Lifestyle Desires — Australian living

A woman testing an outfit beside records and a clothes rack, caught between style ritual and recommendation culture

Personal taste is getting harder to hear

Personal taste feels flatter in 2026 because algorithmic feeds now shape wardrobes, playlists and rooms before we know what we want.

Imogen Hartley· 9 min read

The Forest by Woods Bagot, winner of the 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards Premier Award

home

The quiet room is winning

Katharina Lou campaign image showing the label's direct-to-audience fashion mood

style

What Katharina Mildren is proving when the shop never opens

A checkout counter inside a retail store, echoing Kmart's return to front-of-store tills.

home

Why Kmart is walking shoppers back to the door

Style

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Personal taste is getting harder to hear

Personal taste feels flatter in 2026 because algorithmic feeds now shape wardrobes, playlists and rooms before we know what we want.

What Katharina Mildren is proving when the shop never opens

A model in pale tailoring, caught between fashion week appointments

Paris wants a showroom. Australia wants proof

Folded cotton T-shirts with cotton stems, a quiet still life for an ethics-of-basics story

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Woman in an elegant dress looking out towards the Sydney Harbour Bridge

Chanel Sydney runway: Australia gets the mirror test

Home

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The quiet room is winning

2026 Australian Interior Design Awards point to quieter rooms, adaptive reuse and coastal homes that protect rather than perform.

Why Kmart is walking shoppers back to the door

IKEA PS chairs, sofa, coffee table and lamps inside the Sydney staycation home

The Ikea sleepover wasn't really about Ikea

Home goods displayed on wooden shelves inside a decor store

What Kmart's K Home gamble says about us

Travel

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Sunset view from a plane window above the clouds, evoking the aspirational mood of a bargain holiday

When the bargain holiday stops feeling clever

Families and travellers on a Bali beach, the ordinary holiday at the centre of Australia's status argument

The holiday you sneer at is telling on you

Vintage camera resting on a folded travel map, a visual case for swapping apps for dedicated travel tools

The trip gets better when your phone gets boring

Travel documents and planning materials before a trip

The 2026 travel paperwork to check before you book

Travel toiletries and beauty essentials spread out before packing.

What the bathroom floor knows before a trip

A room at Castello di Reschio looking onto the Umbrian landscape.

When a beautiful hotel follows you home

Relationships

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A woman sits alone at a warmly lit bar with a glass of wine

What solo-maxxing says about the price of being coupled

Solo-maxxing is turning dating costs into a relationships question, with $200 date nights making single life feel less like failure.

Students gathered around a table in discussion

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A couple in conversation over wine at a cafe table

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A couple walking through a city at night, the kind of ordinary date that now comes with a visible price tag.

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A mother and child share a quiet moment at home, held close in black and white.

The bill comes due when you become the cycle-breaker

Culture

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Personal taste is getting harder to hear

Personal taste feels flatter in 2026 because algorithmic feeds now shape wardrobes, playlists and rooms before we know what we want.

A vintage cinema projector, suited to an essay about Hollywood’s processed feel

The sausage-factory line is rude because it feels true

A clapperboard held against a dark film-set background

What YouTube’s Gen Z directors are doing to Hollywood now

Sydney Harbour glowing at night during festival season, with the Opera House, Harbour Bridge and CBD lit across the water

When Vivid’s drones faltered, Sydney kept staring

Food & Drink

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Cold flavoured sparkling water cans and a glass on a kitchen bench

The cold can has become our clean little vice

Amber-lit restaurant dining room with tables set beside tall windows

What Melbourne’s best-designed restaurants are really selling now

A can of La Campagnola tomatoes on a kitchen counter with soft lighting.

Why tinned tomatoes still decide how dinner tastes

Rows of agave on a sun-bleached Queensland farm, where Australian distillers are betting the plant can anchor a local spirits future.

The prickly plant changing Australia's pour

A chilled glass of horchata with cinnamon sticks, echoing the cold creamy café drink at the centre of the story

Horchata slips into the café script

Exterior of a Guzman y Gomez restaurant, used as the hero image for coverage of the chain's US exit.

Guzman y Gomez could conquer Australia. America was another story.

Community

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Woman seated on floor against a wall, conveying housing insecurity and distress.

What the rental crisis is doing to women who need to leave now

Australia's rental crisis is changing what it means to leave a violent home, forcing women to weigh safety against rents, paperwork and nowhere to land.

A young man lies on a bed reaching for his phone near a window — the suspended animation of adulthood in a childhood room.

Late 20s and living at home: the cost no one's counting

Woman working in a rural field, echoing Rachel Ward's shift from glamour to farm labour.

Rachel Ward found purpose where glamour ran out

Power lines and regional landscape on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula

The sea-change dream starts to flicker

Open farm country outside a small Australian town, a stand-in for the scale around Robinvale.

In Robinvale, half the town disappears when the census arrives

Wellbeing

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A medical professional reviewing MRI brain scans in a clinical setting

The supplement I trusted is now linked to Alzheimer's — and I don't know what to tell my patients

A University of Florida study published in Nature Metabolism found the popular joint supplement glucosamine was associated with 25% higher risk of progression from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's. GP-turned-writer Dr Mira Joshi on what this means for the millions of Australians who take it daily — and what she'll tell her next patient.

Woman checking her fitness tracker with a concerned expression

Why the health-tracker backlash suddenly feels like relief

A GP in a clinic setting for a perimenopause consultation

Perimenopause signs: how to tell if it has started

A skincare routine being filmed in a bathroom mirror

Children’s skincare boom: girls learn correction too early

Beauty

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Children’s skincare boom: girls learn correction too early

Hair-loss serum bottle held against dark hair, pointing to the private ritual behind scalp-treatment claims.

The oldest hair-loss promise in the bathroom cabinet

Collagen supplement bottle with capsules and dried flowers on a dark surface.

Why collagen supplements still sound more certain than they are

Interior of Mecca's Bourke Street flagship in Melbourne with consultation counters and multi-level beauty displays.

Why Mecca thinks beauty still needs a room

A woman holds a small hand mirror indoors, echoing the self-scrutiny behind the GLP-1 look.

What Wegovy is doing to beauty standards

The chatbot beauty standard was always going to end up in a surgeon’s office

Money & Career

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A mother and daughter sharing a quiet conversation at the kitchen table

What teaching a daughter to get rich really sounds like

Jannese Torres is building a million-dollar portfolio for her daughter — and rewriting the family script about who gets to have the grown-up money conversations.

Bright Melbourne-style living room interior, echoing the domestic space renters are now better equipped to ask more of.

What Victoria’s rental reset changes for renters

A worker at a desk in a workplace setting.

What disclosing a disability at work costs, and what it shouldn't

Payroll and superannuation paperwork on a desk

The super rise you notice late, and the payday shift behind it

What the Saturday auction sounded like after investors stepped back

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