You’ve Already Won

What does the "vibe shift" really mean for American culture?

You’ve already won.

That’s the simple, charming message of Nike’s latest advert, posted to social media in the aftermath of Scottie Scheffler’s win at the 153rd Open Championship.

The advert features an image of the new champion squatting on the golf green, as his infant son crawls towards him and reaches for his club.

“You’ve already won,” reads the caption.

The message is pretty clear, I think. There’s achievement on the sports field, and there’s achievement off it: The two aren’t the same, and one is more important, ultimately, than the other.

This isn’t actually a new message for Nike. It’s a message the company pushed in its advertising with Colin Kaepernick a few years ago, which featured a black-and-white image of the quarterback’s smug face and the slogan, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Kaepernick chose to reposition himself as a racial-justice grifter at the exact moment his football career hit the skids, but he—and Nike—wanted the world to believe his decision was principled rather than pragmatic.

This new campaign, by contrast, isn’t about social justice or Black Lives Matter or securing reparations for the “generational trauma” of slavery. It’s about something much simpler and less ephemeral, less modish. Something universal.

It’s about family. A white man with his white child in the kind of image that was once two-a-penny in advertising—plastered on billboards and in magazines and all over TV—but now, for various reasons, has become taboo. That image of Scheffler and his child is simultaneously beyond politics, but in 2025 it’s also political right to the core.

The Scheffler ad has been welcomed as yet another herald of the much-heralded “vibe shift.” The moment when all the values, aesthetic choices and public-facing role models of the previous regime are dismissed, and something new—or older—and better replaces them. Gone are the pansuit girlbosses; gone are the sassy action heroines who can beat the shit out of your favourite male hero; gone too are the obese mystery-meat creatures in yoga pants and the millionaire sports stars lecturing you about how you’re oppressing them by watching them play sport on television for an hour a week.

Here’s someone called Freddie Featherby, who decided to write a short undergraduate essay on Twitter about what the Scheffler advert really means and how it fits in with other cultural events like Dolce and Gabbana’s recent fashion show in Rome, which included striking openly Catholic imagery. Forty Catholic bishops walked in the show.

“We’re witnessing a quiet reorientation in global storytelling,” says Freddie.

“Nike’s Scottie Scheffler pro family ad doesn’t just sell performance, it also centres generational legacy, positioning family as the foundation of excellence. Meanwhile, Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Sartoria show in Rome is more than fashion; it’s a cinematic return to faith, craftsmanship, and ancestral memory. These aren’t isolated campaigns, they signal a broader cultural turn. After decades of chasing futurism, acceleration, and abstraction, brands and artists are now once again, leaning into origin stories, permanence, and the emotional weight of tradition. In an age of AI and global flux, the new luxury is lineage. The new narrative is no longer ‘what’s next?’, but ‘what endures?’”

That’s certainly an A for effort, Freddie. Well done.

I think some of this is obviously true. People really are tired of all the shit they’ve had to put up with for years now. They don’t want to be forcefed politics and they don’t want to be made to feel bad about who they are and what they are, especially not by companies trying to sell them sneakers and track shorts. They do want something permanent, with a deeper history that provides emotional satisfaction.

The motivations behind these corporate about-turns don’t even really matter, either. If Nike is only doing this to sell more stuff it makes—who cares? Nike’s still doing it. Businesses go where the money is, or where they think it is. Always. That’s enough, or it’s certainly enough for me.

The reaction to the new Nike ad has generally been very positive, even if a few people have grumbled about how the company apparently treated this or that female sports star when she was pregnant.

We should be careful, though, not to read too much into just a single advert. Another advertising campaign launched last week, and the reaction to it was very different and perhaps more illuminating of what the “vibe shift” really means or doesn’t.

American Eagle have made Sydney Sweeney the face—and chest—of their new autumn campaign, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The campaign marks a clear return to genuinely attractive people in American Eagle’s promotional materials, rather than the fat, ugly, ambiguous people foisted on us by body-positivity goblins and SJWs.

Two videos were released that play on the pun “jeans” / “genes,” alluding very obviously to the fact that, as well as looking good in jeans, Ms. Sweeney inherited her ENORMOUS GLOBES from her mother.