To prepare ourselves mentally and emotionally for the new year, we asked a few Substackers what they’re expecting to see in 2025. At a glance: look forward to more indulgent (and surprising) flavor profiles, a return to practicality and personality in fashion, more vibrant literary criticism, and a potential sports betting backlash.
Food Hispi cabbage, shared by Maddy; seashell butter, shared by Rach; chili crisp, shared by Brian Lund; ice cream, shared by Nicola Lamb Nicola Lamb: The USA is about to discover the joy of grilled hispi, also known as pointed cabbage. Honestly, the fact that it hasn’t had its moment yet is shocking to me. Vietnamese cuisine is poised to become the new go-to for modern and fusion takes. Yotam Ottolenghi: Forget mayonnaise, or mustard; it’s all about chili condiments (sauces, ferments, crisps), herby marinades, punchy sauces from around the world, nuts and seeds to sprinkle over veggies. Condiments, with a capital C, aren’t just condiments anymore; they are building blocks for home cooking. Snaxshot: It’s safe to say that the pendulum has swung back hard from almost a decade ago, when meat, dairy, carbs, butter, and the like were demonized and shunned. They’re resurfacing now in a way that feels almost like a crusade. [Expect a] big year for beef tallow, clarified and grass-fed butter, and even lard. Roti Brown: Coffee has ruled the dessert and cocktail space for so long, I think it’s time for tea to take center stage. Imagine matcha affogatos, chai tea tiramisu, matcha martinis, and black tea pumpkin pie. Nicola Lamb: Forget salted caramel; tomato sorbet and squash ice cream are the new frontier of blurring savory and sweet lines.
Fashion Viv Chen; Jalil Johnson; Bottega Venetta, shared by Liana Satenstein; Tahirah Hairston Hey Mrs. Solomon on Style: A confluence of things will make this the year of the grown-ass person when it comes to style. I think we can expect to see a willingness to invest when details take our real lives into consideration in practical ways, and even more so when there’s a nod of irony, because we know being serious all the time is exhausting. Liana Satenstein: In 2025, I see fashion moving away from dressing for social media—no more every-hair-in-place looks. No more hyper-curation! No more pristine looks. Now we are going back to dressing for reality. Editorials in Family Style and Hommegirls that show models in wearable designer clothes going grocery shopping or picking up their dry cleaning show that there is a shift. Tahirah Hairston: Luxury fashion prices are already skyrocketing (see: Chanel bag price hikes), and with the looming threat of even steeper increases due to Trump’s proposed tariffs, I suspect brands, especially fast-fashion and luxury ones, will cut more corners, leading to even lower quality. Jalil Johnson: I predict that 2025 will mark the end of “quiet luxury” on the runway. With so much change underway, I believe (and hope) that designers will move away from commercially driven collections and embrace a more inventive, perhaps even ostentatious, approach. Viv Chen: With the rise of government surveillance, laws that limit people’s control over their own bodies, and apps that sell your personal data, I think we’ll see the pendulum swing toward sartorial anonymity as a means of protest, privacy and protection. Longer skirts, baggier pants, facial coverings like balaclavas and scarves, eyewear. jessie randall: I think shine will be big moving forward, a slightly subtle shine—like the shiny leather of those Balenciaga bags that were big back in the early 2000s. Metal elements like studs and interesting hardware shapes are going to continue to be important, an armor of sorts. Noora Raj Brown: I think people want to have a little fun. There is a subtle sexiness brewing. Not a laughable “mob wife” microtrend, but after the past few seasons of quiet luxury, I think we’ll see more skin, more power.
Literature Books coming out in 2025 Naomi Kanakia: One heartening trend from 2024 was the increase in the number of negative reviews (often fueled by critics’ desire to make their bones with a viral takedown), and I expect the number of negative reviews to increase—paradoxically, debate about a book’s merits tends (as with this year’s divisive literary breakout, All Fours) to indicate that there is genuine interest in the book. A book with no negative reviews is a book nobody is bothering to read closely. Noah Kumin: In 2025 I think we’ll see more mainstream bets on political and artistic subjects that could not have seen the light during the tedious and stifling 2016–2024 era; what will be big this year in publishing is grandiosity, experimentation, bewildering successes and spectacular failures, and the dawning realization that it is now our grave responsibility, as the old ways die out, to usher a new literary age into existence. Henry Oliver: Literary criticism is supposed to be in a golden age, but it’s often disconnected from the common reader—Substack, of course, is very much connected with the common reader. I see many Substacks (like BDM, the Washington Review of Books, Joel J Miller, laura thompson, Naomi Kanakia, John Pistelli, Horace & friends, Julianne Werlin, Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal), Brad Skow, and Adam Roberts) offering a wide range of critical writing that covers everything from Latin poetry to Golden Age detective fiction to “the modern novel” to the Mahabharata to the state of the humanities and AI, and so on. I think this gathering of internet critics will continue to flourish on Substack and increasingly offer something different to the existing model from journals and magazines. Naomi Kanakia: [Publishers will respond to] uncertainty by putting even more money into pushing authors that they regard as surefire hits: Han Kang, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Katie Kitamura all have novels coming out in the first half of 2025. Expect these authors’ names to be everywhere during their release months. Emma Gannon: A publishing trend that is not slowing down: women in literature wanting to be alone and seeking pleasure. Publishing in 2025, there’s Pathfinding, a book about the power of women walking; The Way Through the Woods, a witchy guide to finding your path; and Women Among Monuments, on how women needed ‘permission’ to have solitude over the centuries. My own novel, Table for One, on three intergenerational women seeking time alone, is publishing in April 2025. Leigh Stein: As Gen Z writers hit their mid-20s and we start seeing more debuts from that generation, we’re going to see absurdism, surrealism, and chaos supplanting millennial irony and social satire. As Gen Z rediscovers millennial fashion trends from our Hipstamatic years, there’s a simultaneous renaissance of the alt-lit vibes of the 2010s (HTML Giant, Tao Lin, Blake Butler). The literary novels that do break out will be more playful and less politically correct. Ross Barkan: The number of high-quality small-press and self-published novels will increase as the Big 5 grow less and less interested in nurturing emerging talent. [...] Ambitious and gifted writers of the 2020s will not wait years and years to get published, especially when the old publicity machinery promises much less than it once did. In turn, the literary “scene” will get stylistically and ideologically richer.
Media and pop culture Ad featuring Alex Cooper, shared by Ochuko Akpovbovbo; screenshots shared by Lia Haberman Ochuko Akpovbovbo: You probably don’t need me to tell you we’re heading toward a serious power struggle between traditional and alternative media in the coming year—but I’m telling you anyway. Everything we’re already seeing—the ongoing decline in trust in legacy media, paired with the rise of alternative personality-driven media via social media, podcasts, Substack, and private newsletters—will come to a head in 2025. Lia Haberman: The idea of an online monoculture is obsolete. Today the internet is filled with countless communities and creators catering to every taste and topic. While this fracturing will make it harder to grow to the level of MrBeast or Alex Cooper, it also means there’s an audience for everyone—no matter how niche. Mackenzie Thomas: The fall of Crumbl cookie, pregnancy (not mine), cavity removal (mine), an alternative hairstyle where you get rid of every hair on your head except the ones you like to play with when you’re nervous or bored, allergies, and universal love for Mackenzie Thomas. shit you should care about: Giving people grace on the internet—maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but as someone who has had to learn how to deal with over 3 million different opinions in the comment sections, I feel like we’re finally entering the post-2020 social media era where everyone is just a little bit more . . . chill? On the hinges? Hope so.
Sports Picture shared by Split Zone Duo; Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, shared by Ross Barkan Madeline Hill: Sports fans will want more content about the stories off the field. We’ll get more athlete-focused documentaries, content creators covering major sporting events, profiles on WAGs, and brands wanting to capitalize on the fact that there are fans who only watch football to see how a star quarterback performs after his breakup was announced and could care less about his QB rating. Split Zone Duo: I don’t know what 2025 holds for sports media on the whole, but I do have a prediction about what will work well for writers and podcasters who aren’t attached to big companies: Make stuff people like, and identify who those people are that you’re making it for. For us, that means making a college football podcast that will appeal to people who want to get deeper into why the sport ticks but also have it balanced with just talkin’ ball. It’s easy to overcomplicate things in an era of “sports and culture” publications, but sometimes people just want to learn a thing or two about the college football season and have a laugh or feel their interest piqued. Charlotte Wilder: It sounds silly to say that sports will continue to become more mainstream, because they’ve always been a huge part of this country’s identity. But as someone who’s worked in sports media for over a decade, these past few years have felt different. It seems that casual fans are more plugged in than they’ve been before, and that advertisers and businesses rely on sports more than ever as our big, collective moments become more rare (Taylor Swift also helped, let’s be honest). Molly Knight: As sports betting in this United States continues to grow, largely without guardrails, it’s only a matter of time until famous American athletes are caught up in gambling scandals that will rock MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and other professional leagues. Steroid abuse in the ’90s and early aughts cast a dark cloud over MLB, and it took the league decades to fully recover. We are headed down that path with daily sports betting. Ben Fawkes: With a difficult job market in media, more professionals will look to publishing communities like Substack as either a part-time or full-time job. Those communities allow the freedom to leverage the audience gained from a previous job or current social media source (X, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) and help a person strengthen his/her existing brand, as well as make income off subscriptions.
Finally, a hopeful trend for everyone in 2025:
shit you should care about: Phoenixing: this is the phase that comes after life has burned you down, you’ve been in the ashes, and you come out of it. It’s that rising feeling, and I want it for everyone in 2025.
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What to expect in 2025
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