Last month, Margaret Qualley wore Chanel’s divisive barefoot shoes from the cruise 2027 collection to the London premiere of her film, The Dog Stars. The shoes, which consist of little more than a leather heel cap laced around the foot, feel almost deliberately impractical. Sure enough, Qualley’s appearance elicited an intense reaction online, with comments ranging from “...don’t piss me off, I just woke up” to “Freaky shoe girls unite”.
It’s not the first time fashion has stumbled into — or intentionally courted — the internet’s wrath. In June, controversial looksmaxxer Clavicular walked the 424 Paris Fashion Week runway, prompting a stream of outraged responses from fashion journalists and commentators alike. Just days before, biohacker Bryan Johnson’s appearance at Matières Fécales’s FW26 runway also prompted backlash, but garnered millions of impressions on Instagram and TikTok in the process.
Creators have been honing these tactics for years, with some openly acknowledging that baiting their audience is part of their strategy. Luxury creator Audrey Peters, for example, who has worked with Jimmy Choo and Estée Lauder, has spoken about deliberating rage-baiting her followers with things like $25 Doordash coffee orders, because she knows it will drive engagement.
Similarly, creator Winta Zesu recently said in a BBC interview that “every single video” of hers that’s garnered millions of views is “because of hate comments”.
It’s a marked shift in how fashion generates attention, wherein outrage has become a powerful marketing currency offering brands and creators a way to cut through an increasingly crowded feed. The strategy has become so ubiquitous that “rage bait” was named Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025, with usage tripling over the previous 12 months.
Oxford Languages defines it as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.” In short: where clickbait once relied on curiosity to get us to click, rage bait relies on emotion to get us to react.
“You need to create more and more extreme things in order to be picked up by the algorithm. Brands are content factories and the algorithm is teaching them what to put online,” says strategy executive Ana Andjelic, who is hosting an upcoming day summit, Tasteful, exploring how brands can build cultural capital and lasting relevance.
“Consumer attention is now bought, and which brand has the most money buys the most attention. But attention is like fast food, it’s all empty calories that leaves you hungry.
Everyone is left wanting more in this scenario, without ever feeling full.”
“Rage bait is synonymous with the era. We live in really fast times, and people are always looking for a quick outcome,” says Gabe Whaley, founder and CEO of 10-year-old artist collective Mschf, known for provocative projects that get people talking, from its Big Red Boots to its Satan Shoes collaboration with Lil Nas X.
“Engineering rage bait is the laziest approach. It’s the least work for the highest ROI of any sort of marketing.”
While some of the collective’s projects have elicited fierce reactions — most notably, Our Cow Angus, in which Mschf bought a real cow and sold tokens representing 1,200 burgers and four leather bags, leaving buyers to decide whether to sacrifice their purchases to save Angus from slaughter — Whaley’s wasn’t trying to make people angry just for clicks. “The Angus thing was really interesting, because people would get upset, but it’s sort of like, you’re pointing one finger out and three fingers back at yourself.
Are you mad at us, or are you mad at the system of which you are a part?” he says.
Mschf could have written a think piece about the industrial agricultural complex; instead, the Angus project turned the argument into something people could interact with and influence. “The things that we put out, there’s a two-way interaction, versus us just broadcasting our point of view and you have to deal with it in the comments,” he says.
After all, there’s a difference between being provocative in a way that challenges people or opens up a conversation, and provoking them simply for the sake of it (and for the residual engagement and impression it will generate). “It’s very easy to get trapped in the superficial short-term game, so it’s just sort of like a self-perpetuating cycle of rage and misery.
That’s why nobody wants to be online anymore,” explains Whaley. “The internet kind of sucks.
Nobody’s having a good time. The adults are pissed.
The kids are pissed.”
So what happens when everyone is rage-baiting? In an attention economy where brands still need to be seen, is provoking outrage really the only way to make people look? Could fashion create desire through curiosity rather than controversy, or give people something to care about rather than simply something to get angry about?
How rage bait became all the rage
Rage bait may be a distinctly 21st century term, but the commercial logic behind it is centuries old. Cyberethnographer and author of upcoming book In Defence of Being-On-Line Ruby Justice Thelot traces its roots to the rise of mass media in the 19th century, when cheap, sensational entertainment emerged to serve a rapidly expanding audience — from Britain’s penny dreadfuls, which were cheaply produced, sensational fiction sold for a penny, to the scandalous and often politically provocative Grub Street pamphlets.
What has changed, Thelot argues, is the technology delivering that content and, with it, the number of things competing for our attention. Fashion’s audience has expanded dramatically, and the way we encounter it has been transformed by social media and the feed.
“In the ’90s, a spread in a magazine allowed you to tell a story,” says Thelot. “Now, the image that you spend thousands of dollars making is right next to an amazing comedian, a funny cat video, and your best friend’s engagement.
You’re competing against so many things that people feel the need to shock in order to capture that attention.”
There’s another problem with chasing the broadest possible audience, wherein the people generating the most noise around fashion online are not necessarily reaching the people buying the clothes. “The world we live in — the world of social media, the world of video, the world of mass communication — does not predispose people to contemplation.
It is the opposite. The current luxury fashion consumer is simply not wired to think about fashion in any sustained way,” says Eugene Rabkin, founder of Stylezeitgeist and author of the upcoming book Torn: Fashion and Postmodernism.
Rabkin argues that over the last few decades, fashion has become a mass pop culture phenomenon, with more people than ever making content about it and buying into its world. That expansion has come at a cost.
“The people who are buying the stuff and the people who are commenting on the internet are not the same,” he continues, noting that such antics alienate tastemakers and enthusiasts who are integral when it comes to driving desire.
Instead Rabkin has described much of this fashion output as “pseudo-events” — spectacles that mean nothing and are created primarily to fill the round-the-clock media cycle. In practice, that can mean everything from absurd price points to meme products engineered to become talking points, keeping brands at the center of the conversation even though it’s being driven by a tsunami of disgruntled trolls.
Of course, a little bit of outrage around a tongue-in-cheek shoe is one thing, but when rage bait tips over into something genuinely offensive, as in the case of Clavicular, it starts to feel a lot more unsavory.
“There’s an information asymmetry in the market right now, where there are more reactions than things to react to. That’s created this imbalance, because the incentive is to generate reactions, and the only reactions that perform need to be more volatile.
The internet is mostly just reactions now, whereas 15 years ago, it was mostly things. We live in an economy where it’s more about the reaction to the thing than the thing.
The only problem is we’re running out of things,” says Mschf’s Whaley. “My important focus with Mschf and [creative agency] Applied Mschf is: how do you make sure you have the discipline and the focus to make a great thing?”
Beyond rage bait
The next challenge is learning how to convert attention into something that actually lasts. “Staying power is so much more important than virality,” says Whaley. “And I say this as the person who sort of weaponized our own brand of virality for a very long time. But it can’t be the end goal. Virality was always just a tool to distribute an idea.”
“We’re primarily focused on longer, harder formats. If everyone’s doing short form, we will go into long form,” he continues. “It’s this beautiful opportunity, but also the impossible task, which is: peak once, walk away from that, and then reinvent and maybe do it again, because most people don’t reinvent; they just keep chasing what brought them to that original peak.”
Rather than chasing maximum reach, Whaley is also interested in smaller, more contained networks — arguing that, in an internet saturated with content, popping up here and there in smaller groups has more credibility and staying power. That runs counter to the logic of the feed, where the goal is to put every piece of content in front of as many people as possible.
To escape that cycle, Thelot argues, brands may need to take great control over how they communicate with customers.
“If one wanted to escape the attention dynamics that push us toward rage bait and shock, one would need essentially vertical integration,” Thelot says, building proprietary channels rather than placing brand messages into the same feed “right next to a picture of a war, to a picture of a cute cat, and to a funny Canadian”.
For instance, brands from The RealReal to Balenciaga have set up their own Substacks, while Chanel launched its own print magazine this year, Arts & Culture, and Bottega Veneta has a digital journal, Issue.
All of these approaches point to the same shift away from maximizing visibility and toward retaining interest. “You need to slowly build,” agrees strategy exec Andjelic.
“Any restaurant can be buzzy for one season, but actually having the reputation that gets you Michelin stars, that gets you to the urban lore, is the same mechanism that happens with brands.” The distinction is between social contagion and fandom: a product can go viral without creating a lasting relationship with the people who encounter it. “That’s not fandom,” she says.
“But having that durability and that power is something that distinguishes those who are one-hit wonders from the rest.”
“What a grand opportunity we find ourselves in, where the baseline is so low and everything sucks so much. It doesn’t take much now to just make something really good,” says Whaley. The difficulty is resisting the incentives that make that harder.
“That level of cognitive discipline is just going to be really tough for most people,” he continues. “It requires setting aside your short-term attention span and your short-term incentives to focus a little bit longer term while everyone else is busy getting attention.
Empires are going to rise and fall between the time you start and actually put out something real, but it’ll be worth it; it’ll be worth it for the few who do it. The future will belong to the people who kind of bypass that temptation and just double down on doing hard things really well.”