Over the past year, our feeds have become saturated with AI-generated content and endlessly recycled recommendations, favoring speed and volume over substance. It feels like every other video is pushing product, and so it’s no surprise that Gen Zs feel like they’re constantly being sold to online.
This new algorithmic reality is giving rise to a new creator class. Enter the intellectual influencer, who distinguishes themselves by creating content rooted in their expertise, hyperfixations, knowledge, or insights on a specific subject, rather than their looks or style. In 2023, trend forecasting consultancy The Future Laboratory predicted the rise of this creator group. But in recent years, as intellectual corners of the internet like #booktok have hit the mainstream and platforms like Substack and Discord have surged, fashion brands are finally taking note of this creator class to build more resonant connections with consumers.
Last month, Substack writer Zara Wong shaped luggage brand July’s transition into handbags, co-creating an edit for their site and in-store, while Vivian Tu, founder and CEO of the business podcast Your Rich BFF, has worked with Depop since December to reframe resale through a financial lens. Elsewhere, wellness podcaster Jay Shetty attended Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut men’s collectsion in June 2025. And the internet’s self-proclaimed “resident librarian” Jack Edwards — who has become a regular attendee at Valentino events — joined Esquire as a contributing literary editor earlier this year. Taken together, it suggests a widening definition of fashion authority — one that is shaped by those who can interpret culture as much as by those who participate in it.
The intellectual influencer leads the anti-slop agenda
The momentum of this expert class is less a new type of creator than a response to what our feeds have become, experts agree. “During a moment defined by anti-intellectualism, escapism, and AI tools that let you skip cognitive work entirely... intellectual creators are doing something kinda countercultural,” says Death To Stock’s culture researcher Agus Panzoni.
These influencers, who have already built established communities around intellectual pursuits, hold greater meaning and engender more trust than pay-to-post creators. “Against a backdrop of AI reliance, attention hacking, and short-form overload, audiences have started reaching for something that actually means something… depth has become its own signal of credibility,” says Eve Lee, founder of creative agencies Digi Fairy and Source Material.
“Audiences have so much insight, transparency, and cynicism around the inner workings of advertising right now,” says fashion commentator Rian Phin, noting growing skepticism towards creators who appear too easily aligned with brand agendas.
“[Today, they] expect value-driven content…They want a strong perspective and informed opinion.” Phin notes that she trusts intellectual influencers like scientists or scholars more readily than traditional creators, even when they’re posting fashion content or beauty routines, because their sole career focus isn’t simply selling stuff.
Knowledge-seeking is also increasingly becoming an important shared activity. As Panzoni observes, it is now “a site of belonging”, with Gen Z gravitating towards book clubs, lecture series, and reading cafés as social spaces. Intellectual life is no longer confined to solitary study, but embedded within community — a shift that helps explain the growing appeal of this creator archetype.
The value of sparking conversation
Brands wanting to work with intellectual creators should focus on substance, authorship, and cultural relevance. “It’s such a waste of someone’s trust with their audience to ask an intellectual influencer to do a cheesy unboxing, GRWM, or try-on haul like every other creator on every other campaign,” Phin says. “It doesn’t mean long videos, it means tailor the ad to what actually sets them apart. Campaigns must be uniquely tailored to the content they make, otherwise it has the opposite effect.”
As Lee puts it, brands have spent too long engaging a creator’s audience “without engaging their ideas”, even though “every objective the strategy side is trying to achieve, creators already do instinctively.” Her platform, Source Material, operates as a culture-first advisory network, connecting brands with creators and cultural thinkers to shape strategy, rather than traditional market research. The agency provides one-to-one consultations with creators; ongoing creator councils to advise brands on strategy, and even co-creation of products using creator expertise.
The newly launched agency “came from over a decade of watching the creator economy be simultaneously underestimated and misused”, Lee explains. “The industry has spent so long optimizing for short-term data that credibility is often deprioritized… social teams’ success is all based on numbers and virality versus credibility.”
Unlike collaborations with traditional lifestyle influencers, intellectual influencer partnerships work when they operate as cultural output. Rather than simply extending reach, they shape perception — making a brand feel considered, culturally situated, and worth talking about. For Source Material, that value is most effective when intellectual creators are brought in early. “If this level of cultural expertise is embedded upstream, the downstream becomes far more effective across all metrics — from brand perception and cultural positioning to the quality of ideas and depth of audience trust,” she says.
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For example, at Depop, intellectual influencers have long been positioned less as endorsers and more as “creative directors”. “When a creator’s expertise is central to their value, that is a benefit and reinforces the importance of self-expression,” says Stephanie Dolgins, interim chief marketing officer. In practice, that means intellectual influencers are not promoting products, but situating them in a broader cultural context.
Video essayist Mina Le explored the history of low-rise jeans before directing viewers to find their own on Depop, while fashion consultant Affie Kacar broke down Ralph Lauren’s Fall/Winter 2026 show into wearable looks sourced from the platform. The brand has doubled down on this approach with the appointment of stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson as its official trends spokesperson for 2026, bringing a point of view rooted in cultural context and historical reference.
Rather than simply reporting on trends, Karefa-Johnson explains where they come from and what they mean, giving audiences a more informed entry point to fashion. The result is content that “often extends the lifecycle… We see stronger signals of engaged attention… they continue to circulate and be referenced over time, which isn’t always the case with more trend-led activations,” Dolgins adds.
At Ebay, that logic is just as explicit. “Partnering with creators who have a distinctive point of view… is becoming an incredibly valuable currency for brands,” says strategy and communications agency Seen Connect’s client services director, Emma Wills. “For a platform like Ebay, which has democratized access to pre-loved designer fashion, these creators can surface the deeper narratives behind items through a cultural lens,” she says.
In one collaboration Instagram video, Phin demonstrates this by tracing a Prada 1999 leaf-appliqué purse through its broader context, linking its nature motifs and synthetic materials to late ’90s anxieties around futurism and the natural world, before drawing a line to Yohji Yamamoto’s craftsmanship-led runway work. The item itself becomes a starting point, not the story — reframed as part of a broader fashion history that can be rediscovered through resale.
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In a landscape where content is easier to produce and harder to distinguish, that interpretive layer becomes a point of difference. “Brands that partner with creators who bring cultural context and critical thinking… will build better equity long-term,” she adds. “They are paving the way and reframing fashion in a modern landscape as something to be explored and not just consumed.”
Brand restraint as strategy
That approach also becomes most useful in times of brand transformation. Luggage label July’s collaboration with Wong ensured the transition into the new space was credible. “The best part about this kind of engagement is that everyone knows these kinds of influencers only partner with brands they believe in… we’re known for our luggage, and Zara helped validate that our bags are worth traveling with to an audience we’re new-ish to,” says July co-founder Athan Didaskalou. “There’s a responsibility to not turn someone’s voice into brand mush. If anything, it’s about having the restraint to let it feel a little off-brand in places. That’s usually where the good stuff is.”
That kind of resonance, however, is difficult to manufacture. “When the emphasis falls too heavily on the ‘aesthetic of knowledge-seeking’… without real engagement with the [creator’s] actual works, that’s where things get lost,” Panzoni adds. Beauty has already been forced to respond to that scrutiny. “The customer is incredibly informed, and the feedback loop is almost immediate,” Lee notes.
For fashion, what is changing is not simply who holds influence, but what influence is expected to do. Visibility still matters, but without perspective, it is starting to feel thin.
