Adi in the USA, cities are still cultural hubs, catering to the creative 1%, social grab bag :)
Happy friday! accidental style-focused edition today.
Hi friends,
Happy friday!! V quick send because its been an absolutely chaotic week. Your girl is working VERY hard at the moment. Looking forward to July.
If you’re in the northern hemisphere i hope the start of summer is blessing you with sunshine and minimal mosquito activity. As always please feel free to reply straight in your email @ me, & forward this to any friend who you think might find it a handy resource.
Big dog Bjorn has spoken & dare we say he ‘gets’ it?
Great write-up/profile of Adidas CEO Bjorn Gulden on the state of the business. Some really choice quotes throughout.
On criticism of Nike for not innovating: “Innovation [isn’t just] technology. Innovation is also how you rotate your franchises so they are perceived as being new. Marketing, distribution, price point is also part of innovation. I believe the critique of Nike with innovation is unfair.”
On Grace Wales-bonner: “She impresses me, and from what I hear, any luxury brand would want to work with her. I cannot say a millimeter of negativity about her. But when we approach these franchises, we must be very careful that we manage them in a better way than before. This includes heating them up at the right time.”
On the US: “In America, to be a successful business, we need to connect to the men’s market, we need to connect to the urban consumer and we also need to be ‘more American.’ I have said from Day One that the world is not one market where you can have the same recipe. You need to look at what the consumer wants, what influences them. The recipe is easy, but the execution is always difficult. And we are in the middle of it.”
If the success of the latest Receipts moment via adi’s Ant Edwards is anything to judge, they are doing v. well. Imho.
The Bushwick/LES to mainstream style pipeline and why i’m not arguing over the relevance of cities anymore
A lot of people who work in marketing like to dismiss big cities, especially NYC, as being “not the real America”, or truly indicative of cultural temperature when you share whats happening in cultural centers as a point of reference for a project, or building out a set of insights. (source: my lived experience). They’re not entirely wrong, but also, they are. Cities push the direction of culture, and fashion is the most visible proof-point. Its the reason some of your favorite brands have city offices dedicated to city-level activations and planning. I’m not even gonna lie, lately i’ve been a little unsure of it myself; i’m working on style-focused projects right now and there’s absolutely without a doubt a complete erosion of regional style and a total flattening of trends occurring in general. I’m not Kyle Chayka so i won’t be elaborating further. That said I can’t unsee the following sequence.
The crazy-dressing subway fashion lady from last summer (this video is from July 2023).
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This email from Miaou this morning:
(In case you are not a shopper of womens ‘going out tops’ and dresses, Miaou is an it girl brand that has had a pretty persistent presence in wardrobes for the past few years.) As for this outfit, If you live within a few miles of the Lower East Side you know this to be the pre-eminent style of (predominantly caucasian) women under the age of 25 for the past year. I don’t know what the genesis of it all is anymore: whether its the city, or merely the city serving as a tiktok backdrop and actually tiktok just boosting the living s*%^ out of everything in new york, or if its the sheer mass of people here emulating each other and then making content out of it that shifts things through force of numbers, either way i’m not arguing with people about whether or not cities influence the way people dress, act or talk anymore. they just do.
Incidentally this could also literally be a miaou set. Related/unrelated: Alexandra Hildreth wrote a great piece this week on the future of the fashion industry without tiktok (given its possible looming ban); some great nuggets on the difference between tiktok and snap, reels etc.
“I think the comments section on TikTok is where trends [actually] start. A viral style post on TikTok can get thousands of comments, but on Instagram Reels, [the comments are] ads and spam.” To Chernyaev, Reels lacks the organic, community-centric user pool that's become instrumental to TikTok's unique success.
The case for smallness - & the 1% (cultural 1%, not capital 1%)
I can’t remember how i found it but someone posted this essay from the founder of the shuttered social shopping site Svpply the other day. I thought it was very pertinent to thinking through strategies for fashion and style marketing.
“So in any given website: 1% create all the content, 9% edit and organize, 90% make up the viewing audience.”
“What I’ve noticed since leaving Svpply is that other industries treat their 1% differently. In the fashion or magazine industries for instance, they give the creative output of their star members their full attention. The 1% is the whole thing. There’s no open invitation to contribute content to Monocle.”
He described the pivot to a more mass growth attempt as ‘misreading the opportunity’. Yep….
Some fashion brands that are nailing social rn
The photography and content direction of jcrew mens is deeply millennial-coded but still serviceable and great. Does anyone know how j crews numbers are looking?
I share caitlins enthusiasm for marc jacobs social.
Poster Girl make their launches so fun every single time. Zeitgeisty, always feels like a conversation/kiki with their customer and a joke everyone is in on instead of a talking-at-you-campaign.
Love how british brand Fera turned the trend of outdoorsy, viral cooking videos into inspiration for a capsule + a content effort:
Link round up
A dutch coffee brand has appointed a Board of Little Directors - composed entirely of 8-12 year olds.
A beautiful homage to books and print media in Greenpoint.
Brand Yikes of the week
The rise of the no-buy year: I would LOVE to try and do this. Next Year. maybe. I do hope this picks up steam.
Heady examination of the collapse of religion by
: “Our New Religion Isn’t Enough”.
Feets section
The new Vans x Proenza Collab is extremely my shit, feels like a more wearable alt to the much-maligned NB/Junya Watanabe sneaker loafer.
Throwing Fits did a friends+family gazelle. I love the quote about podcasting being a sport.
absolutely EGREGIOUS dupe/hybrid of the prada americas cup/AF1’s from imran potato
Ok thats it from me! See you next week. I will also be going longform on someone elses substack next week and will cross-post here. Stay tuned. :)
GG x
1-800 GG is cookin.
Subway girl receiving her flowers by actually inspiring product on brands really proves that big cities are still cultural catalysts, even in global trend flatlined culture.