Bonjour,
Welcome to the many new subscribers who found us through Deana’s AI Research project (which had a little viral moment on ig), we are so happy you are here and hope you love us.
Deana celebrated with a breakfast of champions (couldn’t be me).
ily,
This week's newsletter is taking a bit of a departure from my ordinary coverage, where I often talk about unexpected second-order consequences of viral trends both IRL (i.e. peptides, surveillance sunglasses, death of big alcohol, etc.) and URL (TikTok's #SkinnyTok ban, white women obsessing over chicness, prediction markets, etc.).
But this week our very own Cait Cavell launched the first episode of our new show LOOKBOOK, a Boys Club Production. It’s a video essay series exploring style, signals, and systems. So I’m taking this opportunity to give you a little taste of her thinking here with the written word.
In this episode, she explains trend cycles and if there was anyone I would trust to do that, it would be this this bitch:
As much as we would like to believe trends are random and arbitrary, she argues that they exist on 20-year cycles that are easy to spot and predict by keeping an eye on decades-old fashion runways, media, street style, retail, and search data.
That nostalgia and familiarity are in a constant push and pull with reinterpretation as an entirely new generation comes into buying power.
She lays out this thesis with case studies like the Ed Hardy Renaissance and Abercrombie rebrand (whose stock price, BTW, is up ~203% over the past 5 years).
She ends the episode with a playbook for both brands and individuals to spot the signals that make up the next cycle. So if you want to avoid being an NPC…
….I suggest you tap in and watch the full video episode below:
New episodes dropping soon, so become a sub. See you next week!
