Dinosaur Time and Meme Drought
after school weekend edition
Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition, a not-so-brief trends debrief for paid subscribers. Your support keeps this newsletter going!
In today’s letter:
Anakin Skywalker a** generation
The viral “she doesn’t know it yet” trend
“Boneless eyelashes” and how Gen Z is shaping the mascara market
Old Navy is selling prom dresses
Kate Spade’s comeback could be imminent
The corpcore aesthetic backlash has begun
You can now BNPL your Taco Bell
The brand aspiring to be Gen Alpha’s Bonne Bell
And so much more, plus everything I’m buying, reading, and listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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(Not my hand, though I wish it was!)
Earlier this week, my Gen Z writer friend
shared a brief but excruciating (complimentary!) essay with me that details the disillusionment of Gen Z writers facing a post-digital media crash landscape. Steffi Cao writes:…They’re missing 2010s media like a bitch, and so am I. Over the past few years, my shame for not having been born ten years earlier has only cropped up more frequently. If only I’d been born in 1988! My career would be so much better! I know I’m not the only twenty-something writer that feels this way. Clearly, I’m not the only one who spent years working towards this burgeoning new landscape of writing only to find that there’s seemingly no gold left for us.
As a millennial who worked in media then, I never thought I’d see young people romanticize that era, though now that I have seen it, I understand it was inevitable.
After spending my adolescence reading every magazine I could get my hands on and studying journalism in college, I moved to New York to be a writer. It was the summer of 2010 and it did not take long for the disillusionment to set in. (My very first bout of disillusionment hit me even before I graduated and moved to New York, when the magazine I’d spent the summer interning for folded, but optimism or naivety or something compelled me to move anyway.)
I, to paraphrase Cao, found myself missing 2000s media like a bitch. I, too, wished that I’d been born 10 years earlier, except my 10 years earlier was a very different time than her 10 years earlier.