Rent Doom and Vacation Guilt

we are so back

Hugo tapped Bella Poarch for its fall campaign; Alix Earle just landed her first big beauty partnership, and the lucky brand is Benefit; and Ganni is collaborating with Paloma Elsesser.

GEN Z CAN’T AFFORD THE RENT, nyt
This generation finds it nearly impossible to envision owning a home, with over a third believing it's unattainable. These days, housing costs far exceed the 30% income guideline, and the age of first-time homeowners has risen to 36. As a result, Gen Z has turned to living with parents, sharing apartments, or moving away from cities to cope with the housing crisis. “I have to make every extra dollar I have last,” said Manny Rawlings, a 25-year-old in Mamaroneck, N.Y. “I’m losing the ability to go out and have entertainment, to go to the movies or to go out to dinner with friends.”

CUSTOM ART, AIR PURIFIERS AND TIKTOK: COLLEGE-SPENDING BOOM COULD BOOST RETAILERS’ SALES THIS FALL, cnbc
The average household back-to-college spend has spiked by 40% since 2019 to about $1,367 per person this year, according to an annual survey. Retailers say sales have grown in recent years, and the uptick in spending can be attributed to the popularity of dorm decor TikToks. No longer are you just trying to impress your dorm mates; you want your dorm room to be so cool that it goes viral on social media.

BYTEDANCE AGAIN LOOKS TO TIKTOK TO PROMOTE ITS OTHER SOCIAL APP, LEMON8, techcrunch
TikTok appears to be working on an integration with Lemon8, the social app owned by ByteDance. Lemon8 went viral earlier this year — around the same time that the potential TikTok ban was in headlines — which Techcrunch reports was artificially inflated.

With suspicious timing, the app “went viral” on TikTok’s video platform after numerous influencers posted positive videos promoting Lemon8 using similar language describing it as a mix of Pinterest and Instagram. None of the videos we came across at the time indicated they were sponsored content or ads. This forced popularity, in turn, pushed Lemon8 into the Top 10 Overall apps in the U.S. App Store for several days in March 2023.

GEN Z SOCIAL APP FIZZ RAISES $25M, axios
We are so back. The anonymous social media app offers college-based communities that are only available to those with a school email address. COO Teddy Solomon and CTO Ashton Cofer cofounded Fizz when they were freshmen at Stanford in 2021; now it’s available on more than 80 college campuses, including Dartmouth and Notre Dame.

BOOMERS ENJOY VACATION WHILE GEN Z FEELS GUILTY ABOUT BEING AWAY FROM WORK, SURVEY FINDS, insider
A LinkedIn survey found that 35% of Gen Z respondents feel guilty not working while on vacation, compared to 22% of boomers. (Fwiw, millennials — 30% — and Gen Xers — 32% — also experience vacation guilt.) This is somewhat surprising only because the narrative around Gen Z in the workplace is that they don’t care about their 9-5 beyond the hours of 9 to 5; makes me wonder if there’s a larger shift towards the prioritization of work among this cohort — which seems inevitable — though recent trends like the “lazy girl job” don’t exactly support that theory.

INSIDE IRREGULAR HOURS, WHERE FINDING A JOB DOESN’T HAVE TO SUCK, nylon
Irregular Hours, a new NYC career center seemingly engineered for Gen Z, offers free headshots, canned lattes, and professional horoscopes. Oh, and career counseling. The Lower East Side storefront “feels like what the dream of an open air workspace promised: an easy, low-pressure place to hang out, a place that benefits collaboration and not just optics.”

One last thought: