TR.BIZ: 4.7.2026
From TMZ's political pivot to an Arby's prank, this is your early-mid-week check-in ✨
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 looking at headphones as a brain status symbol, Vanity Fair’s latest scandal, why the new Devil Wears Prada movie is going to spiritually flop, and the “it” bird of NYC.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider, I: Vanity Fair’s theater of pain
When documenting the “fall of Hollywood,” there’s an unlikely media figure we should keep an eye on too: Vanity Fair, the Condé Nast publication focused on the happenings of the industry. The first strike this year was the failed Oscar after party this year, which was mired by intense ugly lighting and Jake Shane as red carpet terrorist. Now a month later, the publication is in hot water again for a very strange SNL cast interview in which Chloe Fineman detailed an uncomfortable story about being a teenager pantsing a six year old. The video went viral on Twitter — and is very uncomfortable — as the magazine edited out the moment, leading to a near-Streissand effect amplification of the issue, ending up as a spiritual twin to The Drama. Sure, a “prank” but the inclusion of the story and it’s being cut is the story now, which Decider’s editor-in-chief puts best as “The cover-up is always worse than the crime!” Whose fault is all this? Unsure, as there are likely a lot of little people along the way responsible the same way as the after party item — but they both get at bungled digital efforts, which means this ladders up to the top, to Mark Guiducci, the less-than-a-year-old Global Editorial Director of the magazine. He’s the same person who is putting Kylie Jenner on the cover (but also the now-iconic Susie Wiles issue). The 37-year-old is a disciple of Anna Wintour and, in a now-striking FT interview where “nepo baby” allegations come up twice, he spoke about tech’s upheaving qualities as an asset. He described the revamped party as “just as much a part of the magazine in my view as our YouTube channel or the print product” and yet both of those things are what has gotten the brand into trouble. It feels like the digital cart is running away from the digital horse, or as Daniel D’Addario of Variety noted on Twitter of this moment, “Anyone who has read Tina Brown’s or Graydon Carter’s memoirs (I’ve read both!) knows that they’d do just about anything before editing something already published to please a publicist.” Times change, but maybe not for the better.
🤩 Hollyweird Insider, II: Into the sequel copy machine
Very quickly, the full trailer for Devil Wears Prada 2 dropped and…it looks very bad. Sorry to break it to you! Not only is the fashion really cringeworthy (Rachel Seville Tashjian: “Toteme???? i dunno honey”) but it suffers from fatal sequelitis, less in its being a cash-grab (It is.) but more that it’s of a genre of new films where the sequel is the original made to look like a sequel: fan service without evolving or challenging viewers, a rockabye baby lullaby intellectual holding patterns, the MAGA mindset of movie creativity. Think last year’s Freakier Friday, 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the whole of the new Ghostbusters era, and last week’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie: this is sequelslop that barely adds onto the original but functions to stuff easter eggs and references to the original assumes fans are only able to communicate in winks, that they only come for a portal between now and the origin of these characters and situations. A makeover scene! A Madonna track! Blue cerulean sweatermaxxing! Everything a reference, nothing new: nostalgia is a prison they won’t let us out of for fear we may think too much (or that they will have to think too much). It is that deep because life is that deep. We may all be surprised and find ourselves loving the film, but it feels like content in the style of a Ryan Murphy or And Just Like That head-empty encore made by old people trying to flex relevance but failing miserably. An Old Navy collab? AI memes?? A cancellation plotline in 2026??? A Vogue cover with Anna Wintour???? Be for real, as such cheeseball sensibilities contextualize the effort for what it is: forced, which is always out of fashion.
👹 The Thing: Headphones as intellect signal
