A few days ago, a crowd of young people gathered near the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona to participate in an event as novel as it was unsettling. It was the first call in the Catalan capital to “farm aura,” the new viral concept that you have probably read about in this very publication.
Hundreds of teenagers gathered to perform a series of poses, project an “original” attitude, and measure the “social respect” they could scrape together under the gaze of all those strangers. The spectacle, halfway between artistic performance and delirium, inevitably recalled a certain film directed and starring Ben Stiller 25 years ago.
When Zoolander hit theaters in September 2001, critics were ruthless with it. The Washington Post, for example, called it a “one-joke comedy,” while the global edition of Time Out described it as a “banal comedy that fails on all levels.” Meanwhile, Ángel Fernández Santos called it in El País “Nothing but dull (…) A crazily badly constructed comedy (…) Clumsy, indigestible.”
The box office didn’t help either, probably because it premiered just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, a time when the public was hardly in the mood for a dose of absurd humor. However, seen a quarter of a century later, the film can be read, besides as a crude caricature of fashion, as a sociological prophecy. A hyperbolic nonsense that describes, with alarming precision, the tyranny of image, the culture of the selfie, and the bodily hyper-awareness that dominates the year 2026.
The birth of the little faces
Besides the laughs, which may be easier to understand today than during the hangover of the worst attack on American soil in history, the first of Zoolander’s great discoveries, often overlooked, was “focusing its gaze on male models, blowing up the traditional gender roles of the time,” according to Estel Vilaseca, director of the Fashion Design Area at LCI Barcelona.
In fact, the film is about gazes. Gazes that, in Zoolander’s hands, become almost crafted works of art. “Blue Steel,” “Ferrari,” “Magnum”… The characters in the film seem to treat them like paintings in the Louvre, despite all seeming the same to the viewer’s eyes. Today, we live surrounded by that kind of absurd grimace. Every day we see them on social media. Some people only appear on their accounts making these kinds of little faces that have become so embedded in the collective imagination that they seem as normal to us as a demure smile.
According to stylist Rocco Marvin, “despite being structured as an absurd comedy, Zoolander contains a very sharp critique of the weight society places on appearance, fame, and the construction of a public image.” She says, “under a grotesque format, the film questions to what extent individual identity is subordinated to others’ perception.”
In this context, Derek’s character and his famous “Blue Steel” look function, according to the expert, as a caricature of the contemporary need to find a perfect and iconic image. “Although the film takes this idea to the extreme, it is easy to relate it to the present, especially with social media, where many people carefully select the photo, gesture, or appearance with which they want to present themselves to others,” she points out.
As the project’s proud screenwriter, John Hamburg, suggested in an analysis published in Esquire on its twentieth anniversary, time has proven Zoolander’s intuitions right. In his opinion, the film was ahead of its time by shining a spotlight on the fashion industry’s dirty laundry (such as child labor exploitation or eating disorders) and, above all, on a culture that was already germinating before the arrival of smartphones and social media. The film managed to dissect and project the dynamics of visual overexposure that would erupt years later with the culture of the selfie and the arrival of digital celebrities of the modern era, personified by figures like the Kardashians or the Hadid sisters.
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The luxury uglyism
If Derek’s pose anticipated the Instagram era, the Derelicte collection, designed in fiction by the villain Mugatu inspired by homeless people, foreshadowed one of the most controversial trends in the contemporary industry: the commodification of poverty and luxury uglyism. Although Estel Vilaseca points out that, in reality, when the film was shot, fashion had already shown signs of heading in that direction. The expert recalls that Mugatu’s proposal seems a reflection of the famous spring/summer 2000 collection John Galliano designed for Dior.
Those dresses, featuring a newspaper print, became famous (and controversial) because they were inspired by the clochards who slept under the bridges of Paris and whom the designer encountered when he went running. The expert adds that “although Galliano’s interpretation was not ironic but rather poetic, it does add to fashion’s attraction to provocation and recontextualization, which is also reflected in Zoolander.” An obsession that has led current brands like Balenciaga to market garbage bags or worn-out garments at astronomical prices, further consolidating a strategy where scandal and uglyism operate as market drivers.
According to Rocco, the Derelicte collection also serves to illustrate “how arbitrary the fashion system is: what in one context might be considered unpleasant, strange, or worthless can become a trend simply because certain figures or institutions decide to grant it prestige,” she points out. “The exaggeration is comical but also reveals a critique of the power the industry has to determine what we consider attractive or desirable.”
The assimilation of parody
Another important brushstroke about the fashion world provided by Zoolander came through the relationship between the film and the very sector it parodied, which went through a very particular “metamorphosis.” During filming in 2000, much of the fashion industry turned its back on the project. Costume designer David C. Robinson recalled in Esquire how numerous fashion houses refused to lend clothes for filming after seeing a short aired during the VH1 Fashion Awards presenting the character of Zoolander.
However, after becoming a cult phenomenon, the sector itself ended up embracing the story, to the point that top designers and models fought to make cameos in its sequel, Zoolander 2. According to Vilaseca, this story of initial rejection and later acceptance fits perfectly with the sector’s behavior. “The same happened with The Devil Wears Prada. In the first movie, Vogue barely covered it, but in the second, it actively collaborated.”
“Initially there is fear of reputational damage, but then, seeing the phenomenon and the profit that can be made, they jump on the bandwagon,” she continues. “Although in both cases the first installment is considered much more genuine. And, without a doubt, in the case of Zoolander, much more fun.”
Beyond the newspaper dresses or the sophistication of the poses in front of the camera, perhaps Zoolander’s most prophetic success was sketching the definitive outline of the contemporary influencer: a figure obsessed with projecting their own image but radically disconnected from reality. Their inability to understand the world around them is immortalized in one of the film’s key scenes, when Derek violently destroys a model of the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good. Seeing the miniature model, Stiller shouts indignantly: “What is this, an ant center? (…) How are they going to learn to read if they don’t even fit in the building?”
Beyond the joke, the scene today functions as an unintentional allegory about the functional emptiness that dominates much of today’s content creators. In the era of dopaminergic aesthetics, fast consumption on TikTok, and the cult of aura, form has completely devoured substance. Derek Zoolander anticipated that digital elite that knows how to pose with sculptural precision but is sometimes incapable of interpreting the context in which they produce their content. Twenty-five years after its release, the joke is starting to be on the other side of the screen: the reality of 2026 has ended up imitating the delirium imagined by a comedy that increasingly resembles the world we live in.
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