

Discover more from After School by Casey Lewis
Daniel Kaluuya’s Barney film will be a ‘surreal, A24-type’ work of art; Luca Guadagnino will direct an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards; Alix Earle is giving back to her alma mater with a scholarship for business students; and I guess we’re all threading now?
TIKTOK EMERGES AS THREAT TO AMAZON WITH $20 BILLION SHOPPING PILOT, bloomberg
TikTok Shop is expected to hit $20 billion in gross merchandise value by the end of this year, quadrupling from a year earlier. If it can sustain that momentum, analysts say, it could revamp a company whose mainstay video platform is already luring consumers and advertisers away from Meta and Google.
WELCOME TO BODEWORLD, thecut
“I literally scoop ice cream for Bode,” said one high-schooler. “I think it’s so special. The pieces are so special.” But what makes Bode so special? Fans — most of whom are young men — say the brand is what got them to ditch the hypebeast aesthetic and embrace florals and sheer tops for the first time. Or, as Lauren Sherman put it, “It says, ‘You can wear a lace shirt and still fuck girls.’”
THE ‘LAZY GIRL JOB’ TREND ROMANTICISES THE DRUDGERY OF WORK, dazed
Quiet quitting is so last year; enter the “lazy girl job,” the latest iteration of anti-girlboss culture. On TikTok, the #lazygirljob hashtag has over 12 million views, with videos from self-professed lazy girls boasting about how easy their working lives are. “All I do is copy and paste the same emails, take 3-4 [calls] a day, take my extra long break, take more breaks AND get a nice salary,” one video is captioned.
HOW TIKTOK MADE A 00S DATING ADVICE BOOK A BEST SELLER, i-d
Dated dating manuals, including Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and Why Men Love Bitches, are now being repackaged for the digital age. On TikTok, #whymenlovebeaches — the hashtag used for the book; swear words limit the reach of videos — has more than 58.2M views.
IN DEFENSE OF ROMANTICISING YOUR LIFE, EVEN THOUGH THE GUARDIAN THINKS IT MAKES GEN Z BORING, screenshot
This is a Gen Z response to The Guardian’s now-viral piece, published Monday, called “Beware the ‘Beige-Fluencers” about the “millions of young people” on TikTok who are romanticizing a life that’s “overwhelmingly dull, fundamentally rooted in living each day the same, and following a narrow, regimented routine.”
If millennials want to come for us over our ruthless rejection of toxic 21st century beauty standards, fine, but don’t you dare label our lives as boring, because for a generation of 30-somethings who worshipped the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon, you don’t really have a leg to stand on, do you?
MORE CHICKEN, LIGHTER BEER, PINK DRINKS: COMPANIES CRAFT NEW PRODUCTS FOR GEN Z TASTES, wsj
Gen Z is now the largest generation in the world, with a collective disposable income of $360 billion — and F&B companies are scrambling to win over these young consumers with specific preferences: “Beers are lighter. Drinks are more colorful. Coffees are colder.”
GEN Z AND MILLENNIALS ARE LOSING FRIENDS OVER SPENDING HABITS, wwd
A consumer survey by Credit Karma made the rounds on Twitter yesterday, but I think that was mostly because of the clickbait-y headline suggesting that young people are, like, breaking up friendships over money. In reality, the findings are all pretty expected — more than a third of Gen Z and millennials report having a friend that pushes them to overspend, which, sure! We’ve all seen the Friends episode, and we’ve all lived out the Friends episode in real life. I guess it’s possible that inflation has accentuated financial disparities among friends, but we all have friends who spend more than us, and we all have friends who spend less, and that’s always going to be the case regardless of generational differences.
One last thought:
Beige-fluencers and Bode Boys
Loved this