Skibidi Ohio Rizz and Underconsumptioncore
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! 💫
Today we’re talking about:
The viral Apple dance
White Tube Top Girl
“If you asked me on a deeper level” meme
Boots and a slicked back bun
Eye color bracelets
The next Samba
Marc Jacob’s wannabe it bag
Raccoon bite piercings
“Pick me girl” makeup
Tween girls want ballerina nails
“One million beers” meme
Socks!!!
Plus everything else that happened this week in style, beauty, and culture and what I’m buying/reading/listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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The generational socks discourse (and the state of trend reporting in 2024)
Because my brain has limits (and boy does it!), this newsletter serves as a place to track trends. An archive of sorts.
The internet is an abyss. Social media is ephemeral. Videos are posted, only to be deleted, while algorithms and platforms are forever mutating (even, depending on how things turn out, altogether disappearing). Online media is also in a constant state of evolution. Publications are bought and sold, with years worth of content (to think we used to call them “articles”) wiped clean.
One side effect of tracking trends is tracking the way trends are covered by the media, which has changed a lot in the three years I’ve been writing this newsletter.
I crunched some numbers and I scan through around 5,000 headlines a week. Of that, I probably read 150 articles, around 20 a day. I’m reading stories about trends — not exactly Shakespeare — but I do try to give everything a thorough read because so often the most valuable insights or quotes are not apparent on a quick skim. I have a lot of strategies for sifting through the internet each day and surfacing the stories I think might be worth remembering in a year.
All of this is to say the ongoing generational sock discourse really sent me into a spiral this week.
I try not to cover the same trends over and over in this newsletter, which is not easy, because every publication is, of course, covering the same trends. And that's okay! That’s how they hit their traffic goals, and many publications are better than others.
At the same time, it often feels worth documenting the coverage and cadence of trend reporting.
One specific example that I’ve recently watched with amusement is the “butter yellow” trend; search “butter yellow” in Google News and you’ll see what I mean. Tracking how many publications have covered a specific trend in a certain amount of time can be a good way to gauge how prominent a trend is; it can also be a good way to gauge how desperate publications are for traffic.
Last weekend (July 6th), the Wall Street Journal wrote about how no-show socks had created a division between millennials, who love them, and Gen Z, who hates them.
The same story was covered by the New York Times (June 20th), the Washington Post (June 21st), and The Guardian (June 23rd) a full two weeks prior.
I’m not saying that WSJ shouldn’t have written this trend story. Yes, everyone else had already covered it, but the average WSJ reader (or what I think to be the average WSJ reader, anyway) is not likely to have seen such a niche trend story, and also, Chavie Lieber is a fantastic reporter who took the story further than “this thing is happening on TikTok.”
Her piece included excellent quotes (“If you are wearing low-cut socks, it means you are 30-plus,” says 26-year-old Chidebe Ndibe — which hurts but also isn’t, in my experience, untrue) and valuable data (Bombas reports that socks that show make up 42% of the company’s business, compared with last year’s 33%, while sales of no-show socks dropped 9%).
But this sock discourse is not new. My FYP has been full of generational sock TikToks for months. In fact, on May 5th, I included the below TikTok in this newsletter, writing, “Hard to overstate how important socks are these days.”
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But it goes back even further.