Winter Arcs and Glitter Freckles
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! 💫
I could tell you this is arriving in your inbox on Monday instead of Sunday because of the long weekend, but the truth is I spent the end of the week recovering from being sick, and as soon as I started to feel better, we discovered that our two dogs and 19-year-old cat were covered in fleas. I never had lice as a kid, and I was able to avoid infestations during The Great Bedbug Outbreak of 2010, but the parasitic insects finally got me (or my pets, but still). It’s been three days of painstakingly combing through fur and vacuums and laundry and baths. Lather, rinse, repeat. The worst is behind us, but my nightmares will be occupied by creepy crawlers for the foreseeable future.
If you see me in person this week, please know that I am not contagious — neither the cold nor the bugs — but be forewarned that I am emotionally fragile and that I’ll probably try to tell you about #fleatok.
But no more flea talk here! Today, we’re discussing:
Urban Outfitters’ turnaround attempt (and why Abercrombie’s playbook won’t work)
Wet Seal’s unexpected resurgence
Louis Vuitton’s Neverfull Influencer campaign
The animal print hoodie all over my FYP
The Baggu backlash
Why I’m convinced the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is going to be a success
Clinique is reinventing Happy for the “body mist generation”
The $300 hairbrush that’s going viral
TikTok has rediscovered “Piano Man” by Billy Joel
The trendy new template for point-and-shoot-obsessed youths
Plus everything else that happened in trends and what I’m buying/reading/listening to. First, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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This past week, Piper Sandler released their 48th semi-annual survey of 13,515 U.S. teens. I spent a few hours combing through the report, a brief reprieve from combing through my pets. Some things that caught my eye:
The vibecession continues! 67% of teens say the economy is “getting worse” — and yet teen spending is up 6% year-over-year.
While they’re spending more, they’re working less: Fewer teens have a part-time job (34% compared to 38% last spring and 37% in fall 2023), which I presume means they’re getting more spending money from their parents to compensate.
Clothing dominates the wallet share for teen girls (27%) over food (20%) and personal care (14%), a category that includes skincare, beauty, and fragrance; for teen boys, food tops clothes (23% versus 18%), and while personal care doesn’t rank for teen boys, fragrance appeared in the top 10 most popular trends for the first time at No. 2 among male teens.
Nike maintained its No. 1 spot as a favorite brand for all teens. The athletic giant’s struggles have been well-documented, but it still has the top spot among young people when it comes to both shoes and clothing. But that doesn’t mean Nike’s in the clear: Among upper-income teens, the brand saw an 11-point year-over-year decline, a sign that they need to turn things around quickly.
Throughout 2022 and 2023, Converse maintained its position as the No. 2 top footwear brand, but Adidas has since ousted it and is now second to Nike. Unsurprisingly, Adidas is especially popular among females, where they saw the biggest increase across brands (to 14% this fall from 3% last fall), caused by Samba mania, followed by the Gazelle craze, which we’re still in the midst of.
The shoes have boosted Adidas sales over the past year, according to Inc., and analysts expect it to report third-quarter revenues of 6.4 billion euros, a 10 percent increase on a year ago in currency-adjusted terms, when it reports earnings on Oct. 29.
Lululemon’s grip on Gen Z is loosening. The brand maintained its No. 3 rank in apparel for all teens, but it lost four points of mindshare among upper-income teens.
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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserBeauty spending is up. (No duh.) The core beauty wallet reached its highest level since spring 2018 at $342, with all categories — except for skincare, notably! — growing year over year. Fragrance is growing the fastest at +25% Y/Y.
E.l.f. maintained its position as the No. 1 cosmetic brand. The drugstore brand takes a lot of big marketing swings, and I’m not sure that any of them really pay off — the Liquid Death collab and the flummoxing Tinder partnership both come to mind — but at the end of the day, the brand has figured out how to produce a high-quality product at a very low price point, and young people are obsessed with good value.
Green bubble shame is going nowhere. 87% of teens own an iPhone and nearly 30% of teens plan to upgrade their Apple hardware in the next 6 months “because of Apple Intelligence.”
Stanley cups are, inevitably, on their way out. This one feels good, I have to admit! In January, I made a TikTok about how the Stanley cup had peaked and would soon be out, and it went a little bit viral. I’m not a trend forecaster, I just know how trend cycles work, and I’m sure you do, too: When something becomes that saturated, the cool people, i.e. early adopters, start looking for the next and new. Anyway, according to Piper Sandler’s survey, the Stanley water bottle moved up to the No. 3 “fashion trend on its way out,” up from No. 8 in spring 2024.
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WEEKLY TREND HIGHLIGHTS
Methodology: Throughout the week, I keep a log of trends mentioned across publications and social media, and then 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”!
THIS WEEK IN STYLE
Urban Outfitters admits it doesn’t know how to sell to Gen Z and is now hoping to “pull off an Abercrombie-like turnaround.” Shea Jensen, president of Urban Outfitters, attributes their struggles to missing the “rapid and seismic shifts” between millennials and Gen Z during the global pandemic. “As these shifts occurred and a new generation began coming of age, we lost focus on our customer, and we lost track of how to win with them in today’s dynamic retail environment,” said Jensen in an earnings call in August. I’ll say!
Over the last few years, Urban Outfitters has become known among young people for being both prohibitively expensive and poor quality — a particularly brutal combination! — but what’s worse is that the designs themselves aren’t even good.
