TR.BIZ: 9.17.2025

Your late-mid-week check-in, where we travel to Flopchella for some recession indicators and to Italy for some irl brainrot 💫

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 the trends brands are using to pretend everything “is normal,” Ben & Jerry’s political endgame, and why men really love heavy metal cubes.

Also a reminder: next Wednesday, September 24 at 12PM EST / 9AM PST / 6PM CEST, I’ll be fashion journalist

Max Berlinger

and I will be in conversations as a part of the new How To Be Creative™ series, exploring the life and work of a fashion and trends writer. It’s free! RSVP here!

🤩 Hollyweird Insider, I: Flopchella continues

Did you catch the Coachella lineup? Well, it dropped and no one cares — or no one cares in a positive light. First, the announcement is very early, assumed to be because of a crowded landscape of festivals and concerts (and related dramas). Second, the unexplained “big” items like a Nine Inch Nail and Radiohead presence, which is largely a great unknown. Third, it has become an indicator of the music industry — like many creative industries — being lost right now. Fourth, people are generally unenthused about the event, to the point of calling it by it’s biblically accurate name: flopchella. “There was a time, in its salad days, when Coachella felt like the American answer to Glastonbury,” Arielle Gordon mused for Pitchfork. “There’s little left in the desert for a festival that once promised an escape from corporate sponsorship. Maybe the good vibrations were just a mirage.” This is exactly right, considering the biggest red flag is the financials of it: more than half of tickets in the most recent festival were via payment plan with sales lagging behind previous years. People are viewing all of this together as a major recession indicator, that neither the festival nor festivalgoers have money. I’d agree with that, but I’d also point to a larger crisis of the corporatization of music and the arts paired with Coachella being a deeply Millennial brand that won’t suck it up and become exclusive again: it became “too big to fail” and is subsequently failing bigly. A bright spot? Sabrina Carpenter at least closed the circle on her iconic 2024 proclamation that she’ll be back to headline.

🤩 Hollyweird Insider, II: Media cancels itself

By now you’ve heard of the Jimmy Kimmel thing which, yes, is a crisis of free speech and authoritarianism — but it’s more and less than that: Hollywood itself — like much of media — allowed this to happen, extending a hand to billionaires and sketchy tech, political dynasties and film royalty. By their giving into Nexstar and Sinclair, companies like Disney auctioned off their power to Trump’s highest bidder. Clearly this safety dance trotted beyond a defanged Emmys and disappointing celebs “both sides”-ing Charlie Kirk as those with industry power are choosing to take the hand of the monster instead of fending it off. They don’t want to be taken seriously: they are aligning with today’s power, illustrating a complicity but also a middle finger to you, that they dance for dollars not for beliefs in the same way Target, et al, did. This goes way beyond “this” though: in a whiplash inducing about face, the FCC opened the door to Kimmel’s “cancellation,” extending the new normal beyond lawsuits against publishers; Sinclair Media — a known conservative power — moved in to replace the show with a Charlie Kirk tribute; CBS-Paramount has officially become state owned media as Larry Ellison’s son takes control, while gunning for Warner Brothers too; TikTok too is being closed in on by Ellison as well, thus cancelling culture via media itself. This is about free speech, true, but it’s a wider sell out: they let the vampire in. “When companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law,” civil rights lawyer Matthew Segal observed, “they are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won't matter.” “There was an order from the state about what people must say,” David Frum said. “It’s an order from the government…Jimmy Kimmel didn’t read it, he went off the air.” All this was a bully jumping upon one’s back to see if it broke — and it did, yielding to “consequence culture.” RIP, American media. It was fun.

🩹 Branded, I: Ben & Jerry’s pivots to Ben’s

In a bold development that contrasts the above, Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame has resigned from the company in response to the brand’s owner — Unilever — seeking to silence their social activism. “It's profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever, is gone,” Ben Cohen of the brand shared in a searing, baller statement on Twitter. “And it's happening at a time when our country's current administration is attacking civil rights, voting rights, the rights of immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ community….It's easy to stand up and speak out when there's nothing at risk. The real test of values is when times are challenging and you have something to lose.” This is major, given the landscape of so many brands and industries bending over to give the conservative powers whatever they want. Know that for years the founders have been arrested for their social activism, most recently in May in standing up for Palestine during a Senate hearing. This is the same brand that went full throat on ending white supremacy in 2020: they mean what they say. “Ben & Jerry’s independent board, established as part of the merger agreement to protect the brand’s values, is suing Unilever for violating the merger agreement,” FT reported on Jerry’s departure, “arguing that the parent company has prevented the brand from speaking out on social and political issues.” This is performative, sure, but I trust these boys since they put their money where their mouth is. It asks a question that much of media has answered incorrectly: are you brave enough to risk it all for your values?

🩹 Branded, II: Brand social is in full ad psychosis