The aspect ratio 9:16 has passed away of natural causes, surrounded by its extended family of influencers, creators, and scrollers. It spent its last days doing what it loved: Being liked and followed.

9:16 was raised on the wrong side of the tracks, in the early days of Snapchat. It met the world through the disappearing medium of the “Story,” but from the beginning, it had ambitions to become part of history. The aspect ratio burned bright through the pandemic, reaching its pinnacle during that period with the twin-ascent of TikTok and Instagram Reels.

9:16’s impact on image culture is objective and undeniable. It allowed CONTENT to flow into a seamless scroll on our phones with no frames or borders. Its shape — the exact shape of the iPhone — democratized cultural production by making everything in one’s camera roll primed to become mass media, no cropping necessary. Ironically, it would also be an iPhone – the iPhone Duo, which was announced last month and ships tomorrow – that would signal its demise.

Born in 2012, 9:16 lived for centuries in Internet Years. In an effort to remember its glory, this is (a very incomplete) list of milestones that marked its infiltration into fashion:

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I’ve noticed something fishy in the air recently. Not quite a Vibe Shift, let alone a Paradigm Shift. More like a smell than something that’s actually happened.

Audiences are getting fatigued on the dominant mode of consuming and sharing ideas within our cultural marketplace. The fumes of this burnout linger everywhere. People talk about their phones the way the media used to talk about smoking crack. It’s unclear if anything we’re seeing is real anymore (dead internet theory). The dopamine hit of “breaking the internet” doesn’t even hit the way it used to. Ana Andjelic mapped part of this phenomenon extensively in her series on the death of virality. But what I’m smelling is something more extreme, perhaps a total reversal in the laws of cultural physics altogether.

Two occurrences bookended this epiphany for me:

1. A year ago, when social media overlord Mark Zuckerberg declared that we’re in a loneliness crisis where the average person has less than three real friends. (But don’t worry, we’re going to become friends with AI.)

2. The unveiling last month of the iPhone Duo, a product that announced the death of the 9:16 era in culture. After inventing the vertical slab on which all of our social output now takes place, it’s as if Apple said, “Okay the jig is up, turn that shit to the side and exit the infinite doomscroll.”

But even if the rules of the game are changing, what CONTENT is metaphysically, a priori, remains the same. In particular these three things about it:

CONTENT can be anything, but not everything is CONTENT.

A bank statement isn’t CONTENT. No one buys a Brick™ because they’re spending too much time scrolling the Weather app. Simply sharing information does not suffice. Within any socio-technological era of history, CONTENT is a process of producing something that elicits engagement with its audience. A computer-generated video of Barack Obama fighting 1,000,000 Tyrannosauruses Rex is CONTENT. As is an 18th Century snuff box. The Odyssey was a campfire story that banged so hard, it became a billion-dollar movie three millennia later. CONTENT can’t just say something, it has to do something and encourage a reaction, whether that’s passively liking, being brought to tears, or being given the impetus to create something yourself.

CONTENT generates motion. An audience in motion generates culture.

Audiences today are like a sea of atoms: nothing happens in a vacuum, rather every bit of motion transfers motion to the particles around it. Good CONTENT is a cannonball into a pool of digital eyeballs. It reverberates outwards, mingling with other waves to form new and unexpected currents. This is how people talking at feasts became oral history became an entire canon literature. This is how cave paintings became Caravaggio became Hello Kitty.

CONTENT can go wide, but it can also go deep.

Perhaps one of the biggest fallacies in this area is the notion that CONTENT can only go big by reaching a wide audience (ie. “going viral”). Yes, it is valid to measure the magnitude of CONTENT in terms of reach/views/etc. But CONTENT can also go deep in equal magnitudes:

–A seven-second Tik Tok with a million views and a two-hour podcast viewed by a thousand people engage their respective audiences for the same amount of time.

–An 8-hour Twitch stream with only 100 concurrents clocks 33 *days* of audience engagement.

–You can buy 16 Skims thongs for the price of a one-year Hulu subscription — and Kim’s got a solid block of her audience buying both

–A newsletter with 10,000 subscribers and a 50% open rate can speak directly to 5,000 people. That’s the size of a Roman legion.

In the midst of today’s cultural somersault, those who read the writing on the wall seem to be swimming toward The Deep End. Whether that’s Balenciaga betting on Substack, or Marc Jacobs’s late-career arc as an influencer. Brands that know what’s up aren’t trying to break your internet. They’re trying to become your friend.

During a recent chat with internet funnyman Stavros Halkias, he put it like this:

TB: One of the most fascinating things about podcast era of media—which your career grew out of—is this notion of the parasocial relationship. A lot of people actually feel like they’re your friend, because [Cum Town] was just dudes hanging out. You have it in your ear, and you’re the fourth dude.

SH: You’re the fourth dude! We didn’t have a fucking plan. It was just us talking. Nobody ever thinks, “Everybody’s going to hear this.” You just divulge shit about yourself that is super personal. I do meet certain people and we become friends. [In] some ways, we are friends. Whatever you’re making, you’re putting it out there for people to interact with it. It is kind of an honour that people feel that close to me. When I had a tough time, when I was super depressed, I did realise, “Oh fuck, my favourite media, my favourite podcasts, my favourite movies—that’s what got me out of it.” So it feels really good actually that what I make helps people get through tough times. It’s awesome until it crosses over into somebody being too weird in person.

Is being “The Fourth Dude” the quintessential media experience of our time? Is our version of the crowd in 3D glasses on the cover of The Society of the Spectacle someone drinking a cortado with How Long Gone in their Airpods? And how is this dynamic already taking place in fashion, perhaps the least “relatable” of all the industries?

First Name Basis

Nothing has changed the brain chemistry of American Sports culture more than Formula 1: Drive to Survive. Through this one docu-series, F1 went from being a weird thing liked by old men in Monte Carlo to a pop cultural staple. Drive to Survive succeeded in this by turning dudes in fast cars into a human melodrama, one in which you come to feel like you know the players involved. The fact that millennials in Williamsburg will call Max Verstappen “Max” like they went to Dutch boarding school with him is an indicator of this. Lewis Hamilton dating parasocial deity Kim Kardashian is this process’s ultimate consummation.

Instagram itself has become fashion’s Drive to Survive. Through it, we follow a human comedy on a myriad levels: from the Creative Directors to the Insiders to the Online Take-Artists. Last month marked the first Paris Fashion Week I have skipped since the pandemic and I was shocked at how immersed in it I was from 3000 miles away: front row, up close, back stage, hugs and air kisses, praise and well wishes we all familiar to me — and I still enjoyed the CONTENT — but then there as the unfamiliar, intimate dinners, friend cliques I didn’t know existed, GRWMs in hotels and with facialists I did not yet know, people I adore looking fab and humming a song in their chauffeured Mercedes. Post after post, reel after reel, I watched convinced that almost everyone I had ever had drinks with was a fucking genius.

Anyone can be The Fourth Dude in fashion. We can be so proud of “Anthony” and his GOATed run at YSL, or wait with baited breath to see what “Grace” does at Hermes, or what “Dario” will do at Armani. And it’s not just the powerbrokers we can feel this way about, but also the other agents taking us deeper inside. What do Lyas, Ash, Brenda, Kim, and Beka think about everything that happened? What cool interns do you follow? Or showroom people? Or makeup assistants? Through the gravity of this endless rabbit hole, fashion has assumed a place in culture it never had before.

Brand-as-Facilitator…

There will always need to be some level of distance, craft, and/or mystery to truly make objects feel expensive. A thirty thousand dollar blazer can’t be something your friend made. However, luxury can make you the Fourth Dude without breaking the Fourth Wall, and tuned-in brand operators have learned to walk this tightrope by serving the role of cultural facilitator.

Matthieu Blazy did this ingeniously at Bottega Veneta by sponsoring the revival of BUTT magazine, a move that generated powerful parasocial gravity amongst those who love that publication. And even from the ivory tower of Chanel, Blazy continues leaving breadcrumbs that form a human connection. He likes BUTT like we do, he likes old Kylie Minogue videos like we do, and judging from the show soundtracks at Chanel, he probably listens to Britney and Gaga at the gym like we do. By liking these things outloud, Blazy doesn’t just share something with us, he elevates what we like into the halls of luxury.

One can imagine this is also what Dior is up to when it collaborates with A24, a partnership that was fittingly announced with a video of famous friends impersonating designer Jonathan Anderson. Even more fittingly, the video was made by genius-friend-of-CONTENT Aidan Zamiri, who directed The Moment, a parasocial masterstroke about a group of friends playing themselves in front of a home-audience who thinks they part of the clique.

Less luxury, but even more fascinating is Gap’s recent announcement that they would be sponsoring a boy band called Just Your Type. The move is clearly a bet on the parasocial gravity of stan armies, a concept tested through Gap’s blockbuster campaigns with other music acts like Young Miko and Katseye. Neither Miko nor Katseye are household names, but both have a deep connection with their fans. Buried in Gap’s press release is something even more interesting: the brand will be hosting a 90s-style “Mall Tour” with the Just Your Type, reversing America’s retail apocalypse brick-by-brick, one screaming stan at a time.

It’s actually wise to think that concerts are the only way to get someone under 25 to go to a mall. Live music is the most potent strain of human interaction we have left in culture. At their best, concerts unite people who dress alike, share a worldview, and know the words to the same songs. For artists with real fans — real communities, even — you can tell that they are playing a venue by how people are dressed outside: whether that’s 0pium heads seeing Ken Carson, Hedi Boys seeing The Hellp, or the people wearing bunny ears and painted dollar-signs I encountered on a recent field trip to see Slayyyter. These are artists who have figured out The Deep End.

WTF is a Community?

There’s a lyric by one of my favorite bands, The Minutemen, which later became the title of a book about the DIY punk scene: “Our band could be your life.” And it has an interesting double-meaning: on one hand, our band is so much like you that we could actually be you, but on the other hand, the aesthetic world we’ve created is so expansive that you yourself could occupy it and live your entire life inside of it. This state where peer-to-peer connection (relationships) meets aesthetic completeness (immersion) is the essence of a Community.

Standing on a line to buy the same pair of sneakers is not a Community. People who consume the same media are not in a Community with one another. Neither are people who simply like the same things. A friend of mine who was recently moonlighting at an agency on a project for General Mills, told me the strategists kept pontificating about how they could tap into “Cereal Culture.”

Liking Cinnamon Toast Crunch is not a scene, but I get why marketers want it to be. Because the promise of Community is the goal of going deep, a state in which a brand transcends participating in culture and becomes a culture unto itself. Unlike a parasocial fandom, where there are lonely spokes on a wheel connected to the same central figure, Communities are meshed together peer-to-peer. Hermes and Chanel have their own Roman legions, webs of stans, group chats, and secondary markets dedicated to their products. Chrome Hearts has its own version of this, so does Rick Owens. Even the luxury brands that aren’t there yet are learning to court their own Fourth Dudes. Because even when fads change and recessions happen, friends are forever ;)

Coming up on CONTENT…

–One of my great loves

–More on why the iPhone Duo signifies the end of 9:16 (and the beginning of my vlogger era)

–How to post all of your CONTENT and not look like a thirst bucket

Free access to CONTENT is available to students and newcomers to the industry by signing up here.

I’ve recently launched CONTENT Professionals, a resource for those looking to find jobs in the Content Industrial Complex, that you can sign up for here.

Please direct all inquiries regarding my creative studio, CONTENT WORLD, to inquiries@content.world (I don’t see replies to these emails)

We have a paid-only dispatch of the Attention Economics series coming next week — a deep dive on my iPhone Wabi-Sabi theory — but this one is free because I need to atone for my own personal contributions to the apocalypse. No, I don’t secretly make content for Palantir. But I did help engender a wave of marketing that uses memes to sell fashion. And it’s time to put that proverbial genie back in its proverbial bottle.

It seemed like a good idea at the time — many of the worst things do — but there are four main reasons why memes make sense as a brand marketing tool:

1. They’re digitally native — Memes are the dominant language of online culture, so it would therefore make sense for brands to want to speak this language as a way of building closeness with their audience and meeting the audience “where they are.”

2. They’re incredibly engaging — A hyper-retouched glossy image registers in the back of your brain as “ad” when you scroll past it. Whereas memes suck you in…What’s the joke? Why is it funny?

3. They’re cheap to make — At most all you need is someone funny with an iPhone and/or Adobe to make professional-grade memes. If you compare this to what brands normally spend to make fashion images — millions upon millions per year — memes are basically free.

4. They’re a growth hack — If you want to get a lot of people to see a picture of your purse with a SHOP NOW button on Instagram, you’re going to have to shell out serious ad spend. If you make the right meme, you can get hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of views organically without paying anything.

When I joined SSENSE as Head of Creative and Content in 2022, I didn’t think consciously about any of the above. It was the first time I had ever held a job that didn’t have the word “Editor” in it, and I hadn’t yet learned to think on those terms. Instead, my truffle pig’s instinct for telling stories and growing audiences sort of just took us there.

But what was crystal clear from the outset was that memes made sense for SSENSE because SSENSE was already a meme. The clone-like ecomm models, the novel selection of products, the feeding frenzy created by its biannual sales — these things were memes long before we ever set foot in the building. It’s a lot easier to stir a pot that’s already boiling than to heat up your own.

(And that brings me to rule number one of contemporary branding: Culture is made by people. Brands can only serve to shepherd culture, ruin it, or gracefully ignore it. Whether it’s showering in Arc’teryx, building tridents with White Monster Energy cans, or finding a Loewe Tomato, people are the ones who can successfully turn brands into memes. Brands can only ride the wave, or wipe out.)

The two years that followed at SSENSE were an engagement (and aura) harvest for the ages. Our views quadrupled year over year. Our engagement rate on Instagram was 10x that of our closest competitor. Trade publications couldn’t stop writing articles about us. We got short-listed for Cannes Lions and other awards whose names I can’t remember. But most joyously of all, our #Social-Only Slack had turned into an always-on writers room overflowing with ideas so based, the vast majority of them never saw the light of day. (We came this close to making a billboard that said WHOSE THERESA? in reference to our competitor MyTheresa.)

But by 2024 the whole thing began to feel a little boring. Countless brands were now doing the same exact thing we were doing. But, more importantly, the entire exercise began to feel less relevant. Got it, brands can be as funny as real people online. Now what? We embarked on a process of completely rebooting our content strategy, but I left the company before we finished (and SSENSE ran into bigger problems than being sick of memes).

It’s important to note here that we were by no means operating in a vacuum at SSENSE. A lot of our ideas owed a debt to Demna’s peak at Balenciaga, or to the OG proto-memes of Oliviero Toscani, or to the deeply funny fashion meme accounts that paved the way (our head of instagram at SSENSE was also the admin of @throwingfits), or to contemporaries like Ava Nirui who was absolutely cooking at Marc Jacobs during our time at SSENSE. But like anything good online, what we were all up to was on the verge of being cooked.

To quote Barbara Kruger’s infamous letter to Supreme: sometimes the work you make becomes the “sadly foolish farce” you sought to describe in the first place. Making memes for a fashion brand was fun at first because it felt like “anti-marketing” — something that resisted and undermined the polished (and elitist) forms of traditional fashion image-making. But when that strategy returns to the mothership of capitalism it feels doubly insidious, like a brand has sent cultural spies to come speak your language and sell you stuff. The creative agency meme account @silencebrands is spot on at capturing this tension: between zillennial creative workers and the brands that use them tap into the cultural bloodstream.

Whether it’s getting the elderly museum director to rattle off zoomer speak, or the ongoing burger clapbacks between Burger King and McDonald’s, or Zalando making SSENSE memes for LTNs, or Yahoo’s cheugy new social media strategy, or the horror show taking place on the PopTarts Instagram, or whatever the fuck happened to Leonardo DiCaprio at the Oscars, today’s brand memes flop because you can viscerally feel how hard they are trying to be clever and “highly relatable.”

This pandering is what puts meme-marketing so deep into the cringe cycle. And it begs the question: Should marketing try to be digitally native? Should it even care about being relatable?

One must wonder if brands are even getting what they need from these memes, especially as the stunts become higher and higher budget (a la Ben Affleck’s ongoing Dunkin’ Donuts Gesamtkunstwerk). Are memes generating loyalty? Probably not. Are they selling stuff? Maybe… sometimes. Are they building cultural relevance? Yes and no. As my esteemed comrade Ana Andjelic who does recently wrote in her scathing report on the death of viral marketing: “Anything that doesn’t drive long-term value is just expensive distraction.”

The patron saint of Gen X fashion designers, Raf Simons, recently made waves online for saying “maybe [fashion] was nicer when it was more elitist.” And while I don’t hold the same sentiment, I understand why it is so sticky. At a time when brands are bending over backwards to get on our level and speak our language, what we really crave now is ambition: whether that takes the form of Pre-Zara John Galliano, Hype Williams’s multi-gagillion dollar music videos, Chris Cunningham’s ads for Playstation, or Spike Lee’s ads for Nike. Ambition doesn’t necessarily mean something high budget or something created by someone famous. It just needs to exist on a level of ideas and execution beyond what the edgelords at home can make. The rest is just slop.

Now, excuse me while I light this Parliament cigarette and drive off into the night.

This post was researched in partnership with Viktor Wendt. Check out his substack Substanz.

What does it say about about our society that the two smartest long-term investments of this century are:

1) Monster Energy stock (up 100,000% since 2001)

2) Hermés Bags (more stable than gold within the same period)

I have some ideas…

It’s easy to think of consumer products in terms of what people want. But it’s often more important to think about them in terms of how people feel. A want sends you in one direction (I need that thing, let me get it, okay I got it.) Whereas a feeling has the ability to switch trajectories (I was feeling rustic, but now I’m feeling fancy.) Without getting too touchy-feely about it, feelings are what people actually buy into, not physical things. This is why luxury advertisements are rarely just a picture of a product, and when they are, the message is usually about either craft or design, not “Hey, do you want this thing? Buy it.”

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It’s a question that reveals quite a bit about someone’s worldview, how their brain works, and how they gain access to information. (Remember: 90% of being a CONTENT professional is about knowing things about culture before most people do. Investors call it “alpha,” my friends call it “tea.”) There’s no right or wrong answer to the media diet question, but to me the biggest red flag is when someone rattles off a bunch of high-brow gobbledygook:

I mostly read The Paris Review, Art Forum, n+1, The New Yorker, maybe I watch an Eric Rohmer film on the weekend if I feel like vegging out.

To me, this is the equivalent of asserting that your diet-diet consists entirely of grilled chicken and baby spinach with no dressing: a) You’re probably lying, and b) If you’re telling the truth, that’s even more unsettling.

A lot of my CONTENT lifeforce comes from consuming what some (including myself) might perceive as trash. I like trash made by big companies to appeal to our basest urges. I like trash made by anonymous lone wolves. And perhaps most of all, I like trash made by those who have built little trash-making cottage industries for themselves. To borrow some phrasing by i-D all-star Nicolaia Rips, trash is the backbone of the internet.

So welcome to the first CONTENT Dumpster Dive. Today, I would like to explore an emerging set of Internet Archetypes I find fascinating. If you yourself made any of these things, do not be offended that I’m calling it trash. I salute you. In fact, please DM me.

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If you opened this email or clicked on this post, you’ve fallen prey to the oldest CONTENT trick in the book: Clickbait.

What did Thom mess up? And why, in fact, did he not tell us earlier?

(The sinister wordsmiths who make the headlines we read every day call this a “curiosity gap.”)

But that’s the thing about Clickbait… it’s as inevitable as it is annoying. Every product needs a package. Every idea needs to be marketed concisely in order to survive in the chaotic deluge of our feeds. You can mourn a simpler time when everyone just opened the paper and didn’t need to be psy-oped into reading something. But have you ever read the paper cover-to-cover? No, you just read the articles with the best headlines.

But Thom, I don’t work for a magazine and write headlines for anything. Why should I even know about this?

Zoom out a bit. Headlining isn’t an art that is not limited to the very specific task of writing the title of an article. Anyone who wants to make good CONTENT of any type needs to understand how to grab attention, how to distill something to its most curious essence, and how to create a package for ideas. Offering the public ideas without a frame is like serving spaghetti without a plate. It’s quite literally slop.

Because I believe the best headlines are workshopped in a group, I’ve enlisted some friends and legends to weigh in on the topic as well.

Read the New York Post. Whatever your politics might be, this is the paper of record when it comes to writing headlines — in particular cover lines. They consistently deliver succinct, punchy, and hilarious headlines that are profoundly attention-grabbing. In some cases the headlines even become the story themselves.

Keith Poole, the EIC of NYP, was kind enough to send me a bit of the secret recipe (shout out to Amber Chow):

The New York Post is world famous for its front page headlines and they are one of the best parts of the job. We are famous for our puns but there are many different types of headlines. You have to be really clear what it is you want to say because there are so many clever plays on words available - but only when it really hits the meaning does it become memorable or special. You also have to be confident of what you want to say for the headline to really pop.

1. If it is a serious story, you do not pun. But you have to make a very strong, short statement that tries to elevate it. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, it wasn’t Russia Invades Ukraine. It was War in Europe, because of the historical nature of the action and a reflection of how the consequences would reverberate around the world.

2. The pun: This really is a team effort among a group of people who have done it for years. It is a brainstorm, where no idea is bad, and it is often obvious to everyone what the best one is at the end of the process. It really is a magical process to take part in, and I can’t really explain it because it emanates from a soup of experience, a love of words and a deep understanding of the brand and our audience. So far, even the world’s best LLMs cannot imitate or deconstruct it because it is a very human phenomenon, where headlines just spark from the gazillions of synapses firing in the depths of people’s brains — whether they be a play on words, phrases, meanings, rhymes, lyrics, TV shows.

3. Sometimes the best headline is actually something that is a combination of a picture and the headline. As they say, a picture tells a story of 1,000 words, and that can be used to riff off in words.

4. Be historical. Our Red Apple cover when the socialist Mayor was elected sold out. This is because we wanted something to stand the test of time — to be relevant beyond that one day. And I guess it is a mix of all three above. Or when the Queen died, we didn’t pun or come up with a clever headline. That was all about choosing the right picture and setting the right tone. It was a collector’s edition.

Imagine a door. With a sign on it. This is the number one thing I always talk about when teaching new editors how to write headlines. It sounds dumb (the best things do), but it’s a thought experiment that solves 95% of problems with headlines. Getting someone to open a door is a process that builds trust. Adults don’t just go around opening random unknown doors. No, you need some kind of assurance that there’s something intriguing or welcoming inside. Would you open a door with something vague written on it? Creatures Inside — Are we talking puppies or snakes? If the door just said everything that was inside, you would only enter on the off chance it has the exact thing you’re looking for. Copper Tubing and Water Bottles for Hamsters — Nevermind, I don’t need either of those. You want to walk through a door that promises something exciting inside, but not something so exciting that it’s scary. And perhaps most importantly: you want to be promised something that you can’t experience by simply reading the door.

Don’t be boring. This is another mantra of mine, summed up perfectly by i-D’s chief wordsmith Steff Yotka:

Headlines should be surprising... or make a reader go “Huh? I want to know more about that!” So many headlines are like “Catching Up with TK,” “The Beauty and Struggle of TK,” “What TK Wants for the Holidays.” I always think a headline should spinal tap right into the core of the story—the most fun, wild, crazy, exciting bit.

Take it somewhere weird. Per Steff, twisting the knife on the wildest thing about the topic is always a good tack. When I asked Interview’s Executive Editor about this process (which he described as “The thing I hate most in the world”), he deferred to the Warholian school of thinking:

When it comes to writing headlines about famous people, I tend to gravitate towards the headtrip of it all: the identity crisis, the disorientation, and the anxiety that comes with meteoric success.

Create your own focus group. As Mr. Poole said, the best headlines in the world come out of a room of riffers, which is perhaps the most euphoric and gratifying experience of being an editor. According to Complex Editorial Director (and revered man of letters) Ross Scarano:

Write a headline that makes the people around you chuckle, or express curiosity, or some other good feeling you want the reader to feel, too. I mostly think about playing to a room of smart people, looking for the combination of words that makes them go, “Yep, that’s the one.”

Or, as Hypebeast EIC Madrell Stinney puts in true headline-esque fashion:

If you don’t softly whisper “bars” to yourself after writing your headline, it’s likely not a good headline.

Think about the folks at home. Just before you hit PUBLISH, wait a beat and consider if your headline is maybe only funny to you and your friends. Making inside jokes in public is CONTENT death. Stitch what Highsnobiety EIC Noah Johnson says onto a pillow:

Don’t write headlines for editors, write them for readers.

Flex your wit. How do you win over this proverbial “reader”? For CNN Senior Reporter Rachel Tashjian, it’s a matter of snake-charming your audience with delicious wordplay:

I hate digital headlines. Obviously as a news person I understand them. But I love when someone can sell the entire mood of a story with a clever phrase and an evocative image. The magazine doing a peerless job at this now is World of Interiors. There’s an essay in the new miniatures issue about dollhouses called The Ups of Downsizing and a story on a Japanese deer shed titled Ruminant with a View. It’s a kind of wit that confers authority over your subject and makes readers understand your world and trust you. I really don’t care that those headlines are not “clicky.” In fact I’m tired of that internet school of thinking — seduce your readers instead of drowning them in the curiosity gap!

Ditch the clichés. T Magazine Editor-at-Large Nick Haramis — who spent two years red-penning the shit out of my writing (complimentary) at Interview — is rightfully sensitive to vacuous turns of phrase. Anyone who has written a headline knows that they are such an easy trap to fall into. Just. Don’t. Say. Something. Lame.

Be punchy. Avoid puns. Resist the impulse to refer to a subject’s “renaissance” or describe their “enduring” appeal/allure/charm/etc. Fight the urge to allude to Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” or John Irving’s “The World According to Garp.” Give the reader some credit; a headline doesn’t need to be service-y or too expository to draw an audience. Oh, and this is a personal one, but I kind of hate when anyone “speaks on” anything.

Context. Context. Context. Let me leave you with one last one. A headline’s meaning is consummated by where it’s written. Put a sentence in the subject line of a Substack or put it on the cover of the New York Post or the overlay of a Snapchat, and its meaning completely changes. When writing a headline — or anything of the sort — think about where it’s going and how it’s best optimized to show up in that space. Test it on a burner account if you can, so you can actually see what it looks like in the format in which readers will experience it. But context is not just visual, obviously, it’s also cultural. A headline should be fluent in the environment it’s being placed in, or if it’s not, it needs to actively go against the grain of that context. Putting the title of your thesis as the caption of a TikTok could be a great idea. Doing the opposite might not be. POV: You just got an F

By the way, I regret not paywalling this. Did you know that students and newcomers to the industry can get a free paid subscription to CONTENT? Just fill out the form here.

So I recently decided that I want to do more of these about the actual nuts and bolts of making CONTENT. If you’re a fan of my sprawling theories about contemporary culture, don’t worry, I have more of those stashed away too. Many of these are copy-pasted from actual how-to’s I’ve put together for editors on my teams throughout the years.

I think of conducting interviews as almost like the base unit of making CONTENT. The same way all actors should learn how to do Shakespeare (even if they end up being in Marvel movies), I think anyone in the CONTENT-verse could benefit from knowing how to conduct an entertaining interview, either on camera or for print. Being an interviewer requires so many skills that are good for other things: thinking on your feet, doing research, but most importantly the rabid instinct to zero on the most interesting aspect of any situation.

But let’s cut the preamble and get to it:

Embrace chaos. What makes interviews fun to do (and read) is that they aren’t scripted. If you try to control or overdetermine the conversation you will inevitably kill its magic. Instead, be the chaos agent in the conversation. Change the subject. Cut to the chase. Ask a random ice-breaker. If a subject starts telling you about their Pez Dispenser collection, lean in and make the whole thing about that. One of my favorite interviews I’ve worked on (from over ten years ago, wow) was Jack Self’s Jonathan Anderson interview for 032c, where he started the interview by surprising Anderson with a Myers-Brigg personality test (and basically getting him to admit he’s a sociopath in the process).

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Then enter Emmanuel Olunkwa of November Mag, and suddenly I’m on a Zoom spilling my guts about my journey from adolescence to present. It’s a really good interview by a really good interviewer, and you can read the first half of it below.

Emmanuel Olunkwa: I’m curious what 032c, Interview, Highsnobiety, SSENSE, and i-D have in common.

Thom Bettridge: [Laughs.] I’ve been thinking about that, actually. I recently started a Substack that began as something casual and then became serious almost by accident. I offered free subscriptions to students through this small Google Form and included what I thought was a throwaway question: What do you wish people wrote about more? Most of the answers weren’t about the subject matter at all. They wanted career advice: how to enter this world, how to navigate it, and how to survive it. What struck me is that I’ve never felt like I had a clean doctrine to offer. So much of my own trajectory has come down to timing. When I left 032c in Berlin to return home to New York, it was because my mother was sick. I resigned in the morning and that afternoon got a call from Interview asking if I wanted to help relaunch it. From the outside it looked incredibly strategic. In reality, it was a coincidence.

Can you speak to that? You’ve become the person people call to rebuild a publication.

That reputation developed unintentionally, but I understand why it stuck. Whenever I arrive somewhere, I’m not interested in rearranging what already exists; I’m compelled to take the whole thing down to the studs. There’s a difference between moving furniture and rebuilding the house, and I’m only really engaged when the latter is possible. If the job is simply to maintain an inherited structure, you end up operating inside someone else’s logic. That’s when you go on autopilot. And I’m not useful in autopilot. The work only becomes meaningful when the foundation is available to be rethought.

So what is the Thom Bettridge project?

I think it comes from growing up at a hinge moment between two cultural infrastructures. I was 17 when the iPhone came out in 2007, so my early years were shaped by the pre-digital scarcity of information: tracking down obscure books, art magazines, philosophy texts you could only find by digging. By the time I reached college, during the 2008–09 recession, the entire ecosystem had inverted. Suddenly everything rare was on Instagram or Tumblr, stripped of context, and you were expected to operate within a digital attention economy that rewarded speed over comprehension. That shift created a strange dissonance in me. I felt responsible for material that was disappearing in the transition but didn’t yet have a place in the new world.

Right, but talk about the mechanics of that shift. People don’t always understand how radical it was.

It wasn’t just technological; it fundamentally altered the metabolism of culture: how ideas circulate, how quickly they move, how little space they’re given to unfold. A lot of valuable material didn’t survive that change because it didn’t fit the pace or format of online life. So the through-line of my work is figuring out how to carry the most interesting parts of culture into an environment that flattens almost everything. There are ideas that deserve longevity but don’t make sense on the current grid of consumption. My job is essentially translation: taking depth, nuance, and intellectual eccentricity and finding a form where they can live without being diluted.

What’s happening in that negotiation?

For me, editing is a form of method acting. It begins with genuine research, but instead of following the archive literally, you build a character out of it. You internalize a worldview and operate from that internal logic. When Mel Ottenberg, Richard Turley, and I arrived at Interview, we went through the old issues and realized that Warhol’s sensibility—his flat humor, fixation on fame, and almost Internet-native detachment—actually resonates more fully today than it did in the 1970s. So we didn’t recreate Warhol; we created a contemporary extension of his sensibility, a kind of genetic spawn activated for the social media era. Writing from that position gave us the freedom to push the magazine’s voice as far as it could go while remaining true to its DNA. The extremity was already in the source material; we simply reframed it.

And you pushed that logic as far as you possibly could.

Because the original material demanded it. The same approach applied at i-D. Once you understand the founding logic—that glossy magazines weren’t capturing what people actually looked like in 1980s London, and that i-D was essentially an anthropological project—you see that its methodology was observation. It was about documenting real people in real scenes and treating youth culture as knowledge, not just style. That logic is consistent with how storytelling works now, where lived context and proximity matter more than polish, aesthetics and presentation. So instead of copying i-D’s historical aesthetics, we revived its method. We took its original spore and cloned it for a different century.

When you’re doing what you do, what does it feel like? Do you feel like a scientist?

It’s funny, because I don’t feel scientific at all, not in the math-and-science-brain sense. The closest analogy for me is still the method acting thing. There’s research, yes, but then there’s this strange divination vibe to the work, where you’re tapping into something dormant and coaxing it back into the present. You take a text, an archive, a sensibility that’s essentially dead on the page, and you figure out how to make it breathe again.

You Frankenstein it. Tell me more.

A lot of the material I work with comes from eras that will never repeat themselves in print. But you can revive the tone, the posture, the worldview, and let it act in the world in a new way. That’s where the Frankenstein metaphor comes in: you take these archival limbs—old interviews, layouts, sensibilities—and reassemble them into a creature that moves through the contemporary world with its own agency.

When was your time at Interview?

That was 2018.

Right, basically on the eve of the magazine’s 50th anniversary.

Exactly. I think the 50th-anniversary issue came out right after I left. My last issue, the one with Rihanna wearing the gimp mask, was just before that milestone.

But you were there for the relaunch. For how long?

Only about a year and change. It was a short cycle, but it was the entire structural reset.

Here’s a question that might help you blanket the answer: when did you actually start believing in what you were doing? When did you feel the work cohering, or anticipate what it could become?

I think it’s tied to the rhythm of being an editor. You make something, you put it into the world, you watch how the world reacts, and then you make something else. Over time, if you’re paying attention, you develop a sensitivity to what the world wants from you—not in a pandering way, but in a perceptual one. When you feel attuned to that, it’s exhilarating. That’s why blogging or Substack is thrilling on a micro level, and legacy media is thrilling on a macro one. You’re listening for a vibe in the air and trying to push the conversation a few inches forward. In that sense, it feels a bit like stand-up comedy: most people are terrible at it at first, but once you learn how to feel the crowd, you gain this sixth sense. I’ve never done stand-up, but the parallel makes sense to me.

Let’s zoom in. Again: What did you learn at 032c? Interview? Highsnobiety?

032c was the best possible place to start because the team was so small that I touched almost everything: social media, newsletters, editing the magazine, commissioning photography. It taught me how the entire ecosystem functions when you can’t hide inside a silo. It also taught me that text and image have to be in active tension, not just politely aligned. And the environment itself—Berlin—shaped my work in a way New York couldn’t. I grew up in New York and then studied here, so it let me see New York as an object rather than a backdrop.

Say more about the move to Berlin—the psychology behind it, the cultural perspective, even what it meant to experience New York from Berlin.

I grew up in New York, then did a year at Wesleyan, then came back and transferred to Columbia. Berlin had this intellectual and physical spaciousness that New York didn’t have at that time. That distance clarified what the New York culture industry felt like: overcrowded, mythic, and sealed off. From Berlin, you could see the machinery more clearly, and that clarity fed into how we made the magazine.

Why did you leave Wesleyan?

I still have a lot of love for Wesleyan. It was this intense little bubble. I actually have more friends from Wesleyan than from Columbia. A lot of people who now run A24 were there when I was there. LE1F, the musician, was one of my closest friends. People were already making things before they graduated. But every weekend I would come back to New York. I had friends here, I had a girlfriend here, and a whole social life here I was steady in maintaining. At a certain point I thought, If I’m here every weekend, why am I living in Connecticut? I wanted to be an adult living in a city who happened to attend school, not someone living in a stylized version of college.

Did you change when you moved back to New York?

If anything, I became more myself. Wesleyan was the anomaly. But New York in the early 2010s, post-recession, was complicated. The culture industries felt enormous and inaccessible. As a young person, the opportunities felt minuscule in comparison to the scale of what everyone else was doing. I remember thinking: am I supposed to be a gallery receptionist? Someone’s assistant? What can I possibly contribute to the world at 21? That’s part of why I left the city immediately after graduating. I didn’t want to compete in a world that felt impossible to enter.

That iPhone moment you mentioned earlier—what did it signify? You had these niche interests, but what did the transition feel like at 17?

It felt like a chapter break between an unpublicized life and a semi-public one. Before the iPhone, you’d take pictures on a digital camera, upload them later, and would engage Friendster or MySpace in a limited way to archive and share those moments with your people. But the iPhone created a loop: the device itself took the pictures and presented an immediate yet accessible archive to you, then those pictures fed the social media feed, wherein the feed shaped the culture, and the phone delivered that experience back to you. It was the hinge between analog adolescence and digital adulthood.

What made you believe in magazines? What was the premonition that drew you to 032c?

My original ambition was to be a curator.

Seriously?

Yes. I studied art history and philosophy at Columbia with people who were deeply embedded in October journal: Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, that whole world. My mentor was John Rajchman, who was also close to Deleuze. That was the intellectual environment I was conditioned in. I thought contemporary art was the medium through which you could make arguments about culture.

What did being a curator mean to you? And what art were you meeting at the time?

I wanted to use contemporary art to create conceptual messages about the world. Jordan Wolfson and artists of that generation were emerging around 2008–09. One of the brain-breaking experiences for me was discovering the Jeffrey Deitch–Dakis Joannou exhibitions, like Post Human. And shortly after I graduated, there was Speculations on Anonymous Materials, curated by Susanne Pfeffer, which essentially inaugurated post-internet art in Germany. Those shows convinced me that you could use theory to build a meta-structure around a network of symbols. But over time I realized magazines let me do that work with more speed, more play, and more contact with everyday culture than curating ever could.

Okay, so you were on your way to curating. How did that inform your thinking once you entered the magazine space?

Working with Joerg at 032c showed me how much power there is in the tension between text and image. He loved taking a beautiful photograph and overlaying something abrasive on it, or pairing two things that had no business being together and forcing a new meaning to emerge. A magazine is literally one page attached to another, so the friction between words and visuals is its core power. Curating didn’t offer that same kind of immediacy. With magazines, everything is more mobilized. You’re not moving art around the world; you’re emailing people. At 032c, I could ask photographers to send images to illustrate a story, or pull press pictures from an art book and collage them into something that made a new argument about an artist.

What did you feel like you had to translate? I read that across your work—the sense of method acting or improv as translation. You have this theoretical background, but what did you have to learn? What was the 032c language?

The 032c language was about making pop culture feel weird and niche, and making niche, weird things feel pop. That was the mantra. We’d shoot the Kardashians in a way where you couldn’t even see their faces, or frame them in something uncanny rather than aspirational. Then we’d publish a story about a 95-year-old Austrian sociologist and make him sound like the most vital cultural commentator alive. It was all about bridging worlds that weren’t supposed to meet.

And what did you learn about exaggeration? How did that become a doctrine for approaching editorial content?

I gravitated toward making things as loud as possible. The aesthetic I couldn’t stand was that dainty, overly structured, “good taste zone” magazine voice: polite, academic, mannered. When I made magazines, I wanted to jolt people a bit, to mess with their expectations, to create something you’d want to photograph while you were reading it. “Beautiful and smart” wasn’t the goal. It needed tension.

Because you wanted to make it a little nasty.

Yes. The early 2010s had that whole Kinfolk, twee, indie vibe—everything soft, pale, tastefully arranged—which to me sucked ass. I wanted to go in the opposite direction.

You’re like, “I’m too indie for the indie shit.” I’d argue that rap was the indie of the late aughts, early 2010s.

During my first year at Interview, I pushed hard to put Young Thug on the cover. To the team it was wild—“Why not Charlize Theron?” But to me, the people shaping the zeitgeist at that time were rappers like Young Thug and Travis Scott. Movie stars were famous, but they weren’t changing culture. I don’t think rap occupies that same structural space anymore, but in that moment it really did.

What’s the Highsnobiety version? And same with SSENSE?

With Highsnobiety, which started as a streetwear-and-sneakers blog and grew into a culture platform, I was basically asking: How do you make a GQ for people born after 1990? Something that’s about culture and style at the same time, and that also makes sense with the way people’s brains work now. It was still a “blog-first” operation in many ways, that’s where the traffic came from, but the mandate was to turn that velocity into something that felt like an actual publication and brand, not just a feed. With SSENSE, the question was different: how do you build an editorial platform that’s completely native to a retailer, rather than bolted on as an afterthought?

And where were we in the pandemic? When did you leave?

That part was surreal. I left Interview and started at Highsnobiety at the end of 2019. The first day of the COVID lockdown—March 11, 2020—was literally the release date of my first print issue of the Highsnobiety magazine. I remember watching people cancel in real time—emails coming in like, “Our office is closed, I can’t come to your launch.” It was just this downward spiral. And then I spent the next two years in my weird home office, managing a team of about forty-five people entirely through screens.

I’m curious about that COVID period. What was it like to be at a place that was essentially a blog, and then try to reposition that thinking into a periodical?

It was hard but exhilarating. Publications are already grueling, but part of what makes them bearable is the camaraderie of being in the same room: joking around, arguing, and building something together. When you take that away and you’re just alone at home, the work can become joyless. I had so many calls where people would tell me they weren’t okay, that they were really sad, and I remember thinking, If you’re telling your boss, or your boss’s boss about your depression, it must be really bad. At the same time, 2020—George Floyd, BLM—gave us a license to use the platform in a more political way. One of my favorite things we did was an Election Day takeover where every single link on the site led to a pop-up that basically said, “Stop reading this site. Go vote.” We turned the entire homepage into a call to action. Some people made fun of it. Some people got mad at the people making fun of it. But it created this intense conversation. And when you have a big audience, that kind of friction is interesting.

How did that shift the way you worked or how you understood the magazine? Did it change your sense of what was possible?

It absolutely brought the brand out of its shell. When I first joined, I never would’ve imagined we’d run something like a digital cover with Jamaal Bowman, a progressive congressman, right before he got elected. That would’ve felt unthinkable for Highsnobiety a year earlier. So there was real satisfaction in stretching the platform beyond its comfort zone.

And were you rewarded for that? How did people respond to those moments?

People really liked it. I think there’s always this fear that if an audience knows you for one thing, they won’t let you talk about anything else. But even when I’m reading a fashion magazine, I still care about politics. Maybe a few readers are like, “Why is there a piece about politics?” or “Why are you writing about ceramics?” But honestly, who cares about that person? Fuck that person. Working across different publishing brands, I’ve come to see there’s always churn when you change direction. You join, you shift the logic, and some of the old audience freaks out. When we put Young Thug in Interview, we got comments from old-head fashion people saying, “Interview is dead. This isn’t culture.” Those are the people you eventually want to train to drop you. If you try to keep everyone happy, the thing curdles.

I’m impressed that you made it this far. Read the second half of the interview here.

What gets passed off as an opinion or point of view today is actually a weird form of third-person analysis. Take for example the litany of takes and “opinions” surrounding this past fashion week. It was exceedingly rare for someone to say something like, “I truly loved this fashion show” or “These clothes offended my sensibilities.” Rather, you would hear things like, “This collection was very well-received” or “I think this is going to sell horribly.” The opinion in this scenario is always couched by some idea of “the public,” or the ultimate boogieman “the customer.” (The newly appointed Wolf Blitzer of Clothes Rachel Tashjian recently and ingeniously called this the “Client Commiseration Crisis.”)

This dynamic sounds like a niche thing to complain about, but it has widespread and deleterious effects on the discourse. You see a very similar thing in politics: the comments section never talks about how much they like a candidate, they talk about things like “electability” and whether someone’s “message” is strong. Even casual movie fans today will discuss actors in terms of their Oscar chances or “bankability.” You see this equally with a phenomenon like Superbowl ads. In a more innocent time, one would see the funny commercial and laugh. Now, even laypeople debate the effectiveness of these ads as though they are agency execs. In this sense, we all consume culture today like we are consultants, not real people affected by real events in the real world.

How did this happen?

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Fun fact: Before I became a magazine editor, I wanted to be an art curator.

I quickly found the art world to be very insular (read: boring), but there’s a couple works of curation that still inspire the very different type of work I do today. First and foremost of these is Harald Szeemann’s “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” a group exhibition originally held in Bern in 1969 which was later restaged by the Prada braintrust in Venice in 2013. The exhibition features a rogue’s gallery of post-war heavyweights like Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, and Bruce Nauman, people even us fashion folk have heard of. But Szeemann manages to distill these works away from the clean Ism’s that artists normally get lumped into. In fact, if there’s any organizing principle to the exhibition, it’s messiness. Not just messiness in its literal sense — that too — but conceptual messiness. It’s about the way that things are inherently stuck in their time and place, and inevitably smooshed by the egos of the people who make them. “What matters is not so much the aesthetic position in itself as the extremity to which it is taken,” Szeemann said in his curatorial statement for the show. “And this exhibition includes some of the most extreme art ever produced.”

To use today’s parlance, “When Attitudes Become Form” is an exhibition about Vibes — or Aura, or Juice, or Rizz, or Motion — or any of these other words we now use to describe things that are magnetic but hard to describe. I hate how much I use the word “Vibes.” I cringe whenever I hear it exit my mouth in polite company, let alone on the public record. However I’ve come to embrace that Vibes are unavoidable. They are the cultural equivalent of Anti-Matter: Their gravity and existence are immense and all-encompassing, despite the fact that they are completely unknowable.

Although it’s difficult to pin down what Vibes are, one can come to understand how they exert themselves onto the world. And eventually, through understanding these precise causes and effects, one can even learn to harness Vibes to their own end. This is essentially what being a Content Creator is: a form of witchcraft that summons Vibes as its primary medium. Or as I like to call it, Vibecraft.

Confused? Me too a bit. In attempt to understand it all better, here are some fundamental laws of Vibecraft:

Vibes are the result of two distinct forces interacting. Let’s go back to Harald Szeemann’s exhibition. “The most fundamental law of nature is that everything that exists in space also exists in time,” he said in his 1969 statement. “Artists today work with that knowledge in unforeseen ways.” What is being asserted here is that contemporary art with real aura is art that not only addresses itself as an object (space), it also addresses the context in which it exists (time). Vibecraft is similar. It’s a process of harnessing the interaction between the Vibe you emit (Your Vibe) and the Vibe of the world you’re speaking to (The Vibe). Your Vibe and The Vibe do not necessarily need to exist in harmony. In fact, discord is often more interesting. Understanding these interactions is a matter of intuition and trial and error — the more you cast Your Vibe out into the world, the more you come to understand the effect it has on The Vibe.

Much like Heat in physics, Vibes lose their potency when transferred through conduits. Today, we are living in the Golden Age of Vibecraft, which is interconnected with the rise of Social Media. The technology of these platforms has stripped away all that sits between Your Vibe and The Vibe. In the traditional version of media, Vibes were scripted, then produced, then edited, then vetted, then released into the world. The end result is something that can be artistic, but will always be low-Vibrational. The closest thing we had to Vibecraft in the pre-Internet world was the Talk Show, a format that functioned through the Vibes of its host. (Perhaps no one in history has mastered Vibecraft quite like Wendy Williams.) But even these Vibes were dulled by the rigidity of the television format. It’s a bit like how your parents used to smoke marijuana in the 1970s, but it was so much less potent that it was practically a different drug. Today, Vibes are uncut and unfiltered and laced with every nuance imaginable. Something that might seem utterly uncanny and insane to the pre-Internet mind (like Crisphin Glover’s 1987 appearance on Letterman) happens hundreds of thousands of times a day on Tik Tok. This is because Vibes today can course directly from the Vibecrafter to a mass audience with only a phone.

You are the only person who can truly wield Your Vibe. This summer, I had the honor of directing the Behind-the-Scenes videos for one of the world’s last great Mass Content franchises, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. After studying decades of BTS and trailer footage from past shows (an enterprise I highly recommend), it became clear that the “Hi, I’m Blah Blah at the Blah Blah” talking to camera format was useful in the past but inherently Vibeless in today’s world. Instead, my team and I created a very simple but effective operating principle that led to tens of millions of views for our client: GIVE THE GIRLS THE PHONE. No one looks cuter and feels cuter than they do while recording themselves. And this is true because Vibes exist most potently in a condition in which the creator is also the subject matter. This is where authenticity happens, where empowerment happens, where aura happens.

You will never truly know what The Vibe is, in part because it changes constantly. We’ve now grown accustomed to talking about “Vibe Shifts” thanks to , but what’s misleading about Vibes Shifts is that they imply that Vibes are sometimes static and then sometimes change. Fluidity is an inherent characteristic of The Vibe. In fact, there’s no Content fallacy greater than to assume that The Vibe will ever stay the same. I was recently talking with my friend Lyas about how I first discovered his Content through these Duos he used do with liquor bottles rolling down a staircase stitched and him comparing them to fashion designers. They were purely ingenious Content gold, but hearing Lyas talk about it in retrospective, he knew the second he came up with this idea and did it that he needed to stop doing them and starting doing something else almost immediately. Many creators have this intuition, because it’s clear that the recipe for becoming Cooked is to hold onto a schtick for too long. Allowing Your Vibe to stay the same while The Vibe changes is Content death.

Vibes cannot be scripted. I was recently watching Season Three of White Lotus, and the entire time, I kept thinking about how much less interesting it was than Season Three of Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip. Both take place on vacation in Thailand, but one is in an infinitely more fascinating entertainment experience than the other. While the HBO version of this story attempts to intricately weave together its characters’s foibles into a commentary about the banality of late capitalism, the Bravo version is a delicious mess that involves suspected hypochondria, a scandal over untagged IG photos, and an ongoing mystery about the whereabouts of a missing bottle of Clase Azul tequila. Even when scripted television is “good,” it tries to hard to “construct” something and becomes inherently Vibeless. Reality, on the other hand, creates outlandish and nonsensical scenarios that even the best writer in the world could not come up with.

Vibes are inherently human. In a recent post about Slop vs Aura, writes something that distills the central conceit of “When Attitudes Become Form”: “[What] separates a work of art from all the other slop that was birthed beside it: the artists choice, his ability to say this an not that, his ability to frame his choice for an audience. The creative act is choice. But AI cannot choose. It is programmed. And while it maybe unpredictable at times, it is never choosing, only reacting.” I agree with the overall thrust of this, but I think what makes something art and not slop is about more than just choice. Content with Attitude or Aura isn’t always actively choosing or assessing the context it is in — often its headlessness and irrationality is the most fascinating thing about it. This is why things we see every day online are inherently more surprising and uncanny than witty HBO scripts written by Harvard Crimson alums. Content with aura doesn’t need to actively choose anything. All it needs to do is Be — or, in particular, all it needs to do is Be a Vibe that interacts with The Vibe.

In the face of this paradox, Content guns-for-hire have two options:

1. Shoot the moon and deliver the rare thing that is both polished AND engaging.

2. Coax your client out of their comfort zone toward Content that is platform-native

By virtue of the many smart Contentsmiths doing lots and lots of coaxing over the course of the past five years, Brands have slowly come around to what I call iPhone Wabi-Sabi (iW-S) and now understand the magnetism contained within the slapdash visuals made on our phones. Take Loewe, which during the latter years of Jonathan Anderson’s tenure came to have arguably the best luxury brand TikTok in the industry. If you look at these videos — which lean toward absurdity and a user-generated aesthetic — it would be impossible to imagine them passing the sniff-test as “Luxury Imagery” just five years ago. And even today, they wouldn’t see the light of day at conservative brands. One unique advantage Loewe had was that their creative director himself was a doomscroller, and so one can imagine they were given license to delve into brain rot in ways that are harder to do at other brands (Demna also deserves credit for this too during his Balenciaga years).

But wait, wait, wait. Go back to this iPhone Wabi-Sabi thing…WTF does that mean?

Over the past decade or so, our minds have been trained on visuals made by amateur social media creators, mostly using iPhones to capture and edit their work. This cannon of imagery is something that doesn’t ever quite look “professional” and that’s exactly the point. Like a wonky ceramic tea vessel, the attractiveness and charisma of iW-S comes from its imperfection. Heap onto this the proliferation of AI generators and tools, and the appeal of an image that is “polished” or “professional” becomes even less special and appealing. After all, the power of iW-S comes from the humanity of the person who made it. That is both its imperfection and its charm.

Although the entire zeitgeist of social media can take credit for its arrival, iPhone Wabi Sabi was forced into Fashion most profoundly by TikTok. Just as Brands were getting used to making campaigns for Instagram (that was its own nearly decade-long learning curve), the short and headless image-making style of TikTok combined with its rise during the pandemic threw marketers for a loop. Many major players hesitated a year too long to even have an account. And those who started early helplessly watched their multimillion dollar campaign videos get ratioed by Bama Rush girls and baristas doing viral dances in the breakroom of Starbucks. Those who were smart adapted fast from these fumbles out the gate and started hiring designated teams just to make TikToks. This was a major turning point in the Content trade, one which catapulted the humble figure of the Social Media Manager from being a Distributor (Hey, slice up this campaign and post it) to being a nose-to-tail Originator (Hey, what should our TikTok campaign for this launch be?).

But how does one attain iW-S? In the same way people say a four-year-old could make a Jackson Pollock, it’s tempting to say that all contemporary marketing could be done by a Content Farm of Zoomers plucked right out of college. So what makes something wabi-sabi and not just common or shittily-made? More or less, the answer is about two things: Skill and Charm.

Anyone who has studied 20th Century Art should be familiar with the concept of De-Skilling. Whereas almost the entire history of art was dominated by virtuosos, Post-War artists actively sought to remove technical skill from art-making. Take for example Andy Warhol, whose canonical paintings could be made just as easily by him or any random person who knows how to operate a screenprinter. Warhol would relish this fact, joking at his openings, “This painting looks great, it’s the first time I’ve seen it.” But De-Skilled art isn’t simply a joke or parody at the expense of virtuosity. By De-Skilling artwork, you place one of two things at the center:

1) The Concept: Yes, you could’ve made it, but you didn’t think of it.

2) The Person: Yes, you could’ve made it, but you aren’t me.

It’s important to stress here that something De-Skilled is different from something unskilled or naive. What Andy Warhol was doing with Electric Chair, or what Tracey Emin was doing with My Bed, is very different from what Outsider artists like Jean Debuffet were doing. Something unskilled does not have the access to make something skilled, whereas something De-Skilled is actively removing skill from the process of artmaking. This is a crucial distinction in the context of iW-S, because while a lot of Content made in this mode may seem like it was achieved by accident or lack of skill/effort, it is the result of something calculated. Is Courreges’s recent campaign composed entirely of mirror selfies Recession-Coded? Sure. But its simplicity also belies many clearly defined decisions about everything from styling to location.

What makes an iW-S image “good” rests in its Charm. This can come from the way in which its execution feels funny or authentic. But it often arrives via the charisma of the person making it. iW-S is inherently an autobiographical genre, because even when the image isn’t about the person making it, the off-kilter way it is made is still a reflection of its author. A great pre-internet example of this is the 90s photography of Juergen Teller. At a time when fashion photography was maxing out on glitz and slick execution — ie. Craft — Teller proposed a De-Skilled approach to glamor, one that documents the moment in its rawest form. Can anyone with a 35mm camera and a flash technically make one of his photos? Sure, many have tried. But are you him? And are you in a hotel room with Kate Moss?

While it's tempting to say that iW-S will supplant the Big Beautiful Fashion Image as our culture pushes deeper and deeper into brain rot territory, it's better to think of Craft and Wabi-Sabi as two contrasting forces that are getting stronger and more extreme. It’s similar in the field of entertainment at large, where even as the attention economy gets more and more DIY and YouTube-ified, the relevance of highly produced and incredibly written HBO-style shows is also deepening. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with fashion photography virtuosos par excellence Inez and Vinoodh (ironically, at an event for the new iPhone). When I asked them about how the image culture today has affected their work, Inez said, “I feel like our world is kind of divided between seeing things on the screen over the phone and seeing things as billboards on the street. Everything in between is sort of–”

I finished her sentence: “Dead.”

I feel like I can write 10x more about this topic than I just did. If you want to hear more, LMK below…

My final year at SSENSE marked the beginning of the Luxury Ecommerce Apocalypse (LEA). But even as Matches, Farfetch, and Net-a-Porter all fell into some form of liquidation, I always felt safe there. My peers and bosses were people with math degrees who had worked at places like AWS, McKinsey, Wal-Mart, and Apple. They were using advanced algorithms to figure out everything from when the sale should start to how many Alaia flats to buy. Their spreadsheets were works of art. Surely if anyone would be the last one standing, it’d be the place full of humble people doing their homework.

But there are obvious macro-economic headwinds that continue to dog SSENSE, even after the news last Friday that they’ve obtained financing and will be allowed to restructure their own company. Fashion ecomm in general has cooled after being red hot during the pandemic. And luxury demand has spent two years bracing for a recession. Add black swan political events like the new tariffs to this, and it feels like death by a thousand cuts. But the woes at SSENSE signal a larger (tectonic, even) cultural shift that stretches far beyond selling clothes. It might even signal the end of retail as we once knew it.

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With all the big new debuts taking place in fashion and beyond, I’m revisiting a topic that I think about a lot: Creative Leadership.

Being a good Creative Leader is an urgent paradox: Most creative people don’t grow up aspiring to manage dozens of people (I didn’t), but if you do it badly you can fail horrendously and make other people’s lives a living hell in the process. And even if you master that part, managing upwards and laterally so that your creative vision makes sense for the company you work for is even more nuanced.

Creative Leadership is also an under-represented topic within the vast canon business books. I’ve read a lot of great books by venture capitalists, generals, and even a couple fashion founders (this one and this one) that have helped me learn about leadership, but it always takes a leap to extrapolate those lessons into the context of creative work. (If they’re any great books on Creative Leadership you’ve encountered, link them below.)

I’ve had these maxims about Creative Leadership in my Notes app for about three years. Occasionally I update them by tweaking, adding, and deleting certain things. But I think they are a helpful set of operating principles for any Creative Leader. Even if you’re not at the stage in your career yet where you are leading (or even if you never plan to), it’s still important to think about what a good boss should look like and to demand that yours rises to the occasion.

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Or maybe there’s another way? What I’m about to talk about might feel similar to Rage or Cringe, but it’s actually quite different. It involves Rage, but it lacks the redemption arc of the Rage vs. Cringe cycle. Where we’re going, there’s no heading back.

It’s a place called Trend Hell. 

The creative class loves talking about Trends — in particular their acceleration. It’s an existential topic. Cool people get paid by companies to know what’s cool. Style outlets need something to talk about every day (gulp). Without trends, the people who forecast them would lose their way of life. But here’s the issue: no one knows how to forecast trends. What we normally describe as “forecasting” is actually one of two things: 

1. Research. It’s possible to be so good at research that you look like you’re predicting something when you’re actually just finding it early. Encountering something early is not a forecast — in the same way that sticking your hand out the window to feel drizzle isn’t a forecast. 

2. Vibe Divination. By analyzing the social mood, some people (myself included) are very capable at identifying cultural shifts before they happen. But it’s nearly impossible for Vibe Divination to lead to pinpointing specific trends. Rather, it’ll land on vaguer notions like, “Offline cultures are going to be big in 2026.”  

So much energy is invested in how trends start, but what about how they end? Something I’ve been noticing is how hard trends now fall from grace. Just think about the shiver you get down your spine when you see a grown ass adult with a Stanley Cup or a Labubu. Imagine earnestly saying something was “Brat” or “Demure,” in the year of our lord 2025, or talking about an NFT in polite company? All of these things reside in the deep layers of Trend Hell.

Virality is a rollercoaster ride, one that moves in a somewhat predictable cycle:

1. Emergence. A niche group of people become drawn to a thing, usually young people, and usually things that are liked for a slightly inexplicable IYKYK reason. 

2. Incredulity. The first mainstream reaction is one of skeptical confusion. Did you hear that kids are storming Wal Mart for insulated sippy cups? What’s a Me Espresso?

3. Transcendence. Confusion folds into indoctrination. If so many people like it, maybe I should like it too?

4. Memification. The fact that so many people are into a thing becomes the joy and gag of the thing. Semi-ironic bandwagon ecstasy is expressed vocally online.

5. Pontification. Now everyone needs to know what the existence of the trend “means.” The riddle is chewed over endlessly with take after take. Are luxury flip flops recolonizing the global south? 

6. Disdain. As the trend soldiers on, we become not only sick of  the trend, we become sick of hearing someone even talking about it. We resent the psychic energy the trend has robbed from us. We’ve invested in something banal, and now it’s gone to zero. This revulsion starts loud but quickly slips into silence. 

7. Exile. Now the Trend smolders in Trend Hell, being mentioned or followed only by the most tragically behind members of society. The trend will most likely remain here for eternity, unless it gets Von-Dutchified into a second wave of ironic appreciation. But even that second moment in the sun is far from its original glory.

What has struck me most in recent years isn’t how fast this cycle now happens (people already talk about that a lot). It’s how extreme the highs and lows are. Something can be beloved one week and utterly repulsive the next. The only pre-internet corollary I can think of is disco music, a trend that seemed to take hold of 70s America like a trance, only to become a viscerally disliked cultural punchline. The height of the disco era was less than five years, and yet the next 20 years of music was born out of hating it. Early hair metal bands used to burn effigies of disco stars at their concerts. 

So if Trending is a road littered with bones, why should we even seek Virality? Is it better to be cult, or quiet, or timeless? Or are we all destined for Trend Hell either way? Luckily, there’s two ways to cheat damnation and they both happen to be four-letter acronyms. 

Shutting the Fuck Up (STFU) is perhaps the most tried and true method for evading Trend Hell. This was once a tactic that brands seemed to do earnestly and accidentally — think the light touch marketing approach of Goyard, Brunello Cucinelli, or pre-acquisition Stone Island. Or even a cult brand from outside fashion like Yeti, which I personally spent years unsuccessfully trying to do a feature on. For decades these brands built a cult following by doing (what seems to the untrained eye) basically nothing to communicate about themselves. They grew by building mystique, by focusing on product, and (as the kids say) by farming aura.

But that’s the thing: You don’t Shut the Fuck Up by accident. It’s a strategy, one that needs to be done perfectly in order to work. Firstly (and this is the part I know least about), you need an incredible product that speaks for itself in order to properly STFU. Secondly, you need to be versed in the dark art of Anti-Viral Marketing.  

An Anti-Virus isn’t bed rest, it’s a tactic that actively thwarts Virality and Overexposure. If you STFU passively, it can be interpreted for fear or lack of depth. No, you have to be brave and ruthless in service of your quietude.  When Bottega Veneta became an It-Brand during the first years of Daniel Lee, they surreptitiously deleted their Instagram. The thought of doing such a thing would have left most CMOs shaking, but they understood that if they swung extremely into Anti-Viral terrain that their base (in particular the now semi-official fan account @newbottega) was strong enough to pick up the message. The Row did something similar when they banned phones from their runway shows in Paris, a move that feels antithetical to inviting hundreds of influential people to come see your clothes, but it had the exact effect it intended to have.

Sometimes STFUing means giving your fans exactly what they don’t want. Watch brands like Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet are masters of Anti-Viral tactics, and part of it involves breaking hearts.  As the secondary market for it reached a fever pitch in 2021, Patek discontinued its most sought after watch (the 5711 Nautilus) as a way of cooling things down. Its next major release was a square version of the Nautilus called the Cubitus, a watch so unnerving to the sensibility of watch fanatics that many thought it was a joke when it leaked. I once went to meet-and-greet cocktail for the watchmaker Francois-Paul Journe, whose brand FP Journe has years-long waitlists for every item it makes. The room was packed with millionaires and billionaires, top clients waiting to kiss the ring. The party ended at 9pm and Journe himself showed up at 8:55, quietly skulking in wearing a windbreaker and scuffed On Running shoes. It was a masterclass in STFUing loudly.

What’s difficult to replicate about STFUing is that it’s most famously done by brands that have such strong demand that they can afford to neg customers and still win sales. But here’s the thing: you don’t always have to go whole hog. Even STFUing a little bit can aid you as a brand. Take Louis Vuitton, one of the loudest brands in the world. When the Marc Jacobs era began approaching Trend Hell, the Arnaults pumped the brakes and eventually brought the logo-allergic Nicolas Ghesquiere into the mix. Givenchy is now STFUing after its loud flop with Matthew Williams. Gucci tried to STFU (and flopped as well) by hiring unknown Sabato di Sarno, and ironically I think the key to Demna Gvasalia’s success there will be STFUing a bit. 

Marketers will tell you that STFUing even just a little is hard to pull off (and even harder to sell to the bosses). It also takes a brand that’s complex enough to say the loud part quietly. Duolingo could never get rid of their people-dressed-up-as-a-bird social media strategy, because it’s basically the only cultural IP they have. Virality is a road that’s only one lane wide — and it leads to people only knowing one thing about you. This is why Supreme invests so many resources into sponsoring a skate team and making the best skate videos. It has nothing to do with selling t-shirts. It ensures that the brand is more going on than just a red logo.

If for whatever reason you can’t STFU, you can always Hold On for Dear Life. HODL is originally a crypto term, one that describes the behavior of betting long on an investment no matter how gruesome it gets. There’s something almost religious about HODLing, because it requires a faith in something that runs counter to every Earthly signal that’s telling you to stop. 

Eight or so years ago, an executive at American Eagle told me something that blew my mind. We were talking about trends, and she explained that the brand never ceases manufacturing a silhouette of jeans, no matter how off-trend it is, because there is always a cohort of people who will never stop wearing the jeans they wore in their 20s. Sure, Gen Z is gobbling up Baggies, but there’s an underestimated market of people who never gave up Skinnies. When Kendrick Lamar unexpectedly brought bootcut jeans back into the conversation with his Superbowl performance, I’m sure American Eagle was one of the only places that still had them on deck.

But usually HODLing doesn’t have this “something for everyone” approach. The most courageous are the ones who have all their eggs in one basket. Legacy HODLers like Stetson and Ralph Lauren don’t redo their respective strategies when Western and Prep go in and out of style. They have the back of those who are committed to the bit, and they’re ready for when the world wants to come to them. Footwear brands like Timberland, Birkenstock, and asics are all enjoying a moment in the sun after HODLing to their core aesthetic. 

(BTW, this doesn’t just apply to brands. Just as Tom Ford HODLed on Luxury Sleaze, Cobra Snake HODLed on Indie Sleaze. To quote Madonna without getting the exact words right: “The most controversial thing I ever did was stay relevant.”) 

First and foremost, HODLing is a reminder that most people don’t actually follow Trends. People are aware of them, sure, but to actually follow is a level of commitment that doesn’t capture the majority. As people, our tastes usually become fully formed and relatively hard to change at a certain age. Sure, “Gorpcore” is out, but I’m probably going to wear an Arc’Teryx jacket for the rest of my life. May I rot in Trend Hell with the rest of us.

Thanks for reading. Please don’t STFU in the comments ;)

Ads have always been the horse and buggy that Content is rendering obsolete. And good riddance, right? Why flood the world with banal schlock that only exists to sell things? Why not take those creative budgets and tell stories that contribute to culture while also making people fall in love with brands?

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Making real Content is a process of World-Building. Everything else is just Info-Sharing. 

CNN Shares Info. Business Insider shares that same Info, so do a ton of other places. Info is a commodity. You’ll accept Info from whoever gets it to you the fastest with the least amount of friction. The connection ends there. Have you ever rewatched the nightly news the way you would an episode of your favorite sitcom? Of course not. Why would you? There’s no world to crawl into, no emotion to relive, no Kramer and Jerry, no Ross and Rachel. There’s just Info that you already have.  

Info-Sharing is a crucial function in society, but it doesn’t have anything to do with defining a brand. If Axios came out with an Extra Virgin Olive Oil, would you unironically buy it over the one you use now? If Vogue came out with one, you’d at least be curious. One brand has spent decades building a World, the other hasn’t. 

But Thom, how do I just start… World-Building?

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I never totally understood “rage-bait” until I was exposed to the world of bad recipe TikTok. You’ve definitely seen the type of video I’m talking about, the ones where a person with the utmost confidence of a TV chef will put together a wretched culinary concoction and present it as something delicious…Fireball-flavored Pie. A chocolate fountain, but made out of hot dogs and filled with hot dog water instead of chocolate. The most heinous lasagna you could possibly imagine.

If you’ve never seen what I’m talking about then I envy you. Because the worst part about this genre is that once you see one of these videos, you can’t stop watching them. You need to know what other types of culinary war crimes are going to take place next. It’s often even more delightful to do a deep scan on the litany of horrified comments.

That’s the thing about Rage-Bait, it generates unheard-of engagement. It’s bait.

But what fascinates me most about my own experience of internet Rage is it begins negative yet quickly grows into something else. We enjoy things that make us mad the way a dog loves a chew toy. That’s why in professional wrestling you have the archetype of the “heel,” the villain who drives the plot forward through his hate-ability. But what happens to Rage when it's flooded with pleasure? It becomes Cringe, its self-aware counterpart.

Cringe is Rage for the irony-poisoning era. We don’t merely get mad at something Cringe, we observe and enjoy why it sucks from an arm’s length. (Funny enough, the most ecstatic stage of Cringe is when you realize that you, the witness to Cringe, are indeed yourself Cringe.)

Cringe can often be even more engaging to audiences than Rage, because it operates on multiple levels. Those who aren’t in on the joke just get mad — while those enjoying it ironically can make fun of both the content and the NPCs who are mad.

Perhaps one of the most powerful examples of how Cringe can sustain itself is the existence of the television show And Just Like That… There are so many things to hate about the Sex and the City reboot — from its awkwardly aging stars to its tokenized queer and BIPOC characters to its ham-fisted attempts at covering “contemporary topics” — that hating the show out loud became an online sport. It’s now just starting its third season, a milestone few shows on TV ever reach, entirely off the back of cringe-watching.

Yet even Cringe has its limits. As we find ourselves enjoying the process of hating something, pleasure fades to guilt. We feel like the thing that we are cringing at is actually still winning — just by virtue of the fact that it's getting our attention. We feel used and slip back into Rage.

But how is this journey from Rage to Cringe and back again being used to sell products? In fact, it’s most likely an untapped — albeit dangerous and potentially brand-toxic — dynamic.

A couple months ago I scrolled past a curious Instagram ad for a spikey acupressure mat. The picture was of a man lowering himself onto a bed of spikes (I can’t think of a better metaphor for being online in 2025). On top of the image, it reads: “Expensive for what it is.”

Huh? Was the brand’s account hacked? Did some rogue social media manager go postal and put paid ad dollars behind a negative comment? Once you get hooked in by that mindfuck, the caption does a classic copywriting flip along the lines of: “Heck yeah, it’s expensive. Because it’s super well made and we’re an ethical company that pays living wages. And BTW your health is priceless.”

The post had incredibly strong engagement for a paid ad. People who were heated that a spikey mat could cost into three-figures sounded off. Spikey mat enthusiasts defended their beloved spikey mats, while others made fun of the ragers for being so mad. Perhaps most meta of all the commenters were the ones who called out the rug-pull marketing tactic of the post itself.

But does this type of Rage dogpile actually sell stuff? I guess you could say that the visibility that comes with engagement inevitably leads more people to seeing the product, and inevitably some of those people will buy it. But you can’t build a brand off negative attention — not because it’s negative, because it’s just attention. Neither Rage nor Cringe produce purchase-intent or community. They’re a collective scream into the void.

In their most overt forms, Rage and Cringe are attention-grabbing tactics that rarely move culture beyond the commotion they make. But if you don’t understand their dynamic, you can end up in the crosshairs. And if used correctly in moderation, they are indeed powerful.

Perhaps the most seminal example of this effect is Hailey Bieber’s infamous Erewhon smoothie. From its inception, the beverage fueled many Rage-tinted questions: What do this Venice Beach health food store and would-be lip gloss mogul have in common? How is it healthy if it tastes like a milkshake? Why is it $20?

Of course, price was the main kernel of rage in this equation (more on that in a bit). But beyond breaking the sound barrier of being a $20 thing served in a plastic cup, there was something inevitable about its success. Even walking up to the counter at Erewhon and dead-panning “One Hailey Bieber smoothie, please” (as I’ve done a dozen times) is a delectably Cringe experience. Many tried it just to hate it, many others ended up going into debt to make it part of their lifestyle. It’s been three years and counting, and the “temporary menu item” is still a phenomenon, and Hailey herself is a billionaire.

What’s perfect about the Hailey Bieber smoothie is that it neither delves too far into Rage nor too far into Cringe — it is suspended somewhere between the two, in a place let’s call The Guilty Pleasure Zone.

In this place, we feel the pleasure that follows Rage without yet feeling the Irony Poisoning that comes with Cringe. Yes, the smoothie is expensive, but so are a lot of things — there’s nothing to get too mad about. On the flip side, it’s Cringe but not so much so that you’re ironically fixated on something you hate. In fact, the smoothie is actually good. So what is there to be too guilty about? And just like that…you’re on Abbot Kinney sipping berry glaze in a serene limbo.

For the luxury world, the biggest source of Rage is often pricing. Luxury items are unbelievably expensive for most people, and when those prices get too high (Himalaya Birkin) or artificially scarce (Labubu), or what the thing actually is seems banal (a white t-shirt), it stirs tremendous Rage. Back when I was the EIC at Highsnobiety during the pandemic, the headline “Check Out This Normcore Sock” would flop — whereas “Check Out This $900 Sock” would do numbers.

Perhaps the master of this was once Demna Gvasalia, who (intentionally or not) drove his work into ubiquity with viral offenses to common sense like his nearly $2,000 purse that looks like a bag of potato chips, or brand new sneakers that look like someone walked through a puddle in them. These items made some online so mad (Rage) and drove others to ironically embrace them as though they are contemporary art (Cringe). But quickly enough, this Rage-Cringe cycle would spin out of control — and Gvasalia would find himself embroiled in a bizarre scandal fueled by … online raging online conspiracy theorists.

I’ve argued to many in private that the Balenciaga scandal was what gave birth to Quiet Luxury. It was a reckoning for those in charge of expensive clothes. Why are we sticking our necks out to be “popular” and “highly online” when our value is actually generated by a small cohort of VICs? Why are we chasing engagement from those who don’t participate in the most important type of engagement of all: buying things? And just like that…fashion became about rich people again.

The stickiness of Quiet Luxury is that from its onset it was able to exist perfectly within the Guilty Pleasure Zone. Our collective fascination with the show Succession was pivotal to its rise in that it added a dose of irony to being rich that made it less Rage-worthy. But Quiet Luxury was never quite so Cringe either. Why? Because dressing more simply and focusing on quality actually looks good on most people.

This summer’s viral The Row flip flops are a perfect exemplar of this. How can a pair of flip flops cost nearly $900? Fair, but they’re also incredibly well-made. Is it Cringe to wear them? Not really, because to the average person you just look like you’re wearing pleasantly generic flip flops. Quiet Luxury’s covertness is another safeguard. A quintessential Quiet Luxury item should just be the expensive version of a normal-looking thing — be it a driving shoe or a cashmere crewneck. This undetectability puts a cap on the Rage or Cringe it can generate.

Funny enough, I think the end of the Quiet Luxury era was signaled by another television show. Or rather, just behind-the-scenes pictures of a television show. Online fashionistas practically stampeded each other to eviscerate images of actress Sarah Pidgeon playing Carolyn Bassett Kennedy in Ryan Murphy’s upcoming FX drama.

For the past couple years, the late CBK and her also late husband JFK Jr. had been resurrected as the patron moodboard saints of Quiet Luxury. Their paparazzi pics oozing with pre-internet 90s innocence and effortless chic were powerfully aspirational. The CBK of FX, however, was a farce of this idea. And it really doesn’t help that proponents of Quiet Luxury are insanely detail-oriented. Her Birkin was perfectly buckled, not open and slouchy in the manner CBK wore the bag (a quirk later on radicalized by both the founders of The Row and Demna too). Her Converse sneakers made no sense. Her clothes looked poorly made. To some it up from a line I’m grabbing from a meme: Wearing beige from Zara does not equal “Quiet Luxury.”

This moment was not merely a roast of someone’s costumes — it brought other questions to the surface: Is this style “exclusive” if every 20-something in the West Village is dressing this way? Why am I modeling my entire personal style after paparazzi pictures of a dead celebrity? Does someone actually look “expensive” when they dress this way, or is it tragically aspirational? In these images Sarah Pidgeon wasn’t just an actress playing an icon — she was our own worst nightmare: a person failing miserably to look chic. Were we Cringe all along?

Sure, this newsletter is about Rage vs. Cringe, but this is just one of many dynamics coursing through the cultural marketplace. If you want to make Content without becoming roadkill, you need to understand these dynamics — how they can propel your message, and how they can upend it. What makes this process hard is that all of these variables are fluid. What’s Based one moment can be Cringe the next. Someone’s genuine fascination can be another person’s nightmare fuel.

In short: It’s all the Rage.