Despite producing mostly wacky European flicks, the brand has quickly established notable presence at esteemed international film festivals. It burst into Cannes with a Western short, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, and three feature films, one of which, Emilia Pérez, went on to score a whopping 13 Academy nominations last year although it’s been deemed largely unwatchable by both viewers and critics. Based on reviews, it is actually Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope that is a relative standout among all the projects Saint Laurent has produced so far — a stylized film that follows an irresistibly beautiful young woman as she stumbles aimlessly through life, cutting from provocative intimate scenes to poetic conversations that sound profound but carry little meaning.

All in all, Parthenope boils down to an old Italian man’s long-winded meditation on the corruptive powers of beauty and youth. But if you manage to tune out the casual misogyny that pulls it together, perhaps by reminding yourself that the whole thing is supposed to double as commentary on the city of Naples and its people, you are in for a scrumptious visual feast: breathtaking seascapes, rich interiors, and magnetic closeups of the lead actress smoking in distress. It’s the type of cinematography that earned films, like Nocturnal Animals, “two-hour perfume commercial” allegations, but at least in that regard Parthenope is honest. The opening credits make it clear — it is a two-hour commercial for Saint Laurent.

From the flirty silver dress in embroidered silk that the protagonist wears the day of the most tragic event of her life to the rich jewel number she puts on in a provocative scene with an old Catholic bishop, the selection of costumes produced by Saint Laurent comes close to dethroning the lead actress as the most desirable in the film. Certain scenes literally feel like 3D magazine spreads where the background folks are posing rather than acting — director’s choice, surely, and an interesting one, but still disorienting to see in a film.

Ultimately, the reason why the film doesn’t work though isn’t because it’s produced by Saint Laurent — in fact, this could have been a perfect pairing, given how well the film’s undertones of indulgence and temptation align with the brand’s cultural universe without making it the focal point of the project. It’s the narrative of the film that is to blame for making it feel so painfully outdated and boring.

Fashion’s growing interest in filmmaking and entertainment overall isn’t an inherently negative trend either. When Demna threw a surprise screening of The Tiger, a Gucci short directed by Halina Reijn and Spike Jonze, to celebrate his inaugural collection for the house last year, it cut through the noise of a debut-heavy news cycle and gave the guests opportunities to capture and share something other than clips of models walking down the runway. It’s ironic how a classic rollout structure that does very little for the industry that invented it anymore can feel so refreshing in the context of a different crowd. If traditional fashion shows generate impressions by putting actors in front row seats, The Tiger flipped the script by inviting models to watch actors do their thing.

Meanwhile, on the film side of things, there’s been an unusual amount of chatter around costume design and even filmmakers’ personal wardrobes. In the past few years alone, we’ve seen critics and audiences across industries obsess over the costuming choices in films that are intentionally campy, like Poor Things and Pricilla, restrained but stylish, like Challengers and Marty Supreme, and fashionably nostalgic, like Party Girl and When Harry Met Sally. The interview series where renowned and up-and-coming filmmakers — Francis Ford Coppola, Eva Victor, Joachim Trier — come on to talk about their personal style and relationship with fashion, has become a fun press cycle stop to consider for the film folks aiming to reach a broader culture-savvy audience. Similar to stylists, costume designers, like Heidi Bivens and Miyako Bellizzi, are reaching celebrity status, and the hype around certain movie merch may be surpassing the hype around the actual movie it’s designed to promote.

Regardless of whether you make clothes or movies, the most effective way to market them in such a crowded and fragmented media landscape is to build alliances and create entertainment that is able to reach audiences outside of the immediate industry circles. People who don’t keep up with the creative director shuffle in Paris, no longer discover brands and styles from magazines and department stores — they want the flared jeans that Kendrick wore to the Super Bowl, the sweater from The Brutalist, and the cropped puffer jacket from the cover of West End Girl. Similarly, few people decide on a movie to watch once they arrive at the box office or when they drive past a billboard on Sunset Blvd. Most show up with a digital ticket to something they heard rave reviews about from the people whose taste they trust across categories — lifestyle podcast hosts, bookfluencers, fashion newsletter writers. That is, if they show up at all.

”Merchandise is often framed by external context: who shared it, where, and what else it appeared alongside,” writes in her latest newsletter. “Brands are no longer just selling stuff; they are situating their wares within a constellation of references their consumers already recognize, own, or aspire to…these surrounding cues don’t compete with the product, they stabilize it — signaling where it belongs.” At the same time, artists are happily accepting brand deals to fund their lifestyle while they work on meaty film projects that are less and less commercially viable. Letting brands patron the arts and in the process, reap a little benefit of associating their products with interesting people and projects feels like a net positive — or at the very least, a better alternative to having their own teams burn the cash they are hoarding on unimaginative activations and content.

The only issue is that when corporations say they want to work with artists, what most of them actually mean is they are interested in the attention and status they posses, some are just more open about it than others. In the end of the day, fashion, and more specifically, luxury fashion, is commerce, which means there isn’t much room for emotions outside of joy and delight. In a twisted way, even some of its grungier, weirder choices, are supposed to be pleasurable — no one buys bags and shoes if you put them off too much, take how people en masse, and even some industry insiders, reacted to Margiela’s SS26 mouthpieces as an example.

After all, there is a reason why people, like Tom Ford, who excel in both art and commerce, prefer to draw a line between the fashion and film projects they touch. “I am a commercial fashion designer, I design clothes to sell. It’s an artistic thing but it’s not necessarily, for me, art,” he explained in an old interview about Nocturnal Animals. “Filmmaking for me is the most expressive, personal, the closets thing to art that I can create.” After nearly four decades in fashion, Ford exited commerce to make movies full-time. But chances are, when his new film comes out, he will still be moving in the same circles as his former employers.

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IN THE MARGINS

• Academia scenes and looks in Parthenope reminded me of this atmospheric video by Paloma Wool. Oh to be a Spanish uni student!

• Also loved this silly video by Olga Basha. Kristoffer Borgli who directed Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario, and upcoming The Drama, is a background actor.

• I’ve been also watching skate videos.

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This particular flavor of aspiration is regarded as more sophisticated than a life of a filthy capitalist, more mature and enlightened than a neurotic hustle of an ambitious upstart although similarly, it cares less about who you are and what you do, and more about the theatrics of how you present yourself — what you wear, where you travel, who you are seen with. It frames a thoughtful media diet and a tasteful shopping list as the prerequisites to a fulfilling life and a successful creative career but glosses over the process of actually achieving either because it’s designed to sell the dream, not help you fulfill it. Curating an artful lifestyle has been elevated to an art form, and for many, it became a form of procrastination that stalls them from pursuing serious art projects.

An artful lifestyle comes with the type of quick and constant reassurance that’s hard to come by in the arts. One of my favorite directorial debuts of the year, Lurker, captures this in a story about a vintage store clerk Matthew who infiltrates the inner circle of a budding music star Oliver through a mix of luck and online stalking. It starts out as a typical quest to make it in LA, full of awkward scenes, testing an outsider’s ability to blend in. And then, instead of evolving into a heartwarming story about taking risks and creative soulmates, Matthew’s “fake it till you make it” plot line derails into a fucked up psychological horror. He is so fixated on becoming a number two in someone else’s career that making art on his own isn’t even an option — not so much for the lack of drive or talent, as for the unique sense of validation and confidence that Matthew finds only in proximity to Oliver.

Whatever Matthew does creatively, whether it’s shooting simple B-roll or directing Oliver’s music video, is ultimately just a means to making personal connections. The art itself carries very little intrinsic value to him — it’s worthless unless it’s recognized by someone like Oliver. There is only one scene where Matthew pauses to consider that the hollowness of his creative practice may be the very reason why he struggles to build genuine relationships. As he makes it up the ranks of Oliver’s entourage, he is approached by a fan on the street who gushes over his sceney outings and calls him his hero and then catches him off guard with a simple question. “What do you, like, do?” says the fan with child-like naivety. “Or…I wanna be like you but, like, what do you do?” he adds quickly, picking up on a sudden change in Matthew’s demeanor. Since Matthew leans on art as a crutch in his quest for validation and connection, scrutinizing his achievements means poking holes in his relationships and ego.

People, like Kendall Jenner, are meticulous about the way they decorate their houses and the type of books they display on their coffee tables because that is what sets them apart from their vulgar friends and families. Audiences are inspired by the “rich who rich right” by patronizing small businesses and dressing in understated outfits because it’s a guilt-free way to admire wealth. Every fashion and design piece that is remotely artistic and well-made has a luxury price tag, and it’s increasingly unclear who the high margins benefit more — the artists or the shareholders.

When the mainstream media framed an artful lifestyle as aspirational, it painted a picture of a future where people en masse are flocking to the arts, but so far, all it seems to have accomplished is create a new strand of consumerism. Like many other aspirational tropes across sports, politics, and Hollywood, the artful lifestyle, as constructed by brands and influencers, is rooted in strategic accumulation of wealth rather than expertise and excellence. Conversations about art get drowned out by red carpet critiques and step-by-step guides to developing personal taste that give rise to the “performative” archetypes rather than a new and larger creative class.

Having seen a peek of a more equatable future — one that’s concerned with enabling fast and safe public transit rather than getting a fit off on a subway platform — serious creative audiences are tuning out the noise created by luxury fashion shows and engagement bait published by culture magazines, in favor of voices that prioritize connection over status. It’s only a matter of time until The Row feels as dated as Mar-a-Lago and reading culture essays is as corny as stacking non-fiction on your nightstand. We’ve got to stop pinning the same five pictures and ideas to a moodboard and go make stuff. It’d be a shame if we let the trap of an artful lifestyle rob us of a chance to build a life in the arts.

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IN THE MARGINS

• Brenda Weischer’s notes on breaking the habit of consuming more than you produce:

“i know that the most wasted times of my life have been those of worrying about something i either can or cannot change, comparing myself to a shiny life I see through my screen, waiting for an idea, a chance, someone’s attention, improvement, change when i could have just moved the needle myself. and that is also creation, doing something, anything. i know that all of the extraordinary that i seek for my life, kind of already exists within me, i just have to start creating it. how can i label myself overly ambitious but spend my nights scrolling through other people’s work?”

• Mickey Galvin is one of the many people whose work has inspired this essay. She makes YouTube videos that range from vlogs to culture criticism and just put out her first short film.

• If you haven’t yet, listen to that NYT interview with Kristen Stewart that went viral a few weeks ago. Besides an overall weird power dynamic between the two, at some point, Kristen turns the host’s random philosophical question back at him which prompts him to reluctantly confess that he regrets not having the guts “to try and be an actual artists.” Chills.

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Over the past few years, “Girls for Gen Z” has been used to describe pretty much every new character-forward show that follows a group of young people which is funny, considering that “Girls for Gen Z” is just Girls. To say otherwise is to imply that the brilliance of the show is in its ability to speak specifically to millennials or capture millennials as a generation rather than what it actually is — create a set of unique, detailed characters, whose personal lives and careers are influenced, but not completely defined by the culture around them. They make the 2010s Williamsburg feel like a made-up world that you get to know a little better with every new episode rather than a real place and time that you have to have lived in order to enjoy the show.

Pop culture at large is full of these direct comparisons that box creatives in with expectations they didn’t sign up to live up to. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has been described as “Uncut Gems for moms,” Addison Rae has been pitted against Tate McRae in a made-up competition for the title of Gen Z’s Britney, and every decent guy with a podcast has been called the Joe Rogan of their niche. The seemingly charitable impulse to chew up new talent and their work and spit them out in digestible for the broader audience terms is actually a disservice because it either measures the new names up against all the wrong people (imagine if the top guy in your line of work was a hack who platforms hateful narratives?) or stirs their careers in the wrong direction. One of the more interesting pieces of criticism circulating around I Love LA, for example, is a suggestion that the classic Hollywood track doesn’t give internet breakouts, like Rachel Sennott and her co-star Jordan Firstman, enough room to fulfill their creative potential because it pressures them to stick to outdated formulas rather than innovate.

Sennott herself has described her show as “Entourage for internet it girls” in a reference to a different HBO classic that follows a group of straight dudes from Queens trying to make it big in the early 2000s Hollywood — a premise so seemingly unrelatable to her target audience of “the girls and the gays” that it gives us a good idea of what to expect without putting the burden of direct comparison on the creator. And yet, after the third week of patiently waiting for I Love LA to kick into high gear, I binged the first season of Entourage and found a bunch of dudes who dabble in casual misogyny and homophobia, infinitely more watchable than a group of contemporaries, playing characters that are written directly for me and my peers.

Part of Entourage’s magic is that its long-gone world is peppered with recognizable details: the guys frequent Urth Caffe and Coffee Bean, kick it with young Jimmy Kimmel, and are in constant pursuit of the hottest status symbols of the moment, be it a pair of Uggs or a fat Rolls-Royce. They create these “he just like me fr” moments that make you chuckle and warm your heart with nostalgia. I Love LA attempts to create the same effect with Courage Bagels and Canyon Coffee which mostly backfires because of how overused these references already are in comedy skits and memes, circulating around the internet.

But more importantly, despite the flamboyant frontiers, the Entourage boys feel like real people, grounded by their simple upbringing and the dream to be part of something cool and acclaimed more so than rich. Each character plays into pop culture stereotypes — Vince puts on a Hollywood playboy act, Eric unconsciously slips into “the suit” persona — but by the end of the season, everyone, including Vince’s bro-ey agent Ari, takes off their toxic masculinity masks and comes together on a human level to make a great (indie!) film. I Love LA follows the same “friends over everything” narrative but so far, it’s still unclear what actually bonds its characters together, given that no one in the group, including its central protege Tallulah, has real interests or clear career aspirations. They move more like a bunch of punchlines stringed together for our entertainment, completely defined by their surroundings, than real people with independent inner lives.

And maybe that is the message — to show exactly how vapid those who succeed at capturing attention despite the lack of real interests and talents are. The problem, then, is that it’s not exactly compelling — the internet has been kicking around the same idea for years by making fun of shallow characters, like the Silver Lake bro and the West Village girl, and it hasn’t pushed the laughing class much further creatively than the people they make fun of. “Meme admins mocking cultural sameness and trends while reproducing them in the same type of memes is the ouroboros of taste,” Ginny Ranu, the admin of @auniquecliche wrote in a recent post. “Algorithms reward imitation, audiences reward recognition, and we end up consuming the trends we create, until there is nothing original to eat.”

The prevalent impulse across the board is to make fun of how corny the mainstream is and then succumb to it anyway. Writers hate quippy descriptors but have to use them to bring visibility to their work. Artists and creatives that leverage internet fame to sign with music labels and secure movie and book deals feel stifled by how risk-averse and commerce-driven the entreatment industry is, but stay in it regardless because it validates them and sets them apart from influencers. Consumers who feel disengaged from the media and products marketed directly to bicoastal archetypes, spend more time making fun of both rather than working on or recommending alternatives. In that sense, I Love LA and the discourse around it are the perfect showcase of why the mainstream culture feels so stagnant despite plenty of new interesting talent cultivating in the niches.

“All [notable] culture has started from people who were like, yea, this sucks, I am going to do something else,” writer and culture critic W. David Marx said on a recent episode of Middle Brow. “You should get together with people who are like that, and you should take yourself out of the system for a while, so those ideas get fostered. And then hopefully, later, go and influence the entire system.” This is something that at least the first season of Entourage gets really well — the protagonist should be so curious about what happens if they revolt against the system and the expectations it places on them, that the perks of making the most of what it currently is can never outweigh the rush of making something cool and different together with their friends.

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By now, an average consumer understands that there is a business arrangement behind every Instagram post, red carpet look, and fashion show appearance, especially when the brand-celebrity match prioritizes the size of reach and compensation over chemistry. Today, Sydney Sweeney is a head-to-toe Miu Miu girl, tomorrow she is a girl-next-door dripped in mall denim — the loyalty only lasts as long as the check clears. Every LVMH show features a fleet of K-pop idols whose squeaky clean media presence is optimized for attention and sales. With the exception of fool-proof concepts, like stripping Jeremy Allen White to his underwear, “celebrity” had become so bland and ubiquitous that on its own, it could hardly produce something memorable.

For a moment there, brands had to get creative. Bottega Veneta dressed A$AP Rocky and Kendall Jenner for dog walks and errands rather than red carpet moments in a staged paparazzi-style campaign. Loewe had Daniel Craig acting out of character with a shaggy hairdo and an undone belt. Prada cast Carey Mulligan to play a series of kooky characters in a theatrical SS25 campaign. Cutting through celebrity partnership noise called for either a deep cut, like Ethel Cain for Miu Miu, or throwing a big, polished name, like Nicole Kidman, into something delightfully weird and random.

And then, slowly but surely, celebrities became all we talk about again. After nearly a decade of walling themselves off from influencers, celebrities realized that befriending them, and using their platforms to promote their agenda is as, if not more, effective as working with legacy media. Not only are A-listers eating hot wings on the biggest show on YouTube and sharing personal stories on sex and dating podcasts, they are also guessing tunes and movies, taking sides in pop culture romance ships, and making cameos in comedy skits all over Reels and TikTok — something that just a few years ago, their teams would have deemed as beneath them. But most importantly, celebrities are staging their own viral moments and reoccurring bits, like the Apple dance or the Sally cameos, that keep their names in the news cycle for months and years on end, and spinning up their own media empires by starting podcasts and newsletters where they interview fellow celebrity guests. In the next 2-3 years, we’re going to wish A-listers still aspired to run beauty and alcohol brands.

Ultimately, most outlets — whether it’s legacy magazines, tabloids, grassroots publications, social-first networks, and independent creators — talk to and about the same people, promoting the same music, shows, and films. By design, celebrities and celebrity projects are either safe or inoffensively edgy, which makes them the perfect talking points of the moment when every part of our daily lives is political, even outside of the global human rights violations. Every awards ceremony, film festival, and charity gala is pulled apart into red carpet clips, quotes, or at the very least, green screen outfit critiques. If we are really lucky, a quippy political statement sneaks into an acceptance speech. So, one contract with a busy, media-savvy celebrity, like Ayo Edebiri or Timothee Chalamet, generates millions of dollars in earned media across a wide range of platforms.

Earlier this year, Margiela, a cult-followed fashion brand known for covering and distorting the faces of its runway models, shot pop star Miley Cyrus in the first ever celebrity campaign. In the past few years, it has also built a relationship with the Kardashians, and given all the attention that Kim has received for doing red carpet interviews in a full face mask at the recent Academy Museum Gala alone, corporate must be happy with the results. Kardashians might be the first family who understood the value of orchestrating a steady drum of public appearances after all, so although devastating, it’s not surprising to see Kylie Jenner pose for Miu Miu alongside Towa Bird and Myha’la, and her sister Kendall cozy up with the notoriously private and mysterious Olsen sisters at The Row. Jokes on us for equating for-profit businesses to cultural institutions.

This behavior isn’t exclusive to luxury fashion either. Everlane, once a cult-followed millennial fashion brand with a focus on sustainability, featured singer Laufey in its first-ever celebrity campaign to drum up the buzz that had slowly dwindled over the past few years, and put its products in front of a younger demographic. Gap’s team has been leaning heavily into celebrity in its efforts to revitalize the brand — from the grandiose Met Gala looks and Anne Hathaway’s viral Cannes dress to the Katseye video and a mother-daughter campaign, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Apple Martin. Even a baby New York darling Alex Mill punches above its weight every year with a holiday season pajamas collaboration with Jimmy Fallon, racking up sales and national brand recognition.

But while the second coming of celebrity craze is working out for every member of the media ecosystem, how long do they have until the pendulum inevitably swings back? A few weeks ago, I pulled the trigger and unfollowed a publication that prides itself in reporting from “the forefront of youth culture” and “championing new voices” when all it really does is trade the remains of its legacy clout for reach with a handful of buzzy names. Safe to say, I missed very little — perhaps, a Rachel Sennott quote or a recipe from Gabbriette? Although that is still more creative than the legacy media brands that have shamelessly turned their platforms into tabloid-style news aggregators.

There is very little incentive to allocate more than minimal time and effort to the boots-on-the-ground culture reporting. Hanging out at sweaty underground parties or talking to people outside of New York and LA is a lot less glamorous for the reporters who are (rightfully!) leveraging their media jobs (that don’t pay a living wage anyway) to build personal brands, and drives a lot less traffic for their employers than taking a video of Alex Consani goofing around backstage at a fashion event. But given how democratized celebrity access has become, with everyone from meme account admins and Letterboxd to GQ and New York Magazine, posted up outside of film festivals and fashion shows, professional reporting from the culture trenches is quickly becoming a differentiator between those who understand culture and those who pump out culture content with the sole purpose of turning it into revenue and selling it off to brands.

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It’s disrespectful for a women’s magazine or a youth culture publication to act like all their audiences care about is why engagement ring diamonds are getting bigger and what Emma Stone wore to the premier of her new vaguely political film. There is a real case for publications whose schedule doesn’t revolve exclusively around celebrity press circuits and major industry events. So, I’d like to think Zoe and I were early, rather than wrong on the whole celebrity endorsement thing.

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Let me set the scene — it’s a Saturday, I wake up late, I almost forget it’s Margiela day. I tune into the livestream just a few minutes early and see the unmanned orchestra setup in the middle of the venue that they clearly wanted us to see. Live music? Cool. I don’t think much of it. It gets quiet, the light brightens, and a fleet of children in oversized suits that look like they belong in their older siblings’ closets, runs out of the curtains and takes position at the orchestra stand. I scream out loud and start clapping in my living room — they got us good. The band makes a bunch of noise and for a second, I wonder — is this a bit or will they actually play the show? They play the show. They play the classics, all charmingly off-key. I can’t stop staring at their serious faces, I am overwhelmed by the sound, I am too distracted by the two young women banging on a giant drum in the back to pay attention to the clothes. But I am also having the time of my life!

Online, I’ve seen all kinds of interpretations. One commenter saw the perfomance as a metaphor for Martens’ team coming into a legendary fashion house, digging through the archives for the classics, and going through the awkward phase of figuring out how to take Martin’s work somewhere new. Another suggested it was a play on the design philosophy of the house — deconstructing the harmony of an orchestra.

To me, it boils down to a feeling — the pure child-like joy piercing through that room. The naiveté it takes to have the courage to take on the classics, get them not quite right, but keep playing them anyway. The privilege that is a patient audience that trusts your best intentions and cheers you on despite the imperfections. The idea that in this particular context, an abrasive sound can be so disarming and beautiful, and a flawless, beautiful sound would have been so boring! It puts a smile on a serious critic’s face. It strips an over-intellectualized form of expression down to the basics. It kicks fashion off its billion-dollar pedestal and reminds it of the days it was a quirky little art niche.

Getting to be playful is a privilege that’s only really accessible to those with certain level of skill and genuine love of the form. What you encounter much more often are performances and objects that exist somewhere between Duchamp-esque conceptual art and social media rage-bait — $600 logo tees, $700 flips flops, and a latex breastplate put on a male model closing an otherwise decent fashion show. The buzz they created was fun for a while. As i-D’s EIC put it, “we enjoy things that make us mad the way a dog loves a chew toy.” Despite how annoying it may be, the impact of someone, like Demna, on youth culture, the industry, and the way people dress is undeniable — your fit, your ideas don’t have to be Balenciaga to have his name written all over them.

And yet, as the world around us turned a lot more serious and sinister, the snarky nihilism that artists inevitably slip into when they optimize their work for discourse, started reading as not only cringe but offensive. The same week we fawned over Chanel’s reincarnation, we also spiraled about what the new Jean Paul Gaultier could have been. The poorly constructed takes on the iconic sailor hats and cone bras and a hairy nude male body printed on a head-to-toe bodysuit just felt like a shell of a statement that the audience was craving from a house that is so deeply embedded in queer and women’s history at a time when their rights and expression are under attack. It didn’t help that its new creative director Duran Lantink had bragged about refusing to learn how to make a pattern and enter the JPG archives.

Joy, happiness, and pleasure are shaping up to be the new creative North Star. “I think fashion is in a funny state. It grew very, very fast and it kind of hit a ceiling. Now fashion needs to rethink its own model,” Matthieu Blazy told BoF leading up to his Chanel debut. “It needs to go back to the product itself, the pleasure you have buying it, or the pleasure you have in-store trying on something that you love.”Glenn Martens echoed the same idea in his pre-PFW interview. “I am very much aware that when I work at Margiela, or at these runways shows, I am proposing clothes that are not going to be reachable or accessible to so many people, but I do know that a lot of people are dreaming through it because they are watching it forever and ever again on YouTube,” he told Imran Amed. “It’s all there to make people happy and to make people enjoy life.” At the same time, we watched Demna put his head down with a classic collection at Gucci, and the Olsen sisters defend The Row’s billion dollar evaluation with a sophisticated Summer 2026 lookbook.

That doesn’t mean there is little space for fun. If anything, the most punk thing you can do, given the current state of the world, is refuse to let it crush your spirit and take its fundamental joys away from you. The only way to stick the landing, however, in an environment where creative work is quick to be pulled apart into snarky commentary, is for your output to be so soaked in genuine love and care for your art that only a real cynic wouldn’t be moved by it, or at the very least, respect the effort. There is a lesson for the audience here too — real criticism, however harsh and honest, comes from a place of love and passion rather than in pursuit of attention and views. After all, we are all just kids stumbling through an awkward phase of trying in pursuit of creating a classic. Grace and patience are the only way we’ll get there.

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IN THE MARGINS

• Like everyone else, I was shook by tweed melting into beading, among other things at Chanel.

• Senja Jansen, who did the music production this Margiela show and has been working with Glenn Martens for a long time shared the BTS of training the kids’ orchestra:

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Western wear is a natural successor to the workwear archetypes that have dominated menswear for the past couple of decades, theorizes fashion and culture writer . “In the 2010s we had the lumbersexual — a lot of flannel, a lot of hard denim, selvedge denim,” he explains. “After that, we moved really heavily into workwear — your Carhartt stuff, even French workwear jackets, and a beloved shortcoat.” In hindsight, it was only a matter of time before the industry landed on the cowboy as the next historical silhouette to pull from, he concludes, pointing to the rise of independent western brands, like Wythe, and their collaborations with Throwing Fits (2022) and 3sixteen (2023) as early signs of it.

When classic cowboy attire barged back into the mainstream, it spawned a range of interpretations, including those from luxury and semi-luxury fashion brands. Pharrell dove head first into classic Americana and turned Louis Vuitton’s AW24 runway into a Western extravaganza: bootcut jeans, tortoise detailing, and logo belt buckles — so incredibly rich and indulgent that it’s almost intimidating. Ackermann went the mischievous route with tech microshorts styled with Stetson hats and over-the-knee rubber boots. Plucked out of a scenic editorial onto the Canada Goose website, the pieces still make up a compelling outdoor collection that carries a scent of freedom and adventure. And most recently, Dario Vitale layered Western silhouettes over classic 80s styles and colors in a widely discussed Versace debut that reads both modern and nostalgic.

In the context of each brand’s archive, some of these luxury plays on Western are more surprising and imaginative than others, but overall, it’s hardly the first time cowboy gear has been positioned as luxury. Pageantry is part of western DNA, explains Spencer Phipps, the founder and creative director of a namesake fashion brand Phipps. “One of the big misconceptions about Western wear is that it’s cheap, blue-collar, purely utilitarian… [But] there’s always been this luxury side to it — Nudie Cohn’s rhinestone suits, custom boots, silver belt buckles and jewelry — Western wear has long been a way to show status. In a place like Dallas or Nashville, for example, it isn’t just functional, it’s high glamour,” he tells me. “So when people say [Western] is suddenly “luxury,” I don’t totally buy it. It’s always had that streak. What’s happening now is that big European houses are leaning into it more heavily for a certain authenticity and freedom that it represents.”

Phipps’ own take on Western is a lot more muted and approachable, which, ironically, makes it that much more desirable and aspirational. Outside of the industry cycles, the revival of Western style harkens back to the romanticized figure of the cowboy as a spiritual predecessor of Marvel superheroes and a classic childhood icon in line with astronauts and firefighters, argues Goodman. Funny enough, stepping into such a loaded historical archetype feels more natural even to those who feel intimidated by contemporary styles, like skater wear, given how easily its silhouettes can be folded into their exiting wardrobes. “If you have a pair of denim and you throw on cowboy boots, you are basically three quarters of the way [there],” Goodman says jokingly. You don’t have to grow up scrubbing barns and riding horses in Wyoming to pull off a pair of jeans the same way you might be expected to name three songs to rep a band tee or do a kick flip at a Vans register.

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“The cowboy is just as much fantasy as a couture gown or a hardcore alpinist parka, but it’s one people can actually wear every day,” echoes Phipps. Since 2018, his brand has gone through a number of phases, both visually and conceptually: AW18 had a heavy focus on quality and durability, SS20 referenced the Frontier thesis and tapped into the spiritual side of geology with crystal prints and accessories, and AW23, which officially marked the brand’s earlier move from Paris to California, leaned into the cinematic world of western with a runway presentation hosted at the Big Sky Movie Ranch in Simi Valley. In the end, Phipps decided, dressing modern cowboys is “less about chasing concepts and more about getting the details right and making real pieces people actually want to wear.”

What stayed consistent throughout the years is the designer’s intent to “build a world that feels coherent and personal” which you can tell by the character that peeks through every part of the brand — from silhouettes that look both classic and contemporary to casting that favors real guys from tool sheds and gas stations over professional models. “The visuals might shift, but the goal has always been the same: making solid, elevated product with storytelling baked into it,” says the designer. “And if we do our job right, the guys who put them on should feel like they’re stepping into their own myth [rather than putting on a costume].”

As Western regains its appeal across all spheres of contemporary culture — sports, music, film, and fashion — this kind of attention to detail and commitment to capturing its underlining ideas are shaping up to be the moat between the rich and real interpretations of the genre and their commercial counterparts. Eager to play with cowboy theatrics, few are skilled and patient enough to dig deep into their complex character, especially since selling a pop version of it is so financially lucrative. Although — there is much more on the horizon, predicts Goodman. “It’s only going to get weirder before [the Western cycle dwindles], and I am curious to see the big swings, one way or another, that happen as we shift through the rest of this moment,” he says. “In a couple of years, are we doing to be able to walk into a Zara and get a fringe leather jacket or riding chaps?” Only time will tell who is a real cowboy and who is in it for the gold rush.

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IN THE MARGINS

• Perhaps the most fascinating manifestation of the resurgence of Western outside of fashion is the rapid ascend of Professional Bull Riding into the mainstream. Rodeo as a sport rather than a regional tradition has been on my mind since Bella Hadid swapped her English saddle for a Western and started dating a professional cowboy. In the research process for this piece, I came across Grayson Scott’s brilliant investigation into PBR’s success for The Baffler. It turns out, historically, bull riding was one of the many events in a rodeo but having realized that they were drawing most of the crowd without proportional allocation of the prize money, twenty bull riders bet on it to become a stand-alone discipline. On paper, it paid off big time — today, PBR events sell out arenas all over the county and attract millions in media deals and sponsorships. But there are all these weird bumps and bruises that Scott uncovers as he strips back the mechanics of PBR’s growth that make you question whether it can ever turn into a global phenomena. “As I left [the arena], I realized I still didn’t understand how PBR thinks someone can become a fan of bull riding without having been born into it in the same way people are fans of basketball or hockey,” Scott concludes. “Not because it’s comparatively cruel, or violent, or trashy, but because its original aesthetic armature — rodeo, ranch life — is so much more compelling than the corny, short-form packaging they’ve inflicted on it.”

• Also stumbled upon J.T. Prince’s interpretation of his Midwestern upbringing that turns regional household artifacts, like statement vervet couches wrapped in plastic, into fab runway pieces. Here is a full walkthrough of the collection in a video by Fashion Roadman.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and check out my culture reports and curated lists at busycorner.xyz :)

“Many see phones as much an accessory as they do a tool,” London-based creative and digital director Emily Chapps told me. I heard a variation of this take in every conversation I’ve had trying to figure out why despite the widespread hatred of screens and their impact on creativity, relationships, and culture, we seem to be pouring more and more time and money into smartphone accessories and modifications. Wildflower Cases — a brand that felt like an influencer cash grab at inception — now operates like a commercially sustainable fashion business with consistent creative direction, celebrity collaborations, and a fleet of unpaid ‘it girl’ ambassadors. Rhode’s lip balm holder — a product that first came across as lighting in a bottle — has joined the brand’s permanent lineup. And a quick look at Casetify’s website overwhelmed me with opportunities for customizations: snap-ons, hooks, and adhesive toys for every inch of a smartphone’s surface.

It’s tempting to write this off as another manifestation of the hyper-individualization phenomenon that’s currently dominating the broader cultural landscape. “Like any other fashion item, [phones] are at the mercy of trends,” suggested Emily. And yet, while there is certainly truth to that, a brief walk down her own hardware history suggests something more layered. At the moment, Emily is repping a £2 phone case shaped as a pink chubby bear that she scored at Primark after nearly eight years of letting her phones hang naked, covered in a rotating array of stickers: SpongeBob, Mr. Sparkle, the yellow dots Berlin bouncers put on cameras at nightclubs, and merch from Friend Editions and “Warning! Camera,” among other things. She comes across as both excited and consistently intentional about the way she decorates her phones — it almost felt like she was giving me a tour of her tattoos.

“The rise of customization and personalization speaks to something deeper: our innate desire to see ourselves reflected in the objects we carry,” theorized Maxine Midtbo, the multidisciplinary artist behind Memor Studio that is known for its mosaic-inspired home decor objects and bespoke phone cases. “The truth is I never would have imagined I’d be making phone cases,” Maxine explained. “To this day it feels strange to say “yeah, I make vases, lighting, furniture….and phone cases”, it’s an outlier. But over the past 5 years we’ve been making the cases I’ve been increasingly interested in integrating [them] conceptually with the rest of my work.”

In her latest project, called 100 Cases, she creates conceptual not-for-sale phone cases as a sculptural warm up and an art practice that allows her to push the limitations of commercial design. In the past year, she’s made a marine-themed phone case that doubles as a watercolor pallet, a candle case that she lit up for the studio’s sixth birthday, and more recently, a Flip Phone case that featured a pearly strap from a pair of Havaianas. The latter hit the fashion girls’ feeds right at the inception of the flip flop craze this summer, and by popular demand, Maxine opened it up for orders. , Head of Community and Social at Hanni whom I met earlier this year, managed to snag one. “For lack of better words, it made me feel very "seen,” she told me. “I thought it was funny, a little absurd, not taking itself too seriously but also a little IYKYK as a fellow fashion girlie turned flip flop enthusiast.”

Memor customers tell Maxine that their phone cases often serve as conversation starters sparked by strangers, which is ironic, given that smartphones are also one of the key drivers of the “loneliness epidemic.” Even something silly and simple, like the Sonny Angel that Emily used to have on one of her naked phones loosens people up: “[it was] a favorite of cashiers and waiters when I used contactless, as I’d often joke about the bills on Angel,” she said. “Most adults have a cell phone, it’s an interesting shared connection in our contemporary reality as a frequently used and held object,” Maxine noted about this contradiction. “That, to me, is where [Memor Studio’s] work lives, at the intersection of personal narrative and collective experience.”

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Funny enough, a staple Memor case was also recently featured in a viral post from someone sharing the way they created some much needed separation from their smartphone by hanging it up on a kitchen wall — Maxine’s beautiful mosaic made it blend seamlessly with the rest of the home decor. This wasn’t the first time I saw something like this either. A few weeks ago, writer Ng published a fascinating account of chaining her phone up to a wall for a week which not only sounded like a fun experiment but also looked chic — a mobile invention immobilized by a metal chain, resting on a straw bench beneath it. “You can try all kinds of dark patterns to trick yourself into spending less time online, purchase new gadgets to protect your phone from yourself. But you could also just chain it up,” she noted. “I know it’s a little medieval, but who doesn’t love some drama?”

The truth is, despite all the negative talk, people cherish smartphones as objects. We go to great length to protect them and can’t help but be deliberate about the way they look and what they communicate about us simply because they are objects we see and are seen with daily. On the one end of the spectrum, there is someone like fashion aficionado who can write a whole newsletter about searching for a chic way out of the hard case of European phone snatcher scaries that she caught last summer. “My phone paranoia was having a detrimental effect on my overall vibe,” she noted. “Turns out a good outfit doesn’t mean sh*t if you behave like a coked up meerkat every time you leave the house.” But as Emily put it, even those who are impartial to fashion and style and allergic to self-expression aren’t immune to at least sliding a polaroid of their friends, family, or lover under a basic 3M clear case.

“With their 2–4 year contract periods, iOS updates, and law-backed charging port changes, [phones] have turned into relics of an era of your life. Like a holiday, they bookend the start and end of a period, holding memories from that time,” she concluded. “I still have my past four phones (with chargers) and sometimes revisit them for a bit of reminiscence…I also have the phone of my late father, which is honestly a really great way to remember him.”

Whether intentional or not, we treat smartphones as special objects. We may dream about the life before and after them, but we are also terrified of losing them, for the texts and voice memos they store, the scratches and cracks they endure, and all the intangible parts of our lives that they are able to contain. After all, they may be the last adequately tangible objects that embody the increasingly digital world around us, and that is not something that is easy to move forward from.

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IN THE MARGINS

• Thank you for all the love on the Post Wellness Report! Reminder that there are two more chapters about what comes after leggings and the blurry line between health and beauty here.

• 30+ new additions to Busy Corner will be up this weekend — references, talent, objects, magazines, and more.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and check out my culture reports and curated lists at busycorner.xyz :)

The men’s side of the wellness market offers a sneak peak into what the search for a middle ground between robotic self-optimization and raw human indulgence could look like. A sportswear brand Satisfy, for example, has spent the past decade building an equivalent of the old-school skateboarding subculture around extreme forms of running. Despite selling €120 tees and €240 shorts, the brand’s dusty, sweaty, bloody visuals make it feel both pleasantly textured and human in comparison to the dystopian longevity universe, and more accessible and humble than the moneyed athleisure world. Its in-house magazine Possessed discusses running in the context of psychedelics, fashion, and punk rock, and captures stories of its pro athletes who load up on donuts and pizza before running hundred-milers and frequently find themselves in the emergency room.

Edition+partners called this genre of fitness enthusiasts “wellness anarchists” — the people who both push themselves physically, often in pursuit of greatness and an endorphin rash, but also proudly dabble in vices. They cite a couple of other examples: ultra-runner William Goodge pausing for a beer mile and a cigarette in the middle of a cross-Australia run, and Travis Barker’s run club participants logging miles in Vans and Chuck Taylors. But while this lifestyle certainly looks attractive on others, it also sounds like a recipe for burnout since at its core, it’s just a crunchy take on the work hard, play hard mentality. Plus, just like the old-school extreme sport subcultures, it’s drenched in testosterone, making it hard to imagine how it would play out across identity lines.

Ironically, the second coming of a different subculture — “doing things” popularized by the activewear brand Outdoor Voices in the late 2010s — may offer a more viable vision for merging wellness and living together in a sustainable way, but only if it were to be executed by someone new, someone whose brain isn’t rotten by tech and capitalism. When “doing things” was originally coined, it marked the departure from performance in sportswear design and positioned life activities, like running errands or dog walks, as a form of exercise. Stretchy pants and sports bras flooded the farmers markets, cafes, and everyone’s wardrobes. What used to be gym clothes was now an everyday uniform, what used to be a compartmentalized hobby was now a lifestyle.

Now that we are looking to rein the wellness industry back in its place, the “doing things” motto could be easily flipped to be the guiding principle for a more grounded, social, and experience-rich lifestyle. Why spend four nights a week at the gym, when you can get your steps in by canvassing for a mayoral candidate who, by the way, runs around the city in dress shoes, suit, and tie? The time spent goofing around with friends in a park is equally enjoyable in a cotton and a sweat-wicking tee. The ultimate secret to peaceful sleep and radiant skin is a happy, balanced life in a world that’s stable and humane, so checking in on a friend or helping out a neighbor might be a better investment than another bottle of mysterious supplements. If the first coming of “doing things” turned every aspect of our lives into wellness, its return could be the way we knock it down from its pedestal.

The OG way of “doing things” was earnest and culty — it called for a uniform, a habit tracker, and an always-on attitude. It’s an equivalent of calling a flexible work schedule “work-life balance” when in reality, it’s just work, work, work. Ideally, its second coming would shape up to be a “choose your own adventure” type of deal that opens up the doors for multiple imperfect subcultures to exist under the same umbrella — doing things the dirtbag way. You can be a Jane Austin-esque character, like Ariel Kellogg, who swings nunchucks in a puff slip top and capris to the tunes of Project Pat; a modern cowboy who scales mountains in grippy high-tech shoes and Levi’s jeans; or a music geek who downs a couple of beers and sweats them out on the dance floor, dripped in Burberry and Stone Island. It’s about compromising productivity, achievement, and comfort for the sake of enjoyment, community, and style — not the other way around.

Coincidentally, that is exactly what nostalgia, and specifically sports nostalgia, is about — watching someone move with so much confidence and style that you can’t help but want to get a taste of it yourself. As a sports journalist and culture critic Zito Madu put it in a recent interview, “If I take a kid to watch a soccer game, the thing that he’s going to latch onto isn’t, like, yea we won that 3-2. It’s this player did something that’s so fantastic that it has drawn you into the sport, that it’s changed the way that you think about the way what is possible on the field.” Replicating that feeling in a world that’s been tempered by tech and capitalism, then, is the main challenge. Bringing back the visuals, styles, and icons associated with it are but a distraction.

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CHAPTER ONE: LEAVE NOSTALGIA BEHIND

Creatives across industries have a soft spot for the sports nostalgia aesthetics — bold colors, quirky typefaces, and grainy texture. Mood board clothing brands shamelessly copy sports candids from the 80s, beauty brands shoot product promo in the style of Y2K basketball and skate reels, and very few hydration and protein brands have been able to resist the urge to throw a poster that looks like a retro magazine ad up on their grid.

“Sports represent a moment in time. Whether it’s a world record at the Olympics, a buzzer beater in game seven, or that time Zumba became super popular, it’s a memory we collectively share,” one of Chloe Gordon’s sources explains in a sports nostalgia issue of her design newsletter. “That memory includes the feeling of victory and euphoria, and most importantly for this topic, the design of that moment. Brands can tap into that feeling by referencing design. It feels familiar, even if it’s new.” It’s the perfect representation of the reference board epidemic — a shortcut to cultivating cultural cache without the pressure of risk taking that robs creatives of the opportunity to cultivate their own iconic moments. In sports terms, that means admitting defeat before the game even begins.

Ironically, flipping this approach and focusing on replicating the abstract elements of sports nostalgia images, like the stature of the athletes in the 80s and the 90s or the mischievous nature of street sports, may just be the secret to creating visuals and movements that feel both familiar and new. When you see pictures of Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova crashing their opponents in dangly earrings and a jean mini skort, the most interesting part isn’t the maker of the skort or the composition of the shot, it’s the clash of the casual, delicate objects, the powerful presence of the figures wearing them, and the intensity of the events. These photos are more than just memories from a particular tennis match — they are snapshots of the overall state of culture back then.

The only issue with capturing layered stories like this today is that the economics of sports have since shifted in a way that sucked the juice out of them, both on the processional and amateur levels. In that same interview with Day One FM, Zito Madu explains how the combination of the pay-to-play dynamic of youth sports, mass sports betting, and focus on profit maximization in major sports leagues have led to the decline in the “variety of play.” Athletes are encouraged to build a monetizable personality online, but rarely show any on the field, striving for points and efficiency. Even amateurs are more likely to break down their diet, gear essentials, and training regimen for their online followers than push the boundaries of their sport or take a shot at creating an entirely new discipline.

To find something worthy, you’ve got to get back into the streets. The most memorable stories as of late originate in the quirky subcultures that fly under the radar of indie publications and culture critics who are busy writing yet another piece about Dimes Squire. It’s endearing for Vibram Fivefingers to sponsor a toe wrestling competition and host a goofy frog-themed retreat while their counterparts at brands, like Puma, are cutting influencer and celebrity checks that materialize in nothing other than wacky fit pics. It’s cool for i-D to run a story about a medieval fighting tournament at the American Dream mall in New Jersey and an interview with an EF cyclist Ben Healy alongside a fashion show recap and a celebrity profile. It’s crazy that Essentia Water is an early corporate sponsor of Jerome Peel of Citybikeboys, and not Vans or Balenciaga. The visuals in this campaign would have topped everything Liquid Death has ever done if it wasn't for the wack copy plastered all over them.

And then, there are all these rough, edgy characters in the crazy, fast-paced worlds outside of sports and wellness, bursting with wild stories about endurance and excellence — line cooks that spend 10-12 hours on their feet, farmers that tame animals and wrestle heavy weights, but also club rats who stay up dancing through the night and even office interns running around the city…

Continue Reading On Busy Corner

This is the end of the What Does Post Wellness Look Like preview. Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and see you at busycorner.xyz for Chapter Two and Three :)

Although this newsletter is designed to mimic a corner cafe on a busy city street where you get to overhear private convos and catch glimpses of strangers’ laptop screens among other things, becoming a regular in one of those places used to scare me. I thought it meant life got boring and stagnant until I realized that watching the way certain places, people, and happenings open up only when you stick around, beats that clean slate feeling of constantly finding yourself somewhere new.

Although in this series we are going to cheat a little and ask various regulars to tell us stories only a regular would know, I hope it inspires you to stick around somewhere to start a The Regular story of your own :)

With that, meet Craft Society's Isabelle Rieken and Noa Mellul who will take us through the arts and crafts aisles of vintage stores, estate sales, and all-American retail icons as we chat about Home Ec classes, the inspo behind their workshops, and more.

It’s impossible not to fall into a rabbit hole in a John Derian Company store. John, the owner of the shops, is an avid collector of antique prints that he turns into whimsical home goods, sold alongside a thoughtful curation of art, furniture, and decorative objects made by artisans and historical workshops. Anke Drechsel’s silk velvet pillows are stacked next to hand-stitched bedcovers from Jeanette Farrier on antique French beds, all overlooking Hugo Guinness’s whimsical portraits of fictional characters that are hung up on the walls. Even for people like me, who are easily overwhelmed by colors, patterns, and stuff in general, it feels like a joyful playground full of precious treasures made and curated with the kind of love that’s missing in most modern retail stores.

Places like this are a major source of inspiration for Noa and Isabelle and the workshops they host at Craft Society. Whenever they spot something interesting, their instinct is to figure out how to make it rather than buy it, and then help others do the same. This summer, they’ve taught their guests how to weave baskets and make kites out of natural materials as well as put together ribbon accessories, inspired by the horse girl renaissance and the recent work of designers, like Mimi Wade and Sandy Liang. But while seasonality (things “get cozier” in the winter with lots of knitting and crocheting) and visual trends certainly influence the type of workshops they offer, Noa and Isabelle’s core focus has been on heritage crafts and timeless folky objects.

The kite-making workshop, for example, was inspired by the pictures of wind sculptures and kites that the two found in the “Wind” folder in the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, the work of Charles and Ray Eames who often used them in showroom staging and advertising, and the history of mulberry paper and its significance in the craft of traditional kite-making in Asia. Noa and Isabelle actually just got back from a trip to Korea and Japan where they admired the weaving work of craftsmen in Kyoto, made pottery at the Takigahara Farm in Ichikawa, and learned heritage fabric crafts at Gallery Mir in Seoul. But perhaps their most surprising evergreen source of inspiration are the Home Ec classes taught in American high schools in the 60s.

While there was certainly a wildly sexist side to them — the three of us establish quickly in the wake of the trad wife nostalgia — Noa and Isabelle see a modern take on those classes as an opportunity to help people of all genders regain appreciation for craftsmanship and well-made objects amidst an overconsumption crisis as well as rebuild the confidence in being able to take care of themselves in a rocky socio-economic environment. The prospect of being able to fill their homes with unique, handmade objects without shelling out thousands of dollars on designer decor, make a one-of-one pair of pants or even mend a pair that was made back when luxury was still synonymous with quality, is increasingly exciting to people, they explain, as they proudly show me the couch they just built together for Noa’s apartment.

There is also a strong desire to be playful driven by the newfound appreciation of “girlhood” in the zeitgeist which for Noa and Isabelle, is a genderless term. It’s just as much about twenty-year-old girls making Victorian valentines over milkshakes and sundaes and their own story of meeting each other on a trampoline as it is about fifty-year-old New Yorkers gathering in a book store after hours to make paper stick puppets and young men running around a park with a kite they just hand painted. Everyone is welcome to sit at the Craft Society’s big communal table, get a little messy, and remember how to entertain themselves and connect with others via something other than a phone screen.

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Although the interest in crafts is resurging in a form of counterculture to consumption (remember when girls on TikTok taught each other how to DYI a bag from the Sandy Liang x Baggu collab?), they can quickly get wildly expensive. A pottery class in Manhattan, for example, can run you anywhere from $100 to $300 dollars — an intimidating sum for an amateur to bet on their ability to make something nice and useful for their home. To keep the cost of their projects and workshops low, Noa and Isabelle are always on a hunt for beautiful buttons, fabric, yarn, and other small treasures at local thrift stores, estate sales, and charity shops. “Whenever I am in San Francisco, I go to this store called SCRAP and come back to [New York] with a suitcase of craft supplies,” says Isabelle. “I love that place, but I only get to go like once a year.”

“Does it make you nervous that the resurgence of interest in crafts is powered by the internet? The very place that gave us microtrends,” I ask Noa and Isabelle as I start to imagine another wave of pre-packaged DIY kits and TikTok users picking up and abandoning crafty hobbies just as fast as they change their outfits. “Our focus is traditional crafts,” says Noa. “It's something that won't really die out because they are meant to be preserved.” While some of the objects they help their guests create are decorative and entertaining, many, like baskets and market bags, are useful day-to-day. “And also, community is never going to be trendy,” she adds. “People want to connect with other people, and I think they don't feel connected through their work or their phones anymore.”

As I leave Noa and Isabelle, I spend at least an hour gasping over rabbit mugs handmade in Paris and antique figurines and boxes sold in John Derian Company stores, and think about planning a trip to the Bay for the second time this month. But most importantly, I try to imagine what fashion, design, and other creative industries could look like if instead of fostering false sense of luxury, individuality, and exclusivity, they shifted their focus back to craftsmanship, preservation, and community.

IN THE MARGINS

• In the research process for this, I came across Maw studio and realized that it’s ran by Makayla Wray who also runs a street repair cart and up-cycling workshops in New York.

• Can’t remember how exactly I got here but I am fascinated by the now a bit dated discourse around artist Lucien Smith attempting to revive an iconic Soho restaurant Food:

“The original was founded by Carol Goodden, a dancer and photographer, and her then-boyfriend, the late artist Gordon Matta-Clark. With regular hours and a huge cast of occasional workers, it operated as art-world employer, cafeteria, and de facto meeting spot for everyone from Trisha Brown and her dancers (of which Goodden was one) to Philip Glass’s collaborators. The new Food is being opened by Smith, a creative director and producer named Ken Farmer, and Laurence Chandler, a menswear designer who used to manage Ye’s brand, Yeezy. The original was born on Prince Street at a time when working a couple of shifts a week might cover your loft’s rent. The new Food will be in Dimes Square, two blocks from a luxury hotel. Smith says that no matter how “corny” anyone thinks it is, Dimes Square is for artists. “This is my Soho,” Smith says, “and I’m very into it.”

• If you see a young adult posting about their weekend in The Hamptons, odds are Montauk General Store matcha cups are making an appearance. The catch? MGS is a “fake” store that doesn’t have a prominent physical location. In my latest story for Inc., I chat with he founder Kate Diament about bottling up vibes and lifestyle into products and navigating the nation-wide all-year-round obsession with a local lifestyle she grew up with. Spoiler: there is much more appetite for MGS in the city than out east.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and check out my culture reports and curated lists at busycorner.xyz :)

“It has this domino effect where someone sees someone getting a tattoo, and then the queue gets full,” designer and artist Carmen Kelly tells me about the flash tattoos people get at the pop-ups she puts together for her brand California Dirt. She was skeptical to offer them at first — for the most part, she’s been focused on designing jewelry, so it was hard to wrap her head around the symbols she created becoming a permanent part of someone’s body — but it turned out to be an instant hit. Some people get them because they like how they look, others find a personal meaning in them. One couple, who have been California Dirt customers for a long time, commemorated their engagement with a matching tattoo featuring two shapes designed by Carmen linked in a gentle union.

The symbols and shapes that have become the DNA of California Dirt emerged from Carmen’s work with a Jungian therapist while she was still at Rhode Island School of Design, experimenting across different materials and mediums. “A new symbol will be born, and I spend a lot of time with that symbol. I turn it into a piece of jewelry, a furniture handle, a belt buckle,” she says. She sees these abstract, psychic forms as lively mystical creatures that guide her through the design process. And although she has her own interpretations of the pieces she creates, she prefers not to share them with her customers. They get to prescribe their own meaning to the ones they take home, as if it’s an inkblot test, bringing what she starts in the studio to completion.

Throughout our chat, Carmen gets visibly self-conscious from verbalizing how spiritual her design practice is, but I find the exchange it’s able to facilitate uniquely freeing. Both of us are part of a generation that’s simultaneously so anal about constructing a visual persona that directly reflects our psyche and for the most part, so comically superficial in execution that we suck the meaning out of everything we touch and are forced to move onto something new unprecedentedly quickly. There is something so tragically beautiful about the intense wish to get things right being the very reason we fail at it so miserably. Loosening the grip on the controls both in creation and consumptions feels like a viable way to finally break this vicious cycle.

“People aged 35 to 50 tend to live with their tattoos for a decade before regretting them, whereas the younger generation — who never grappled with much stigma in the first place — regret their tattoos more quickly within two to three years,” Carrie Battan writes in a recent GQ piece about the growing popularity of tattoo removal. She interviews the owners of a tattoo removal clinic who are salivating at the idea of a future where the procedure becomes so quick and painless that tattoo culture can assume the cyclical rhythms of fashion. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m going to get new tattoos for the first day of school.’ Someone gets drafted by the Jets, they’re going to get a bunch of Jets tattoos. But if they get traded, they can remove them,” says one of them giddily.

What surprised me though is that none of Battan’s sources, even the “fuddy-duddy old-school tattoo purists,” are worked up about this the way culture and fashion critics are worked up about microtrends. Tattoo removal lets people participate in their culture without the pressure of making a mistake. It’s fun to get a dumb tattoo, it’s fine to regret it, and it’s cool that you can remove it and replace it with something great. It’s much more forgiving and progressive than certified snobs in media and fashion clinging onto nostalgia and sinking institutions in response to the rapid loss of substance, elegance, and coolness in their respective industries as they got unceremoniously disrupted by tech. The impulse is to “bring back gatekeeping” and retrieve back to the insider circles of people who “get it” in places, like Paris, New York, and LA.

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“LA is such a hot bed for small creative brands,” Carmen notes as she explains that even though this is where California Dirt is based, San Francisco — the city that embodies what unregulated tech disruption can do to culture — has actually become a special place for the brand. Since last May, she’s hosted three pop-ups here that brought together a mixed bag of visitors — from Santa Cruz surfers to tech employees from San Jose who do pottery on the weekends. There is a different level of excitement about California Dirt here — people are eager to come out and are much more inquisitive about Carmen’s background and how the brand came about. There are plenty of entrepreneurs in The Bay, but few of them are creative.

Even back home in LA, Carmen’s most memorable interactions often involve people who don’t fit into the typical target demo for a creative brand ran by a young artist, like an eighty-year-old woman who saw herself in one of the earlier California Dirt pieces and decided to buy it as a birthday gift for herself. “It was the moment when designing in a timeless way became a design principle of mine,” says Carmen. She realized that the family of forms she created intuitively had something a lot of people strive really hard for — the rare power to transcend trends and turn into pieces that speak to people across generations.

Perhaps what I crave after all isn’t the perfect tattoo but the patience and confidence it takes to invite others into my world and let them experience it on their own terms. There is beauty in precision and permanence, sure, but is it worth all that pressure? The only real way to find out is to stop peddling so hard against the current and trust that it will stir us somewhere just as, if not more, beautiful.

IN THE MARGINS:

• I posted a video about secret brand campaigns on Busy Corner’s IG; Perfectly Imperfect published a guide to conspiracy theories with A24 (write me at viktoriia@perfectlyimperfect.fyi); and Busy Corner newsboard features clippings from Spike Magazine, Library180, and my story about the rise of cool outdoors communities and the growing interest in hiking, fly fishing, and birdwatching among urban youth for Inc. this week.

• Letting the tattoo gods guide me through the research for this week’s newsletter, I came across Tiarna Meehan’s tattoo reporting for Dazed. She’s written about Gen Z’s brand logo tattoos, post-ironic body art, and the rise of cowboy ink among other things.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and check out my culture reports and curated lists at busycorner.xyz :)

So far, the project has materialized into a series of expensive activations and campaigns. In April, Mercedes unveiled a molted chrome CLA draped in diamonds that spelled “Princess” for the self-proclaimed hip hop princess Ice Spice, as well as a co-branded merch capsule at a party in NYC. In May, Gustaf Westman got to dream up a bubblegum pink Mercedes wonderland in London filled with goopy side mirrors, logo plates, and a chunky CLA centerpiece — perhaps the most tasteful and effective activation in the lineup that doesn’t feel like a cash grab. And finally, this past Men’s Fashion Week, Kid Super installed a CLA designed to be his take on a dream superhero getaway car at his show in Paris that also featured a couple of pieces with Mercedes branding.

Taking a page out of LVMH’s playbook, Mercedes is letting the whimsey into its otherwise conservative luxury universe in attempt to position itself as a player in the culture at large rather than just a car manufacturer. The press moments are less about how fast, efficient, or even luxurious the CLA model is, and more about the imaginative world it inspires — and even if you can’t afford a Mercedes, you can still have a piece of it in form of an Ice Spice keychain or a TikTok viral chunky plate. My gut tells me it’s a bad sign when a strategy can be easily distilled into a deck, especially when that deck feels severely outdated and has proven to lead fashion brands, like Burberry and Louis Vuitton, astray — but perhaps, this is just a reflection of who an average Mercedes customer really is and their level of taste.

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There is certainly an appetite for whimsey and even a place for pop culture IPs in the luxury world that has skewed towards stoic minimalism and lowkey branding for the past few years. Louis Vuitton revisited their collaboration with Takashi Murakami. Gucci welcomed Demna as its new creative director. Tory Burch released a capsule of colorful sandals, sugary bags, and charms with a Swedish candy brand BonBon. Simone Rocha made Crocs, Coperni hosted a show at Disneyland Paris, and Rick Owens made an OnlyFans for his feet. Meanwhile, luxury customers are decorating their bags with Pop Mart toys, prize ribbons, sashes, and brooches are catching on, and funky neckties and bootleg graphic tees are finding their way back into everyone’s wardrobes.

The collective wish to stand out, find small pockets of joy in otherwise bleak socioeconomic landscape, and of course, ride the wave of attention created by publicity stunts into commercial success have created a lot of delightfully playful as well as grossly commercial moments both on the design and consumer side. The line between the two is intuitive, but if we were to try and rationalize it, it boils down to two things — access and intellectualism. Low access — limited stock, high price point, fringe origin — protects products and creatives from quick market saturation and dupes as well as manages the crowd associated with them. Intellectualism can mean everything from literal ties to arts and sciences to analogue research and execution.

Labubus, the product of a social media trend, quickly flooded the market due to an affordable price point and mass supply and therefore, skew heavily towards faux pas although they are intellectualized by their creator artist Kasing Lung whose career trajectory is starting to resemble that of Brian Donnelly. Coperni’s Disney pieces are a modern take on analogue nostalgia, inaccessible to the masses due to the higher price point, limited sizing and stock — think less Disney adults dripped out in souvenir shop swag and more Addison Rae wearing a Björk puffer jacket in front of the Magic Castle.

It’s not as straightforward as cheap and trendy equals faux pas and exclusive and expensive equals chic though. Random gift shop finds are much coolers than designer bag charms. Fun cufflinks are endearing while fun socks are cringe even though both are prevalent in the white collar corporate world. A tabi shoe with its ties to Japanese culture and Margiela’s creative genius is timeless while a jelly shoe with its nostalgic yet commercial background skews towards trendy and gimmicky. At this point, the only acceptable way to acquire a pair is to buy it at a random local store for under 30 bucks (unless you are on the PR list for these).

Outside of product, things get even trickier. Status-wise, everything digital is inherently inferior to anything analogue. For example, even though Gucci’s latest Marmont bag ads stirred up a brief intellectual discourse as the off-beat creative marked the beginning of Demna’s reign at the house for many, the execution looked a little too digital for comfort. The perception would have likely been different if the desserts were inspired by an 18th century painting the same way Rick Owens’ OnlyFans project is based on Contessa de Castiglione’s photographs of her feet.

The only caveat is that reverse-engineering the whimsey by hiking up the price, limiting the stock, or engaging in performative intellectualism is much worse than any genuine attempt to be playful, even the ones that accidentally slip into faux pas. With a heavy heart, I have to say that carrying a Truman Capote Dior tote is a worse offense to the field of literature than Kendall Jenner reading Joan Didion on a luxury vacation. Given Jonathan Anderson’s genuine passion for the arts, I suppose they could have landed differently in a cultural climate where brands and celebrities didn’t already lean into literature for validation, but ultimately, it’s hard to unsee Dior’s business folks salivating at the commercial potential here.

The best kind of whimsey emerges naturally as a byproduct of a genuine pursuit. Similar to “passionate,” it’s an adjective you are supposed to embody rather than use to describe yourself — making impulsive brushstrokes that feel right but are impossible to fully comprehend. Even though the stakes are high and so is the temptation to feed into the appetite for something different, if that is your starting point, you’ve already lost. The whimsey that’s worth striving for can’t be reverse-engineered or distilled into a deck, so perhaps, it’s a sign to stop holding onto our seats and let the road show the way.

IN THE MARGINS

• Perfectly Imperfect published the cutest guide to “being awkward, together” that features recs and stories from subscribers, friends, and past guests, in collaboration with Hinge. If you run or work for a brand that’s curious about working with PI in any capacity, you can send me a note at viktoriia@perfectlyimperfect.fyi :)

• My dream came true — I’ve been posting consistent videos on Busy Corner’s IG. I did one on talent trips, one on ’s piece about the dire state of celebrity interviews, and one on Kevin Carpet - the man that people online are stirring up a moral panic about. My hands are itching to make a companion something for this newsletter, but for now, I am still figuring out the lighting situation.

• 25+ new additions to Busy Corner’s Talent Rolodex and Reference Bank this week!

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and check out my culture reports and curated lists at busycorner.xyz :)

The charming exteriors of Art Deco motels and the no-bullshit attitude of small-town establishments make the perfect backdrop for the provocatively honest stories told by indie directors at European film festivals. There, in the comfort of the darkness, the audiences get to feel what it’s like to be a single mother fighting madness or a teenager misunderstood by their caregivers and peers. “Uniquely disarming” and “heartbreakingly beautiful” we type into Letterboxd, feeling relieved as the credits roll down the screen.

In an inverted version of watching a Hallmark movie for comfort, we dive head first into these messed up part-fiction, part-real stories looking to feel something, to be intellectually challenged — knowing full well that if things get too disturbing, we can always close the book, walk out of the gallery, look away from the screen.

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I’ll be the first to say it — I am mesmerized by this type of raw, honest art. I’ve flipped through Larry Clark’s photo books, I’ve studied the fan-written Google Doc that breaks down Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, I got a special place in my heart for The Florida Project and Bones and All. I’ve seen Tim Hursley’s photos of brothels and funeral homes, I’ve done a deep dive on SALEM, I’ve added Gummo to my watchlist. A few summers ago, I inhaled Julia Fox’s memoir detailing her tumultuous adolescence while sipping on an iced chai latte on a beautiful day in Venice Beach — the irony isn’t lost on me.

Last week, I watched Magic Farm — Amalia Ulman’s quirky comedy about a media crew from New York mistakenly landing in rural Argentina. To cover up the mishap and turn in the assignment, they manufacture a meaningless culture trend, completely missing the serious, breaking stories casually unfolding right in front of them. The characters are so comically foolish and oblivious to the life of the locals that it’s easy to roll your eyes and laugh at them. It’s tempting to see the whole thing as a spoof of the bygone era of exploitative journalism spearheaded by Vice, until you start catching glimpses of yourself on the screen.

Creatives en masse are eager to move to cities, like Paris and New York, fill their circle with people they meet at readings, showrooms, and brand dinners and throw their two cents in on things like “have we reached peak influencer trip?” — all while the stories that move us the most are happening in much less sexier places that we are effectively disconnected from. It’s easy to get so caught up in playing the game that the people and the life outside of the city become invisible until someone in the inner circle is brave enough to break out and put a spotlight on them.

That opens up a whole box of moral dilemmas: Which characters can we “platform”? Whose place is it to tell whose stories? And who deserves to “review” and offer up opinions about them? Having “the right” judgement feels urgent and all-consuming even though the art itself, and especially its subjects, rarely call for it. As indie goes mass and gets picked apart by the relentless online discourse, it feels like the artist’s mission is to offer evaluations and answer questions rather than master walking the fine line between honestly and sensationalism, documentation and exploitation, art and clickbait.

In the past five years, everything, including the brands we shop, the people we follow, and the art we consume has become political. In a memoir Health and Safety, The New Yorker reporter Emily Witt chronicles her immersion in NYC’s rave scene alongside her reporting on gun violence and police brutality during the BLM protests in 2020. In a matter of a couple of years, she goes from partying and not paying attention to the news to producing the news, the news altering her personal life, and eventually the news becoming “our only channel to perceive the world.” “There was for sure this constant and shifting map of purity tests that continues to be presented every day and that you either pass or fail. And I think the tragedy of it is that they’re very performative,” she told Interview last year. “Meanwhile, power is operating in a totally other sphere at a totally different level.”

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A few months ago, for a sadly scrapped project about excessive politicization of certain objects, I spoke to a multidisciplinary artist Chivas Clem about his controversial exhibit Shirttail Kin. It features a series of intimate, mostly nude, photographs of rednecks and drifters passing through Paris, Texas — the type of men Clem used to fear as a young queer kid growing up in the South. Initially hired to help around the studio, they grew close and started posing as models for what turned into an impromptu decade-long art project exploring a whole range of complicated themes – masculinity, class, desire, addiction but also humanity, tenderness, and the duality of people’s exterior and interior.

Online, the reaction to the work was strong. Most of the men featured in Shirttail Kin are former convicts with questionable prison tattoos, posing nude, often with guns or drugs in their hands. They look like the men who Hillary Clinton referred to as “a basket of deplorables” propping up a violent, hateful regime in her controversial 2016 presidential campaign speech. There were comments about whether they deserved to be humanized. Coastal magazine writers kept asking the artist to speculate about their sexuality and politics. Ironically, the same week Shirttail Kin wrapped up at Dallas Contemporary, a group of rich, college educated men — the direct opposites of Clem’s models — proudly spread hateful ideas from the inauguration stage in D.C.

What stood out the most in my conversation with Clem is that he didn’t think of his work as edgy and radial. He has been simply photographing the people around him — the people who represent a large swath of America — trying to capture the complexity of their essence. The rest of the discourse around the exhibit was initiated by the audience and their interpretation of the photos depending on the lens they chose to apply to it.

Nonetheless, I read every line of Clem’s press circuit making sure his politics and moral compass aligned with mine. I decided not to draw attention to certain tattoos pictured in the photos mostly because it freed me up from what felt like a moral choice at the time. When my project got scrapped, I felt frustrated because I worked so hard to get things right but also a little relieved — perhaps, it saved me from criticism. I naively assumed that pre-chewing someone’s art was noble as if making people’s brains spin in circles wasn’t the whole point, as if the art couldn’t speak for itself.

IN THE MARGINS

• 20+ new additions to Busy Corner this week — references, talent, magazines, book stores, and more.

• If you want to learn more about Shirttail Kin, I suggest reading this interview as your mind spins in circles from the very first photo you see:

• I finally finished Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection which I think is a master class in walking the line between smart culture criticism and internet-induced brain rot. The “Main Character” chapter made me never want to engage in online discourse, at least in a genuine way, ever again.

• And if you haven’t read Dean Kissick’s The Painted Protest essay yet, I suggest you take it for a spin this weekend. All I am going to say about it in the spirit of today’s newsletter is that it’s wild how much hate he got in the art world for what feels like a tame take to an outsider.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and check out my culture reports and curated lists at busycorner.xyz :)

When two years ago, Zuck announced the Ray-Ban Meta partnership, most people I know were disturbed — a creepy tech nerd discreetly recording you in public was the first and only use case that popped into our heads. It also felt like a step further into the dystopian future that we dread — a self-imposed surveillance state, the main character epidemic, and the online and offline worlds slowly but surely melting together. There is nothing that kills my vibe more than turning my head in a $40 workout class and getting a glimpse of someone’s phone propped up in the corner or watching a teenager in front of me at a concert record the entire thing and plop it on their Snap story.

Lately through, I’ve been hearing from the artists and creatives I like that they are curious about the smart glasses. Some of them even quietly asked Meta for a free pair to play around with, and that doesn’t include the ones who got paid to wear them during Fashion Week. While most of them couldn’t care less about the AI assistant part, they are intrigued by the built-in camera — if only its high resolution didn't make it so commercial. “I didn’t like the way the footage looks,” Liv Solomon tells me about her experience trying out the Meta glasses. “It just kind of mimics an iPhone camera and that, to me, feels redundant. At that point, you can just hold up an iPhone and take a video.”

For that BITER000000 project that she produced for Office magazine, she went with a random pair of cheap camera glasses from Amazon. It was a combination of wanting to capture the raw Uncut Gems vibe of New York City’s Diamond District and show the intimate process of making jewelry — both of which aren’t outsider-friendly — that led her to the idea of using spy glasses in the first place, she explains. Besides the moody texture that creates an interesting visual aesthetic, they also added layers of meaning to the project. There is something about sneaking in a recording device into a place full of hidden cameras, documenting the entirety of the creative process, and the videographer passing over the controls to her subjects that turns up the thrill and the level of trust required to pull the project off.

Unlike an iPhone or a proper modern camera that become invisible in the final cut, surveillance tech is a character of its own that has the power to turn the most mundane happenings into a cultural statement or at the very least, make the final piece technically impressive. Eugene Kotlyarenko’s latest movie The Code is a great example of how a project can benefit from it. Patched up from the footage captured on more than 70 cameras, including security cameras, spy glasses, and 360° camera mounted on a head strap, it follows a troubled young couple, Celine and Jay, caught up in a downward spiral of mutual surveillance. When Jay suspects that Celine’s urge to make a “COVID documentary” is actually a ploy to damage his reputation, he gets a bunch of hidden cameras to catch her saying or doing something horrible as a form of insurance.

Because of the film’s amateur production style, abundance of POV footage, and characters frequently looking and speaking directly into the camera, the viewer ends up becoming the third main character of the film. Halfway through, it becomes hard to draw the line between Jay’s and Celine’s personalities and performances — an allegory for how our online and office behaviors are shaped by the casual panopticon we’ve collectively built. Throughout the film, the characters set up so many uncomfortable, vulnerable, and invasive “scenes” that it’s unclear who wants to stick around more — the viewer who is curious to see how this train wreck of a relationship ends, or the characters who need the viewer to see their side in the anxious anticipation of the finale.

Unlike other art and creative projects of this genre, like Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion, Black Mirror, or even Kotlyarenko’s earlier movie Spree, The Code not only provides the audience with an experience and food for thought, it tells a real story. It takes the subject of mutual surveillance and the social dynamics that unravel around it, out of that video game, sci-fi context that makes these projects feel like an exaggerated portrayal of a distant dystopian future that the viewer brushes off the second the credits roll. It feels like we are only scratching the surface in terms of how the voluntary wish to sacrifice the last remnants of privacy in search of safety, intimacy, attention, and self-expression has impacted our social lives, careers, and daily routines. These stories are current and so painfully trivial that perhaps, using alt camera tech to capture them might be the best way to communicate how important and nuanced they are without turning them into a violent, disturbing spectacle.

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But even on a more casual level, it’s an opportunity to have fun, challenge yourself creatively, and shake up the dynamics within existing cultural institutions. Jacquemus threw off its camera-ready fashion show guests with a hidden camera placed in an elevator — the response was so positive that Tory Burch copied the concept a few days later. Moni Haworth shot this surveillance camera-esque cover story for The Face where Yeat got to play a weird blurry character rather than be a human billboard for Chrome Hearts and Acne Studios. Jason Stewart threw on a bodycam-looking setup to record himself cooking green wings for a subtle comedic effect. Although cumulatively, all of these innocent projects still prompt a larger discussion about the way public attention has shifted away from the main act towards backstage, how the power dynamics between the audience, the talent, and the crew constantly fluctuate, and whether we are getting fed up with authenticity.

“It’s a matter of time before we see people who do have an interesting approach get their hands on these [smart glasses],” Liv tells me as she draws a comparison to Pavel Golik and Juergen Teller figuring out a way to shoot compelling editorial content on an iPhone. It’s a matter of giving someone, like Nadia Lee Cohen who has already worn smart glasses to a Coperni show, a check and an empty brief for them to catch on. It’s a matter of throwing an atmospheric house track over one more Uncut Gem-style video for me personally to order a pair of bootleg camera glasses on Amazon. Where does this urge to experiment and reclaim the tech that frightens us in an act of “empowering exhibitionism” take the casual panopticon and every conversation that surrounds it? That, I am not so sure of.

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IN THE MARGINS

• Thank you for all the love on Real Girls Report! Reminder that there are two more chapters about real girls’ fashion and lifestyle waiting for you here.

• 30+ new additions to Busy Corner this week — references, talent, magazines, book stores, and more.

• Google partnered with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to design the Android XR glasses.

• Cosmopolitan introduced a new wearable tech column “Locked In” (lol). The spring and summer issues feature Alice McNally and Emma Rogue wearing AirPod Max and Oura rings. Eva Chen’s dialing.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business :)

Every part of women’s identities – the books on our nightstands, our opinions and values, who we spend time with and where – are leveraged for clicks, followers, and insights swapped between magazines, brands, and marketing agencies. Ironically, the people who claim to understand us the most are the ones mistaking noise for signal, satisfied with picking up on the outer traits of the mainstream female identities without digging deeper. Some are chasing blonde all-American girls who move to New York from Charleston to drink dirty martinis. Others are captivated by tortured artsy girls downtown who never smile in photos and keep a low online profile. Neither realize how similar these two groups of women actually are.

The only girls I care to pay attention to are the ones who don’t perform for others – be it industry gatekeepers or the algorithm. I call them real – a simple world that’s doing a lot of work to describe their elusive qualities. They too want to be liked and capitalize on influence but they are confident enough not to bend their interests to fit an existing mold. They are grateful for sponsorships and invites, but what they are really after are opportunities to “be in the room” which is why rather than turning themselves into digital mannequins and salesmen, they take the long road of becoming friends and collaborators to the people they look up to. It takes a lot of patience and hard work to appear as lucky and effortless as they do. 

I spend a lot of time watching and listening to these girls because they are the ones who have the power to move culture, and because selfishly, I want to be one of them. You might not know who they are yet, but you are certainly familiar with their work — these are the girls who mold, capture, and inspire the most interesting names in the zeitgeist until they are big enough to fly on their own. They are talented curators, stylists, writers, makeup artists, models, directors, and they are also just friends of friends…of friends who are down to show up for their peers simply because they see something special in them. To them, it’s less about climbing a ladder or cashing in favors and more about doing what they love with the people they admire. To me, it’s less about predicting what’s next or stealing their swag and more about learning from the women I respect and find interesting. 

Mildly disturbed by the LinkedIn-fication of culture research that revolves around unearthing quick insights about a certain demo with the sole purpose of repackaging them into client decks and TikToks, I wanted to take my time and get to know real women the way they deserve – not as part of a statistic or photographs inserted into a marketing brief, but as complex individuals who are so much more than consumers. It turns out that when you dig deeper than surface-level trends and performative behaviors, you realize that there is quite a discrepancy between what the loudest voices in beauty, fashion, and culture say is happening, and where women are actually moving and taking our culture to. 

Continue reading on Busy Corner

CHAPTER ONE: “STOP SACRIFICING SWAG FOR BEAUTY”

When Emily Wood first graced my feed in 2023, I thought she was kooky. She refers to herself as a “face decorator” rather than a makeup artist which feels appropriate considering her application technique. Emily doesn’t own a ring light. She does her makeup on the balcony, in the elevator, or what looks like British countryside in less than ideal weather conditions. Some days, she whips out a brush to apply a nude color to her lips, and some days, she is slathering neon green eyeshadow all over her eyelids with her fingers. In her hands, a lip pencil is a blush, an eyeshadow, a contour, and a skin tint. Her content doesn’t quite fit anywhere between the intricate makeup videos I watched on YouTube as a teen and the seven-step skincare routines I save on TikTok as a young woman. I wonder if beauty brand managers would’ve still been writing her off as “the weird girl” who doesn’t fit into their brand’s aspirational mood board if the internet didn’t find out that she was Aimee Lee Wood’s sister. I wonder if they would’ve looked at her twice if she wasn’t white and naturally pretty which isn’t to say she doesn’t deserve the attention she is getting. 

If you zoom out and look at the bigger picture though, nothing about Emily is weird. After five years of glossy lips, donut glaze skin, and bushy boy brows, we are up for a resurgence of the bolder nostalgic looks. On social media, alternative fashion, beauty, and lifestyle influences have long started thinning, bleaching, and shaving off their eyebrows to replicate the 90s grunge looks, and for a brief moment in 2021, some of them were even drawing dark undereyes. Like Emily, they are applying skincare and makeup in the middle of busy city streets, on subway trains, and in the middle of nowhere. If early beauty creators turned an intimate ritual into entertainment, the youngest generation of beauty creators turned it into performance art. While the final look matters, so does the act of self-expression that is creating it in public.  

Outside of the internet, prominent fashion figures, like Alex Consani and Gabbriette made 90s eyebrows part of their signature look. Celebrities, like Julia Fox, Doja Cat, and Chappel Roan, have leaned heavily into drastic red carpet looks that reference everything from pop culture moments to Greek mythology. Margaret Zhang, Tiffany Godoy, and Mix Wei brought progressive makeup looks, reminiscent of the 80s editorial and stage makeup, to the big fashion covers – W Magazine China and Vogue China and Japan – pushing partner brands, like Chanel Beauty, out of their comfort zone. And of course, there is a whole slew of independent magazines and fashion brands that never stopped pushing for artistry and creative expression in beauty. 

Last year, Pat McGrath and her team caused a social media frenzy with the porcelain doll looks they created for John Galliano’s last couture show at Margiela. It felt like everyone remotely interested in beauty and fashion was trying to crack what was used to create that porcelain shine on the models’ skin. A year later, those looks materialized in the beauty market in the form of the Skin Fetish mask which caused tension among industry insiders – many questioned whether releasing a $38 mask that the internet has long managed to find a drugstore dupe for, was a smart business decision. Its utility outside of the editorial world was also questionable which is likely why the company launched a much more versatile Skin Fetish setting spray a few weeks ago. 

Other beauty companies, like Starface, have been changing the narrative around imperfections with colorful acne patches spotted on everyone from Addison Rae to Lil Uzi Vert. In the past couple of years, their PR reps at Gia Kuan Consulting scored the company The Face and Dazed cover shoots with Madeline Argy and Amelia Gray, Collina Strada runway show at NYFW, and a collaboration with Heaven by Marc Jacobs – pushing the brand and its young customers into the editorial beauty territory that other young commercial brands, like Glossier, Rhode, and Rare Beauty largely stay away from. 

None of this is happening in the vacuum. There is an obvious link between what’s happening in the arts, entertainment, and culture at large and beauty trends. Self-expression that’s integral to the queer clubbing and rave scene has exploded into the mainstream post “brat summer” after slowly but surely building up its influence over the past few decades. “Without spaces where subcultures can genuinely experiment with their style, beauty would completely lose out to the clean girl aesthetic,” Hatti Rex writes in the intro of her interview with photographer Felicity Ingram who spent the past two years documenting the experimental fashion and makeup looks created by underground youth. “Nobody is rocking up to reformer pilates or an all-hands meeting with liberty spikes and kabuki make-up, as iconic as that may be.”

These days, stripping off layers and showing up as “authentic self” feels boring rather than refreshing – partially because very few people are authentically interesting and partially because authenticity has lost value and meaning in the current attention economy. All identity construction is artificial even if you are a civilian picking out an outfit, a makeup look, and a hairstyle that feels like you. The only way to remain honest is to embrace the absurdity and use beauty and fashion to create compelling characters. “The world is your stage” calls for exaggerated, almost theatrical makeup that communicates something rather than makes the performers look pretty. 

The value of beauty and specifically the type of beauty that fits into the conservative, predominantly white standards, is questionable in the world where women are both increasingly independent and aware of the misogyny that surrounds them. A few months ago, I came across a video that said “I love Emma. She does nothing for the male gaze,” over a screengrab of influencer Emma Chamberlain learning to play a ukulele. Last September, she posted a YouTube video documenting the hairstyles she’s had over the years and the process of making a decision to cut her hair short…and then shorter for the Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty…and then even shorter for The Met. The fans didn’t love it, but she didn’t care, reiterating something along the lines of “it makes me feel cool” over and over again, and seven months later, everyone is finally seeing the vision. 

With the rise of the “manosphere” influencers and political figures openly attacking women’s rights, it’s tempting to point to a resurgence of “men repeller” looks – short colorful hair, bleached eyebrows, bold makeup, piercings, and tattoos. But that would mean that any form of women’s self-expression is tied to men in one way or another which is unfair even to the “clean girls” on TikTok who dabble in minimal makeup, stereotypically preferred by men, as a form of self-care and attempt to connect with other women. That would leave out a growing number of women who just don’t care where they stand in relation to the male gaze and want to have fun with the largely female and queer fashion and beauty crowds. 

What I find odd is that most of the beauty brands represented in large retailers, like Ulta and Sephora, are still producing products and marketing for the lowest common denominator consumer. Majority of innovation goes into perfecting the formula and creating the ultimate base, blush, and glossy lip. Majority of the marketing budget goes into influencer marketing, aesthetic iPhone photos, and dreamy activations. Very few product developers and marketers care to dig deeper into the recent shifts in women’s behavior, lifestyles, and interests. If they did, we would’ve seen a wider range of shades, colors, and textures, multi-use products, and a variety of face decorations on the market. We would have had thoughtful conversations about beauty in the context of self-expression, art, creativity instead of watching someone blend their blush and reapply lip gloss over and over again.

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This is the end of the Real Girls preview. Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and see you at busycorner.xyz for Real Girls Chapter Two and Three :)

My only consolation is that there is a reason why all these years later, young people en masse still idolize these larger-than-life characters — they represent what feels like a now mostly gone ‘everything-is-possible’ era of the city where a talented artist could exchange their work for a room at the Chelsea Hotel, and a former waitress and restaurant manager could scrape together enough money to sign a 15-year lease downtown and open their own place.

What’s not lost on my generation is the power of blind enthusiasm that gets you to close your eyes and follow your most delusional dreams anyway — despite the housing crisis, the quiet recession, and some sort of geopolitical crisis always looming in the background. James Sundquist, the founder of Uhaul Gallery is an excellent example of that.

Technically, Uhaul Gallery is exactly what it sounds like — a mobile art gallery set up in the back of a standard U-Haul truck. But on a conceptual level, it’s also a meta statement on the hypercommodification of space in the city where every squire foot is accounted for despite plenty of storefronts and office spaces remaining vacant as landlords hold out for affluent tenants — a bummer for artists, creatives, and small business hustlers who make the city special.

The original idea for Uhaul Galley came to James around 2016-2017 when he thought about driving a truck full of his paintings to New York from Rhode Island, where he grew up, on a Thursday night to coincide with art show openings in Chelsea, but it wasn’t until last spring when he finally got the guts to go through with it. “I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the cost of space and battling that in order to have a place to paint and make art. I was running myself ragged trying to balance work with personal life with my own studio practice,” he explained. “During one studio move, I remember putting the first painting in the back of a U-Haul and having a moment of recognition of that earlier idea. I saw 3 walls and a roof — a gallery. The next night I went to an opening at a Chinatown gallery and I realized the space I was standing in was effectively the same size as a U-Haul…I estimated they were paying many thousands of dollars a month to hold that amount of space. The Uhaul is 19.99/day. Better yet, it could be anywhere. Even in the most expensive real estate markets in the city, I'd be paying the same price to have a gallery.”

The inaugural Uhaul Gallery show took place in SoHo — a neighborhood that went through a classic case of gentrification. “It felt appropriate to reclaim that space,” James told me. Titled Delivery Included, it featured works from Titus McBeath and Luc Hammond-Thomas among other artists and was a real team effort to put together — fellow artists Fili Latinikas, Buzz Smith, as well as James’ partner Briana Van Verdeghem all came together to make it happen.

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Since then, they’ve hosted five more shows in New York and most recently, one in LA, parking right outside of prominent galleries and international art fairs. Each one was powered by friendly mischief and hustle, as well as parking tickets and hit-and-run collateral framed and sold as art pieces along the way. My favorite is the one titled Stolen Goods. Put together in collaboration with Victoria Gill and Jack Chase, it featured crowdsourced objects people have stolen from work — everything from a box full of cheap black hair combs to the original Pink Panther animation cel stolen from Framestore in London. Jack’s contribution was the Boards of Canada record Music Has the Right to Children (1998) that he stole on his last day at Eavesdrop bar in Brooklyn, titled I Was The Only One Who Would Play This Record Anyway.

Just around the time I decide to profile Uhaul Gallery, happened to write a piece on the blurring lines between “journey” and “destination” in the most literal sense — transport that substitutes real estate as economic inequality in cities in the US and across the world intensifies. “As urban real estate grows more expensive, activities that might otherwise take place in buildings spill onto the street,” he explained. “The food truck—as much a symbol of the millennial generation as not being able to buy a home—exemplifies this: Food trucks proliferated in gentrified American urban areas not because they needed mobility but because streets and parking lots are more economical sites than the equivalent building space in many locations.”

To some degree, these mobile establishments are a painful physical representation of the gloomy and confusing American reality that many of us try not to acknowledge for the sake of preserving our own sanity. If you give it too much thought, you eventually start wondering — is a food truck a powerful act of rejecting the system or its unwitting accomplice? Are we sticking it to the man by finding loopholes in his rules or are we merely encouraging his behavior by refusing to engage with them all together?

Objectively though, transport is not that different from buildings, especially as our lives become more digital. “If the plane has wi-fi, it’s just another room — maybe a bit more cramped than the one where you’d be working or watching TV at home, but good enough for a few hours,” Drew argued in his piece. Plus, the stakes are high — by physically displacing artists, creatives, and hustlers from the neighborhoods they inhabited, the rapid growth of the tech sector and the financial inequality it created also disrupted global art and culture in a negative way. “its kinda fucked up theres no exiled intellectual cities anymore. its just expensive everywhere now,” @clockstiqqun wrote in a viral tweet. “theres nowhere to be a weird little fuckup with your weird little fuckup friends and thats why literature is dead.” In this context, a gallery inside a U-Haul could be a catalyst for a radical effort to bring back the magic of the city that people like Keith McNally, write Instagram captions and memoirs about.

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Uhaul Gallery’s biggest undertaking to date is organizing the Uhaul Art Fair that is set to take place across ten U-Haul trucks parked in Chelsea in September. If you are an artist looking to have your work featured or a curator looking to get involved in putting the fair together, fill out an application here. In the meantime, you can catch Uhaul Gallery’s next show Today, Last Year — the gallery’s first solo exhibit starring Ben Nunez — in Chelsea from May 8th to May 11th. “The show is a presentation of Ben's "Panopticon" piece from 2024 in which he wore a police body camera everyday of his waking life that year,” James told me. “As the show title implies, we will be screening the film from May 8th-11th of last year. People will be able to buy a day of Ben's life on a USB stick.” Follow them on Instagram to get the location info closer to that weekend, as well as the details for three more shows they will host overt the summer.

IN THE MARGINS:

• Busy Corner now has a Newsboard that will populate with new content over the week. This week’s curation features my chat with Ellie Chen and Jensen Neff about the community they’ve built around their LA-based clothing brand Oddli for Inc. Your favorite artists, creatives, and influencers are all over their Instagram comments gushing about Oddli’s new collections and growth milestones (without being on the brand’s payroll!), and two minutes into talking to Ellie and Jens, I understood why.

• In case you missed last week’s newsletter, I got to speak with three impromptu Puma researchers and archivists about Puma’s stupidly cool 2000s archives as well as the brand’s latest comeback attempts:

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business :)

But consumers are savvy. By now, anyone who is remotely interested in fashion, understands the basic mechanics of an orchestrated resurgence campaign — luxury fashion and indie designer collabs, influencer gifting, and celebrity ambassador contracts. While all of this certainly brings exposure and drives immediate conversions, it doesn’t fill a brand with sauce. Lucky for Puma, it turns out, there is plenty of sauce in the archives, as well as a couple of culture and fashion trends colliding in the zeitgeist to create an opportunity for a grand comeback — that, of course, if they play their hand right. To help me figure out what that could look like, I spoke to three accidental Puma researchers, resellers, and archivists who, while being only lightly associated with Puma, are the main reason why I got curious and excited about the brand — Alice of Bootalicious and Rhea and Max of Andro1dGirl.

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Alice, who’s been a vintage reseller on Depop since she was fifteen, decided to focus on shoes three years ago out of convenience. In the process, she started finding cool vintage Puma pieces that sparked her interest — lots of original Speedcats and ballet flats but also Circats, Lowvitations, and luxury collabs. “At the time, basically no one was buying it,” she recollected. “I was like, why does no one sell this? This is so nice,” so she decided to take a risk and buy those pieces up just around the time Puma started popping back into the zeitgeist. Rhea’s and Max’s bet on Puma was more intentional but nonetheless, just as lucky. “[Max] has these premonitions, like a fortune-teller. He was like “Rhea, I think ballet flats are gonna come back — this was two years ago,” Rhea explained. “I was like what kind of ballet flats? And he was like Puma.” Skeptical, she agreed to source and bring back vintage Puma pieces back to Melbourne from their joint trip to France. They checked in an extra suitcase full of Speed Princesses, Mostros, and some gorgeous pieces from Puma’s ‘96 Hours’ line among similar silhouettes from other sportswear brands.

All three researchers specialize in sourcing pieces from the early 2000s which feels like the golden era of Puma. “There was a lot more creativity in design back then,” Alice told me. “I also think the quality of products was generally so much better.” “We had a chat with [Florence Weber] who did the Impulse Cat which is the first ballet flat they ever did, and [Joerg Rohwer-Kahlmann] who is the designer of the Futurecat, and they were telling us that [Puma] would sent them to camps somewhere in Spain, and they would just give them a brief that was like ‘designers on acid’ — you go and you come back with what you want,” Max explained. “Puma was literally just approving everything that landed on their desk because they were in dire state with their money, they were about to collapse,” added Rhea.

“Designers on acid” they were. There were Puma Kugelblitzs designed by Peter Schmid in 2004 and named after a theoretical black hole, the Levitation shoes designed by Joerg Rohwer-Kahlmann in 2005 that featured a floating heal, and Puma K-1s with a wrap-around ‘cheese sole’ designed for draining excess water while kayaking. But perhaps the most mind-bending and boundary-breaking designs came from Puma’s luxury line ‘96 Hours’ that was conceptualized as a competitor to Prada Sport, and an indoor sports line Puma Nuala that was produced in collaboration with model Christy Turlington — an early 2000s predecessor of ballet and pilates princess cores. Alice found an insane pair of 'Gol Wn’s' which is essentially a women’s dress shoe with a removable kitten heel tip, inspired by football cleats. Max and Rhea sourced a gorgeous pair of “Mahanuala” knit boots and tall suede boots from the Nuala line that the Addison Rae and Lexee Smith types would absolutely die for. And then, of course, there were a few of iconic luxury collaborations with Alexander McQueen, Mihara Yasuhiro, and Jil Sander. Pretty much all of these styles had limited runs which makes them hard to find and even identify. There are barely any traces of Puma’s most creative silhouettes and sub lines on the internet, and it’s a real community effort between the brand’s archivists and past and present employees to identify the names of certain styles and the sub lines that they belong to.

“Ahead of its time” is a phrase I saw a lot when looking through Alice’s, Max’s and Rhea’s archives. There are so many “weird” (by the mainstream standards) silhouette that could easily be the hottest shoe of the year now — in the post-hype beast, Yeezy, and Demna’s Balenciaga era that exposed the masses to all kinds of freaky conceptual footwear. Rombaut’s Levitation shoes feel like an an original concept until you realize it’s actually a modern take on an archival Puma style, and the ‘96 Hours’ dress shoes aren’t that far off conceptually from the controversial New Balance loafers. My age is showing here, but the deeper I dove into Puma’s archives, the more “back to the future” the modern state of footwear felt — either Puma designers were insanely avant-garde or fashion is really that cyclical. Max suggested it was the latter — forgotten 2000s silhouettes, which Rhea aptly described as “space age with sportswear combined” looking “fresh” to the consumers who have been “forced-fed chunky shoes and soles” for nearly a decade. “Fashion is like a rubber band — you pull, and you pull, and you pull, it’s just gonna completely wack in the other way around,” Max theorized. Still, I wondered if in the broader cultural and industry context of the early 2000s, these archival Puma silhouette felt as extraordinary as they do now in the current landscape of commercial fashion.

In 2010s, Puma went through several ownership and leadership changes as it struggled to compete financially and maybe most importantly, lost whatever cultural influence and street credit it had managed to accumulate in the early 2000s. They tried to ride the the chunky sole trend with their first ever Fenty collab which apparently, performed really well and helped reposition Puma as a fashion brand even though the only person I know who bought into those suede creepers was my best friend in college who was a huge fan of Rihanna. Outside of that, Puma became a discounted retailer staple while other prominent brands, like New Balance, Vans, and Nike cycled in and out of the zeitgeist, and young brands, like Hoka and On, entered the market.

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Today, Puma is still largely under water — in January, their shares fell by 18% (the lowest they’ve been since 2018) after the brand reported lower than expected fourth-quarter sales and a decline in annual profit for 2024. The sales of Speedcats which the brand has been actively pushing as the next ‘it shoe’ and a fresh alternative to Adidas Gazelles and Sambas, have been weaker than projected, and their investment into A$AP and Rihanna, hasn’t won them as much cultural relevance as they had hoped. Still, with the current footwear market being oversaturated with collaborations, the eroding dominance of Nike, and Puma poaching a handful of folks who are responsible for turning Adidas around, it feels like there is still a window for a Puma comeback.

“Three years ago, if you wanted the cool stuff, you needed to go to a store that had a Nike TL 0 [accounts that carry the most exclusive releases] in order to get the Travis Scott and [limited drops] like that. Most of the personnel there would just backdoor everything, it would end up on Facebook Marketplace [and] Stock X…and people grew completely tired of this,” Max explained. “General Release used to be almost an insult, and it’s not the case anymore. At some point, the girls started going to Footlocker and grabbing those ASICS 1130s that you can find just about anywhere for maybe €100. And that was the death of exclusivity, no one wants [exclusive collabs] anymore. They just want to be able to go online, or to a store, and grab something.” And Puma’s comeback efforts are largely aligned with that. Unlike brands, like New Balance, whose resurgence was jumpstarted with 500s collabs, they are streamlining their messaging and marketing spend to position Speedcats (and their ballet flats variation) as the next big everyday sneaker.

That’s not to say it will be an easy feat — by now, every brand, from Nike and Vans to Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton, are gunning to kick Adidas off its pedestal with their own version of a basic skinny sneaker. The advantage that Puma does have is the community of archivists, researchers, and past employees that has organically formed around the brand in the past couple of years. Nurturing this curiosity and these connections has been instrumental in building genuine excitement around the brand. Max and Rhea got to curate an exhibit showcasing the evolution of Puma’s Speedcat from 1999 to 2025 at a brand activation in Melbourne. Alice’s archival Speedboat collection has been spotlighted by Puma UK. And George Roberts of Inside Tag, who Alice, Max, and Rhea have unanimously voted “the nicest guy ever” got to release a limited run of his own trainers with Puma among other things. “It’s so good to see Puma promoting the people who have made this comeback happen,” Alice said. “It doesn’t happen often. Normally, [a brand] would realize that there is a trend, and they would grab it and then not thank anybody.” To me, that alone makes it the type of brand that’s worth rooting for.

IN THE MARGINS:

• Busy Corner has a long-promised new look thanks to my dear friend Jenny Nilsson! Please bear with me as I finish transferring over every reference, agency contact, and culture report over to the new website, as well as ironing out remaining quirks this weekend. Keep an eye out for new additions next week, and check out Jenny’s portfolio while you are here.

• A couple of weeks ago, I got to speak to Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo of 831 Stories about the merch side of their romantic fiction business for Inc. Their clever baseball hats that play into the common romance tropes (i.e. Enemies to Lovers) as well as their ‘in-universe’ items designed to prolong their readers’ time with their favorite 831 Stories book characters have become a much larger than expected source of both revenue and exposure for the brand. Thank you to my editor (who also writes) for the opportunity!

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business :)

On a quiet Wednesday afternoon, just a couple of weeks before Valentine’s Day earlier this year, a group of NYC creatives gathered in a jam-packed common room of a buzzy co-working space in SoHo to listen to an artist talk by Jason Nocito. It was just around the time when everyone in the city started to push themselves out of the winter slump and into the streets in search of fun, love, and opportunities. So, Jason’s stories about shooting buzzy celebrities, like Ariana Grande and Nicolas Cage for the covers of The Fader and GQ and finding inspiration in the unlikely patterns and objects he found in puddles and debris around the city, were right on beat. A big part of his talk was also about the photos from his monograph I Heart Transylvania that documents four years (!) worth of trips up to Vancouver to see his then long-distance girlfriend, now wife, Meghan as she finished up nursing school, and how much meeting her and falling in love has impacted his art. 

Surprisingly, there are quite a few parallels between searching for love and growing as a creative – the desire to find “your people”, the pressure to act likable, and the courage and patience it takes to consistently put yourself out there and be vulnerable. There’ve been so many times, both on dates and at creative gatherings, when I’ve felt like everyone else was having a blast, effortlessly chatting up the coolest people in the room while I was anxiously rattling off the same, kind of boring facts about myself to the person in front of me – what I do for work and what’s it like to split time between New York and Europe – and listening to their thoughts on the latest season of Industry or White Lotus. Whether I am standing in a room full of fellow creatives or sitting in front of someone at a restaurant table, my biggest hope is that the conversation won’t turn into an impromptu job interview.

My go-to trick for taking the pressure off and making real connections with people, both romantic and not, is to skip the usual coffees and dinners and invite them to some sort of event or exhibit that would give us something to talk about outside of our resumes. In general, I am a vocal proponent of getting out of the house to peruse the thoughtful curations of local shops, learn how to play chess in a buzzy downtown bar on a Tuesday night, or pop into someone’s event simply because no artsy self-help book or strategy report have impacted how compelling of a person and creative I am quite like getting to know the people who work and live around me. Some nights I had fun, some nights I learned a lot about unlikely subjects, like menswear and AI, and some nights made me realize how lucky I am not to be confined within the NYC downtown scene bubble. 

So, as the city warms up both temperature and general attitude-wise, I hope you take every opportunity you get to look away from your screens and meet someone IRL – perhaps, that Hinge match you’ve been chatting with for a little while. And to help you have a fun time and learn something about yourself and others in the process, I curated a shortlist of events, club meetups, and experiences that you can use as creative date ideas or perfect excuses to put your best outfit on and get out of the house. 

Artist talks and studio visits hosted by Homes and Studios

Jason Nocito’s talk that I mentioned in the very beginning was organized by a creative producer Rachael Yaeger and Isabel Münter who you should be already familiar with from an earlier newsletter about Pawn Chess Club. Together, they curate an archive of artists’ homes and studios as well as architectural gems around the world on their website and host studio visits and artist talks in NYC. “What makes these talks [and visits] special is how intimate of an experience it is,” Isabel told me. “The speakers are often established and accomplished, so getting to know them better in an intimate space for 1.5 hours humanizes them in a healthy way and puts them down from this celebrity pedestal.”

Most recently, Home and Studios organized a visit to Victoria Manganiello’s studio in Brooklyn to check out her abstract paintings and kinetic sculptures made with hand-woven textiles. This month, they will be going on a day trip to KinoSaito – an interdisciplinary arts center in Verplanck, NY – where their guests get to explore the life and work of a Japanese abstract painter Kikuo Saito, tour the current exhibitions, and meet the artists in residence. Grab tickets here and follow Home and Studios on Instagram for more upcoming events.

2025 Tax Party hosted by Family Office

Last year, Family Office, a design studio founded Diego Segura and Eliz Akgün, pulled together a wild mix of speakers, like an extremely niche cult-followed financial writer Jim Grant and KJ and Curtis of Dimes Square’s favorite podcast The Ion Pack, for a night of casual conversations about money – a touchy subject for any creative and any relationship. “It was super free form, 130 people attended at Spring Place, and truly — I know I'm biased — people loved it,” Diego told me. 

This year, on Tax Day, they are doing it all over again but at an even cooler venue (perhaps, The Downtown Association – a historical social club in Lower Manhattan) and another wild mix of speakers. RSVP here and don’t procrastinate filing your taxes.

Sips and bites from local chefs, bakers, and makers

One of my biggest joys this past year has been watching people who make small batches of Italian sandwiches, artisanal teas, and fresh squeezed juices at home and slowly but surely scale their farmers’ market stands and weekend Citi bike deliveries into a full-time thing. Not only are these people real hustlers spinning up the coolest events in the intersection of food, art, and fashion, they are also anchors of their local neighborhood regularly bringing people across the city together over delicious treats. 

Tom Wright of Tom’s Juice, for example, has become fashion’s go-to event partner, making fresh-squeezed juices for brands, like Nike and Jacquemus, but also slinging them at his store in the East Village and out of his bike trunk. My friend Arjun Narayen of Raazi Tea has spun up a cafe at the latest Tata Bazaar, and you can grab a delicious chai from him at the Fort Greene farmers market on Saturdays to break up your coffee routine and hear out his comedy bits. While you are there, you can also check out Lisbonata whose founders Kamila and Jorge just got the keys to their first brick-and-mortar store in Crown Heights. And if you are in the mood for a picnic, head to the Grover Cleveland Park for mouth-watering paninis from Salvatore La Rosa of Salvo’s on Saturdays that he sells out of the most adorable blue truck. 

Exhibits and art spaces that don’t call for a rental car

On his episode of How Long Gone, comedian and the host of Subway Takes Kareem Rahma told Chris and Jason that his go-to first date move used to be a day trip to Storm King. After a bit of a debate about which one of the artsy destinations upstate are more romantic between Storm King and Dia Beacon, all three concluded the obvious – both feel more like a fourth or fifth date. Personally, I’ve gone on dates to both (the Storm King trip was more romantic but maybe I was just more in love then), so here is a list of local exhibits and art spaces that don’t call for a rental car: 

• The Loving Cup at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery. On view February 14th - April 12th, 2025

• Frieze New York 2025 at The Shed. On view May 7 – May 11.

• Gordon Matta-Clark: NYC Graffiti Archive 1972/3 at White Columns. On view March 20 – May 10.

• Leonard Baby’s The Babys and Colleen Barry’s Good Mud at Half Gallery. On view March 26th – April 24th, 2025.

• Ben Wether’s Townworld at Amanita. On view March 6, 2025 – April 20, 2025.

• Landline with works by Leonard Baby, Bernie Kaminski, Karyn Lyons, and Gösta Peterson at Turn. On view March 5th – April 25th.

• Hope Atherton’s Umbra at Gratin. On view March 6 – April 12. 

Screening and film clubs

The last movie I saw in a theater was Opus by Mark Anthony Green who used to be a writer at GQ prior to becoming a director and getting an A24 deal for this film. It had a stunning title card, John Malkovich acting like a diva in Rick Owens boots, great body horror and a couple of charmingly odd transitions that remind you that it’s MAG’s first feature film. Prior to watching the movie, I listened to the director’s Throwing Fits interview which, despite James’ and Larry’s risqué humor, nearly brought me to tears – it took a village and a lot of friendly favors to make MAG’s big screen debut. 

There are a couple of other screenings I’d catch this spring brought to you by no less talented creatives whose work brings people together around the big screen:

• Bad Film Club X Partiful. Screening of AIRPLANE! (1980) at 7:15, followed by a party at 9. Open Bar, Popcorn, Cake + goodies and photos by Partiful. Catch it at The Hancock in Brooklyn on April 24. 

• ‘Welcome to Suburbia’ series at the Metrograph. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, Metrograph will be screening a series of classics that explore the dark underbelly of American suburbs, including American Beauty, Suburbia and Harmony Korine’s Gummo. Surprise guest + a perfect opportunity to open up about your family during the debrief – on throughout April.  

Stud Country line dancing parties

A little while ago, I found Elaine Constantin’s ‘Mosh’ photo series that she shot for The Face in 1997, picturing something that’s rare today – a bunch of sweaty young people dancing the night away at a Northern Soul music club with no phones in sight. “The person becomes locked into the record,” she wrote in Northern Soul. “The desire is just to experience the record in their own head, not to impress anyone. The music allows you to jump inside and escape. It takes you somewhere else.” Since then, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of chasing that high of feeling completely and utterly present, and that one clip from the Footloose (2011) dancing rehearsal that keeps coming up on my feed hasn’t been helpful. 

Since Northern Soul isn’t up for a revival, I’ve been meaning to check out Stud Country – a queer line dancing club founded by best friends, Sean and Bailey, who teach partner dancing and classic era line dances from disco to nineties country while mixing in new genre pop songs. They just posted their event schedule for April, and you can follow them on IG for the dances and workshops coming up in May. 

Flip through art books (or play a game of chess) at the city’s coolest bookstore

There is a bookstore I’ve been meaning to check out, called High Valley Books. The sweetest man Bill Hall runs it out of his house in Greenpoint — he and his family live upstairs, but his living room and basement are covered in stacks of vintage books. All visits are appointment only, and all first time customers get a private tour from Bill. Buying a book here feels like getting to keep something from his personal collection and at the end of your visit he will offer to take your picture to commemorate it. 

Creatives spend so much time analyzing the way the internet has changed our relationships and dreaming about a more offline future that sometimes I am afraid that it takes away the energy that we could be putting into planting a flag somewhere and getting to know the people who live and work around us. So, I hope this guide gets off your phone and onto a great date, or at the very least – gives you an opportunity to learn something and have a fun time. Thanks to Hinge for sponsoring this newsletter, and if you or someone you know is hosting something fun in the city this spring – a lunch zine, an art show, or a bowling league tournament – drop a comment below! 

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business :) 

Over the past decade, just like luxury fashion and premium beauty, design has rapidly transitioned from a niche artful hobby to a mainstream commercial venture. What felt like an anecdotal experience of putting lots of effort and money into decorating my first NYC apartment at the tail of the pandemic and ending up in a home filled with a bunch of pop design objects that went viral on social media soon thereafter, was actually representative of a larger trend. When everyone was forced to spend most of their time scrolling through social media feed and making sourdough in 2020, the home decor market grew by a record 7.31%, reaching an evaluation of over $116B. The mecca of pop design, the MoMA Design Store experienced a 20% rise in transactions each year since 2020 and posted its strongest sales to date in 2022. A fashion e-commerce platform SSENSE introduced the Everything Else section to the website in December 2020, adding luxury design objects to its curation, and a cross-category marketplace for tastemakers Basic.Space that was founded the same year, would go on to raise $23M. Even today, despite everyone more or less returning to their pre-pandemic routines, the interest in aesthetic living remains strong with the home decor market projected to reach $139B by the end of 2025.

While design becoming more accessible to the masses is a largely positive trend, it has also done a lot of damage to the way we think about individual objects. If for older generations, design was something they needed to “get into", younger generations fall into it — once the industry knows that you have enough money to splurge on a sectional couch or at the very least, a colorful cutting board that would add a much needed color accent to your boring rental, they start actively luring you. And the way they go about it isn’t ideal — instead of educating the masses about the significance of certain makers, materials, and styles, most design brands with a mass market ambition dangle colorful kitchenware and furniture that looks like it belong in a playroom, and say something along the lines of “wouldn’t it be so cute to have something like that in your home?” And while this might be the right choice of language for design brands looking to expand their business quickly, it also erases the necessary friction between the audience and the makers and fills our homes with a bunch of memable objects that we treat as commodities meant to create the optics of taste, rather than unique, artful objects.

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Reverting back to small feels like the latest trend across all creative industries that blew up quickly. Rachel Tashjian reported back from Paris Fashion Week that smaller shows, smaller budgets, and smaller guest lists were the mantra of the season. “Recently we feel that big business, big culture, global systems, world structures maybe are not so great after all,” she quoted Comme des Garçons’ show notes. “There is also strong value in small. Small can be mighty.” If a few years ago, we were in a transitional moment where meta commentary on the rapid commercialization of fashion and the culture at large made brands, like Vetements and Balenciaga, hot and financially successful, today, this messaging is so depressingly mainstream that both the people in creative industries and the public at large, have a renewed level of appreciation for sincerity and dedication to the craft. “This is not a time for brands (or anyone creative, whether they’re making clothes, books or movies) to be cynical,” Tashjian concluded. “It is time to offer another way forward. The future is terrifying, but for better or worse, it is a designer’s job to help show us what it could look like.”

Over in Los Angeles, Jesse Lee, the founder of the art and design marketplace Basic.Space that blew up in 2020, seems to be on the same wavelength. He is redirecting the focus of his team from the rapid growth of their digital platform to creating meaningful hybrid experiences for a smaller group of engaged art and design enthusiasts. After acquiring Design Miami, the host of some of the most visible design fairs in the world, they are merging the two brands together into Design.Space — seven-day design shopping events with invitation-only IRL previews and an e-commerce element open to the general public. They are also restricting the access to the Basic.Space app to a limited number of carefully curated members. “As a venture-backed startup, you think that you’re supposed to hit certain amount of growth rate year over year. I think we kind of fell into that trap,” Lee told Christopher Michael on the What’s Contemporary Now podcast. “Basic.Space was born out of curation…but I’d be the first to admit — after a couple of years, we sort of got away from that because, okay, we need more sellers to get more customers,” he continued. “We lost a little of that specialness from the beginning.”

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It takes time and patience to create high-quality experiences, products, and content and put them in front of carefully curated audiences instead of anxiously optimizing for virality and growth like everyone else, but that is what it takes to build a premium brand for a discerning audience. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen so many gimmicks on the runway and in showrooms that coming across creatives that are quietly but surely building something special feels instantly intriguing.

A little while ago, I stumbled upon Akua Objects’ “poetic tableware” designed by Annika Zobel Agerled and Josefine Arthur in Copenhagen and handmade by glassmakers in Bohemia and Murano. It’s tough to explain what exactly stood out to me — all I know is both their objects and their campaigns exude the type of magic you want to harness in your home and share with others. There are a couple of things they do differently — instead of running traditional marketing campaigns, they create “table poems.” “Most people can find poetic moments in their homes, especially around a table where memories are often created,” Josefine explained. “When we engage in art direction, Annika’s focus is on facilitating a feeling or narrative rather than simply showcasing a product without a story behind it.” “For us, poetry serves as a metaphorical language that evokes emotions and tells stories, allowing us to express complex feelings or thoughts in a compact form,” she continued. “Glassmaking is an art form that has, unfortunately, been forgotten by many and lost respect in the industrial era; therefore, we believe that a mouth-blown glass object, steeped in deep heritage, deserves to be framed within a poetic context.”

What’s also interesting is that the visual components of Akua Objects’ “table poems” are shot by fashion rather than product photographers, like Hasse Nielsen and Sascha Oda Adler, and that’s not just because the founders have a fashion background. “All of the photographers we choose to work with are light nerds and understand the beauty of shadows, incidence of light and staging the right daylight or rays of sun,” Annika told me. “This is very important for us because we are working with translucent objects. The difference between [photographing clothes and tableware] is that when working with fashion it’s all about creating an illusion and setting trends. I appreciate the timeless and more sculptural approach to my work, focusing on the silhouette, the overall aesthetic, and creating memorable pictures.”

What I still couldn’t wrap my head around though is how brands, like Akua, can balance their artful nature and commercial ambitions — how do they market products without getting overexposed and slipping into the pop design category? “Akua is grounded in emotions; our emotional compass guides us rather than conventional marketing considerations,” Annika explained. “We pursue what feels right, and as long as we trust our instincts, we believe the chances of ending up in a dystopian scenario are significantly reduced.”

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Something similar is happening at Laguna~B — a much larger glassware brand with much longer history. Initially founded by Marie Brandolini in the 90s, a Parisian who left New York in pursuit of glassmaking in Venice, the studio reinterpreted informal glassware traditionally made from a mix of scraps into collectible, functional art pieces sold both in department stores and auctions all over the world. Given how traditional and misogynistic the glassmaking industry was at the time (and largely, still is), Laguna~B was a radical and modern business. So, when Marie’s son Marcantonio Brandolini took over the company in 2016, his priority was to not only preserve its history and creativity but also carry on that youthful and contemporary spirit.

Looking through Laguna~B’s catalogue, I quickly realized that they made those charming striped vases for Bottega Veneta’s artisanal craft showcase last year, which feels in line with Marcantonio’s vision for the brand that he shared in a Town and Country profile a few months prior: “The main goal is to produce the highest-quality drinking glasses on the planet. Ones made with such elegance and artistry they become collectible artworks.” What I found the most fascinating though is that Marcantonio’s strategy for achieving the brand’s global ambitions isn’t limited to designing beautiful, high-quality objects and working with global luxury brands. Initiatives designed to reestablish Venice’s cultural relevance and reinvigorate the passion for glassmaking among the younger generation of artists and designers are also a big part of it.

Over the past couple of years, Laguna~B has transformed its newsletter into an editorial and finally, launched a digital magazine featuring essays, interviews, and articles about all things creativity and craftsmanship earlier this year. They also launched Autonoma Next - an international student program designed to expose more young artists and designers to glassmaking. In 2023, they facilitated a two-week residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington for an international group of students and instructors, and in 2024, they invited students from Chicago affected by gun violence for a 10-day glassmaking workshop in Murano. “It should not be the idea that the output of craft is an object of high luxury,” Marcantonio told Vogue in his 2023 profile. “Crafts should bring people together, make people happy about their lives, and inspire passion.”

Reviving the interest in glassmaking among younger creatives and artists does, in fact, seem like one of the strongest driving forces behind glassmaking slowly gaining back its footing in the art world after losing its reputation as an art form during the industrial years. There are quite a few creatives, like Marcantonio himself, who are taking over their family workshops and modernizing their designs and business practices to be in touch with the current state of the world. But there are also those who, like Justine Menard, are stumbling upon it after years of studying fashion and making jewelry and using that outside expertise and fresh ideas to push the boundaries of what a glassmaking practice is supposed to look like. Justine’s repertoire that ranges from the functional pieces, like glassware sets, to aesthetic jewelry pieces, like rings and brooches, to conceptual objects, like the series of beauty tools she created for Mid/night cosmetics, is a perfect example of that.

What all these younger creatives have in common is that while they welcome and actively pursue opportunities for global impact and exposure, they also understand the compounding value of personal relationships and touching individual lives. Whether it’s a glass you keep on your bedside table, a design fair installation, or a photograph you see on social media, it’s designed to provoke emotion rather than generate buzz. To them, focusing on the small doesn’t mean giving up on commercial ambitions but rather, mastering the craft of tuning out the noise in favor of perfecting the details that will eventually change the big picture.

IN THE MARGINS

• Big changes are coming to Busy Corner starting next week — Writer Rolodex will fold into a cross-industry Talent Rolodex, there will be a new side feed for me to share things I am reading, watching, and doing, and the whole thing will look different (you may have noticed the changes I’ve already started making on IG). Until then, I am adding a bunch of new magazines to the Indie Media guide, a couple of new stores to the Independent Retail list, and a bunch of new references to the Reference Bank once I am done with this project deadline I got today.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and check out my culture reports and curated lists at busycorner.xyz :)

In college, the library quietly became the center of my universe. It was a gorgeous two-story building with huge windows and tall ceilings in the heart of Southern California with Mac computers, free snacks, and lounge chairs where you could take a quick nap between classes. But most importantly, it was the place where student life happened — where gossip spread, quiz answers were exchanged, friendships grew closer, and crushes were made. Plus, there were all these gorgeous libraries I got to hang out at when visiting friends from neighboring schools and towns — the Huntington Beach Public Library with its famously beautiful gardens, Clack Library at UCLA that’s basically a time travel machine, and the brutalist marvel that is Geisel Library at UCSD where you can study for a Chem final while getting your steps in on a walking pad. I was still largely wary of their massive collections and archives but understood the importance of these places to their local communities and was deeply grateful for the memories and resources they so generously gifted me. Perhaps, America’s best talent is turning everything you think of as old, stuffy, and conservative into a fun adult playground.

Things got dark last year, when the New York Public Library closed its doors for the weekends and was under a threat of further defunding — all while the NYPD budget remained astronomical. It felt like overnight, libraries turned into political symbols — beacons of hope and places of refuge in the world that’s becoming increasingly soulless and commercial at the hands of its horrifyingly incompetent and cruel leaders. Watching young kids share how much they love coming to the library and hearing that Barnes & Noble is planning on opening at least sixty new stores this year makes me deeply emotional because of the growing fear of what the decline of literacy rates, the rampant anti-intellectualism, and the all-consuming capitalism can do to our culture in the next decade. I found a new level of respect for the people who dedicate their lives to preserving and curating important artifacts and ideas, and understood how special it is to spend hours flipping through book and magazine pages, uncovering images and ideas that are yet to be digitalized, recycled, and spit back at us in the form of green screen videos, useless products, and consumer trends. I started actively seeking out people who share book scans and archive curations, and create positive spaces for collective learning instead of pumping out culture criticism content that fosters anxiety and boosts egos, and promised myself to try and follow in their footprints.

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“I love looking at things—it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what draws me in. I often find myself clicking around the Internet Archive for hours, letting curiosity guide me,” Lucy Dellar, an artist, designer, and publisher who recently moved to New York from Australia told me when I reached out to her to learn more about her image research, book curation, and design practices. A few months ago, she started a newsletter where she shares scans from the books she’s collected on both her physical and digital shelves over the years — a natural extension of another one of her projects, called Library Sale. “Lately, I’ve been especially inspired by old software manuals — not just for their nostalgic content but also for their almost non-design quality,” she continued. “Many of these manuals were put together by community groups or enthusiasts creating club newsletters, resulting in layouts that are purely functional, unintentionally experimental, and unconcerned with trends. There’s a charm in that unpolished, DIY aesthetic, and I love how they capture a specific era of technology and the resourcefulness of the people who made them.”

Lucy’s interdisciplinary approach is what drew me to her work in the first place. Most people’s go-to when it comes to image research in print media are art books and fashion magazines which must be a big reason why fashion, beauty, and celebrity campaigns have been feeling stagnated. For a long time, Lucy’s favorite genres have been health, science, and various forms of life advice, like this brilliant book from the 80s called How to Be a Happy Homosexual or the one chronicling the history of female healers called Witches, Midwifes, and Nurses. “When I started Ok Books in 2016, I had recently moved through a period of inner transformation, and self-help books, guides on mindful movement and alternative healing/medicine were in heavy rotation,” she explained. “These books had a strong educational element, often featuring diagrams and instructional photography, which I’ve always been drawn to.” Over time, her interest shifted from these specific genres to the design choices, illustration styles, materials, and techniques used in books and ephemera created between 1950 and 2000, and she started pulling references from everything from vintage science videos and old manuals to grassroots newsletters. “I’m also fascinated by the female form, hands interacting with objects or demonstrating actions, and ex-library books that carry traces of their past owners or borrowers—annotations, library stamps, or even a child’s scribbles on an illustration,” she told me. “There’s something special about these quiet imprints of interaction, where a book becomes more than just an object but a record of lived experience.”

Looking through Lucy’s prints, illustrations, and commercial designs, I could see the influence of her visual research work. There is a webpage that looks like a handmade collage, a packaging element that resembles a black-and-white pop science illustration, and a digital drawing with the texture of a scanned ink stamp. I could roughly piece together the special way in which her ideas come about without knowing exactly which one of her clippings each of them came from. “I focus on recontextualizing found imagery and production methods, often experimenting with old software or unconventional tools to generate something that feels both nostalgic and new. It’s this process of reinterpretation — playing with different techniques, layering influences, and letting unexpected results emerge — that keeps my work from slipping into direct replication,” Lucy explained. “But most of all, I approach it with a sense of fun and curiosity. There’s so much joy in exploring, testing ideas, and seeing where they lead.”

The sense of curiosity and the patience it takes to find great source materials and experiment with them until you strike that delicate balance between drawing inspiration from the past and pushing your work forward, are deeply aspirational. A few months ago, I made the mistake of telling a VP at a marketing agency that one of my resolutions this year was to spend more time in archives and libraries which probably sounded like a red flag to him — no one in this industry likes to hear that you want to go down to the physical archives and flip through print pages when a client brief is due in a few days. But it feels like the tides are changing — there is a lot of interest from young creatives towards offline sources of inspiration and local libraries simply because of how overwhelming our digital lives have become. If the teenage me didn’t get the point of digging through stacks of magazines and books to find simple answers, the current me can’t get enough of it.

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IN THE MARGINS:

Lucy’s favorite libraries: the Concordia Library in Montreal, the Monash Library in Melbourne, and the Victoria University Library in British Columbia for their vast collections and architecture. The Barbican Library in London and the Royal Roads University Library in Victoria, BC for their built environment. The Brighton Library in Victoria, Australia for its intimacy and important role in the community.

Library visits that are on Lucy’s bucket list: Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, Toronto Reference Library, and The New York Picture Collection archive.

Books that made the most impact on Lucy’s creativity: Books by or about Bruno Munari and Corita Kent and their approach to making, focused on curiosity, play, and experimentation.

Books she is dying to get her hands on: There’s a book on shopping bag designs I’d love to own, but otherwise, my book collecting is mostly serendipitous. Although, now that I think of it, there are a few Remy Charlip books I’d love to add to my shelf <[:·).

IN OTHER NEWS:

I have one million ideas that I need to stop turning into two-week research projects that completely take over my life. From now on, I am committed to turning them into small curations and short notes on Busy Corner’s IG. This week’s curation is about…feet pics.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and check out my culture reports and curated lists at busycorner.xyz :)

This never-ending chain of referencing is a common theme in today’s pop culture. Ayo Edebiri’s Golden Globes Loewe suit referenced Julia Roberts’ off-the-rack Armani that she wore to receive the same award for Pretty Woman back when boxy shoulders and a wide pant were a bold choice for a Hollywood starlet. Cosmopolitan’s love issue features a photo of Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song that’s a direct reference to the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Rolling Stone cover photographed by Annie Leibovitz hours before Lennon was assassinated. Charli XCX and Troye Sivan posed for i-D in Stella McCartney ‘About Fucking Time!’ tank tops which are reproductions of the top Stella herself wore to her dad’s induction into The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2001 — a playful wink at both of these artists finally getting the mainstream recognition they deserve. Rhode replicated the iconic Versace FW 1994 campaign for the launch of Lip Shape, and Skims 2023 winter campaign, which made us all do a double take on Kim and polyester underwear, referenced the mischievous covers of a French adult-entertainment magazine Lui. Take anything you like, and chances are, it’s a reference to something everyone lost their minds about decades ago.

That’s not to say that every piece of art and creative that references something that came before it is automatically unremarkable or unoriginal. Dropped in the right place at the right time, a good reference, both widely known and obscure, can be a powerful storytelling tool that adds depth to the message or winks at a certain demo while flying over everyone else’s heads. The problem is that more often than not, what the public discourse refers to as a reference is actually just a blatant copy of something ripped out of its original context for the sake of visual aesthetics. And if out of our collective empathy for braving through the big content rat race, we’ve gotten used to the two-people marketing teams at small fashion, beauty, and DTC brands recreating Tumblr and Pinterest images that by now, have been practically burnt into every creative’s brain, things still get tense when a big celebrity moment is a carbon copy of something that came before it. If the people who have access to the best global talent and resources can’t execute something original and thoughtful, what does it mean for the rest of us down the creative food chain? Are young artists and brands robbing themselves of a chance to create their own legacy by associating themselves too closely with the big names of the past? And what does all of this say about the state of the culture at large?

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“I give it two more years or red carpets before the girlies completely run out of looks to reference,” writer, editor, and the host of The New Garde podcast tweeted out in response to a side-by-side of Tate McRae’s and Britney Spears’s identical lacy mini dresses that they wore to the VMAs — decades apart from each other. She can’t take full credit for it, but Alyssa’s best theory for why Hollywood starlets keep replicating iconic 90s looks is a deadly mix of fearing criticism and craving public attention at the same time. “I think because there is so much content and so many red carpets and so many step-and-repeat moments that if you are a celebrity, an influencer, or whatever, and you want to guarantee that press moment for yourself, going the reference route — because you know that ‘your outfit and then the reference outfit' post will go viral — is an easy way to get talked about,” she explained to me.

There is a similar media strategy behind archival pulls for young stars, aged brand identities, marketing campaigns that draw inspiration from old magazines and editorials, and even self-referential brand revival moments, like J.Crew’s catalogue relaunch and Gap’s dancing commercial. All of these things generate buzz around young celebrities, small brands, and sleeping corporate giants before their creative output is strong enough to generate the same level of buzz on its own. You don’t have to understand the hype around Olivia Rodrigo and her music to appreciate the fact that she copped her 73 Questions with Vogue Versace mini dress at Chloe Sevigny’s closet sale. Suddenly, she feels more sophisticated and culturally savvy than an average twenty-year-old pop star that blew up on TikTok. Suddenly, Drivers License could just be a girlhood anthem of a generation you don’t quite understand.

But while successful in terms of generating engagement and scoring street credit, creating direct associations between young artists or brands and prominent cultural artifacts can quickly backfire and rob them of something that is such more important than magazine headlines and social media impressions — an opportunity to create their own legacy. “We need those early career red carpet moments, even if they are bad, to look back on,” Alyssa told me. “That is part of your lore, that is part of your creative process to get where you are today. And I feel like we are losing that now because a lot of these young stars’ first forays on the red carpet are not an original, kind of crazy, moment.” And it goes beyond the red carpet — since attention became the primary currency over artistry and craft, the goalpost for a lot of young creatives has shifted from pushing their own limits and the limits of their industries by making something avant-garde to reverse-engineering brand campaigns, editorials, music, and fashion shows that have the potential to do well online. The same way young people are copying mature people’s outfits, young creatives are reproducing mature creatives’ style as a shortcut for getting the look and feel that only years of trial and error can amount to. Which is a shame, since every young creative that’s having a proper moment right now has at least a decade of fearlessly putting out their rough, early work behind them. There would be no Forever Yung without Ginseng Strip 2002, no Chicken Shop Date without Amelia Dimoldenberg’s student magazine column, and no custom JPG looks for Emma Chamberlain without her 2016 VSCO girl internet persona. Very few people are willing to put themselves at the risk of public ridicule and stick with it for years quite like that and to a certain degree, the public at large is directly responsible for it.

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Every pop culture moment, be it a red carpet, an album release, or a brand campaign, gets swallowed as a whole and spit back at us in a never-ending stream of hot takes, live reaction videos, memes, headlines, think pieces, and perhaps worst of all — LinkedIn strategy lessons. If this is how an average person interacts with pop culture, and if this is the type of environment we’ve cultivated for young creatives to work in, is it really that surprising that everything new feels depressingly recycled? Literacy rates are abysmal, commerce is stomping all over culture, young artists don’t have access to health insurance, Maya Hawke can’t get funding for a movie if her cast doesn’t meet a collective Instagram follower quota — and the best commentary the public at large can offer on all of this is joking about whose “nachos” are getting reheated by whom. “Not enough of you talking about annie lennox’s nachos but people can’t get enough of them!!” someone said in response to a side-by-side of Chappell Roan and Halsey both of which are referencing Annie Lennox. “she is reheating supernanny’s nachos,” another person wrote about the same picture of Chappell. To quote Ethel Cain’s viral Tumblr rant: “i LOVE to laugh and i love funny shit but like. we are in an irony epidemic…i feel like no matter what i make or what i do, it will always get turned into a fucking joke.” It’s a tough pill to swallow but perhaps, as a culture at large, we are asking for art and creatives we don’t quite deserve.

“I do think that there is a real hunger out these for something fresh,” Alyssa assured me. “And I do think we're in a time that's ripe for disruption, and I'm hoping that as the fashion month goes on, as the Oscars season comes to a close, and we move into the Met Gala, which offers some more opportunities for risk-taking, some people are going to shake it up.” And as I nodded along throughout our conversation, I also couldn’t help but hope that when these brave creatives decide to do something different, their managers will be brave enough to trust their intuition, their peers will be brave enough to support and work alongside them, and their audiences will be brave enough to be earnest and thoughtful in spite of the irony and thought leadership epidemic.

IN THE MARGINS:

• A bunch of new references in the Busy Corner Reference Bank this week: a sweaty dance editorial I picked up in ’s newsletter, a vintage Puma archivist, and a photobook dedicated to cartel influencers among other things.

• Thank you for all the love on the Mass and Luxury Fashion Report! Since I published it a couple of weeks ago, Alec Leach speculated about the near future of the luxury market, Aaron Levine curated some pieces for Zara, and Style Not Com got slammed for making a fashion week capsule with Zara and then landed a spot on the LVMH Prize panel the following week. I am going to be rounding up the free report giveaway today at 11:59 PM EST and notifying the five lucky winners early next week. So, if you don’t hear from me by Wednesday, I hope you can ask your manager to expense it and get your copy here.

Thank you for reading all the way through! Follow me and Busy Corner on IG for quick notes on creativity and business and see you at busycorner.xyz :)