Tension Branding: How to Capture Our Dominant Mood
Aim for a ‘wholesome strangeness’.
Bad business people build great brands all of the time. Dov Charney, founder of American Apparel, was one of them, and if you got sucked into the Netflix algo this week, you know what I’m talking about. He created a brand with two opposite poles: 1) provocative, carnal sexuality, and 2) ethical idealism based on immigrant rights and second chances. Together, those incompatible extremes created magic that outlasted Charney’s bad behavior for a lot longer than it rationally should have.
As chairman Allan Mayer said, “If you took out the sex, it would be kind of boring. And if you took out the idealistic component… it would just be sleazy. But you put them together, and you have something that’s interesting. It’s edgy, but it’s also strangely wholesome at the same time.”
When it comes to branding, ‘wholesome strangeness’ is the land of milk and honey. If you can make people feel good about discomfort, if you can make them feel like something weird is also natural, then you can make them change their beliefs and behaviors.
This tension is at the soul of every generative brand. American Apparel was sex and idealism. Nike was discipline and rebellion. Apple was control and creativity. Japan is hyper futurism and deep tradition. OnlyFans is liberation and commodification. Hannah Neeleman is domesticity and power. For all the talk of coherence in the world of branding, it is tension that is the real engine of meaning.
Nearly every major blockbuster brand of the last 50 years - commercial, political, or communal - has changed a belief or a behavior in their market through the embrace of that tension, because what it really does is bend the will of the market.
At any given point, the market moves forward linearly and your brand follows. Products, features, ideas, expectations, behaviors and the overall story that defines them will continue to move forward in the same direction along the same line.
But when you bend the will of the market by changing people’s beliefs and behaviors like American Apparel did, you bend the direction of that line. You change the overall story so that suddenly your brand is on the critical path, and your competitors have fallen off.
This conditioning of peoples’ expectations and tastes is one of the few powerful psychotechnologies available to brand creators. When a brand can hold two opposing ideas without collapsing, like sex and idealism in American Apparel’s case, they reflect peoples’ inner conflict back to them, and that’s a magnetic energy to project. That’s how you get brands with auras of excitement and possibility, and even sometimes mystery.
But while tension is the highest form of branding, it never stands still.
Every era has its own dominant tension, which is just its unique way of bending the will of the market, and we’ve just entered a new era with new contradictions that are begging to be slammed together.
The bad news is that of all the eras, this new one is probably the hardest to achieve.
The good news is it’s also probably the most rewarding for those who can get it right.
Tension Eras
Some decades were defined by moral tension, where brands challenged taboos or redefined what’s acceptable. Others thrived in our current aesthetic tension, packaging contradiction into something subversive and consumable (sometimes literally as chaos packaging). Today, we’re entering existential tension, which is the most difficult and most transformative terrain yet.
Here’s a map of where we’ve been and where things are about to get more interesting:
Tension captures what people are feeling, even when they can’t name it. They’re ambient contradictions we live inside, and we rely on culture, brands, media, influencers, communities and politicians to reflect them back to us.
The most powerful voices offload the cognitive burden of holding it all. When a brand externalizes the tension we’ve been silently carrying, we feel relief and recognition, and we assign them disproportionate value for it.
There are layers of psychological and cultural value to this. I’ve written before about how every category and industry goes through a cycle of four phases of growth, and when a brand brings things out of an invisible tension phase and into a phase of visible exploration and transformation, they create the highest form of brand equity.
Most good brands uphold the culture of their time, but the greatest brands move people from one stage of culture to the next.
Moral Tension (2000s–mid 2010s)
One of the earlier examples of this was the era of moral tension. This was the age of Abercrombie & Fitch and the Iraq War. Of the TOMS buy-one-give-one alongside the meteoric rise of disposable H&M and Forever 21 clothes. Millennials came of age in a moment defined by rising ethical awareness colliding with their first real taste of material power. We were making money and faced with a new kind of mental math: Can I live a life of comfort and still be good? Can I participate in capitalism and still critique it?
This inner conflict fueled the rise of ethical consumerism. Brands like Patagonia, American Apparel, Everlane, and TOMS sold moral resolution. They offered a way to feel spiritually aligned without opting out of the system. “Voting with your dollars” was the perfect refrain.
If you wanted a more nihilistic flavor to your tension, Vice Magazine combined moral outrage with ironic detachment. Black Mirror, in its heyday of this period, gave you a really entertaining way to consume your moral anxieties.
All of them reflected our need to reconcile material desire with political consciousness. They didn’t eliminate the contradiction but they did contain it, and that containment gave people just enough relief to keep going.
Aesthetic Tension (2010s–mid 2020s)
After years of pursuing a moral singularity, we hit a point where we realized it wasn’t as easily feasible as we thought. That moment was marked most clearly by the 2024 election, and the president we elected was the embodiment of the plurality in our social media feeds.
Life had collapsed into the scroll where you might see a Met Gala look next to slime videos, a Harvard commencement clip next to a mukbang stream, a Sotheby’s drop next to a scene of genocide. High and low, raw and polished, sacred and profane, lighthearted and heart-shattering - every layer of culture was flattened and reassembled on-screen. You could not open a cafe or clothing store without a selfie wall. The Museum of Ice Cream, perhaps the most successful collection of selfie walls ever created, was a natural hit.
The only way to resolve the tension of a world that says it values substance, and yet rewards shallowness, is to mix style and taste codes so that you’re in on the gag. Balenciaga, Heaven, Praying, these are all inside jokes dressed up as fashion.
We moved from moral signaling to aesthetic layering. From purity to irony. Sarcasm became the language of gen z, a safe bubble from which they could indulge in their guilty pleasures without having to confess they actually cared.
Aesthetic tension, deep down, is about wanting to signal that the whole game is actually absurd, so that you can keep playing without making yourself vulnerable. The brands and people who could style contradiction were the people who won attention.
Attention and visual saliency were such drivers that we literally put ourselves into “cores” - cottagecore, cybercore, nostalgiacore - so that the algorithm could see us. We voluntarily flattened ourselves to fit into two-dimensional boxes because that’s what it took to attain aesthetic tension. But shit got three-dimensional really fast when we realized late last year that the algorithm isn’t how people vote, how they find community, or how they build their value systems in real life.
A new tension has emerged.
Existential Tension (emerging)
The reason why ethical consumerism, nostalgia, corporate social responsibility and ‘cores’ all feel flat right now is because we are moving into a new cultural tension that is waiting to be expressed, and our old ideas aren’t cutting it.
We’re living through the polycrisis of climate, AI, tribalism, and a post-truth information economy. That’s on a public scale. But pay attention to what is happening more in our private lives, too. A disconnection from our bodies, reconciliation of the home where the nuclear family is no longer the statistical majority, a loneliness crisis, and the decoupling of work and reward.
There is no single story that explains the world anymore, and that loss of coherence is deeply felt. Our new tension is about what to believe in when everyday reality doesn’t ladder up to some shared greater truth. How do we accept chaos and surrender without giving up coherence or agency?
It’s a psychic dissonance that’s a lot wider than anything we saw in the moral or aesthetic arcs. It’s why the strange softness of A24’s spiritual horror makes sense and why Christianity has become a convenient salve for Silicon Valley where new churches seem to be popping up every week.
Aesthetics can’t touch it. Morality can’t resolve it. We need something that can hold the contradictions of this moment without rushing to fix them. That’s why we’re seeing the rise of spiritual-but-not-religious platforms, body-based therapies, dissociative art, new kinds of cults (AI or otherwise), and new kinds of communities. This tension requires a little more embodiment and maybe a dose of (quote, unquote) magic.
As my teammate Zach Lamb called it all the way back in 2023 in his article The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands:
There’s a charged current grounding everything that’s in flux in culture right now: intuition, the “felt to be true”. We were already beginning to lean into our feelings and intuitions before the advent of AI. Now, we are being guided by them, and we’re re-evaluating how we know ourselves, how we relate to each other and the meaning of “higher powers” in our lives.
And strangely, people are open to it. There’s a growing appetite for radical reinvention of spirituality, identity, belonging, health, work and community. We want novelty, but we also want roots. We want control, but we’re exhausted by optimization. We want to feel something, and the brands that learn to hold this tension will feel like portals.
It’s well past attention and morality. This is about our place in the world. Every cultural story we had ended, or is so disconnected from reality as to be rendered useless. We’re left with no usable map of the future. The post singularity world may be upon us and we’re fundamentally unable to form expectations about the future because of it.
Existential tension is the internal conflict of our time, and if you want to capture the zeitgeist, you have to reflect it back to your people.
Wholesome Strangeness
Weirdness has always been a big part of my work as a cultural futurist and brand strategist. The future always starts as an anomaly, and you have to have an appetite for the strange if you ever want to create something new in the world.
Not every kind of weird is the right kind of weird, however.
There’s a lot of weird in the world that’s just for shock value and entertainment. The deeper weird that matters is anything that trespasses our invisible boundaries and norms as a culture. That’s what wholesome strangeness is - the strange that somehow feels right, the contradiction that shouldn’t work but does.
It doesn’t soothe us by resolving the tension. It draws us deeper into it, and in that discomfort, offers something honest. The brands that rise now are the ones that hold that contradiction without flinching.
It used to be that brands were rewarded for standing for something clear. For solving a cultural paradox with a clean answer or a strong point of view. That was the logic of moral tension: if you could align your product with a righteous ideal, you could win. But we’ve moved past that. In this era of existential tension, it’s not about what you stand for. It’s about the contradiction you’re brave enough to hold.
Every culture has its unresolved paradoxes, and when a brand can reflect those paradoxes back to us without collapsing into resolution or cliché, it gives the culture room to breathe and metabolize complexity. Room to build new stories. The friction isn’t going away, at least not in a world of climate collapse, AI chaos, spiritual crisis, and fragmented realities. So the most generative thing a brand can do now is to create space for people to live inside the friction.
Some categories are more naturally suited to each era of tension. Tech and cpg brands thrived during the age of moral tension, fashion and consumer brands peaked in aesthetic tension. Now, in existential tension, it’s media, wellness, psychedelics, and mental health platforms that feel closest to the center of gravity. But that doesn’t mean others can’t play.
Any brand can hold existential tension if it’s willing to tell the truth of contradiction. If American Apparel could be sleazy and idealistic at the same time, then there’s room for tension everywhere. You just have to find the part of your brand that feels unresolvable and make it feel like home.
Secret Identities
Here's what we've been consuming.
Nobody Has A Personality Anymore (
by ): “We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism […] Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.”Kneecap, Masculinity & Why Techno Is Ruining The Mating Game | Ash Sarkar Meets Blindboy (Novara Media): "It's like the storytelling of the world, the make-believe, and world-building. What makes it interesting in terms of theater - there's no fourth wall. Usually with theater, there's spectator and then there's the show going on on stage. But professional wrestling is theater. It's brilliant athletes, it's storytelling, and it's theater. But we know that it's fake, and we know this guy is going to win, that guy is going to lose. They don't really hate each other. They could be best buddies backstage. We know all that, but the collective sense of suspended disbelief that we all have to engage in to enjoy it? That's unique to wrestling, and that's called kayfabe."
by ): “You can’t help but read Blom’s The Vertigo Years (2008) with today in mind. Like then, our present is defined by its relentless pace […] We are all arguably going through our own vertigo years, with similar anxious uncertainties about the future. To read about the early 20th century is to look into a society that was struggling to keep up. Emotions ran high, tension was everywhere, and there was this nagging sense that the old rules no longer applied.”The Pinterest Men Trend Report (Pinterest Newsroom): “Men – and especially Gen Z men – have been joining Pinterest in record numbers. And how they use our platform might surprise you. Our first-ever Pinterest Men’s Trend Report dives deep into how men – now more than one-third of our global audience and counting – come to our platform to develop their personal passions and authentic selves, far from the toxicity of other online spaces. They’re looking into everything from well-being (Pilates and rock climbing are standout trends) to smart parenting (up 125% in Pinterest searches)."
[BONUS] Disco: The Podcast: Our principal strategist Zach Lamb, whose writing you’ve seen in this newsletter, has launched a new podcast about discovering the evolving landscape of spirituality, energetic connectedness, and holistic wellness. Each podcast episode features authentic conversations with healers, coaches, alternative practitioners and journeyers in this space. Check it out.
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I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:
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Love the idea that brands have moved past standing for an ideal and now express a human tension. Mapping out Apple as control and creativity was a particularly new and clear way to think about it. Also love this quote: "In this era of existential tension, it’s not about what you stand for. It’s about the contradiction you’re brave enough to hold."
Glad you liked my essay enough to mention it here, I appreciate it!