This Summer’s Must

Once every quarter, online shopping platform Lyst puts out its Lyst Index, a ranking of the most in-demand fashion brands and products. The Index tracks search data across three categories: Desire, Demand and Discovery, to calculate which products are currently the “hottest.” Welcome to Heat Check: A guide to the trends and products taking the internet by a storm. Discover more here. The recently released Q2 Lyst Index reports on the second quarter of 2026, detailing what the hottest brands and products were as summer kicked off. To give you an idea of the level of fashion the Lyst Index typically deals with, the top five brands in the report are, in order: Chanel, Miu Miu, Dior, Saint Laurent and Gucci. This is all high-fashion, high-priced stuff, which makes it all the more surprising that the hottest product in the new report is a baseball cap that costs just $37. Taking the top product spot in the Lyst Index for Q2 is a humble New York Knicks baseball cap. The Knicks of course won the NBA championship in June, the team’s first in 53 years, which brought a ton of exposure and popularity to the team and its long-suffering fanbase (which includes yours truly, a loyal diehard Knicks fan since the early ’90s). According to Lyst’s data, online searches for Knicks hats increased by an absurd 4,276 percent from Q1 to Q2, with the team’s incredible playoff run, which began in April, obviously fueling the rise.