Beauty Water and Bygone Cocktails
Beauty Water and Bygone Cocktails
“It was a martini"
After School is a daily newsletter about youth culture read by thousands of execs from companies like TikTok, Nike, and Depop. If you enjoy it, please consider forwarding to your extremely powerful boss and/or smartest friend (and/or becoming a paid subscriber).
Black Friday spending was…not great (though I sure did my part); adolescent acne go-to Proactiv is rebranding; ‘literally why are boomers so mean’; in defense of the teen-era “ugly phase”; how two 'unemployable' Gen Z brothers launched a luxury fashion company; and Harry Styles’ viral cardigan is now an NFT.
WHY GEN Z IS FLOCKING TO NEW YORK’S OLD-SCHOOL HOTELS AND BARS, nyt
You’ve probably already seen this floating around your Twitter feed, but just in case you missed it — and because this quote is too good not to reprint.
“The other day a group of young girls asked me what cocktail I was drinking,” said Jennifer Cooke, who runs communications for the Carlyle. “It was a martini.”
WHEN MULTILEVEL MARKETING MET GEN Z, atlantic
A dark look inside influencer Amelia Whelan’s Breakaway Movement, “classic multilevel marketing, optimized and freshened up for Gen Z.” One of my classmates has recently started hawking water-ionizing machines on social media (she also sells Monat), and this article about how Gen Z are falling for the same MLM tricks millennials fell for (and Xers and boomers before them) is equal parts fascinating and depressing.
TIKTOK THINKS 2010S STYLE IS COMING BACK, vogue
I mean, this kind of goes without saying, right? Gen Z already exhausted all of the early 2000s trends, so of course the 2010s will be next.
“As someone who is young enough to be a regular TikTok user, but old enough to have been a teenage Tumblr user in the 2010s, it's crazy to see how quickly things are making a comeback,” she tells Vogue. “The next generation of teens are already starting to wear creepers, and are romanticizing soft and pastel grunge on TikTok.” She also predicts that asymmetric skirts, striped shirts, and feathered hair extensions—a favorite of 2010s stars like Ke$ha—will come back, too.
‘TWO WARDROBES’: ATHLEISURE AND PARTY WEAR DRIVE SALES GROWTH FOR APPAREL RETAILERS DURING THE THIRD QUARTER, modernretail
How much do we think Omicron will impact formalwear sales into December…? (I, for one, would rather go naked than buy another pair of yoga pants after two years of loungewear.)
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU’RE THE INVESTMENT, atlantic
I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that this generation of creators will not need brand deals — they don’t want to be the face of your perfume/makeup/fast food company — they are the brand, complete with product offshoots (i.e. a home influencer who creates her own candle company, or the makeup TikToker who launches her own lipgloss). This isn’t my own groundbreaking opinion here; we’ve already seen this play out with KKW and Skims, etc. Still, this blew my mind:
The 19-year-old TikTok star Josh Richards had flirted with being a brand ambassador for Red Bull. When I asked him why he passed, he looked at me quizzically—why, he wondered, should he be the vessel for someone else’s wealth creation? That’s the playbook for celebrities of yesteryear. Instead, Richards launched his own energy-drink brand, Ani Energy, off the back of his 25 million TikTok followers. A year later, Ani is in over 400 Walmart stores.
One last thought:
