TR.BIZ: 5.19.2026
From Everlane's sell out to booing at graduation, 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 talking about rising rage baiting, Everlane’s sell out, midterm fundings, and a few TikTok songs to listen to.
📝 Media Matters: Why is media late to everything now?
I don’t know what’s happening but this past week has really turned direct an idea that has been simmering for months if not years now: traditional media is operating on an increasingly obvious lag. This past week’s viral Vulture story about the “feed being fake” outlined how marketers have tapped into creators to help push conversations forward, coordinated efforts that “fake” the feed, be it to push a musician or political candidate. The response by many was shock — but for a good amount of people this was an open secret, something we all have known as a quality of being deeplyonline and understanding how both marketing and creator worlds work: this is old news. Then there’s the Washington Post story about Boomers being the new iPad kids, which is something people have been talking about for literal years and years and years. The “Gen Z pout” conversation is another example too, which popped up again after popping up again as the creator Mina Le got needless flack for talking about the subject which, as I pointed out, is a reflection of this conversation having a retrend earlier this year. This seems to be the “new normal,” where online conversations — from comments sections to Substack stories — are the cultural hot bed while the media apparatus has become the hashtag olds that report on subjects months if not years after the fact, likely signalling that they’re catering to older and or offline and therefore less culturally relevant audiences. Is this another sign of traditional media struggling to keep up with the emerging new media world? Probably, as Mara Dettmann wrote about at the very top of the year, after frictionmaxxing stories went around after people like myself wrote about it months before. “When an idea has already been debated on creator platforms, legacy media need to be clear about what they’re adding to the conversation before they decide to cover it,” Mara wrote months ago, “Otherwise, what are they offering at all?” It’s an important question that more in media need to consider, as they’re no longer the leaders of conversations that they claim to be (or at least we need to stop thinking of them as such).
💥 Soft Powers: Ragesturbation
You’re probably tired of hearing me talk about the Trend Report: Trend Report™, a quarterly analysis of these times, but a lot of what we talked in that report about continues to hold true. An item I think is obvious but that must be pointed out is the continued prevalence of rage bait less as a digital quality but more as a human behavior. Here’s a snippet from the latest Report: Report™ —
Welcome to the era of Human Rage Bait™, a key card to play in the game of attention. Clavicular, MAGA Minaj, therians: these are all examples of people pushing buttons for attention and succeeding in the process, no matter if the effort is in the service of sexual appeal, political gain, or confusing parents. The tactic is the same: make people confused or mad enough to react. Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame as an endurance test designed to enrage.
Let me name and blame a few figures as they keep pushing the rage button again and again and again to monopolize conversation: Charli XCX, as the whole of “Rock Music” has been one long rage play (which I talked about last week on HIP REPLACEMENT); the White House, which has gotten so desperate for attention that their posts are constantly cribbing pop culture to enrage for clout; Demna, whose Gucci reign has taken his trolling at Balenciaga to pissing people off via Tom Brady and Paris Hilton cameos. The move is imitated far and wide — from Paper to Katseye to Israel — and illustrates that one must manipulate emotion in order to “cut through the noise.” Why else is vagueposting continuing to have a moment?
👠 Aesthetically Pleasing: Everlane was always Shein
Big news for some Millennials of a certain basic style: Everlane is being bought by Shein. First scooped by Puck, this is a private equity play that saw the company’s debt get eaten up by the ultra-fast fashion brand as Shein is trying to pin their legitimacy on making their own Quince. This is a shock to some but should be a wake up call to anyone “concerned” with living more ethically: Everlane was never as “sustainable” as it claimed to be, instead a greenwashy stepchild born in the echo of TOMS that confused cost transparency with actual transparency, a la: Where are the product’s materials coming from? Are workers in supply chains being compensated? How is the business affecting change in local communities where both materials are gathered and clothes are produced? Is the brand advocating for upward mobility for those working within supply chains? These all may sound like complicated and difficult questions but — given the rise of sustainability watch dogs in fashion from Good On You to Commons to Fashion Toolbox by BCome (and even the increasingly non-credible B Corp), all of whom make such information easy to access — there’s really no excuse for not having these answers as a business. But here’s the thing: a lot of this problem and its confusion is our fault, meaning “I can shop with my wallet!” Millennials are so poisoned post-TOMS and its flimsy by-one/give-one model that they see any sign of greenness as a release from culpability in one’s complicity or participation in exploitation. It happened with Allbirds, it happened with Sézane, it happened with Quince, it happened with Everlane: brands may project a care-full approach to fashion when it’s all smoke and mirrors to make you feel good about only overconsumption, thanks to surface level promises of goodness. Some brands really are walking the walk they talk (Nudie Jeans, Reformation, Asket, Armedangels, Colorful Standard, Pangaia), which we don’t really hear about or talk about because these brands are quiet by design: they’re not operating by the same buy-buy-buy capitalist fake sustainability models of the aforementioned tech/fashion brands because they mean what they say, and they don’t intend to propel overconsumption. True sustainability is about shopping less, investing in clothing that lasts and that comes from cared-for processes, which spikes my growing theory that most modern and mall brands are fast fashion by another name. That’s why Everlane was green lipstick on the pig of fashion, a dressing up of the industry’s continued ugliness, highlighting how again and again fashion is doing more harm than good to the world and to culture. Why are they getting away with it? Because they’re in the market of making us feel and look “good” — and we’re more interested in being told we’re pretty than telling the charm offensive factory leaders that they’re evil.
🏛️ Politicultural: The evil donors behind the midterm elections
