75 Cozy and Cold Fish
after school weekend edition
Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition, a weekly trend debrief for paid subscribers.💫
I’m traveling quite a bit over the next month — my husband and I are going to be driving around Florida, seeking out sunshine and escaping the frozen tundras of Brooklyn — so I’m taking the change in routine to experiment with formats for the weekend letter. As always, open to feedback!
Today we’re talking about:
The tinned fish hot girls’ ugly breakup
Mean Girls is going viral, but not because it’s good
Some actually good product placement (not in Mean Girls)
Dryish Januaryish (also: I asked Josh Cellars’s CBO about the memes!)
The limits of dupe culture
Young people are budgeting, loudly
SMU RushTok
The Instagram filter going viral on TikTok
“You know I die for you in a backwards hat”
Plus everything else that happened this week in youth culture and what I’m buying/reading/listening to. Before we jump in, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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The tinned fish hot girls’ ugly breakup
I’ve been a Caroline Goldfarb fan for years. “Glowing Up,” her excellent beauty podcast with Esther Povitsky that led to The Cut calling them “funniest people in skin care,” was the first podcast I ever really listened to in earnest, and the meme account Caroline’s been running since (at least?) 2016 is consistently brilliant.
When she launched Fishwife in 2020 alongside Becca Millstein, I was rapt. What did a TV writer and a music industry exec know about CPG? Hard to say, but they certainly knew enough about modern marketing to successfully turn canned sardines into an appealing — sexy, even — dinner for young women, propelling the phrase “hot girls eat tinned fish” into the cultural lexicon.
Since the brand’s debut, it has infiltrated shelves at every shoppy shop around. They’ve had collabs with East Fork Pottery, Talea, and Fly By Jing. They got a coveted Vogue profile. Business has, seemingly, boomed.
When Fishwife made their Shark Tank debut last week, I was surprised that Becca took the stage without Caroline. She did a great job — her outfit that matched the Fishwife logo was an especially nice touch — but I couldn’t stop thinking about Caroline.
So I googled it. And, to my surprise, I came across a lawsuit filed by Becca against Caroline for trademark infringement. It’s not an exaggeration to say my jaw dropped.
Next, I did what any chronically online person might do. I recorded a TikTok about it.