Barbie Memes and Babygirl Sobriquets

after school weekend edition

Welcome back to After School ✨weekend edition✨. Think of the daily letter as the CliffsNotes; this is the extended version for paid subscribers.

On Tuesday evening, I hosted a dinner party with Day One Agency as part of their Ask a Gen Z series launch. The event was at Parcelle, a natural wine bar in the middle of Dimes Square — a neighborhood that was buzzing even more than usual, due to the sun and 60-degree weather. The room was full of cool Gen Zers (and a few blessed millennials, hi), and I feel so lucky to have been part of it. A few takeaways from conversations I both personally had and also eavesdropped on:

• Twitter is still a great platform, for better or worse. No one wants to like Twitter as much as they do, but it’s a great app with a great network — especially if you’re in media or VC.

• Everyone is starting a Substack. Like, everyone. (I had the pleasure of meeting Jalil Johnson, a veryyyy stylish Gen Zer who recently launched

  Consider Yourself Cultured
  ; this piece on the resurgence of the yuppie is great.)

• TikTok is meh. A lot of Gen Zers who had been super bullish on the platform as a growth hack are less eager to post.

• There was a lot of chatter about Lemon8, ByteDance’s app that’s not TikTok, and Shuffles, Pinterest’s Landing dupe!

• Finally, here’s me — very obviously a millennial; could I be cheesing harder — with D1A’s Clara, who is very obviously a Gen Zer and could not be cooler. (There are more photos if you click through)

d1a

A post shared by Day One Agency (@d1a)

Now that I’ve photographically revealed how little chill I have, let’s get into it! Today we’re talking about:

• Coach’s college tour

• Kith’s gorpcore drop

• Reebok’s beauty collab

• Coca Cola’s full-court press on Gen Z

• Puma’s young consumer coalition

• The trending Peanuts tee

• The new “it” water bottle

• The $70 tank TikTok is obsessed with

• Summer’s biggest shoe trend

• “Bro-celets”

• Straight brows

• Aldi drips

And everything else that happened this week in brands, trends, and internet culture.