Nobody wants to be cringe. The word itself embodies humanity’s ickiest idiosyncrasies: the things that make us wince with discomfort until we want the ground to swallow us whole. It’s saying “I love you” to colleagues at the end of a Zoom meeting. It’s dropping your stainless steel thermos in the silent section of a busy library. It’s sobbing to a stranger in a nightclub bathroom about a lover who left you on read, before magically recovering when they reply. You get the idea.
But in 2026, I believe, such negative associations with “cringe” are firmly in the past. Call it a vibe shift, a glitch in the zeitgeist, or a cultural midlife crisis, but somehow, against all odds, I do think that cringe is becoming cool. It’s a thing we want rather than run from; it’s turning into something to aspire towards.
As with any global movement, it’s hard to pinpoint its exact inception. But murmurings began in the early 2020s, when we started to hear a lot of the phrase “To be cringe is to be free.” In recent months, though, the idea seems to have accelerated. Think: the Marty Supreme press tour that saw Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner posing on the red carpet in matching tangerine ensembles. Or literally everything about Wicked – specifically Michelle Yeoh’s repeated explanations that her character, Madame Morrible, has the initials “MM’”, which, flipped around, shows as “WW” for “Wicked Witch”. It was cringe, but we loved it more each time she showed us.
There was also I Love LA, Rachel Sennott’s hilarious zillennial comedy that celebrated cringe in more knowing, self-aware ways, leaning into the self-absorption of its lead characters and spotlighting extremely online rhetoric with masterful derision: “If Talullah gets a reputation as ‘brand unsafe,’ I’m fucked. What’s she going to do, write a book?” bemoans Sennott’s character Maia. The series also opens with Maia having sex with her boyfriend during an earthquake: “If we’re gonna die, I just wanna come,” she says. You’re recoiling, yes – but you’re also laughing.
The cringe rebrand is set to continue. Consider Charli xcx’s upcoming A24 mockumentary, The Moment, which details a fictionalised account of Brat summer from the inside. “How do we keep this Brat thing going?” asks Arielle Dombasle, as a label exec, in the trailer for the film that also stars Sennott and even Jenner, who says at one point: “The second people are getting sick of you, that’s when you need to go even harder.” Poking fun at your own virality? Mocking the summer everyone went batshit for slime green? It’s awkward and clunky, but it also has teeth; The Moment feels considered and self-aware. In other words, its cringe isn’t accidental, or even superfluous. It’s the whole point.
Essentially, we’re no longer laughing at cringe, we’re laughing with it – embracing it, even. Playing it cool and pretending to be nonplussed by life’s inevitable quirks, awkward moments and setbacks is not anyone’s modus operandi. It got old. It got tedious. It got boring. Instead of smiling silently behind our sunglasses, we’re giggling obnoxiously loudly with wide, excitable eyes, embracing the weirdest and strangest parts of ourselves instead of pushing them to one side. We’re being noisy, brash and unapologetic. And I have to say, it feels pretty good.
