Djerf Girls and Low Pros
after school weekend edition
Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition. Think of the Monday-Thursday letters as the CliffsNotes; this is the extended version for paid subscribers. Thanks for reading — your support makes this possible! 💫
TODAY WE’RE TALKING ABOUT:
Push-up bras are back, baby
Gen Z’s favorite Swede Matilda Djerf makes her NYC debut
It girl brand With Jéan goes gender neutral
Luxury spending down, streetwear spending up
Anti-aging skincare is coming for Gen Z :/
Can you engineer virality? L’Oreal sure is trying
Gen Z discovered Tabis
The Italian
jobbobBee Pollen Boob Growth
Latex lips
Big Oil
RushTok ("Have a great day not a good day!”)
The rise (and fall?) of Parade
Plus everything else that happened this week in brands, trends, and internet culture. Before we jump in, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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“as someone who is going to be a sophomore this is all so true. make the most of your freshman year” 🫶
THE RISE (AND FALL?) OF PARADE
In 2019, I was walking my dog one morning in Williamsburg and I came across a wild posting for an underwear brand I’d never heard of. I looked it up on Instagram, as one does, and they had launched that day. Within a matter of hours, my IG feed was filled with cool Gen Zers — people I followed! — posing in the colorful underwear.
Parade’s long-running microinfluencer campaign continues to be one of the best-executed marketing strategies I’ve seen. Gifting your product to hip people on Instagram in exchange for social media photos is not revolutionary, but the way the brand infiltrated such a specific subset of Instagram — and the fact that the product was immediately recognizable — was brilliant. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Parade singlehandedly made an entire generation feel comfortable posting photos of themselves nearly nude on the internet. Seemingly overnight, they established themselves as the underwear of choice for Gen Z.
