Something has shifted in what women want from brands. And it is not moving quietly.
The fastest-selling adult novel in BookScan history was written by a woman, for women, about female desire and fantasy. It sold over a million copies in its first week. The romantasy genre, where romance meets fantasy, centred entirely on female pleasure and perspective, has gone from niche to dominant cultural force. Meanwhile, brands built on the male gaze are losing ground with younger audiences at an accelerating rate, and the campaigns earning genuine loyalty from women in 2026 look almost nothing like the ones that ran five years ago.
This is the female gaze moment. And if your brand communicates with women, or wants to, it's worth understanding what it actually means, because most interpretations of it are wrong.
The concept comes from film theory, but its cultural application has spread well beyond cinema. Simply put, the male gaze frames women as objects to be looked at. The female gaze inverts that, it centres female subjectivity, desire, interiority and perspective. It asks not "how does she look?" but "how does she feel? What does she want? What does the world look like from where she's standing?"
In branding, this distinction matters more than most creative directors have historically acknowledged. The male gaze in marketing isn't just a social issue, it's a strategic one. A creative campaign can generate clicks and impressions and still fail to build any genuine connection with the people it's supposedly for, because the people can feel when something wasn't made with them in mind.
What the female gaze is not: simply putting a woman in the ad. Not slapping "empowerment" over imagery that still objectifies. Not a Women's Day post from a brand that otherwise ignores female audiences for eleven months. Gen Z women have grown up inside the mechanics of media and marketing. They can read the subtext. They notice when the gaze hasn't actually changed, only the surface dressing.
Female perspectives have dominated the culture in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. On music charts, in publishing, on streaming platforms, the most commercially successful creative work is being made by women, for women, on women's terms.
The romantasy boom is the clearest signal. Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series broke records that no book had broken in generations. Sarah J. Maas now outsells Harry Potter in the UK. These books are entirely unapologetic about centring female desire, fantasy and agency, and they are absolutely enormous business. What was once dismissed as low-brow, hysterical and niche has turned out to be the most potent commercial force in publishing.
The same shift is playing out in music. The artists dominating the charts right now, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, Olivia Dean, are building worlds entirely on their own terms. The audience isn't a passive recipient of their image; it's an active co-creator of their mythology. Female pleasure and female perspective aren't side characters in these worlds. They're the entire point.
And then there's the more quiet, more intimate signal: women on TikTok going viral for watching nuns be warm to each other. Commenting "you are so good at that, sister" and having millions of women respond with genuine longing. That's not about religion. It's about the rarity of seeing low-ego, non-competitive female connection represented anywhere. When it appears, women flock to it.
Despite all of this, the male gaze persists in marketing with remarkable stubbornness. In 2026, campaigns supposedly aimed at women still routinely centre how they look rather than how they feel. They use "strong woman" tropes that are really just male-coded strength with a feminine filter. They mistake aspiration for inspiration, showing women an ideal rather than a reflection.
The other failure mode is the one-note empowerment play. "You can do anything." "Be yourself." "This is for you." These phrases have been so thoroughly colonised by performative campaigns that they now function as a red flag rather than a signal of genuine understanding. Women can tell the difference between a brand that has thought carefully about their experience and one that has hired a consultant to add female-coded language to existing material.
The deepest problem is a structural one. Most marketing is still being made primarily by people who don't experience the world from a female perspective, for audiences who do. The gap between producer and audience is felt in the work, even when no one can articulate exactly where it shows up.
The campaigns earning genuine loyalty from female audiences right now share a few consistent qualities that are worth examining closely.
They prioritise interiority over appearance. M&S Love That, featuring Amelia Dimoldenberg, worked because it was about the experience of receiving a genuine compliment from another woman, the warmth of it, the rarity of it. The product was almost beside the point. What was being sold was a feeling that most women recognise and most advertising ignores entirely.
They make room for imperfection and realism. The maternal gaze emerging in fashion, Paloma Wool's campaign imagery of cluttered homes, stretch marks and unglamorous domesticity, is finding a significant audience precisely because it refuses the polished fantasy. Aspirational no longer has to mean perfect. For many women, seeing reality represented with care is more aspirational than seeing an ideal they've long since stopped believing in.
They understand that female audiences aren't monolithic. The female gaze isn't a single aesthetic or a single message. It encompasses the romantasy reader and the looksmaxxing enthusiast and the woman who wants to be seen in her full complexity and the one who just wants to laugh. The brands that perform best don't try to speak to all of these at once, they know specifically who they're talking to and they talk to that person with genuine precision.
They involve women in making the work. This one is less visible but arguably the most important. The question of whether a campaign carries the female gaze isn't always answerable by looking at the output. It often comes down to who was in the room when it was made. Brands that have built genuine creative partnerships with women, in their teams, their agencies, their communities, tend to produce work that lands differently. Not because of a formula, but because the perspective is actually present.
Here's what the female gaze moment represents for brands willing to take it seriously: an enormous and underserved appetite for creative work that actually sees women.
Not as a demographic to convert. Not as a category requiring special handling. As the primary drivers of cultural taste, commercial spending, and creative influence in the current moment, which, statistically and culturally, they are.
The full SS/27 States of Culture report maps this alongside the other forces reshaping how Gen Z live, consume and connect, including the trad lives aesthetic pulling in one direction and the slop snob rejection of low-effort content pulling in another. The female gaze trend sits within the Yearning section of the report, a generation hungry for experiences that feel earned, intimate and real.
The brands that will win with this audience aren't the ones that run a campaign for Women's History Month and call it done. They're the ones building from genuine understanding. That starts with knowing what women actually want, not what brands have historically assumed they want.
Download the full report here: SS/27 States of Culture, Gen Z Trend Report.
Make work that actually sees them.
