fashion loves fascism btw

On the fall of the aesthetic realm at the hands of the fascists and a continued rumination from the prisons of perfection.

Apr 26, 2026

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Ceasefire will be indefinite, Trump says
Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extended
Clearing Hormuz could take 6 months

Mess atop of mess, which is spiking the liberal prediction preppers over on TikTok. Buckle up because things are about to get screwy everywhere 🥴

EU approves a $106B loan to help Ukraine

Some good news, which may be an example of what can happen now that Victor Orbán is out.

The FBI Director Is MIA
“Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket”
MAGA Convinced Assassination Was Staged
Terror Official Suspended, Sugar Baby Allegations
Unpacking ‘nuclear chief’ Hugg revealed secrets

All of this is so spiritually TMZ Goes To Washington™ and yet, surprisingly, none of these stories are from TMZ in Washington.

At least 10 tied to sensitive US research have died
“Is anyone investigating this?”
Chinese Scientists Have Been Dying Too
“Isn’t this a plot of the Three-Body Problem?”

To the above! What the hell is happening with these missing scientists? It may not matter, but it does play into a whole section we have on conspiracy cultures going boom in the latest Trend Report: Trend Report™ (which we discussed toward the end of Tuesday’s live).

Timeline: Trump assassination attempts
Trump Describes Mind-Set After Chaos

And yet another point on the board for conspiracy culture, as this whole situation is stirring up lots of thoughts — The ballroom talking points, the “Cole Allen” madness, the unbriefed Melania, the Karoline Leavitt gaffe, etc. — which I’m sure the new MAGA assassination conspiracists are having a field day with.

It’s not just one thing — it’s another thing
Using a chatbot for medical advice? Read this first.
AI Job Loss Is Coming. Anyone Have a Plan?
“That is the skeleton key”
“how helpless people feel”
“down with big tech !”

A fat round-up of fuck-around-and-find-out AI stuff, none of which is surprising but it does come to further represent the frustrations around tech as class wars continue to wage. Anyway, here are some robot running crashes in China and a funny story about a (failing) AI-run retail project.

Pancreatic cancer vaccine shows lasting results

More good news! I feel like some big cancer stories are breaking but the current news cycle keeps drowning them.

Congress betrayed the Boundary Waters
Wildfires across Georgia, Florida
Denver Water plans to drain Antero Reservoir
PGA Tour confirms exit from Hawaii

This week in concerning nature items. We’re also not talking enough about this summer’s El Niño! I need the jewel at the center of the Woke 2.0 crown to be championing the climate.

**NEW**: Q1 analysis Trend Report: Trend Report™ is available for download here.

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Two years ago Camila Cabello dropped “I LUV IT” and C,XOXO, an effort far ahead of their time yet far behind that whom she cribbed, Charli XCX, who was seconds away from dropping brat. Camila’s mind, as big and empty but full of media executives as it is, were onto something: Charli’s style — a performative alternativeness, that maybe is real but largely is a character informed by the artist’s past — is a skeleton key to cool, which is why Camila and her team imagined it was possible to imitate and reap successes by being seen as an innovator or tastemaker. Camila and her team were wrong and right: wrong, in that it didn’t yield success for Camila (Although the record did land on a few best-of lists.), but right in that she anticipated a pop trope of using Charli’s aesthetic to signal cool in the way that Katy Perry and Demi Lovato, among others, did. What Charli — and her wannabes — prove is something drag queens known well, all built on a history of queerness and gender studies: it’s all drag as clothing and aesthetics are a vocabulary to signals associations, experiences, and taste. Semiotics as culture cleaver! It’s a very spiritually Gen Z approach to the world too: I can just buy the aesthetic and then become it. Seeing is believing. Hence the early 2020s trend cycle that was the aesthetics craze, a series of styles that lacked life because they weren’t tied to one’s experience: it was costume. But the looks were so loud and “interesting” that media at large took it for fact.

A similar undertaking is happening, but one far more nefarious: very bad people are using a similar semiotics playbook to advance or “soften” ugly ideologies that feeble minded looksmaxxers and their ilk will eat up, hungry consumerist hypebeasts sheep to the maw of influence. After more than a decade of social media training us to see an image and believe said image — that one “wearing” a type of fashion means they discovered it themself, that they are a part of a culture — this very Kardashian learning has rippled up: we are in the era of aesthetic evil, where imagery are being used to soften ideologies from fascism to mass exploitation. None are new, but they are clicking much harder than they have. Take the Palantir chore coat, an object so evil as it coalesces a very specific urban Millennial wannabe European image and uses it as a shield to distract people from — Um. — murder, surveillance, and fascism, all techniques it can and will apply to you too. But it’s a relaxed fit! And made in America! Can it be bad? Of course, but such an if-this-then-that transitive association via fashion will almost always favor visual truth over factual truth: if it looks cool, it is cool in a way that the pop girls couldn’t pull off, as their music didn’t deliver on said cool — but Palantir? Its products aren’t actually seen or felt until you’re actively dying from them: unlike flop albums, it’s not possible to “see” or “question” the associations that their chore coat and other domination swag are a part of. This is merch seeking to divorce itself from ideology in order to reframe it. Fashion has become the representative of the end goal of culture’s worst qualities: “a look” as dress up for our most evil.

The days of the far right wearing white polos and Fred Perry are over because now they dress like you, invisible in their Brooklyn and Silver Lake cool cosplay that they seek to push further into. “Taste as a new core skill” isn’t actually about having taste but about blurring associations: AI war machines like Anthropic best represent this via their soulless stone washed thought swag that set off a chain reaction of similar efforts (Ahem, OpenAI.) revealing such “cool” looks are now baked into the machine — Tasteslop! — available to be bought and sold with a click as easily as Palantir did. Open your browser and hop from your open kill tab to a buy now tab! It would be simple and stupid enough if this was siloed to Silicon Valley types struggling with cope, but it’s not: actual fashion has let in these ghouls with open arms. All the billionaires at fashion week, on and off the runway, reveal how the industry is now content to dress those who are monied regardless of what their associations since common people now have neither money nor power as they did in the 2010s. Prada Meta glasses, anyone? Again: none of this is new, either in the recent past or more distant past, but it’s unsurprising that a “creative” industry continues to thrive from legacies of colonization and slavery is now getting cozy with rich but deeply evil people, those responsible for our unfortunate now.

It’s easy to see why this is the case too: fashion is suffering financially and are hitching themselves to such leadership and tech like AI to be granted salvation once a “new world order” breaks where they can finally abandon having to cater to those they seem unworthy (Black, queer, poor, etc.) so they can rise to the white elite they’ve always associated themselves with. Tech bros and fascists and those between the two groups are eager for fashion to make over their messages and images, softening the population’s palates through looks, all as fashion is eager to be saved from the slums of slumping sales: they’re a match made in a heaven of hell — and it’s killing fashion, sending us toward a fast approaching culture crash where the cool people no longer find fashion cool, which will tank an industry’s reputation. (It most certainly has made the industry sour for me, or at least major labels.) As we approach a Bezos-sponsored Met Gala featuring the presences of Meta, OpenAI, Snapchat, ShopMy, and more, this long existing evil symbiotic relationship will crack open as more and more people come back to a realization from last year and the year before, that the whole Met Gala is a parade of bad rich people playing in our faces, selling us cake. Fashion’s clout, like tech’s clout, will crash: tech is already crashing, and we are seconds away from it taking fashion down too.

It’s possible these associations paraded around in public will create a delicious Streissand effect, that “quiet luxury” fascist merch will easily elevate poor thinkers and sloppers at scale, revealing the targets for our tomatoes and molotov cocktails: if the data center is a main target of our woes, so will the Palantir chore coat and the Anthropic “thinking” hat — but also any brand sucking the toes of Lauren Sánchez Bezos and her ilk. The signal of an aesthetic runs both ways, that the art of drag only works if you’re good at the character, if you’re a strong performer: Charli — unlike Camila, Katy, or Demi — can sell the idea of being cool and alt while actively selling out, graduating from the Beyoncé and Taylor Swift school of capitalism. These tech bros? The fashion industry? They’re somehow very bad at it and the public is collectively making the connection. At least we’ll have Zohran, whose approach to such subjects truly represents the quiet luxury that is actually having taste.

Finland Limits Venice Biennale Role
EU to cut Venice Biennale funding over Russia
With Trump, Can U.S. Win Art Olympics?

I am hoping to go to this year’s Venice Biennale, particularly to see the vision of the late curator Koyo Kouoh and the late artist Henrike Naumann, who is representing Germany. But! There are some interesting dramas, like Finland going on strike if Russia participates (Good!) through the surprising dog food connection to the US exhibition.

WB approves Paramount’s $111bn takeover
The Onion Has a Deal to Take Over Infowars

Two big entertainment items, one of which is very bad (See above.) and the other of which is very good (especially given Alex Jones’ various big crash outs). However, one will reshape the landscape for the worse while the other will be largely go unheard and unseen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

I am a long-standing Jimmy Fallon hater and this Current Affairs story is 1.) delicious and 2.) long overdue.

FIFA struggling to sell tickets

The World Cup is going to be a fascinating affair in that it’s going to be make-or-break for American culture with home field advantage. The first game featuring the America team struggling to sell tickets? As the following game between Iran and New Zealand is outselling it? An enthralling, obvious drama.

Saudis Withdraw Millions to Met Opera

Does the Metropolitan Opera need money? Yes. But is said money disappearing as it was from Saudi Arabia a good thing? Also yes, as it avoids the above (even if art at large is desperate for such funding). Mackenzie Bezos, can you helo here?

He spreads hate, fans pay him thousands

Most interesting thing I read this week, as it reveals the racist types who are donating to Nick Fuentes — and the insane stories attached to them. Everyone’s parasocial! Even the most morally corrupt people!!

Losing My Friend Over Wegovy
“they’ve done it again”
“the perspective we amplify”

This story is as crazy as people claimed it to be, which shows off that — Yes! — The Cut still has that sauce. Also: stories like this really illustrate a cuckoo 2010s identity politics psychosis about 2020s subjects.

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“In 10 years, AI is going to be able to do Timothée’s job, but it will not be able to replace a person on a stage dancing live,” the actor Charlize Theron told The New York Times. If Hollywood’s treatment of itself and the advances of AI video tech are any indication of anything, Charlize would be right: it is very easy to envision a future where AI actors are doing bit parts or stealing starring roles, as much as people like you and I balk at that prospect. Who will watch such slop content? Unsure, but it is an unfortunate but likely reality. And yet: Charlize’s timing was absolutely awful, as she got lumped into a similar — and actually bad — pro-AI conversation by her peers, specifically Reese “AI” Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock. Now, Charlize is being forced to kneel on glass to atone: ““I talked out of my ass,” she told Variety. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in ten years, okay? Nobody does. But I assume that a living, live performance would be hard [to replicate].”

Such a situation — like Timothée’s situation, despite my dislike of him — is a very good example of something we see again and again and again, a hangover of the late 2010s that is now calcified in leftist culture that is a hangover of Christianity that has come to shape a point of view: a seeking of perfect purity, unstained politics by all. There cannot be any nuance! Reconciliation requires near-literal suicide before a sin cannot be absolved. There is no forgiving nor is there forgetting: that’s the culture game we’re playing, try as we might to say the right is dumb — but at least they do make room for making amends, at least they aren’t always Pollyanna policing those in their movement. Look to Sabrina Carpenter not just last summer but last week as a key site of this, whose wobbly reaction to someone ululating (?) didn’t just get messy for her but for many who participated in the discourse, forcing normies to make apologies as their participation threw them into the maw of MAGA, therefore contextualizing their purity picking for what it is: conservative.

Every few days such a pious perfection performance emerges about the littlest and dumbest things (The cringe standing up to Charli about dance being “dead.”) to the biggest and most dire things (TikTok versus Christian Divyne, over misreadings the CNN story about a “rape” academy.), all of which has people on the same side of the wall yelling at each other instead of breaking down. This brings me to something I’ve been thinking a lot about for the past few years: the death of veganism, the death of queerness, and the death of sustainability. Clearly, all these things “still exist” but, in a post-DEI world, these three domains at the overlap of culture and politics have been hollowed out, either by Trump or by people’s exhaustion with the all-or-nothing fundamentalism that barks loudest from the respective communities. With veganism, the dogma was projected as no meat anything, suggesting alternatives (Pescatarianism, “meat on the weekends,” etc.) as wrong, to the point that entire businesses around meat alternatives have crumbled. With queerness, this was that the community could only have one type of political expression, that identities are fluid but minds are fixed — and thus sets a trap that forces some formerly trans people to go cross-eyed and brain dead in the process. With sustainability, life became even more difficult as us little people have to do everything (No straws! No polyester! No meat!), which rightfully feels myopic when compared to Taylor Swift and her peers but also sets up an impossible standard one can ever be “good enough” at. “We’ve created an environment where no one wants to talk about sustainability online,” Brittany Sierra said of this. “Yes, the algorithm is part of it, but so is the culture we’ve built around the conversation.”

The hangover here is that these (failed) movements somehow became everything, so many aspects of society becoming “perfect”: cartoons are going extinct as slick digital doppelgangers trample creative possibility for uniformity; video games push toward extreme realism even if players are more interested in better gameplay than better looks; wellness has exploded from the pursuit of “being healthy” to getting locked into a prison of pretty that bends toward the fascist. The body must now be slim, the skin must be smooth. Genders and sexuality can now only be one or the other. Everything quiet, no one dirty. “Why do we mix races?” a creator said earlier this month in a viral video. “Why aren’t we keeping the white people with the white people?...Let’s just keep it simple.” Simple. Not complicated: simple. Not tacky or trashy: classy, which pins our demands of perfection to the body as a disqualifier based in economic equalizers. I am perfect therefore I am above you, culture says, and I shan’t try to understand nuance, I shan’t allow depth. “Presentable is the bare minimum of social civility,” Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote of such thinking a decade ago. “It means being clean, not smelling, wearing shirts and shoes for service and the like. Presentable as a sufficient condition for gainful, dignified work or successful social interactions is a privilege. It’s the aging white hippie who can cut the ponytail of his youthful rebellion and walk into senior management while aging black panthers can never completely outrun the effects of stigmatization against which they were courting a revolution. Presentable is relative and, like life, it ain’t fair.”

As teen boys choose the perfection of AI girlfriends over human women who challenge them, as gay AI thirst trap creators reinforce our collective body dysmorphias, the “performed imperfection” line of thinking is a co-opting of the imperfect that is an extension of the perfect. Hello, AI “anti-Grammarly”! The real push-backs against perfection are the same messy and ugly things that break us from the prison of pretty and are why we’re seeing aesthetic non-normativity being pushed as “alternative” or “cutting edge” when it’s simply living without filter, without demands: older women the hottest trend in fashion; the renewed appeal of party photography (and party reportage); fonts and designs culled from the planet simply existing; the widening appeal of being not-on-your-phone, from regular people to entire businesses. To be human is to be simple, to care less, to offer renewal and restoration as an act of love. We, the older and slightly more lived, understand this — but a generation raised online with a pitchfork in hand? Who have been groomed by anti-progressive media to apply dominance at scale? They’re repeating our mistakes, which makes the present a continued messy replay of a well intentioned part of our past that will continue to haunt us.