cool sports bro

Why fashion's pivot to sports is bad news and positing a different way of looking at time.

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• A week from today: if you’re in Paris, we’re doing a hang April 27!

  Bobby Aaron Solomon
  and I will be at Causeries in the 3rd at 5P, likely for a few hours before we mosey on to dinner. Message if you’re coming, etc.!!

• This week’s🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 was with

  Byron Stewart
  , where he,
  Ben Dietz
  , and I talked the new era of legacy brands like Stussy, Sabrina Carpenter taking over Fortnite, and the rise of technofashion. Listen now on Spotify and YouTube!

• The next Trend Report Live™ is happening May 4 in Barcelona! I’d love to see you, if you’re local: RSVP here.

El Salvador’s Won’t Return Wrongly Deported Man
”Trump floated deporting ‘homegrown criminals’”
“a gulag”
Democrat meets with Abrego Garcia
“will do to deceive people”
“Nuremberg this entire social”
This is, um, extremely concerning, as we’re being primed for anyone to get the boot to Trump’s concentration camps, which is raising many “This is the bad place.” alarms as fascism is here. See also: people rushing to learn what a constitutional crisis is. As you’ll see on Glimpse, searches are going wild as of late. In any event, an Easter gift for you all: the Pope refused to see JD Vance yesterday. That’s funny until you realize Vance is tied to Opus Dei, a hyper-conservative abusive sect of Catholicism that is gunning to take the papacy and enable mass conservatism, which would be very bad.

DNC official to take down fellow Democrats
“replace them with a generational leader”
Sure, yeah, Harvard and MIT fighting Trump — but you know what also rules? Fighting Democrats from the inside out so that they actually meet the moment instead of licking their balls.

US to Lose Billions as Tourists Stay Away
European travellers cancel US visits
US sees biggest drop in Australian visitors
Travelling to the US? Protect yourself
This has been brewing for weeks but is coming to a head. I, for one, cancelled a trip back home less because of “this” but because of the mental, physical, and financial hassle it entails. Sorry, literally everyone in my entire life! Anyway, take a moment to giggle and kick your feet because China’s first quarter results went up despite tariffs. Sorry, loser!

Hungary to ban LGBTQ+ events
UK Court: 'Woman' means bio female
Very concerning turn developments as far as international queer rights.

Japan sees record drop in population
Don’t let the pro-natalists hear about this.

Belgian teens charged with wildlife piracy
Smugglers caught with prized insects in Kenya
After being found with 5,000 Kenyan ants. This is a strange story that definitely highlights a new trend in poaching called “biopiracy,” or “the commercial exploitation of biologic materials” that doesn’t benefit the country of origin. Related cool science news this week: the development of a battery with the consistency of toothpaste, discovering life on a distant planet, and video of a colossal squid for the first time (which is underwhelming).

This isn’t going to sound concerning but it is: fashion is pivoting to sports.

Not in the athleisure sense, not in the sports hallway sense, but in fully picking up the pastimes of the very rich, niche sports that were otherwise untouched-by-fashion. Whereas Nike and Adidas have long fought for big leagues, Louis Vuitton made moves earlier this year by entering a ten year partnership with F1 that is recently expressing itself (which builds on LV’s 2024 sponsoring of the Olympics and America’s Cup, which previously was sponsored by Prada in 2021). Meanwhile, a week ago, Chanel embarked on its first sports sponsorship ever by hosting the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, a richest-of-the-rich regatta in London. This all comes after the past year’s mega moments like the “most fashionable” Super Bowl ever, the “most fashionable” Olympics ever, and Challengers too, all playing into sporty style turning direct. It’s a fascinating merger happening above our heads.

A lot of this has to do with LVMH being in its literal flop era which has them throwing anything at the wall from Pharrell to makeup to literal malls given increasingly slumping sales that mirrors an ongoing, perhaps decade-defining larger luxury fashion sputter, likely explaining why YSL is getting into bookshops, Ralph Lauren is selling dog clothes, and everyone wants to have a restaurant. Sell a lifestyle, if you can’t sell a product. (Ironically, Hermès has pulled to the front of the pack, a brand that has always been tied to equestrian sports. Similarly, Loewe has been on top as well — and it single handedly defined Challengers.) This may be why fashion is getting sporty: it’s reflecting these times, this conservative now. Moreover, subcultures from the queer to the streetwear are out as a result: the classics are in. Like Andy putting down Woody for Buzz, luxury fashion has quickly done an about face, goose stepping in line with what’s en vogue. Who is surprised, for a deeply unsustainable, consumerist, excessive industry? It is perhaps only exceeded by the oil industry as the commercial world’s biggest offenders but, somehow, criticism of fashion isn’t taken as seriously given that “it’s just clothes,” a flip little world that matters only to women and f@ggots like me. That’s exactly why fashion stepping out of the girls-and-gays model needs attention: a lot of this is marketing to a new demographic, meaning sports is coalescing a decade of priming straight men into fashion via streetwear and fashion’s swirling around fascism. The two are perfect bedfellows, meeting at a perfect time where economic opportunity can be mined when men (or the conversation around them) is deeply concerned with their existential crisis, as they pivot to American Psycho inspired vanities, where brands are making a move to mold masculinity now and reframe shopping as patriotic, as more gendered — which means kicking out the minorities who would question this structure in economic hard times, all the groups who helped construct their infrastructure after all these years.

But something else is happening too: that damn vibe shift, which is less about aesthetics themselves and more our loss of subcultures, the growing pains of the “before times” and the inevitable “after times” that we continue to await. Consumerism and algorithms suffocated what was once goth and skater and preppy and whatever other of-real-people cultures that existed which, with help from lost twentysomething teens, morphed into an empty calorie culture of cores, which were real for many people who lived such subcultures until their personal expression became a click away with Shein and the TikTok shop’s help, thus enabling the yearly-for-the-past-three-years conversation of “Trends are dead.” They didn’t die: we confused digital trends for life which strangled real subcultures as business trained people to replace human interaction with goods, meaning consumerism fell one of our most human expressions from both sides. A great example is the loss of stoner culture, which I’ve been thinking about for weeks as we’ve witnessed both a lifestyle and personal expression collapse where opportunity and enterprise arose in the 2010s into the 2020s.

This loss of subcultures has meant we’re all in the whiplash of change, in the waiting room of a new normal, which is perhaps a better expression of the so-called “vibe shift.” The results are bottom feeding expressions as industries and outlets hunt for ways to support itself — and not people — whilst in low-power-mode (a la, pre’conomic collapse): the 1980s moving from a time period to a mineable aesthetic; Broadway’s descent into IP regurgitation; IP/brands monopoly as culture, as perfected by Disney; alternative digital spaces like Grindr pivoting to ad space; a big stupid sponsored rocket full of celebrity women as advertisement for techno dictatorship; young people (or just celebrities) exhuming old tech to “seem more real”; a rise in very basic slogan-based t-shirts that turns one’s chest to ad space.

It’s unsurprising that fashion is abandoning its audience — who were and were not actual shoppers — because, like everything in the world, money talks and those at the bottom, making culture, cannot sustain the infrastructure of luxury. We have been looted of our cultures by business and now we’re seeing them retreat away, us the abused mistress kicked to the curb as their real lover comes home: tradition, the rich, those who uphold the scaffolding of power. We, in the aftermath, are left lost and cultureless, now fully trained to aim our mouths toward the teat of industry instead of figuring out how to get our own milk.

Marie Antoinette in a Penis-Shaped Rocket
Gayle King to Critics
More on the space flight in a moment, all of which is a parading around of riches while actively contributing to problems in our world (like pollution) and failing to address real issues (like gender inequality). We continue to await the invention of the modern guillotine. In other rich people news, millionaire kids are “racing” their sperm. Giant Catastrophic Asteroid…fire when ready. Drone bomb we!

Gaudí on Path to Sainthood
This would be major!! But 100% is publicity for the long-winded finish of the Sagrada Familia.

Dalí’s film to be recreated using AI
OpenAI Is Building Social Platform
This week in AI brain rot, which is reaching new levels of brain rot as Google will make a Dalí film and OpenAI’s social network. Everyone’s homework this week is to watch/listen to

Naomi Klein

and

Paris Marx

explain how we’re living through an AI coup that dehumanizes us all. As Naomi says, social media is a tool of the state now — which it always has been but now has turned more direct.

LA Film and TV Production Levels Plunge
Hollywood At Risk of Becoming “Next Detroit”
This is and isn’t related to the above but: the threat of LA turning into Detroit is grim. Very sad, but also proof of what happens when San Francisco techno dictators infiltrate a city and an industry: they private equity shit from the inside out. Might this be why Cate Blanchet announced she is retiring from acting this week?

The Best and Worst of Coachella
In Space, No One Can Hear You Girlboss
Immediate Pulitzer for criticism to Pitchfork this week. As for Coachella…too bad hardly anyone actually paid to attend! Talk about recession indicators. I didn’t mention last week but, if you haven’t, you gotta watch Gaga’s set. It was truly transcendent.

My Month of Living Quince
We put Quince to the test
“asked me to investigate Quince bags”
Quince is having a mega-moment which I’m going to explain to you gently: this is whitewashed Shein for people who aren’t 17. Please be for real and stop buying this shit.

"First trailer for Ari Aster’s ‘EDDINGTON’"
Ari Aster hive…thoughts?

I passed a guy on the street a few days ago who wore camel bootcut cords, which was striking in that it was such a seamless look. It was contemporary in a post-Kendrick way but also Y2K and 1970s and some elder cowboy era — or something yet to come: it was all of that and none of that. Past, present, future but certainly not timeless. Time full one could say. I watched after him, as he crossed the street, slipping between buildings, and had the thought that he existed in a plane that acknowledges time while transcending it. Spiritual time, I thought. He — or this outfit — was in spiritual time.

The idea has been on my mind all week, which is hard to explain as it's more a feeling than state of being. Spiritual time defies and defines time. Now and then simultaneously that goes beyond the reference. While this specific person’s reason for wearing the look may have been to reference, the appearance wasn’t referential but factual, as the whole outfit (a fitted t-shirt floating at the waist, subtle deep brown boots, a non-tote shoulder bag) was without the indulgence of many personal expressions of style now, these collages of too many fashion eras threatening the cultural competence of the wearer, outing them as time-based, as algorithmically bound with an historic-aesthetic illiteracy manifested as careless maximalism: more-is-more on the body as less-is-less in point of view and knowledge.

Spiritual time hovers above and below the current timeline. Spiritual time is quantum, like a moment in Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter where one can look down the line of alternate realities to see your past, present, and future selves, who feel the same then as they will in the future. Like a monitoring spirit, it is present but unknowable. The internet is the main culprit here as is the “death of trends,” which has forced the collapse of linear time-based expressionism. On a venue like TikTok — or Twitter’s For You — spiritual time is the only time, as the premise of one’s FYP is that you are served content that appeals to you no matter “when,” be it via a post from two hours ago or two months ago or beyond: you like what you like, regardless of time. That leads to a cycle where audios, filters, and general gestures recur, exiting the conversational carousel with the caveat that a trend has already existed and is now more factual, no longer a reference but part of a larger vocabulary of a type of person. The recent (stupid and shitty) “AI starter pack” and its not-AI twin are an example of anti-spiritual time while the original starter pack meme is an example of spiritual time: one is too specifically now (AI aesthetics immediately timestamps anything.) while the other doesn’t require specific formats or tools or framing to properly exist, hence why it has come and gone over the past fifteen years. The 1980s, both as a style and as a time in our cultural consciousness? Very non-spiritual time as it’s too linear and therefore “bad” meaning it’s not now but then. Anti-progress. Out of step. Bootcut jeans? Spiritual time because, as we see, gestures versus eras are spiritual as they float above it all, coming down to Earth when we need them.

This brings us to the crises we face today: we are in between epochs, the space between songs, which in many ways is spiritual. But to be stuck on the song before, playing that tune over and over again? You’re in the past. You’re out of step. These mismatches are becoming more and more pronounced, outing persons and entities as “dated,” less in an out-of-fashion sense and more being in a state of delusion. The Democratic party is the perfect example, a group bound to a long expired playbook that worked three presidencies ago. This week’s tacky Blue Origin flight and its expressing (white) feminism of the 2010s: it exists in a space that doesn’t know how to read the room. It is an expression of cultural illiteracy. The various expressions of nepotism, from Bill Gates’ daughter’s podcast with Kris Jenner to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Schriver’s son being in White Lotus, inspire teeth grinding and pitchforks as they attempt to ignore these difficult times. Anything Jimmy Fallon does, anything Lizzo does, anything anyone does who is not acknowledging the severity of this moment: these are anti-spiritual expressions because they are so untuned to now, what came before, and what may come. They exist in the alternate universes that spiritual time acknowledges but doesn’t dwell in: they exist in delusional time, you could say, a deadly space where one is blinded to think the specifics of a moment in time and a socio-cultural context still exist and, worse, are the only thing that matters, very much akin to the high school quarterback chasing the glory days well into their forties. Hence the very spiritual time trend of people pointing out the dissonance between “these times” and the fascism that has arisen: to dissent, to understand how a political trend has arisen, is to engage in spiritual time. After all: fascism, like many political -isms, exists in spiritual time too, divorced from era but certainly distinctly today. It’s always been there, always will be there, joining us when the time is right.

Undoubtedly this only matters to me and the man I watched walk by me a few days ago, more applicable to expressing taste than anything else — but this is a key to understanding so much of the cultural dissonance we experience now. These are the growing pains of life. To be spiritual is to continue on without getting stuck in the past or preoccupied with the future. It’s not easy, it takes taste training and holding a specific point of view, but it's entirely possible to achieve —unless you exist in the same realm of the most preoccupied by delusional time, the Katy Perrys of the world.

“She felt connected”
“almost lost best muncher”
“I’m really excited”
“sending Karla Sofía”
“Yes girls!!!”
“Katy Perry to a camera”
“Ship five bitches”
Best Blue Origin memes, which isn’t to mention the somewhat hilarious beef between Katy and Wendy’s (along with her beef with some Australian woman).

“Gypsy Rose leg lengthening”
I have been thinking about this conspiracy all week. Anyway, watch Gypsy doing this Cardi B dance real bad with them long legs too.

“Immediate hall of fame”
“NOTHING NOWHERE ALL AT AT ONCE”
"Old seasons vs new season"
New Black Mirror is pretty lame but that “Eulogy” episode was good.

“Crossword clues”
I talk like this irl just so you know.

“marcus core”
“You look stupid”
“Marcus the worm.”
Anyone else keeping up with Marcus the VR worm? Related and not, as far as my obsessions: the rise of meepcore and adoration of the American woodcock, a long beloved avian meme star who definitely exists in spiritual time.

“Simply the best”
“Just don’t want to be”
“My opinion”
My new favorite creator lip syncs with their eyeballs.

And, finally, me trying to teach myself French.

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