NB's athletic chops, skimmy app, music < > fashion, the soft life, nothing tech n more
lots of words today. sorry!
Hey yall, lots of deep reads a lil further down but it just felt like a particularly great week for good-ass writing. Hope you enjoy as much as i did!
New Balance reminding us their gains aren’t just lifestyle
A lil subtle-flex new spot from New Balance yesterday featuring their all-star performance/athlete roster. Still manages to hit the note of fun and approachable despite the performance angle, which seems to be evading other brands in the category rn. Good for them!
Semi-related: A (rare) very worthy LinkedIn post about how black women have been overlooked for signature shoe deals.
Do we need a SKIMS app? And was this ad made with a kimmy deepfake?
Headline kinda says it all. Do you use brand-owned apps to shop? I don’t think I do tbh, other than SNKRS/Nike. I will say, if this is just the next phase of making their Membership offering more robust, it makes more sense to me.
Music motivates everything else, still
Really good profile with Brock Korsan in System Mag. A LOT of takeaways for lifestyle brand building in 2024, here’s a cherry-picked selection;
“Music sells fashion better than anything else. Music and fashion is right shoe, left shoe. You can’t really dress like your favourite basketball player every day. You can’t wear sports uniforms everywhere you go, so you have to look to musicians for inspiration. It’s been that way since the 1950s.”
“Everything I do is driven by an underlying curiosity. ‘Is it fashion? Is it music? Is it art?’ Well, everything is a by-product of the ‘Big Three’ nowadays, because we draw on all of those things when we collaborate. It’s the new hybridity and I like to think I operate between all of those practices.”
“A great artist is like an influential brand: they create beacons of affiliation because there’s a lot of sludge out there. I don’t think everyone needs to go and carry a product with their name on it but I feel like if you have an inclination to do so, and you want to create a product that is either not out there, or better than what is currently out there, then I think that is honourable. Travis Scott is a brand as much as he is an artist, or as much as Dior is a brand, or as Damien Hirst is a brand.”
Soft Life / Reshuffle / the next industrial age
(Sorry in advance if this bores my European readers who are living healthy, well-adjusted lives). A piece in the Guardian this week offered a very thoughtful, considered perspective about millennial women who are opting out of careerism and into a ‘soft life’. There’s genuinely something unfolding under our feet right now, a dynamic new era of some sort of *different* type of work.
“We’re being lectured on not being hardworking enough by people who have no idea what it is like to never switch off.” With Zoom and Slack keeping us connected to our workplaces at every moment, it is no longer plausible to say that you haven’t seen the emails that ping into your smartphone at the weekend. [..] There is a “tendency online to blame all societal ills on our parents’ generations … I’m just saying it doesn’t work in today’s age.” The “return on investment” on working all hours for some kind of meritocratic ideal “just isn’t the same any more”.
No longer can you do everything society asks of you and be guaranteed to attain even the lowest totem on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, when in the US 53% of people living in homeless shelters were employed in 2021.
The tiktok below also contextualizes the current situation as the natural end-point of Jack Welch’s specific brand of leadership, and before that, the foundations laid by Frederick Taylor, the first known management consultant, born in 1856 (just had a great idea for a time travel movie if anyone wants to holler at me).
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Anyway - no idea what happens next, but it feels absolutely beyond doubt that we’re in a very different, new stage of work and life.
Nothing.Tech say they are ‘making tech fun again’ and i believe them
The visuals and branding of Nothing feel like a combo of the color & fun of golden age Apple with the weirdness and eccentricity of old-school Playstation. The new Humane AI device may have flopped on launch this week, but I do think we are in a very cool moment for hardware and on the precipice of finding some nice new daily-driver options and tools. Enter, Nothing (sick brand name btw.) They released their AirPods competitor this week (coming in at $99), which will sync with a Phone which looks intimidatingly techy…. but, color me curious! The earbuds will be integrated with ChatGPT, if you have the Nothing phone. Buckle up yall, its happening.
The race to the bottom continues from our discount-selling overlords, Shein and Amazon
Two stories. First up: according to a WSJ piece, Amazon created a fake streetwear label named “Not So Ape” to gather data from rival platform Shopify and it feels as weird and AI-generated as you can imagine. I just wanna know who is buying it? Looking forward to seeing more bot brands sell to more bot humans in years to come.
Second story: A really beautiful, characteristically thorough N+1 piece about one womans journey through fashion blogging, internet style content history, and the evolution of fast fashion. This hit so many points; as a ‘consumer’, its been a wild ride going from Tavi Gevinson’s blogspot full of eBay finds to TikTok GRWMs inundating our feeds with #hauls. Specifically, SHEIN ones.
Usually brand familiarity accrues in a slow drip, building from obscurity to instant recognizability over the course of months or years as a designer’s work intersects with the zeitgeist and gains traction on social media. SHEIN was different. One day I’d never heard of the retailer and the next it was inescapable: in thousands of outfit videos, on millions of social media feeds. The clothes weren’t distinct or cohesive; what united them wasn’t style but price. All those SHEIN hauls entered my feeds with such ubiquity that they began to feel like they’d always been there.
The article does a great job of examining the uniquely destructive parts of Shein’s model, stating plainly at one point, “SHEIN has shown the world that unsustainability pays.”:
It’s a flexible system built for the internet’s microscopic attention span: all products are tested on SHEIN’s website and app in real time. Garments go from concept to finished product in less than two weeks, allowing SHEIN to be the first retail company to market on every trend, even the most micro ones. The system has proven massively successful.
Further reading if you’re in the mood~…
This piece from Ross Barkan predicts a post-parasocial Fandom future in which the hardcore devotion to acts like Taylor Swift is perceived as ‘cringe’. Gotta say i think we are already close to it? The most ahead-of-the-curve people i know refuse to wear any type of celebrity figure’s merch and have a strong ‘no idols’ stance.
I really enjoyed this reframing from substacker
on challenging his own personal biases as “adjusting [his] factory settings”. The content of this piece is largely concerning life milestones and assumptions around marriage and kids, but i just liked the way he thought about it. Will be referring to these things as Factory Settings from this day onward.Really excellent examination/interrogation of therapy over at
. Maybe we are all just talking to/about ourselves a lil too much!The King of New York, Jalen Brunson lends his pen to the Players Tribune
Courtney love remains nuerodivergently astute and honest. Also, if you’ve never listened to the Marc Maron pod episode with her, it’s good.
Not rly a read, but, how not to do Creator contest marketing, via wearesocial’s “The Feed”
Latest footwear/style tidbits.. u know the vibes
Post Archive Faction x ON SS24 collection drops May 3. this is exactly what the market is looking for imo - looks modern/futuristic, design-forward, technical, but swaggy as hell
Really fun merch from Nia Archives (who shot to new levels supporting Beyonce on the UK leg of her Renaissance tour)-ft. a junglist jersey. More DJ’s need to make more merch please. I will help you if you need ideas or connects.
bite-size business analysis of the state of mass market fashion, wholesale etc here. Mass-market is hurting, wholesale is soft, “Accessible luxury goods (think RL and Max Mara)” are overperforming.
the SSENSE guide to Australian brands, icymi 🇦🇺
Here is a tim duncan sprite vending machine in case anyone is looking for one.
Thats it yall! Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.
GG x
The ‘music motivates everything else, still’ segment reminds me of the truth and importance of the ‘starter pack.’ It’s as real now as it was when I was in high school in the 90s. All that’s changed is the depth of implied meaning.
Thanks Grace for the mention!