When Effort Became a Luxury Again
Why the imperfect, handmade and unmistakably human are suddenly becoming more valuable.
5–6 minute read
Something interesting is happening in advertising at the moment.
Jeans are being made out of pasta. Campaigns are being illustrated by hand. Stop-motion is appearing where CGI could have done the job in a fraction of the time. Brands are showing sketchbooks, prototypes, craftspeople and the slightly imperfect evidence that somebody, somewhere, actually made something.
It would be easy to dismiss it as another aesthetic trend. A swing back towards analogue after years of digital perfection.
But I think there's something much more interesting underneath it.
We're beginning to value effort again.
For most of the last decade, marketing has been moving in the opposite direction. Faster production. Smarter templates. Automated workflows. Content at scale. Then generative AI arrived and accelerated everything. Images that once required a photographer, a location and a production team could suddenly be produced from a laptop. Ideas could be visualised in seconds. Copy could be drafted before the coffee had gone cold.
There are enormous advantages to that. Small brands can now do things that previously required enormous budgets. Creative teams can experiment faster. Tedious parts of the process can disappear altogether.
But whenever something becomes abundant, our perception of what's valuable tends to shift.
And polished content has become very, very abundant.
That's why one of the more interesting creative trends emerging in 2026 isn't really about technology at all. It's about what happens in response to it.
Vogue recently described it as effort signalling: brands deliberately making the human effort behind creative work visible. Chanel has commissioned illustration. Dior has worked with animation studios. Loewe has continued collaborating with artists. Abercrombie & Fitch recently worked with Korean artist Min Kyung-jin, who painstakingly created miniature jeans from pasta. Her Reel for the brand attracted millions of views.
Hermès has taken the idea even further. Earlier this year, rather than filling its website with hyper-real AI imagery, it commissioned illustrator Linda Merad to create a wonderfully strange hand-drawn world of sea creatures, shoes, watches and objects. In a digital landscape capable of producing almost anything instantly, the fact that someone actually drew it became part of its value.
That's the bit I find fascinating.
We used to hide the effort.
The seams weren't meant to show. The messy sketches stayed in the studio. The rejected concepts disappeared into folders. Production existed behind the finished campaign, and the audience generally only saw the polished result.
Now the process itself is becoming interesting.
The hand-drawn line matters because we know someone drew it. Stop-motion becomes compelling partly because we understand how ridiculously painstaking it is. A photograph gains something when we know a real person stood behind the camera waiting for the moment rather than generating twenty versions of it.
The imperfection becomes proof.
And perhaps that's why the word luxury is useful here, even for brands that have absolutely nothing to do with luxury goods.
Luxury has always been partly about scarcity. If technology makes perfect execution almost infinitely available, then time, attention, judgement and human effort become comparatively scarce. Fast Company recently asked whether "human-made" might become the next luxury label, arguing that as AI-assisted creation becomes normal, genuinely human creation may begin carrying a premium of its own.
I don't think that means we all need to throw away our AI tools and start making advertisements out of pasta.
That would rather miss the point.
The interesting lesson isn't that handmade is automatically better. Nor is it that difficult work is automatically good work. Plenty of brilliant ideas are simple, and plenty of terrible ideas take months to produce.
It's that people increasingly want to feel that there was thought behind the thing they're looking at.
Someone cared.
Someone chose this rather than that.
Someone noticed the detail.
Someone decided it was finished.
That distinction is becoming important because AI is extraordinarily good at removing friction from production. What it doesn't remove is the need for judgement. In fact, the more options we're capable of generating, the more important judgement becomes.
For brands, that creates an interesting tension. We should absolutely use technology to remove unnecessary effort. There is no virtue in spending six hours doing something that can be done brilliantly in six minutes. But perhaps we need to be more careful about removing the evidence of human thought along with it.
Because those small signs of humanity are often where connection happens.
It's the founder explaining why the product exists. The designer showing the first sketch. The photographer leaving something slightly imperfect in the frame. The copy that sounds like someone actually speaks. The story behind why a material was chosen. The prototype that didn't work.
None of those things need to be manufactured into "authenticity." In fact, the moment they are, the whole thing falls apart.
They simply need to be allowed to exist.
This is perhaps the most interesting part of the shift. For years, brands have spent enormous amounts of energy trying to appear bigger, smoother and more polished than they really are.
The next era may reward the opposite.
Not amateurism. Not mess for the sake of mess.
Evidence of care.
There is something reassuring about knowing that another person was involved in making the thing in front of you. They brought experience to it. Taste. Humour. Frustration. Instinct. Maybe even eight bags of flour before the miniature shoe finally looked right.
Those details suddenly mean something.
And in a world where almost anything can be created instantly, perhaps one of the most powerful things a brand can show us is that somebody thought it was worth taking the time.
