I can confirm that, I’m part of one of these group chats. Meaning is shaped collectively, in real time, through reaction and response. This approach recognises something fundamental about contemporary fandom: people aren’t satisfied with proximity alone. They want acknowledgement. Contribution. A sense that their attention actively shapes the life of the story. By letting fan expression sit alongside official content, Heated Rivalry becomes less of a finished product and more of a living exchange.

The news of the launch of Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA arrived via an image of her undergoing laser hair removal, wearing underwear and a T-shirt stamped with the show’s title. It’s an intimate scene, mundane, slightly uncomfortable, but instantly recognisable. The image doesn’t dramatise the show’s premise or aestheticise the moment. It places the announcement directly inside a real, bodily ritual - one many people associate with maintenance, preparation and vulnerability, the kind of moment that exists off-camera.

That choice shifts the tone of the announcement entirely. Instead of positioning the show as something to be watched from afar, it enters culture through a shared, embodied experience. The humour lands because it’s grounded in reality. It’s a reminder that worldbuilding doesn’t always require scale or spectacle. More often than not actually, it works best when it starts with the body, the city and the ordinary rituals people recognise immediately. Trust collapsed, attention became scarce and participation replaced persuasion.

The moments that resonate now is built through proximity, participation and trust. When stories enter real life gently and allow people to shape meaning alongside them, they feel worth engaging with. Beyond the trend, this is less a marketing shift and more a cultural one: a move from audiences as spectators to audiences as collaborators in how stories live and travel.

If you’re still here, I’m eternally grateful for your attention. I most definitely do not take it for granted. Thank you. Have a great weekend, M x