TR.BIZ: 9.25.2025

Your late-mid-week check-in, where we cover the loss of gay guy manners online and a great dissolution of digital language 💫

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 perusing the rare Instagram trend, comedians whitewashing human rights violations, and Daft Punk’s latest sellout move.

📲 Tech Talk: Is e-commerce over?

A very quiet Business of Fashion story went up yesterday about Highsnobiety closing out its e-commerce wing. “Highsnobiety launched e-commerce in 2019, looking to translate its cultural authority into product sales,” the story explains, which notes the brand opening a flagship in Berlin last year and that Zalando has a majority stake in it. While Highsnob is a lil player here, its nicheness ripples into other players like Farfetch and Ssense shutting down within the year and month, respectively. Fashion seems to be the greatest canary but we also have $1B valued Flip shuttering as Amazon closes its UK stores (which follow the closure of the Amazon Go stores in 2023). A lot of this ties into the de minimis exemption ending due to tariffs along with money becoming tighter — and tastes for tech items souring. With so much shit in the world now, the shoppers in the middle who may have turned to Highsnob and Ssense are likely turning to resale while fatigue of billionaires and Trump tech ties further sours the tech pool. Enter Depop launching outfits and Vestiarie expanding to men! The results are e-commerce and other tech shopping ideas going down, which plays into a larger 2020s trend of that bubble popping. Pour one out!

💥 Soft Powers: The digital gay guy “no means no” crisis

By no means new, something clicked when I saw a very benign selfie from Basement Yard’s Joe Santagato get salacious responses from gay followers in the reply, going so far as getting emoji buttholes and people asking to see his penis. Yes, it’s Twitter — but something has shifted in the gay internet brain as of late, moving from the beautiful “every time they see a hot guy it’s like their first time ever seeing one” idea to demanding hole pics in the DM of any guy, all evolving the very toxic idea that any man could be gay if bullied enough (which is the awful queer cousin of the “I can make you straight.” talk aimed at lesbians). Some crucial examples of this, from least extreme to most extreme, all within the past month-ish: the admittedly very attractive Liberal Democrat Carl Cashman has had a wild week on Twitter as a recent post of his went viral, to the point that he had to turn comments off as the replies ranged from “I’m touching myself” to “I would eat the tissues you c^m with” (Carl is taking this harassment in strides though); Lego and fitness creator Khaotyyck had to make a (now deleted) statement for his audience of men and women to behave as his DMs were inundated with illicit content and OnlyFans demands, which has led to his setting safety boundaries; tobblesv2 had a video go viral where he explained the intense — and racist — sexual harassment and illicit (AI and real) content he’s gotten from South African viewers. What’s happening is a flattening of desire, that gay men in gay digital spaces have turned any space they’re in into Sniffies, where they can demand sex at any time and anywhere from anyone, our being trained by secret OnlyFans pages and Twitter alts that we now think the whole of the internet reflects our very specific and very gay predilections, resulting in unsubtle sexual harassment. It’s a clear symptom of the great Steven Phillips-Horst New York deep dive on gay sex now: “True horniness — like God’s light or a Cialis-enabled boner — remains constant,” he mused which, unfortunately, is resulting in very uncomfortable and unnecessary situations that make us all look bad.

• What can you do about this? Cut this shit out!!! Sure, make all the horny Philip Seymour Hoffman fancams you want but stop harassing dudes you think are hot online, unless there is a mutual solicitation of said horniness. Just because someone “is attractive” doesn’t mean you can jizz on their digital face: keep it in your pants, modeling respectful behavior. Obviously! Which is a reminder to brands, businesses, creatives, and creators alike to set boundaries and make explicit community guidelines: don’t let fans walk all over you just because they’re following you. It’s your house. Don’t learn the hard way like Disney.

👀 Trend Watchers, I: An annoying Instagram trend you’ll see everywhere