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
; 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)
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.