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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:
Target x Kate Spade, Reformation x Devon Lee Carlson, Zac Posen’s first GapStudio drop, and where they all went wrong
Does Old Navy's clothing predict a recession?
Shein’s Hunger Games collaboration
Selling “it” hoodies to Gen Z girls bought one couple a $150 million mansion
The hottest TV show is not White Lotus, it’s The Group Chat (but not that group chat)
All the girls on TikTok are sharing their “girl canon events”
Social media anxiety
The fake Justin Bieber song taking over the TikTok charts
The “probably needed a hug” meme
The “tramp stamp” resurgence
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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It was a big week for collaborations that would have been great ten or fifteen years ago but ultimately fell short hitting shelves now: Target x Kate Spade, Reformation x Devon Lee Carlson, Zac Posen’s first GapStudio drop.
I analyzed a ton of social media posts (Twitter, TikTok, Reddit) on all three, and here’s what I found…
The Target x Kate Spade collection would have been an instant sell-out success during the 2010s Kate Spade heyday — who else still misses Saturday? — but neither brand is resonating with consumers (young or old) right now, which makes a collaboration between the two a tough sell.
There are more than 300 pieces in the collaboration, and it’s all priced pretty well. The clutch-style beaded bags, for example, are a reasonable $30, but the downside is that they say phrases like “Champagne & French Fries” or, confoundingly, “Going to Target.”
The aesthetic is “but first, coffee” millennial girlboss. C. Wonder-core! But in 2025, who is this for?
The overwhelming sentiment on social media around this collaboration is, as you might guess, not great.
Many young people on TikTok have been taking part in an ongoing boycott of Target over its rollback of DEI initiatives. I haven’t seen a single Target haul posted to social media in the last month or so that hasn’t been met with a barrage of commenters pleading with shoppers to boycott the retailer — and this is not just a fringe-y TikTok trend. According to Forbes, the retailer’s foot traffic is down for the eighth week in a row and stock just hit a 52-week low.
Beyond the boycott, though, many consumers feel this collab is at odds with the moment. I saw a lot of “tone-deaf” comments. $10 striped Kate Spade-branded trash bags? In this economy?
Similarly stuck in the 2010s is Zac Posen’s first GapStudio launch that’s so disappointing to me personally I actually felt upset about it. (Of all the things to be upset by this week, this particular thing is quite meaningless, but if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I love the Gap and I want it to succeed. Like any good millennial, my brand loyalty runs deep.)
I appreciated what Lauren Sherman had to say in Line Sheet:
GapStudio, designed by Zac Posen, launched in earnest today. The campaign, shot by Mario Sorrenti and Line Sheet A-lister Alastair McKimm, is gorgeous. The clothes, however, are… not right. Nobody wants a denim trench, or a too-purple navy blue bubble skirt (even if it’s cute) from the Gap. You know what they want? A t-shirt. Fetishize the t-shirt. Uniqlo is eating Gap’s lunch because they know that high-quality basics are their stock and trade.
I agree with her — fetishize the t-shirt! — though I think the clothes are not just not right, as Lauren politely put it, but actually all wrong. This dress, for example…
…is not an off-the-shoulder or asymmetrical dress, but they’ve only shown it worn that way, which no woman in America will do — the exception being, of course, Anne Hathaway on the red carpet, but that’s not real life! Make clothes people want to wear, yes, but also show us how they really look and how we should actually wear them.
GapStudio’s bias-cut slipdress has the potential to be the best piece in the collection, because Zac Posen, as a designer, is known for his use of draping and is famously talented at bias cuts.
But this particular bias-cut slipdress is 100% polyester, which is fine, and costs $158, which is not. It looks eerily similar to a bias-cut slip dress from Old Navy’s recently launched special occasion line — which Posen also had a hand in — also 100% polyester and priced less than $50.
It’s possible the collection is nicer in person than it appears online, but I wouldn’t know because they didn’t do any influencer seeding (a missed opportunity!), and I also couldn’t find any try-on videos on TikTok yet. When a buzzy collection hits stores, you’ll usually pretty instantly see a bunch of try-on videos filmed by creators, so either very few stores got the collection and those who shopped online haven’t received their orders yet, or this collection is completely irrelevant.
Reformation’s collaboration with influencer Devon Lee Carlson, which came out on Tuesday, already has dozens of try-on videos on TikToks. But what it has in relevance, it lacks in substance.
On TikTok, the consensus is that it’s “giving tj maxx clearance” and looks “sh*in adjacent.”
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Worse than fast-fashion allegations, though, has been a mounting backlash around cultural appropriation. “Have the brown girlies seen the Devon Lee Carlson and Reformation collab?” says creator sigh.sai.sigh in a video viewed nearly 150,000 times. “I'm like, come on, give credit where credit is due. This is literally a lehenga with the buttons. No hate to Devon Lee Carlson, but just think that the pieces…are drawing inspiration from South Asian fashion and therefore should credit South Asian fashion.”
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And now girls are mocking the collection by dressing up in their authentic lehengas.
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Each of these collaborations had the potential to resonate and in another time, they probably would have. But the moment is fraught (and only becoming more so!), and Gen Z expects brands to get it. That means thoughtful design and fair pricing and good value and inclusive styling and, yes, credit where it’s due.
WEEKLY TRENDS DEBRIEF
Methodology: Throughout the week, I keep a log of trends mentioned across publications and social media that I categorize by style, beauty, and culture. Not everything makes it in; I ask myself, “Is this something I’ll want to remember next year?” and if the answer is yes, it’s included. This section is long, so please click “view in a browser”!
STYLE
Has the Gen Z versus millennial gymwear discourse entered your feed in the last few weeks? The tl;dr is that Gen Z has ditched millennial-era tight gym clothes in favor of looser styles. Pinterest searches for “baggy gym outfits” are up 400% in the past year, with 58% of those from 18–24-year-olds. Nike has emerged as the leading supplier of oversized women’s activewear, while leggings’ share of activewear bottoms has dropped from 47% in 2021 to 32% today. Girls just want to wear sweats now.