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 diving into why horror content is trending, Instagram’s new grid feature, SZA’s interesting tabi Vans, a great theory on life at the bottom of the K-economy, and why “in the modern market” is trending.
🔔REMINDERS: THURSDAY! THURSDAY! THURSDAY!
A few things happening on Thursday to know about!
Happening 1P EST / 10A PST online, I’ll be joining Denayja Reese for a live conversation on Substack about ~the world and culture now~: learn more about the series here and join in on the chat here!
Happening at 7PM in NYC, Ben Dietz and I are hosting a live recording of HIP REPLACEMENT with special guest kate lindsay at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. It’ll be a fun night — and it’s free! With drinks too!! RSVP HERE!!!
Now back to regular programming!!!!!
🤩 Hollyweird Insider: Why are scary things hitting so hard?
Horror movies are big money makers for box offices, as we saw most recently with the successes of Obsession and Backrooms largely due to the well known fact that these low-budget, high-profits creations are a great bet for business. But, outside of movies, why does the genre “work”? We know in books and video games the genre hits, the latter of which mirrors Hollywood with low budget indies breaking out. This has been on the pre-Halloween mind as the appeal of horror was a takeaway from Twitch’s 2026 State of Gaming report, which revealed curious findings like games with little critters (142M hours watched) and sandboxes (831M hours watched) being popular but also horror (287M hours watched). Why? “Digital experiences today have become very passive — doomscrolling, brain-rotting, AI slop — none of it really drives connection,” says Mike Minton, Chief Product Officer at Twitch, who notes how the platform’s shared viewership opportunities is a key to its success. “The numbers show that people are really finding that connection when they’re streaming or watching horror content on Twitch. Streamers are entertainers at their core, and when you add the magic of Chat, you have a perfect environment for this type of content,” Minton says, “where everyone gets to experience the jump scares, the intensity, and real-time speculation together.” Most movies and books and games are individual experiences but, with a genre like horror, the collective reveals itself as a key element to its success. This is big learning: in a culture where people are lonely, craving connections, a genre that lets people get together to scream and shiver and share is a win. No wonder Halloween has become such a major holiday for young people.
📳 Socialize: Instagram redoes the feed
I know many of you read this newsletter for your updates on online and marketing items, which I’ve been doing a pee pee poo poo job of lately because I find that space very boring even if I myself work in that space. But! To both bring some “news” in the space and aggregate news I get and pass by, I’m going to start doing round-ups like this to include recent social media marketing and tech happenings to be aware of. We have a lot this week!
Instagram’s letting you redo your feed by adding tagged pictures. “Hopefully this is one more way that you can make Instagram — or your profile rather — into what you want it to be,” Instagram head, Adam Mosseri, said in a post. This is certainly a great way to curate and enable community, while perhaps gamifying whose tagged posts make it on-the-grid.
Streaming is the New York Fashion Week breakout, which we’re seeing mainly via the (very wtf) Kai Cenat debut collection but also with Twitch stepping up as a key player as creators live collabed with Coach and gave you a peek into Showpony’s presentation. Is this the future of fashion? Eh, more like another lever to pull — but an interesting and interactive one!
Etsy, Susan Alexandra, and Rachel Antonoff turned NYFW into a dog show yet again, in a cutesy collaboration that keeps Antonoff’s puppy love going. This continues a see-now-buy-now trend as you can grab the goods now, turning the runway into a direct sales opportunity. Cute!
Quick, vaguely related thing that I had no other room to put: maybe don’t attack protestors at a fashion show? The biggest fashion week thing to me was how the head of CFDA, Steve Kolb, assaulted a PETA protestor at the COS show. He’s been placed on leave. I can’t think of a more fitting peek into the soul of the fashion business than this!
Pinterest dropped their 2026 men’s trend report, with activities (hosting, getting outdoors) being a focus along with looksmaxxing adjacent interests (skincare, workwear).
Paperless Post and Paris Hilton have teamed up, giving you access to very Y2K digital invites and mailable cards. Clearly this is a nostalgia #GenZ win, but I’m thinking it’s also a curious space to invite in celebrities to “co-host” an action with by painting it in their aesthetic.
📓 NYC Diary: Different cultures for different economies
Bobby Aaron Solomon and I went to two different art openings last week, Thursday in Chelsea for some of the “big” galleries like Pace and Gagosian and Friday Downtown for some of the “small” galleries and spaces that do not have a name beyond the local (yet). There was a very interesting texture to the two nights, at least when we compare them: the Uptown scene was a primarily white and “middle aged” affair that featured a lot of fortysomethings and fiftysomethings looking at more established art, perhaps as buyers but more likely as peers to artists like Tauba Auerbach (which is why we were there to begin with); the Downtown scene was markedly young and diverse, more crowded with more people who seemed to be art workers and art friends instead of art patrons, as the shows were for artists and estates like Oscar yi Hou, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and RIDIKKULUZ. New York is definitely a city of tensions and class collisions, which these different scenes made real as you might see Jeffrey Deitch wandering Uptown but you might see Quil Lemons bopping around Downtown. This was somewhat surprising as the “big gallery” versus “small gallery” thing rarely broke down in LA as scenes with such specific types as the West coast gallery scene was much more mixed — or at least it was in the 2010s, in my experience of it. Perhaps this too is a time period thing, but it appeared, in this first interaction, that there are different markets for different communities, or one community that feeds another, as every industry and every economy has. Funny how it plays out in person, in one of the biggest cities for said industry.
We had our first big “Damn, we know lots of people!” happenings, which came via the Alpha x Old Forester Distiller’s Jacket launch. It was a great place to see people we knew (namely ANU and the Side Projects crew), but also put faces to names and enter new worlds we were completely unaware of. This very much seems like a #FashionWeek thing, but also is another marker of being back in the “real world” where such happenings and such crossovers happen anywhere. Lucky us!
The carla lalli’s book launch was very cute, but it did bring up a maybe more-than-NYC item: her new book is about heartbreak (Specifically divorce!), which inspired a flurry of people asking for advice in and voicing their own navigating of heartbreak. Despite being in such an upbeat place at such an upbeat time, it seems that heartbreak, its processes, and the upcoming sunrises of life is the mood of the moment.
