Codes of Culture | Issue 90
The centres of gravity in culture, beauty, and wellness are moving.
Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
Fashion month wrapped this week, and something about it felt different. Of course, Mathieu Blazy’s Chanel mania is everywhere. Across all the collections, though, there was a groundedness I haven’t felt in a while- real clothes, for real women, with real lives. The fantasy is still there, but it was wearing a coat you could actually put on.
Piccioli’s ClairObscur for Balenciaga was the moment that stayed with me longest. A handwritten poem was delivered to every guest before the first look appeared. That kind of gesture, in a season full of noise, says everything about where Piccioli believes luxury is going. His argument, that the tactile, the human, the irreducibly physical is exactly where luxury value lives when AI can generate everything else, landed differently this season than it might have a year ago.
The wearable stories this week also excited me for related reasons. The opportunity for fashion, luxury, and beauty to shape what these technologies feel like, not just what they do, is arriving faster than most of the industry has noticed. And the beauty M&A and AI adoption data, sitting alongside all of that, only reinforced what I keep coming back to: the map of where taste, capital, and growth are being set is being redrawn. This issue is my attempt to make sense of a very full week.
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📖In this issue:
Balenciaga is keeping a human-first approach.
Estée Lauder acquires Forest Essentials. Indian luxury beauty has become a strategic priority.
WHOOP made Samuel Ross its Global Creative Director. Health tech is becoming a design problem.
Andreesen Horowitz publishes its 6th edition of Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps.
A skin patch that reads your sweat, and what it tells us about the future of luxury wellness.
Balenciaga is keeping a human-first approach.
What’s happening: Pierpaolo Piccioli presented ClairObscur, his first co-ed collection for Balenciaga, on 8 March in Paris. The show opened with a handwritten poem from Piccioli delivered to every guest before the first look appeared. Filmmaker Sam Levinson built a cinematic fresco of video installations around a multi-generational cast. The collection draws from the High Renaissance technique of chiaroscuro, translating light and shadow into silhouette, cut, colour, and fabric sheen. It is Piccioli’s third outing at Balenciaga and his second runway show, following Summer 26’s Heartbeat and pre-fall’s Body and Being. Each has centred the same question: what does the person wearing this need? The George, Fan, and HG Avenue bags extend the collection’s architectural logic into accessories. The show is Balenciaga’s explicit response to AI acceleration: when technology can simulate emotion and generate images, the tactile reality of garment, body, and maker becomes the territory that cannot be replicated.
TLDR:
ClairObscur: chiaroscuro as a design system. Light and shadow are used to shape silhouettes and give garments presence, not as surface decoration.
The body is the internal structure of every garment. This represents Cristóbal Balenciaga’s foundational methodology, reinterpreted as a contemporary stance.
Each collection in Piccioli’s Balenciaga journey builds upon the last: Heartbeat, Body and Being, ClairObscur. He is crafting a narrative, not resetting each season.
Couture craftsmanship is integrated into ready-to-wear, with athletic elements alongside formal construction. Wearability is not a compromise; it is the aim.
In a world reshaped by AI, the real heartbeat, the tactile exchange, the glance between people, these remain territories that algorithms cannot reach.
Why it matters: For Future+, this is the most strategically significant show of the Paris season, and not primarily for fashion reasons. Piccioli is making a public argument about where luxury value lives when AI can simulate creativity at scale. His answer, the body, the maker, the lived experience of a garment, is not nostalgia. It is a commercial and cultural thesis. The luxury founders, brand operators, and creative directors in our network are navigating the same question right now. The Balenciaga show is the clearest articulation from inside a major house of where the premium is moving: toward the irreducibly human.
Estée Lauder acquires Forest Essentials. Indian luxury beauty has become a strategic priority.
What’s happening: On 5 March, Estée Lauder Companies announced it will acquire the remaining 51% of Forest Essentials, the Indian luxury Ayurveda brand founded by Mira Kulkarni in 2000. Estée Lauder first invested in 2008 and raised its stake to 49% in 2020. The transaction terms were not disclosed; closing is expected in the second half of 2026. Kulkarni and her son Samrath Bedi will continue to lead the brand from New Delhi. Forest Essentials is India’s top-ranked prestige skincare brand, with nearly 200 freestanding stores. The acquisition makes India Estée Lauder’s largest emerging market. BoF called it the conglomerate’s first major deal under CEO Stéphane de La Faverie.
TLDR:
An 18-year relationship completed via full acquisition. Estée Lauder used the same phased approach it took with Deciem.
Forest Essentials stays Indian: New Delhi HQ, founder-led, name and product strategy unchanged. The deal is for scale, not absorption.
India becomes Estée Lauder’s largest emerging market. After years of China’s dependency, the geographic rebalancing is now explicit.
Ayurvedic beauty has not translated globally at scale. The complexity is real. Challengers including Kama Ayurveda (backed by Puig) are already in the race.
The broader signal: Western beauty conglomerates are buying into culturally rooted, regionally specific brands rather than trying to export a Western template.
Why it matters: This story operates on two levels; the first is beauty M&A. The second is the rebalancing of where luxury taste and growth are being set. Estée Lauder is making a public bet that Indian luxury beauty has global resonance — not as an export, but on its own terms. The same logic applies to the Gulf art market, to Indian tech founders raising in Europe, and to the Middle East collector class. The gravitational centre of prestige is shifting. The brands and operators that understand this earliest will hold better positions.
WHOOP made Samuel Ross its Global Creative Director. Health tech is becoming a design problem.
What’s happening: In January, WHOOP announced a multi-year creative partnership with Samuel Ross MBE, naming him Global Creative Director for a new initiative titled Project Terrain. SR_A, Ross’s design studio, joins as an investor alongside Cristiano Ronaldo and Niall Horan. Under the collaboration, Ross will lead a capsule collection of limited-edition WHOOP bands and technical garments within the WHOOP Body collection, dropping in batches from 2026 to 2028. Ross previously founded A-Cold-Wall and has worked with Nike, LVMH via Hublot, Acqua di Parma, Oakley, and Apple Group as Principal Design Consultant at Beats. WHOOP ships to 56 markets and has raised over $400M since its founding in 2012.
TLDR:
Project Terrain: apparel described as a wearable toolkit for the body, built around zone-based movement, recovery, and demanding environments for nomads and city dwellers.
SR_A joins as an investor, not just a collaborator. Skin in the game on both sides.
Ross’s track record: LVMH prize, Nike, Hublot, Beats. He is not a brand ambassador. He is a product designer who also shapes culture.
WHOOP’s stated ambition: wearable technology that is invisible or cool. Project Terrain is the first serious attempt to make it both.
The WHOOP Body collection already enables wearing the sensor beyond the wrist. Project Terrain builds the aesthetic language around that.
Why it matters: The collision of health tech and fashion has largely resulted in branded merchandise. Project Terrain feels different because Ross is a materials and systems designer, not a stylist. For luxury brands watching the wearable space: the design moment is arriving. The question is no longer whether health data will become part of the premium lifestyle category; it is who shapes its aesthetic language when it does. Samsung did it from the hardware side. WHOOP and Samuel Ross are doing it from the culture side. Both moves are happening in the same week.
Andreessen Horowitz publishes its 6th edition of Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps.
What’s happening: Andreessen Horowitz published the sixth edition of its Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps ranking, drawing on Similarweb and Sensor Tower data through January 2026. ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users, 2.7x Gemini on web traffic. Claude paid subscribers grew 200%+ year-on-year; Gemini grew 258%. About 20% of weekly ChatGPT users also used Gemini that same week. Singapore, UAE, Hong Kong, and South Korea lead per-capita AI adoption. The US ranks 20th. CapCut, Canva, Notion, and Grammarly are included in this edition as AI-core platforms.
TLDR:
ChatGPT has 900M weekly active users, but Claude and Gemini are growing fast enough that no single default is locked in.
Singapore, UAE, Hong Kong, and South Korea lead per-capita adoption. The US ranks 20th.
20% of weekly ChatGPT users also use Gemini in the same week. Multi-tenancy is becoming the norm.
The line between AI-native and AI-enabled has dissolved. CapCut, Canva, and Notion are now AI companies.
The window to shape AI habits in high-adoption markets is open — but not indefinitely.
Why it matters: Future+ operates across Europe, the Middle East, India, and the US. The regions leading per-capita AI adoption in this report are precisely where our network is most active. The US-centric AI narrative obscures a more important structural reality: the next wave of AI-native behaviour is being set in markets that already operate outside Western defaults. The distribution story and the culture story are the same.
A skin patch that reads your sweat — and what it tells us about the future of luxury wellness.
What’s happening: Seveno Capital backed PointFit, a Hong Kong startup incubated at HKUST, at a US$10M valuation. PointFit makes a skin patch for non-invasive real-time biomarker monitoring through sweat, starting with continuous lactate tracking for endurance athletes. It is Seveno’s first Hong Kong transaction, led by incoming Partner Jean-Baptiste Roy. PointFit received a CES 2026 Innovation Award in Digital Health and has completed demos with global sports federations and elite teams. The global wearable market is projected to reach a TAM of US$200B by 2030.
TLDR:
Continuous lactate monitoring moves out of elite labs and into an accessible wearable format for the first time.
The category shift: from measuring proxies (steps, heart rate) to measuring biology directly. That is a fundamentally different value proposition.
Asian capital is consistently setting the pace in performance health. PointFit, WHOOP x Samuel Ross, and Samsung glasses all land in the same week.
For luxury wellness, longevity, and performance lifestyle brands: the infrastructure for the next generation of premium health experiences is being built now.
The regions investing here are the same as those with the highest per-capita AI adoption. These are compounding trends.
Why it matters: Devices that measure proxies are being replaced by tools that measure biology. For luxury and wellness brands in our network, the question is not whether this lands in your market; it is whether you are early enough to shape the experience layer above it. Asian capital is defining the infrastructure. The narrative and cultural positioning above that layer is still wide open.
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