TR.BIZ: 9.9.2025

Your early-mid-week check-in, where we talk fashion's culture recession to signs of our cultural purity politics ✨

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking the need for dumber technology, performative male governments, and the 999 portal. Also a note to readers in Barcelona: this Friday, I’m co-hosting a meet-up with

Perfectly Imperfect

at Bar Manifest: RSVP HERE!

👠 Aesthetically Pleasing: Fashion’s culture recession

I know I mutter a lot to myself to you all about the culture recession and I think a place that people really are missing it manifesting is fashion: the fashion world is deeply in a recession, an industry desperate for a “disruption” but continuing to crank the same business model, never questioning what it’s doing or why it’s doing what it does (other than for profit). Let me count the ways of this recession, in no particular order: Venice Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival are being elevated for their so-called “very buzzy looks” when all we’re getting is recycled JW Anderson and Versace putting two celebs in the same outfit; Copenhagen Fashion Week got lots of buzz for being an “alt” fashion week with great street style when it seems to have just recreated the style of Ashley Tisdale, only interesting for its questionable green claims; Anna Wintour named her second coming, which ended up being another rich bloodline who will uphold conservative business-as-usual (especially if this is her first cover); the Karlie Kloss-led i-D going all in on AI slop for their recent issue; the LVMH Prize’s top winner being the least compelling candidate. “I am getting so tired of seeing the same concepts, models and stories over and over again. Are we stuck in the past?” a popular post about the new Vogue cover said. “i kind of hate how much stupid, non-biodegradable clothing we make just so someone can wear something for like three months and get a bunch of likes on the internet,” known fashion dude Derek Guy observed of the plastic shoe trend. “We’re getting worse experiences and worse craftsmanship,” Mina Le recently said on TikTok. This all says the same thing to me: culture recession. The one tiny bit of hope is Rachel Scott becoming creative director of Proenza Schouler. Why? Because so much of the aforementioned items are “business as usual” despite the world turning, people evolving, and tastes changing. Just like Hollywood, just like music, just like the internet: everything is becoming enshittified, cultureless. Dry. Yes, “these conservative times” — but these deeply uninteresting times too. Everything is soft because no one has teeth anymore.

📲 Tech Talk: Maybe we should be dumb again?

There’s a bubbling feeling that a tech bubble is bursting, less as a solid movement but more that many things that were once innovations are now ruining us — and have gone too far. Some examples: FT data icon John Burn-Murdoch examined how social media use compared to traditional media and television as far as influence and social media enables extreme political views at both ends of the spectrum, thus proving echo chamber ideas; Lizzo has a viral TikTok speaking to a feeling that we’ve all had, that 2025 didn’t have a song of the summer — and she says it’s because algorithms are dog walking the industry, resulting in zero breakthroughs and a take-make-waste model for music; creators are complaining that YouTube is shadowbanning content because channels are getting restricted needlessly, which ties into something

carla lalli music

sounded the alarm on in March of this year; The Atlantic shared a story dropping a bombshell we all know: the job market is in shambles as workers use AI to write cover letters and HR uses AI to read them and interview candidates (“What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market, contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market.”: woof.). These are all signals that the machine has broken such simple things like getting sharing news, that it is preventing typically “easy” human things from happening. To make this matter more interesting, a trend is emerging where “dumb” things are seen as technotainment saviors: Sunday’s flop VMAs got “record” viewership for MTV — but it didn’t actually because the program wasn’t just streamed on MTV and Paramount+ but on CBS, which artificially boosted numbers by turning to traditional media; Amazon’s final season of The Summer I Turned Pretty has driven conversation for weeks by switching to a weekly release schedule versus an all-at-once binge moment, seeing numbers supposedly jump (compared to Wednesday season two, whose split binge nearly matched the ferocity of season one); the AI Sphere Wizard of Oz thing, “sing-alongs” and “meme-alongs” for movies, and the larger “4DX” movie experiences trends suggest the future of movies is live theater or, at least, Rocky Horror style audience participations; OpenAI — which is “supposed to be” the future — is literally making a movie instead of rethinking the format, creating a new art form entirely. Culture recessions, sure, but so much of tech and it’s bleeding into entertainment is no longer futuristic — and the returns are minimal. Paired with Zuckerberg, Cook, Gates, Altman, Pinchai, and more fellating Trump last week, tech is no longer cool: it’s not sexy, it’s not interesting, it’s evil, it’s cringe, it’s ruining our lives and planet. Another era is coming and it will be dumb, meaning a great logoff is on the horizon.

🏛️ Politicultural, I: How purity policing rocketed us from the Astronomer CEO to the baseball Karen