let them eat celebrities 🍰💰😋

On an attempt to "boycott" the rich and what the celebrity supermarket style says about the state of things.

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Brazil flooding death toll hits 100
In case you missed this :(

Biden says U.S. won't transfer weapons if Israel invades Rafah
Netanyahu to defeat Hamas despite US arms threat
Did College Protesters Sway Joe Biden?
”General Assembly voted to back Palestine”
"The prime minister to ban Al Jazeera"
“Class of 2024”
This week in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The DNC Is Preparing For The Worst
This is hilarious. Maybe we have Hillary Clinton talk to protestors?

TikTok sues U.S. government
TikTok will win — or people will revolt. This is all ironic, given the war support bill it was attached to which, um, see above. I stand with TikTok!!

Global Housing Crisis Affects Immigration
"The US simply doesn't have enough homes."
Two very interesting stories about housing, one about immigration and one about cost.

"Crazy going down in Washington state"
"AL lawmakers debate Don't Say Gay"
"Count Binface gets more votes than far-right"
Some wild local-and-not news stories, some funny and some not.

Fish are shrinking around the world
A fascinating story about how fish worldwide are getting smaller, the rising temperature of water, and what this has to do with the “size” of a fish’s gills.

How to pay for the green transition
How much would it actually gost for the world to go green? About nine trillion.

Jack Dorsey Leaves Bluesky, Calls X ‘Freedom Tech’
Flop, simp behavior.

Google is getting even worse for independent sites
"The dark reality of Google Search"
"greatest % declines in Google SEO"
"The new state of search"
A lot of talk about changes to Google Search and the platform becoming very flop.

First Patient Begins Sickle Cell Gene Therapy
This is exciting!

Aurora lights up the sky in geomagnetic storm
My birthday gift to everyone was offering a single technicolor night.

The 2024 Met Gala was underwhelming, disappointing, boring, and no “real” celebrities were there. But the most interesting part didn’t happened on the carpet: it happened on TikTok.

Creator Hayley Bailey posted a video showing off her Gala look, a cascade of florals that reminded of a flower mantis with a rosebud for a hat. The TikTok started with her lip syncing to camera “Let them eat cake.” before the audio transitioned to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon.” “watching from District 12” is the most-liked comment, with almost 200K likes. Similar top-liked comments include “met gala tickets are $75,000 ladies and gents” and “Wow! This is a perfect example of how disconnected the rich and famous are” and “The met gala is dystopian enough but adding this sound?” Many posted that they were watching from District 12. Others were surprised the video was still up — until it got taken down at some point on Friday (to which Hayley posted a teary, “I’m not an elite!” performative apology).

What followed is interesting, or it will become more interesting if it moves beyond TikTok: people are organized to unfollow, block, and remove the most powerful people on platforms from their feeds which is colliding into a trend of people connecting the Met Gala to the class warfare associated with The Hunger Games (and generally spotting “unknown” billionaires at the event). “If we are going to destroy the system, the system that is currently running the world, these people need to be unfollowed,” one person explained. “Once we start fucking with their money, they'll listen.” Another person referred to this movement quite wonderfully as the “digital guillotine, a digitine if you will.” Peruse the action with #BlockOut2024 and #BlockParty2024.

Other efforts are emerging to target celebrity ad budgets, clout chasing by giving “block reports” and advice giving, and general reporting and shitposting the experience. It’s reaching the one-dimensional witch hunt point, while few are pointing out the delicious irony of the JG Ballard inspiration for the Gala. Obviously all this has caused creators to protect themselves — but they’re not speaking about dismantling privileges: they’re rambling about Palestine. Many in the past few days are rushing to talking points, like Alexis Nicole, Brittany Broski, Chris Olsen, Ayamé, Lizzo, Chris Klemens, that “I have a degree in marketing” person — and many more. (But not Erin Hattamer, who has always been ten toes down for months.) As we’re already entering the virtue signal pivot, this moment captures fifteen years of digital activism (“activism”) collapsed into half a week’s time.

Results are to be seen. This “trend” may be a blip within 2024, following a similar path to “deinfluencing,” but it captures how striking, boycotting, “complaining” are this era’s gesture of choice versus, say, action. This has always been true in some ways, but let’s look at various expressions of this in recent years: college students standing up against war; Cereal For Dinner, which plays into a boycott and general upper class and CEO dislike; Free Palestine protestors calling out Kim Kardashian, only for her to say “Free everyone.”; increasing anger and dissatisfaction with “work”; American Horror Story fans unionizing, which relates to everything from fans suing Madonna for starting late to K-pop fans pushing for climate action to other forms of fan unionizing; the general Karen and “speak to the manager” phenomena; years upon years of general understandings of the rich, from Occupy Wall Street to wealth taxes to AOC’s 2021 “tax the rich” Met Gala dress; the ongoing mid-ness and corporatizing of entertainment and the arts at large, which leaves fans vocally dissatisfied; the ongoing conflict of trying to track billionaire’s private flight travel; women on strike with the 4B movement and larger organized feminism discussions; mass organized boycotts, from Starbucks and McDonald’s over the Israel-Palestine conflict to the year of Bud Light boycotting; and the many industry strikes and strikes and strikes, including an almost-strike at the Met Gala. #BlockOut is an exclamation point at the end of a very long sentence in the 2020s, as geopolitics become flatter and flatter. This is underlined by the relationship between fan and celebrity, shopper and brand, worker and company: people are finally connecting dots that, no matter who you are, attention is worth something.

But again: what will be done with this? A simple “block” is the idea of dissolving inequality without actual, tangible action. If anything, #BlockOut shows just how great an appetite there is for justice and change but just how great a failure of motivation there is to go beyond making noise. We — Meaning the largely American, along with its runoff — are stuck in a culture of activism blue balls, with few people who know how to make a move, whose attempts to stage revolutions reveal a form of illiteracy. But the makings of change are all here. All the ingredients have been bought! Once success has been seen as far as taking down celebrities…then brands are next, then employers, then governments. There is a world where social posting and political action can merge, which is why TikTok is rightly arguing that they are a speech tool.

Maybe this will change once #BlockOut crosses over to Instagram (Which it will!). Regardless, we grow closer and closer to our supper of the rich being served and, sheesh, people are starved. They just haven’t figured out how to turn on the oven.

Katy Perry says mum conned by fake AI pic
“Lady Gaga Met Gala”
“how yall want them to dress”
"What I was expecting"
Another thing about the very boring Met Gala was that, unexpectedly, AI won the night as it made people believe a fantasy via unreal fashion. If we recall, AI as a fantasy machine was the subject of a Trend Report™ a few weeks ago! (I want to also point out that, for whatever reason, the event inspired me to check in on Diet Prada and…that account is a shell of its former self.)

Boy Scouts is changing its name
A fascinating story about the renaming of the Boy Scouts (into “Scouting America”), which says a lot more about gender than you’d imagine. It’s very obvious and not! This feels like a bigger deal than people are talking about!

Eurovision Plunged Into Crisis
Eurovision was this weekend, which became a mirror for geopolitics — and buckled under the weight of protest, which is an interesting counterpoint to the #BlockOut antics. Peruse the songs here — and read a great on-the-ground recap (that has to be translated) here, courtesy of reader Johan — Who was on the ground protesting! — for flagging.

The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste
The Collapse of the News Industry
There are no cheat codes for taste!!
“newsletters have swagger”
Wait. Is this fucking play about us?

Liam, Olivia are still most popular names
”Fastest rising baby names”
Come for the obvious (Liam, Olivia, Mateo), stay for the fascinating (Chozen, Ky-anything, Elio, Semaj).

“the entertainment industry is flailing”
“Art Directors Guild says ‘don’t bother’”
Remember last week’s essay on the fall of creative fields? This TikTok by Justin Simien and findings about art directors very much confirms the vibe.

Oscars launch fundraising drive as audience shrinks
See above. This is……embarrassing.

⌨️✏️📃 how to run a newsletter📃✏️⌨️
This week, paid subscribers got a primer on how to run a newsletter. Also: if you want to read and are having trouble, thanks to Substack’s confusing “Read for free!” mechanisms, send me a message (or reply to this email). I’m happy to comp you!

Every few months I try to wrap my brain around “what’s next” in style, in the sense that contemporary fashion exists within an exhausted, antiquated system. Similar to what I wrote about men’s haircuts, there is little novelty and there’s little to “invent”: we’re hitting a ceiling of what’s possible, deciding instead to cannibalize the canon. There are only so many gestures that can be made and, in a world of too much clothing waste and fashion being one of the most problematic for the planet, we need a new path forward.

But what might that be? We’ve talked about new real estates of expression and the emergence of stain swag, which push against hyperconsumption — but there’s something else major that we’re missing which upholds the status quo of an industry: micro-transactional style. If you wear different clothes in the morning versus at-work versus after-work, you’re doing it. If you wear different clothes after work versus to dinner versus going out, you’re definitely doing it. If you’re participating in “instant fashion,” fashion creation that moves as fast as social media despite the consequences for the planet and people, you are absolutely, 100%, totally doing it.

But simply changing outfits for different occasions isn’t inherently microtransactionficiation: it’s more a mindset, that to wear clothes is to be seen, that to be seen is to be ingested, and that to be ingested means one must start all over again, making themselves up anew, to put on a new lil show for whomever is watching from wherever they may be. This is best exemplified by the celebrity food shopping and errand-running style hunting, which has become a consumable moment amplified by Vogue and InStyle and Elle and Zoe Report. This isn’t new — People and Us were always built upon the celebrity “off duty” economy. — but what is new is that this space has become enviable (Where are you shopping? Is it Erewhon? Or are you poor?), performed (Hello, Julia Fox!), and commercialized (Ahem, Ashley Tisdale.). This also isn’t to mention literal style inspiration (Grocery Girl, for example.) that merges an act with an expression. All of this is innocuous and a bit boring — common, even — but alarm bells in my brain start going off when a site like Highsnobiety has become disturbingly obsessed with catching alt and stylishly credible celebrities out and about. The site has written multiple thought pieces on the subject too. It’s not just them: given the rise in a new set of “normie” male celebrities — Jeremy Allen White, Paul Mescal, Jacob Elordi — we now have their every prance dissected by the likes of Mr. Porter, GQ, InsideHook, and other alt-male fashion publications. Somehow hype beast culture and tabloid culture have merged.

You could pin this phenomena to media’s death and a publication’s attempt to hack SEO but there are real world ramifications of this, a la the constant pursuit of “new” clothes for apparently no other reason than we think paparazzi are watching us at the supermarket. What’s alarming is that this is also likely the reason why billionaires are getting hungry to be street style dudes (Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey) which feeds into an obsession with “billionaire style” via stylish billionaire hunting and Loro Piana, all of which seems to say that, if you can afford to change clothes with every move of the body, you have wealth. It also seems to say, on the billionaire’s side, that your being able to flex a fit means you are not only literally wealthy but spiritually wealthy, worthy of attention. Just ask the salmon heir at the Met Gala. Or ask that one rich loser who is trying to stay 18 forever! It’s not just you who wants attention below the celebrity caste: it’s also the richest of the rich who want to be adored, validated, worshipped just for walking around in clothes.

Related to the over-production of “press tour” looks and hyperactive red carpet affairs like that of Zendaya for Dune 2 and Margot Robie for Barbie, this all is happening perhaps because we’re not “making” anything of note anymore. The clothes are all fine, the movies are boring, our jobs are all at risk of extinction. But what will never become “unreal” or captured by technology? Our outfits, our styles. Like humor, it’s a constant moving target that cannot be pinned down, that is dictated by the moving mass of culture and the collective. So one must always “perform” in this way, flexing fits even when you’re “not supposed to” (at the gym, going to the doctor). Who will be surprised when there are just livestreams of us wearing clothes out in public places? Reality shows meet fashion shows by celebrities and normies alike, each of us entering a worldwide competition for some high school style superlative of best dressed. The prize is everything and nothing, but also the giant pile of things you wore once and are apt to throw away. Yuck.

“What have you done with my daughter?”
“watching someone turn gay”
“i know bisexuals are annoying but”
Favorite Met Gala posts. Also, I enjoyed Doja Cat’s explanation of her outfit.

“Fruity Pebbles”
“Me cause it’s almost June”
“If you can sing along”
“don’t think he’ll live this one down”
Some pre-Pride posts.

“Madame President, Hamas says”
I cannot tell if this wild Kamala clip is legitimate or not given the right wing coverage. Regardless: I love it. So unhinged, so unbothered. I wish I was her!

"I am now 18 years and 6 months old."
Did you know that Doge is still alive? And 18? Homeboy looks rough but we will all look that way when we’re his age. Angel!

“love her throat tattoo”
"How much do you love Paper Mario"
Some good tattoo ideas.

"It's weird how 9/11 became a national holiday"
I may have to institute a weekly 9/11 meme area because the volume of them and creativity attached is so impressive.

“olives are like”
"Lmfao. Incredible."
Two good Elon Musk posts. The second one is real!

"ashamed by how many times I've watched"
You gotta watch this person get bonked on the head by a giant Greek pot. It’s real too!

"it’s so sweet of columbia to make life so full circle"
“what happened”
Two good graduation posts, a highlight being one college graduation’s very bad phonetic pronunciation of names.

“bf went to the gym”
“Tutorial coming soon.”
Boyfriend posts of the week. Also I think about the confidence activist’s “Okay.” a lot.

“my family so awkward”
It’s the little smile and the clapping for me.

“Bolsonaro is back in the hospital.”
One of the best posts I saw this week.

“You’re carly?”
Every time I watch this I cry. I need to have a drink with this blonde person.

“A yt lady locked her doors”
Crying over this too. Prudy Pingleton ass.

And, finally, how it feels to be a Trend Report™ reader.

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