You may have noticed that in recent years, disposable film cameras have made a comeback. Their successors, the digital cameras of the early aughts, have skyrocketed in popularity too. For those who lived through the era when disposable film or handheld digital cameras were the only option, this apparent regression may seem puzzling, especially given the extremely powerful cameras we all now have in our phones. And while there certainly is a nostalgic component to their resurgence, that nostalgia is driven by a more complicated feeling that can be observed across many different spheres of culture too.
Earlier this year, Prada presented their Fall 2026 Menswear and Womenswear collections, which featured a number of garments that were visibly stained and in disrepair. Button-down shirts had stippled dirt marks around the cuffs, long-sleeve T-shirts were marked with artificial sweat stains across the chest, and trench coats were tearing and repaired at the seams, reminiscent of the Japanese hand mending technique known as sashiko repair. While fashion’s interest in distressing is nothing new, the distressed look often consumes the entire garment and manifests in obvious ways. In Prada’s collections, however, the distress marks were small and juxtaposed against the clean, sharp lines of Prada’s clothing. This is because — paradoxically — that kind of overt distressing that took the 2010s by storm has now been mass-produced. What Prada is reaching for is a more human kind: a hard-to-get-out coffee stain from a rushed morning, a small snag on a coat that you aren’t quite ready to get rid of, or a barely-there sweat stain that you’ve decided isn’t that noticeable.
The resurgence of digital and film cameras, like Prada’s distressing, appeals to our appreciation of the human touch by foregrounding the human effort and lives behind the photographs and clothes. In an era where perfection has become increasingly accessible, oftentimes the more intriguing creative choice is imperfection, a trait that is fundamentally connected to the concept of humanity. Thus, analog cameras are evoking a very specific kind of nostalgia, for a time predating social media when perfectly curated, high-quality images were not visible everywhere on our feeds. But photographers and fashion designers are not the only ones to have caught onto this humanistic trend: tech companies have too.
Many have reported on the resurgence of serif fonts in the branding of major tech companies, like Claude, Perplexity, Manus, and more. A serif is a small line or stroke attached to letters, like the small overhang in the T of Times New Roman, one of the most widely used serif fonts. Serif fonts are modeled after calligraphy and the accidental embellishments that appear in letters during the imperfect act of writing by hand. The opposite of a serif is a sans-serif — a font lacking these small embellishments — like Helvetica, Arial or Roboto. While sans-serif fonts have typically been the favorite of tech companies, their return to serif fonts is — like film cameras and Prada’s stained shirts — an attempt at signaling humanity, at a time when many tech companies are being accused of undermining humanity entirely. But at the same time, the mass production of serif fonts across tech threatens to neutralize the human feeling associated with them, in the same way that distressed and faded jeans no longer mean that the wearer was the one to distress them. When this happens, we can expect the signs of humanity to shift once again, and perhaps for the tech companies to follow suit.
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