Failmarriages and Rejection Therapy

after school weekend edition

Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition, a weekly trends debrief for paid subscribers. Your support keeps this newsletter going! 💫

This week, WSJ’s Jacob Gallagher wrote about the alleged return of the boat shoe, a trend resurgence that was first covered by Vogue in February, when they declared 2024 “the year of the boat shoe.”

The trend has since been covered by the New York Times (Jason Jules, the author of “Black Ivy,” attributed “the sudden re-emergence of the boat shoe in fashion” to sneaker fatigue), Who What Wear (“Nothing Says ‘I’m Rich’ Like This Summer Shoe Trend” read a headline published this week), and The Guardian (“All aboard! Why boat shoes are being worn nowhere near the sea” read a headline also published this week), among many others and assuredly many more to come.

sperry

A post shared by @sperry

Jacob reached out to interview me for this story, I think because I have a mildly viral TikTok about the topic, and hours after he messaged me, I saw a pair of Topsiders in the wild for the first time, I realized, in more than a decade.

The middle-aged man who was wearing them was also in slim-cut khakis, a departure from the pleated and baggy pants that are now considered trendy, which led me to assume that he wasn’t making a fashion statement but rather has probably worn Topsiders for years, just like my dad.

While much has been written about the return of the boat shoe, the trend itself has not exactly taken the streets by storm — at least not yet. Jacob notes in his story that in the third quarter of last year, Sperry’s revenue dropped 41.4% from the previous year. In January, weeks before Vogue declared this the year of the boat shoe, the brand was sold to Authentic Brands Group. Sperry “needed to have a bit of a refresh,” said the brand’s president Jonathan Frankel, and the refresh came when Miu Miu sent a pair of “unlined bleached leather loafers” — a $950 riff on the Topsider — down its runway last year. The brown pair is entirely sold out.

A few days after I talked to Jacob, I spotted a pair of Topsiders up for grabs in front of my neighbor’s stoop (my neighbor is, notably, not the man I had spotted wearing them). Apparently my neighbor does not read Vogue.

Or maybe he does and that’s why he doesn’t want them anymore.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what is (or is not) a trend. Merriam-Webster defines “trend” as “the general movement over time of a statistically detectable change.” If fashion publications are all eagerly covering a particular item or style, thus causing a “statistically detectable change” in how much coverage something is getting, does that make it a trend? If influencers are all wearing something, whether seeded by the brand or not, does that make it a trend? Or does it have to be organically embraced by consumers to make it a trend?

When I was in college, the boat shoe trend was so mainstream that Payless and Target had versions (we now call them “dupes,” but we did not call them that in 2008). Maybe the true marker of a style becoming a trend is when it’s knocked off by Shein and Alibaba, and when something is being resold on Depop for triple its original price?

We’re not quite there yet.

Today we’re talking about:

• What I would (and would not) do if I was the founder of the controversial beauty brand Youthforia

• Why early-aughts retailer Charlotte Russe is in the headlines

• Gap x LoveShackFancy versus Gap x Dôen

• The retail pop-up with a six-hour line

• Old Navy’s very Gen Z campaign

• Platform Crocs

• Husband shopping

• Paperclipping is the new ghosting

• The “I did my dance” meme

• "What the Sigma?"

• O-Zyn-pic

• Is therapy out?

Plus everything else that happened this week in youth culture and what I’m buying/reading/listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:

@juliacourtneyyyTHEY GROW UP SO FAST 🤰➡️🧑‍🍼➡️👧➡️👩➡️👩‍🏫➡️👩‍🎓

Tiktok failed to load.

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Also: I’m heading to San Francisco this week to speak at a tech company’s marketing offsite. I tell you this to: 1) warn you that the newsletter might arrive in your inbox a bit later and 2) very subtly make you aware that speaking at offsites is something I love doing if you’d like to have me at yours.