A bunch of stray thoughts have been flopping around in my head like Barry Keoghan’s hog at the end of Saltburn so I’m sharing them with you before I forgot what they are. (Shout out the Vevo SEO team who added that “as featured in Saltburn” to the video title to really juice the numbers.)
Neon Genesis Shoevangelion
As much as we’ve been seeing ornamentation usurp minimalism in menswear the last few years, mainstream footwear had been staying relatively tame. And before you say it, the Balenciaga Triple S sneakers are my exception that proves the rule: if a dad shoe that looks like it was designed by HypebeastGPT is the most provocative thing in the mainstream market then the market isn’t that interesting.
But it seems like we’re stepping into a more adventurous quadrant as major fashion houses like Bottega Veneta and Margiela, independent darlings like Our Legacy and TAKAHIROMIYASHITATheSoloist, and and mass market retailers like Camper and Virón are all embracing a similar trend: NEON.
Neon isn’t really my thing, but I do think it’s an interesting development especially when deployed on more classic silhouettes like Chelsea boots. It’s not subversion as much as inversion. We associate certain shoes with a utilitarian drabness, and by dipping them in Nickelodeon slime there’s a sense that we’re countering function with form.
Mean Girls: The Musical Based on the Movie Mean Girls: The Musical
It sure feels like nostalgia cycles are getting shorter and I feel like part of that is because the people pulling the cultural levers are increasingly scared of flopping. Case in point, the new Mean Girls movie. I didn’t realize it was a musical. Apparently I was not alone in that.
Instead of looking for signifiers in this mess of cultural return, I think it’s actually a pretty simple explanation. The people pulling cultural levers are concerned with their own self-preservation. Flops mean you get fired. Therefore, they want to run back what they know has been successful since audiences apparently don’t care if they have contempt for them or not.
The funny piece of failed thinking in there, though, is that you still have to put in some effort on copies. Is there an appetite for another movie like this, when the last one lucked into the zeitgeist of goofy adolescent comedies and peak Lindsay Lohan? Art forgers seem like the appropriate analogy here. They’re still talented artists, which why they’re making fake Freida Kahlos and not painting your caricature on the boardwalk. Our ability to understand what we’re being sold has been whittled away, though, which is maybe the most frustrating thing. The Mean Girls musical movie is set to have a stellar opening weekend at the box office. Maybe we are just a bunch of rubes.
Pop-Tarts Exquisite Corpse
I know it’s a couple weeks old at this point, but man this was weird in a way that I can’t tell if it’s interesting or just another Old Spice marketing let’s-be-wacky-in-a-random-sauce-epic-bacon ass way. I will say this is the first time that both my pragmatic advertising agency friends and actual weird creative friends were talking about the same thing in a while.
Until next time.