Snoopy Sisters and $2K Birkin Dupes
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.
Probably like most of you, I’ve spent a lot of time this week deliberating over AI. I’m an AI optimist. It makes me excited to think about it’ll help humans do human things more efficiently.
But it’s hard to maintain that optimism when BuzzFeed lays off 15% of its staff and shuts down its entire news division, or you see one too many headlines about AI deepfake pornography, or when an AI-generated song by Drake and The Weeknd goes wildly viral even though it’s undebatably bad. (Speaking of the latter, I really loved Rolling Stone’s piece, “Just Because AI-Generated Rap Songs Go Viral Doesn’t Mean They’re Good.”)
But as someone who’s hyper-focused on efficiency and optimization (not in a weird tech bro way, just in that I am a curious, enthusiastic person who wants to do as much as humanly possible), it’s fun to think about the tedious things we’ll never have to do again because of AI.
I played around with this new ShopWithAI tool this week, and now I’m obsessed with how AI might — in the not-so-distant future — make shopping less of a laborious, inefficient, unsustainable task, which for me (and I suspect many of us) it very much is. I’ve been searching for a simple shift mini dress for years. YEARS! The closest I’ve gotten is this Everlane’s Party of One tank shift, which they sold the summer of 2020; unfortunately, I’ve worn them all to shreds. (I know some Everlane team reads this — please, I beg you, bring it back!)
I have ordered so many potential replacements, and all of them are bad, and then I have to deal with returning them all, which is time-intensive and bad for the environment. It’s a depressing cycle, but it’s also unavoidable: I need to clothe my body!
If AI can help save me from the task of sifting through every retailer, ordering multiple sizes of multiple styles (because you never know), and then returning it all, that’s a win for me. If AI can help me discover new music, if it can help me send emails, if it can help my ADD-addled brain edit out typos in my own writing — a win!
Today we’re talking about:
Exposed bums
Cowboy boots
Sheer shoes
The new Samba
Shiv Roy’s fan army
“The season’s most sought-after accessory”
French 75 Jell-O shots
Canned latte aesthetics
A very Gen Z bridal launch
And a very Gen Z bridal bankruptcy
#PromTok2023
The sprinkle cake drama, regrettably :/
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.
