i’m writing from a (very snowy!) NYC. big shout out to my wonderful pals (who know who they are, not naming so my current location doesnt get doxxed lol) for letting me temporarily occupy their gorge office while i’ve been working too much on my current project/client.
had to document my hair color fresh from the salon mid-deliverable
I didn’t mean to take a long break from the newsie, but end of last year felt like a bit of a personal power-down-and-recharge moment - and then the top of this year has been NON-STOP on work. It’s still frantic, but i have enough brain space to re-activate my substack brain without feeling like i’m slipping on projects. Somehow people have still been subscribing in my lil break period, so thank you for being here and i promise you normally won’t get a personal missive at the top of the ‘letter!
lil state of the sneaker union / Swoosh’s return to form, maybe, possibly.
Alright lets see where Swoosh are at after their 2024 year of pain. A lot of people are already crying comeback after the superbowl spot & ‘you can’t win, so win’ campaign ecosystem. (my two cents: im just happy theres any brand that seems to care genuinely about copywriting still. the writing is great.)
Whether you loved or hated the Unbanned/Unbannable campaign, people were talking about it. Elliot Hill has been doing the rounds to massage the Wall St. narrative on the brand overall with key analysts. We all love to root for an underdog, and for the first time in a long time that might be what Nike is?
From the investor analyst notes shared with Footwearnews, I was most interested to hear that they are phasing out dunks entirely (!?) and slowing their roll on AJ1’s, AF1’s. For a moment in time (pre 2021), Nike were absolute maestros of franchise management, but it feels like Adi are running laps around them since dunks/retros flooded the market the past few years and execs didn’t understand how sensitive culture can be to overexposure.
Looks like they are also launching new/old silhouettes that feel aimed at the casual buyer that they may have lost to one of the many low-profile alternatives offered by other brands.
One thing that continues to jump out at me about Nike in the present moment is their approach to color for their big, hero products. It feels a little late for a metallic joint (i may be wrong) and they continue to churn out super bold, super bright performance gear in a fashion moment that is, in my assessment, relatively muted and neutral with earth tones still dominating. I might eat my words come summer, but thats just my read right now from frigid Manhattan. Meanwhile, other sneaker brands have offerings centered around neutrals- the earthy SL72 colors come to mind.
There’s a WWD piece here about some of the trending Pantone colors of fashion week, they are mostly what i’d characterize as ‘muted’ or toned down versions of color, other than the red/fuschia. Some street style snaps on Vogue echo the same. So… thats where things are headed in the coming seasons.
More from the analyst notes via footwearnews:
“Historically, when Nike has fallen on hard times in the past, product has been the reason it turned around – such as in 2017, with the Epic React, Air Max 270, Virgil Abloh collab”.
I agree so much with this, and it feels like Nike are still designing for a space and time where their products were the centerpiece of your wardrobe and not just a smaller element within a broader package. I know how long their product dev timelines can be, so i hope to be proven wrong.
Awkward segue so,…. here’s a lil unified theory of anti-everything / the great retreat, disconnect, isolate, anti-intellectual whatever it might be current moment
We’re at a weird time culturally in USA. from my vantage point, it feels like there are some very rapid shifts happening that i will outline below, mostly with other peoples writing;
1. Maybe, finally, the actual death of social media
No one, I would argue, is having a good time. People are fed up. Burnt out and worn thin. People, really, are tired of being so goddamn terminally online.
I think we will witness a reversal. As a culture, we will wake up to the fact social media is an addiction, engineered to drown us in more and more dopamine until we stop feeling entirely. We will unplug. And we will return to life.
So what is it about this moment that makes leaving [social media] — or significantly moderating — feel possible? The platforms feel toxic, but they’ve felt toxic for a while. They’re more toxic and they’re degrading, overridden by brands and AI. Their utility for connection (the thing that brought us there in the first place!) has deteriorated to the point of uselessness.
2. Our professional lives make no sense, the creative job market is ???????
it is deeply wounding to feel your industry get squeezed into a misshapen lump of clay. Something could be rebuilt from this material, but it’s going to require innovative thinking and people willing to provide the capital for the future of journalism. I see this in the television and film industry, too. The music business. Anywhere creativity lies is being borne down on by a hydraulic press, like in that disgusting commercial by Apple that reduces access to cultural fulfillment down to a goddamn iPad.
How did we get to a point where it became acceptable to force 24-year-olds to turn themselves into a brand and build a massive network and take three people to coffee per week for “informational interviews” and post on every social media platform and have a website and a blog and a portfolio all for a job that you could probably get in 2005 with an associates degree and a year of work experience at a frozen yogurt shop?
3. Meanwhile, AI is changing our brains- for the worse
While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term over-reliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. […] Even for experts, there’s the potential for AI-based “skill decay,” following the academic research on jobs that have already undergone automation for decades.
There is evidence from another paper in the brain-drain research subfield wherein it was younger AI users who showed the most dependency, and the younger cohort also didn’t match the critical thinking skills of older, more skeptical, AI users.
4. All this is happening against the backdrop of an insane streak in anti intellectualism-
it makes me dizzy then to consider this current climate where the words art and reading are treated like they are laced with vermin. according to experts, we are seeing an unprecedented decline in global literacy rates- and to those researchers i say:
we can tell. [..] Any earnest expression of literacy or tastefulness is now painted with the same social brush as actual elitism..”
a counter to this is an explainer from Paul Skallas presenting the view that “there are many ways to be smart”, after AOC described Elon Musk as ‘unintelligent’.
“the Democratic base is heavily composed of college-educated professionals and questioning someone's intelligence has become the common dismissal. [but] We've become a nation of large organizations - 53% of Americans now work for businesses with over 500 employees, a dramatic shift from the era of small business dominance. In this world of credentials and corporate hierarchies, "smart" has come to mean something very specific: good at school, good at tests, good at navigating institutional approval.”
I’ve discovered that if you spend too long on the internet and you will learn to hate the ambitious women you once dreamed of being. They will become tedious, annoying, too loud, too manufactured, and too much. You will fall into all the pits of diminishing yourself.
What happens when we’ve turned our back on the dominant channel/source of information, in the wake of an anti-intellectualism movement, while AI runs rampant? Ruby Thelot wrote last year about how ‘everything is default fake’ - his hierarchy of Media By Order of Fidelity feels prescient;
*updated* Media by Order of Fidelity
1. Video
2. Images
3. Audio recording
4. Written account
1. First-hand account
2. Second-hand account
3. Hearsay
A society in which visual media is devalued in favor of shared physical presence is one where we turn into HYPER-LOCAL / GLOBAL SKEPTICISM.
That was a lot, so tap in if u are equally, like me, seeing the patterns, connecting the dots, not loving it, but knowing what to plan for nonetheless… (p.s if ur not in USA this wont feel nearly as acute, so disregard. just know we’re going through it.)
👍👍👍👍
ANYWAAYYYY…. round up of quick/interesting links and tidbits for ur decks, brainstorms, or debates;
for the brand strat nerds in here - thought this ‘brand strategy op-ed’ stab at a brand framework/approach for OpenAI by Garett Awad was smart. His point around ‘announcement’ marketing cadence is a good one for more tech companies to absorb and re-orient.
This piece about “gymtimidation” made me think. good nugget for your women in sports-related creative briefs; “When survey participants were asked how they felt in front of men, 29 percent said they felt more judged by men than women at the gym, while 39 percent reported feeling more intimidated.”
Some wintery NYC Street style; loveeeee this new motion approach from NYT (this may have been around for awhile, but i didn’t see it.)
don’t steal this concept you gremlins- insanely fucking cool so i’m just putting it here. obsessed with this work around stilt-walking communities.
Very interesting to see LA-based label STAUD delve into their own footwear (theyve done some collabs, with New Balance most notably). Called the ‘ballet glide’, this feels like a very smart entry-point; I think they’re neoprene? Basically like a Rift in skims colors without the tabi toe.
re: sports betting, have you listened to Michael Lewis's "Against the Rules" pod? This season (season 5) is all about sports betting and it's fascinating. Well, to me anyway. Maybe to you, too!
Another amazing edition thanks GG
re: sports betting, have you listened to Michael Lewis's "Against the Rules" pod? This season (season 5) is all about sports betting and it's fascinating. Well, to me anyway. Maybe to you, too!