Kittycore and Brotox

after school weekend edition

Welcome back to After School ✨weekend edition✨. Think of the daily letter as the CliffsNotes; this is the extended version for paid subscribers.

Quite a few of you are new subscribers who arrived via Mattie Kahn’s excellent Times piece, “Is There Life After Influencing?” Thanks for being here and thanks, Mattie, for quoting me! I can’t stop thinking about this emerging “post-creator” generation, a concept we’re going to be confronted with over and over again as influencers inevitably burn out.

(If you have any thoughts on this, please share them - I’ve been thinking about it all week and I can’t stop as my Twitter rants may indicate.)

I usually send these long weekend editions out on Saturday mornings, but candidly, I found myself in a deep Coachella rabbit hole while working on this yesterday, and the next thing I knew, it was 9pm and my search history was full of things like “Alexis Chung Taylor Swift Coachella feud” and “Justin Bieber Chance the Rapper Coachella surprise.”

I went to Coachella a few times when I was an editor for Teen Vogue. This was back when young editors got to do the kinds of all-expenses-paid brand-sponsored press trips influencers now go on. If I’m remembering correctly, my trip in 2013 was sponsored by a popsicle brand; 2014, I think, was paid for by Samsung? What I most vividly recall from the latter trip is getting violently carsick on a band tour bus en route from LA to Indio while I was supposed to be interviewing a pop star. Instead, I spent the hour-plus trip next to the bus driver with my head in a paper bag.

These days, I much prefer to follow Coachella from afar, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m older or if that’s because Coachella is so different now than it was in the 2010s. Or the carsickness.

Today we’re talking about:

• The Official Vodka of Coachella™

• Aperol Spritz’s comeback

• Revolve Fest’s turnaround

• Branded campus pool parties

• AI-generated billboards

• Fruit Roll-Ups’ masterful strategy

• Reformation’s viral approach

• Hello Kitty is chic now?

• Long live teen mags

• Brotox

• Bridal suiting

• Coastal cowgirl

• The Masters girl

And everything else that happened this week in brands, trends, and internet culture. As always, scroll to the end for everything I’m reading, buying, watching, and listening to.

thefakerothko

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