Kimono Chaos

Traditionally speaking, there are many rules to follow in the wearing of kimono. To learn them, one needs to be taught, either over time by their elders, or at kimono school, such as the one I went to for several years. Rules implies rigidity, but it’s not like there are fashion police out there. More simply, it’s a form of etiquette. Even in the modern era, when kimono culture is on the wane, knowing which kimono styles and patterns are most appropriate for a given situation is still seen as a social grace.

But there is one place in Japan where all the rules go out the window. Ironically, it’s also where you can see more people in kimono than almost anywhere else in public. It is Asakusa. I know this from personal experience, for dressing up in a kimono and going to this most traditional of Tokyo neighborhoods is one of my favorite pastimes.

Asakusa, and more specifically the Senso-ji temple area, is brimming with inbaundo, “inbounds,” as the government calls tourists here. And I have seen some really wild kimono styles there. This doesn’t bother me – far from it. While I prefer to follow traditional etiquette, it’s a free country, as Americans say. In fact I am starting to believe that inbound tourists are creating a totally new form of kimono culture without even realizing it. [...]

As I said, we have many customs when it comes to kimono. One of the most important is matching the season. Kimono have beautiful patterns, most of which have symbolic meanings. Some are obvious, like snow patterns for winter, or sakura cherries for spring. Others are pegged to more specific times: hina-doll patterns are worn in the days leading up to Girls Day on March 3. Rose patterns are only worn when roses bloom, which is May.

It is also customary to match the formality of the occasion. Events like weddings, funerals, or the annual coming-of-age day for the latest crop of twenty year olds all expect very specific types of kimono, traditionally speaking. And when you think about it this makes sense. You aren’t going to wear something bright and chipper to a funeral. Nor would you want something dour for a celebration.

There are further divisions within these events. It probably won’t surprise you to hear a bride wears a very specific form of kimono. What about guests? Well, are you a family member or an invitee? If you’re a close relative, you’re traditionally going to want to wear what is known as a kuro-tomesode. If you’re attending as a friend, a plain pattern is the safest choice. And how old are you? Should you be in your twenties, a colorful furisode would be a wonderful choice. Furisode feature long sleeves and bold, bright patterns, which really pop out and attract attention. They’re considered the privilege of young women. But if you are married – even as a twentysomething – they’re out. Then you’re (traditionally) obligated to wear a more formal kimono with short sleeves.

One of the most fundamental things that can throw outsiders for a loop is that, in the traditional kimono worldview, you aren’t wearing the kimono for yourself. Kimono are fashion, but we wear them to show respect for someone or something. This means you’d never wear anything that might shift the center of attention away from the occasion. Weddings? No-brainer. But it’s true for all events, really.

For instance, if you were attending a graduation ceremony, even as a parent, you wouldn’t want to overshadow those getting the spotlight by wearing something super flashy or opulent. And the center of attention isn’t necessarily a person. In spring, it is customary to avoid wearing kimono with cherry blossom patterns to hamami flower-viewing parties. Why? Because the center of attention for cherry blossom parties are the cherry blossoms themselves! Now, it isn’t like anyone is going to yell at you if you happen to wear a sakura pattern to a hanami. But to those in the know, you might seem like, well, a bumpkin.

So those are just a few examples. There are many others. As I often say, Japan is really flexible when it comes to spirituality, but it’s really rigid when it comes to society. You can roll with this or not. I chose to – that’s why I took kimono classes!

Which brings us back to Asakusa. I usually go alone, strolling the shopping arcades, paying my respects at the temples, and maybe stopping at a cafe to write and sip some coffee. These are considered casual occasions, kimono-wise. So I always pick a casual one: tsumugi, for example, which is considered the all-purpose wear of the kimono world, kind of like how the West sees jeans. I tend to go for more colorful patterns, and because Asakusa is such a culturally historic place, I often choose antique kimono for a retro feel. I like to go for a Taisho-era or early Showa vibe. Asakusa’s that kind of place.

It was in fact at a cafe that I started to notice more tourists in kimono. I opened the door and saw the room completely packed with Asian women, all dressed in ultramodern kimono. Really ultramodern, like something out of a Harajuku boutique, with laces and ruffles, the fabric beaded with faux pearls. This really shocked me. Were kimono making a comeback? It wasn’t until I was finally seated that I realized: everyone was speaking Chinese. Aha. These were tourists.

by Hiroko Yoda, Japan Happiness | Read more:
Images: uncredited

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose

VF Corporation started as Vanity Fair Mills. Bras and underwear. They paid $762 million for a company called Blue Bell and picked up JanSport in the deal. That acquisition made them the largest publicly traded clothing company in the world.

Then they went shopping.

In 2000, they bought The North Face. Same year, they bought Eastpak. In 2004, Kipling. In 2007, Eagle Creek. By the time they were done, VF Corporation controlled an estimated 55% of the US backpack market.

More than half. One company.

Every time you stood in a store in the 2010s and compared a JanSport to a North Face to an Eastpak, you were comparing three labels owned by the same parent corporation. Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.

Competition is what kept these brands honest when they were independent. If JanSport built a shitty bag in 1985, you walked across the aisle and bought an Eastpak instead. That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above: hit the margin target.

The easiest way to hit a margin target is to make everything a little worse, across the board, all at once.

What they changed

Denier count is the most measurable indicator of fabric durability. It measures fiber thickness. A bag made with 1000-denier Cordura nylon can survive years of daily use. Drop that to 600-denier polyester and you have a bag that looks identical on the shelf and lasts half as long.

Denier counts dropped across VF Corp's backpack lines.

YKK makes the best zippers on earth. They're Japanese, they cost more per unit, and brands that care about longevity use them because a zipper failure kills a bag faster than fabric wear. On VF Corp's lower-tier models, YKK hardware got swapped for generic alternatives. A few cents saved per unit across millions of bags.

Stitching density went down. More stitches per inch means stronger seams. Fewer stitches means faster production. When you're running millions of units through factories in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, shaving seconds off each seam saves serious money. It also creates failure points at every spot where the bag takes stress. Strap junctions. Zipper terminations. The bottom panel.

None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.

Someone in the industry pushed back on an earlier version of this piece with a fair point: VF Corp's brands still operate with their own design teams and their own headquarters. The brands aren't literally merged. And the premium tiers within North Face and JanSport still use quality materials. The Summit Series from TNF still has Cordura. You can still find a JanSport with YKK zippers if you know where to look.

All of that is true. But it actually makes the argument worse, not better.

The fact that VF Corp kept the premium tiers intact while degrading the entry-level and mid-range products means this was a deliberate segmentation strategy. They still make the good version. They just also sell a garbage version under the same trusted name, in the same stores, to the people who don't know the difference. The brand reputation built by decades of quality products is now being used to move cheap products to buyers who trust the logo.

Walmart's JanSport and REI's JanSport are not the same bag. But they carry the same name, and that's the point. The name is doing the selling. The product doesn't have to.

The warranty is doing the same thing

JanSport still advertises a lifetime warranty. It sounds like a company that stands behind its product.

Go try to use it.

You ship the bag back at your own expense. That runs $12 to $25 depending on size and where you live. You wait three to six weeks. That's the current turnaround per JanSport's own warranty page. Then they evaluate the damage.

"Normal wear and tear" isn't covered. Only "defects in materials and workmanship." Think about what that means for a bag engineered to last two years. When it starts falling apart at eighteen months, that failure can be classified as the product reaching its expected lifetime, not as a defect. The warranty language is structurally designed to exclude the exact type of failure the product is now built to have.

People who do get warranty replacements report receiving bags that are worse than the one they sent in. Thinner fabric. Cheaper hardware. You mailed back a 2016 JanSport and got a 2025 JanSport, and those are fundamentally different products.

The warranty used to be legendary. JanSport used to be the brand people cited when they talked about companies that actually stood behind their stuff. That reputation still exists in people's memories. The warranty now runs on that leftover trust.

One person told me they called about getting a zipper replaced on a JanSport from the late 90s. They were told it was normal wear and tear. They tried tailors, got quoted $50 to $100 for a new zipper. They looked at buying a new JanSport and saw how far the quality had fallen. They ended up buying a used backpack at a thrift store for four dollars.

Ten to twenty used bags for the price of one new one that'll fall apart. That's where we're at.

by Keyana Sapp, Worse on Purpose | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. See also: Your Dinner Got Worse On Purpose (WoP):]

***

A truck pulls into the alley behind two restaurants. Same truck, same hand cart, same flats of frozen jalapeño poppers walking through two different kitchen doors that share a back wall. Two different menus, two different price-points… the exact same food supplies.

The truck is Sysco. They deliver to more than 400,000 of the ~749,000 restaurants in America. Roughly one in every two. The steak and eggs at a diner in the Texas Panhandle and the steak and eggs at a breakfast joint in northern Maine taste functionally identical because they came off the same pallet at the same distribution center, processed against the same private-label spec, on the same line, by people who never knew which restaurant the boxes were headed to.

This is what the system was built to produce. The same dinner, served to 400,000 different rooms, by people who think they are running their own restaurants.

The truck stops everywhere

Sysco does not just feed independent restaurants. They feed hospitals, federal prisons, military bases, public schools, and the food service companies that supply the cafeterias of the United States Capitol. Fiscal year 2025 closed at $81.4 billion in net sales. The customer count sits at roughly 730,000 across 10 countries, with 337 distribution centers and around 1,719 employed drivers.

The thing people should understand is what those numbers do at the supplier layer. When Sysco moves a spec on a chicken breast, the spec moves on the plate of a restaurant-goer, a public school kid and a federal prisoner in the same week. When Sysco strikes a single supplier deal for frozen seafood, the cafeteria at the United States Congress and the chow line at the Bureau of Prisons end up with the same case from the same boat. [...]

The clam chowder in a New England diner and the clam chowder in a Florida diner come out of the same Sysco can. The biscuits at a Tennessee breakfast joint and the biscuits at a Wisconsin one come from the same frozen case. Regional cuisine, the kind that used to be the reason people drove to a particular restaurant in a particular town, requires regional ingredients and regional suppliers and a chef with the leverage to source both. As Frerick put it, “every independent diner becomes an off-brand Denny's."

Among line cooks, the saying is simpler. “When a Sysco truck pulls up to the loading dock, the kitchen has stopped trying.”

How American Camouflage Conquered the World

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—once famous for building aircraft carriers, now better known for creative studios—a company called Crye Precision is one of the biggest tenants. Its footprint in the building is 100,000 square feet. Inside its gigantic warehouse space, rows of whirring sewing machines are stitching together garments made out of the most popular, renowned, and confusing textile of our time: MultiCam.

MultiCam is so ubiquitous that you can buy a camping chair or baby carrier in the camouflage pattern. Arc’teryx and Outdoor Research make jackets in MultiCam. Perhaps most importantly, you may see this iteration of camo on police officers, SWAT teams, ICE agents, or your average January 6 rioter.

For its influence, the pattern has earned a place in MoMA’s permanent collection, a thrill to the Cooper Union art students who created it. “They gave us a lifetime membership, which is cool,” says Gregg Thompson, who was still in graduate school in 1999 when a Cooper Union alumnus, Caleb Crye, reached out to him about a collaboration. “We always had an interest in all things military,” says Thompson. “It’s boy stuff—monster trucks and that kind of thing.”

In 2001, Crye Precision (then known as Crye Associates) got its first military assignment: to make a prototype of a new kind of helmet. While the company was making it, 9/11 happened. With the announcement of the so-called War on Terror, Crye Precision took on a new challenge: camouflage. In all their exploratory research conversations with soldiers, Crye and Thompson learned that the US camouflage situation didn’t work. Soldiers were frequently wearing mismatched camo, which made them stand out on the battlefield as opposed to blending in. “When guys deploy, they’re wearing desert uniforms with woodland body armor,” Thompson explains. What if, they thought, there was one camouflage pattern that could work almost anywhere? It could be a “75 percent solution to environments in general,” Thompson says.

There are a few ways to make a camouflage pattern work in multiple environments. One is to make sure it has the right number of colors. “Three would not be enough; 12 would be too many, because they would just get lost,” Thompson says. He thinks seven is the sweet spot. These colors—greens and browns and beiges—all need to have warm overtones. “Most things in nature have some level of warmth in them,” he says. “Even a building—it came from stone and likely grew a little bit of green stuff on it. Very few things remain cold.” Also very important for a camo pattern is that it should have a lot of highlights, lowlights, gradients, and fades; no two outfits should be identical. As Thompson notes: “If you have all of your guys kind of looking the same, then as soon as you spot one guy, you can very easily pick out the rest, right?”

The design students didn’t start out in the field or on a hunting range. “You start in your Adobe suite, right?” Thompson says. “ Go right in digitally, create it, print it, make uniforms out of it. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.” It was a lot of guesswork. There wasn’t really a reliable measurement for testing the effectiveness of camo. “ The human eye and the user and the guy in the field know what’s good or bad, but to make that be a test that you could replicate across different forces would be very, very hard,” Thompson says.

And yet, Crye Precision was pretty sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their concept for multi-environment camo to the United States military. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this pattern, an early design of which was called Scorpion. In 2004 they did, and christened it MultiCam. Around that same time, when the military had an open call for submissions for a new Army camo, Crye proposed MultiCam. It was rejected.

Instead, the US Army announced that it had designed its own version of an all-purpose camouflage pattern that could blend in with most environments. It was called Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP)—a digital, pixelated pattern that looked as if someone had uploaded an image of camouflage in really low resolution. When UCP was widely adopted throughout the Army in 2005, it became, in the words of costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most dunked-on camo patterns of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in Afghanistan in 2009, was wearing UCP. “We were getting shot at by these Chechen snipers from a long way away,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a road flare duct-taped on my forehead.”

The only soldiers who could essentially opt out of wearing UCP were members of the US Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets get a little more wiggle room when it comes to their clothing. “Every unit, whether conventional or special, has what’s called a tactical standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne tells me. The blue book will outline the “third-party items you’re allowed to wear.” For Special Forces, “they’re usually pretty lenient.” He says he has a buddy in special ops who wears sneakers, and he has heard of someone who wears Vans high-tops.

As such, Special Forces were the perfect audience for MultiCam. This cutting-edge camo started being worn by some of the most elite soldiers in the United States military, many of whom had met Thompson and Crye during the duo’s many trips to Fort Benning. “Those are the people who have the ability to make their own decisions,” says Thompson, “and are also maybe a little more open to some of the crazy stuff.” Crye started to produce runs of their camo, selling their own MultiCam products in the early days of e-commerce and also licensing the pattern.

Around this time, the culture of the Special Forces started to change. Before the War on Terror, elite teams were small and secretive; very few members of the military knew what they were doing. “Look at photos of the first Special Forces units going into Afghanistan in 2001,” says McFarlane. “They look like a suburban dad on a fishing trip.” As the number of special operators grew, the whole Army could see them fast-roping down from helicopters, breaking down doors, storming houses of suspected terrorists—often in MultiCam. Same with the popular video game Call of Duty and movies like Zero Dark 30, American Sniper, and Act of Valor (which featured active-duty Navy SEALs). In a confusing and unpopular war, stories of Special Operators offered rare victories the United States military could claim.

Special Forces started to develop a new image in the popular imagination, says McFarlane: “Dudes with huge beards and long hair and just totally ripped and just wearing lots of technical gear.” Because Special Forces were so admired and idolized, regular infantry soldiers would buy MultiCam backpacks or accessories to emulate them. Everyone wanted to wear MultiCam—not only to cosplay but also to get away from the ugly digital UCP pattern. Including, eventually, the US Army itself.

Although UCP was deployed to American troops all over the world, it became increasingly associated with Iraq: a hated, unsuccessful pattern for a hated, unsuccessful war. In 2010, when the Obama administration was trying to distance itself from Iraq, the military was instructed to get rid of the UCP pattern. And so, to quickly supply a troop surge in Afghanistan, it turned to the most readily available replacement camo: MultiCam.

Even though the US military called its pattern OEFCP (Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern), it was MultiCam from Crye Precision, bought in bulk when roughly 100,000 members of the conventional forces were deployed to Afghanistan. Then, in 2014, the Army announced that its in-house camo team had finally developed a new pattern: Operational Camouflage Pattern, or OCP. As McFarlane believes: OCP is “basically MultiCam without the branding.” If you view two swaths side by side, you can see that OCP is ever so slightly more brown. There’s a reason they look so similar: Both are inspired by Scorpion, the original pattern that Crye presented to the US government.

In a few niche corners of the internet, debate still simmers over whether Crye had the right to trademark MultiCam or whether the Army had the right to make its own version. Truly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that, because of this whole saga, some version of MultiCam or OCP or Scorpion is everywhere. The militaries of Australia, Georgia, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Malta, and France all wear variants of MultiCam uniforms—some specifically customized by Crye Precision. Soldiers fighting for both Russia and Ukraine do, too; they don colored armbands to tell who is on what side. Even the Taliban wear MultiCam. In January 2026, the Minnesota National Guard wore bright yellow vests over their camouflage in part “to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”

MultiCam has trickled down from Special Forces to all kinds of law enforcement: American SWAT teams, municipal police, teams within the FBI, US Marshals, Drug Enforcement, and Border Patrol all dress like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. ICE also wears a mixture of civilian clothes and MultiCam, and in January, Crye Precision was awarded a nearly $40,000 contract to provide cold-weather gear for Border Patrol in Maine. Although there have been a number of camo companies attempting to rival MultiCam’s ubiquity (notably the impressionist looking A-Tacs and the animalistic Kryptek), none of them seem to hold a candle. “ I think the fact of the matter is, there’s been no other pattern that’s proven,” Thompson says proudly. [...]

It’s easy to lampoon these trend followers, who it’s assumed (perhaps falsely) have never gone hunting and don't even know a member of the armed forces. What right do they have to MultiCam? The truth is, they might have the most authentic claim: It was made in Brooklyn by art school grads, after all.

by Avery Trufelman, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Berger

[ed. Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern. Seriously. Lol.]

An AI Company You Can Wear Wthout Socks

Say what you will about AllBirds’ corporate tailspin: You gotta respect the sheer chutzpah of the sneakers-to-AI pivot.

On Wednesday, two weeks after selling off all its assets in an ignominious fire sale, the faded apparel darling announced it would abandon all environmental and sartorial pretenses and start renting out computing power, instead. Just five years ago, AllBirds was valued at $4 billion and beloved by the likes of both Barack Obama and the sorts of tech bros who still vote Democrat. Now, it plans to rent out specialized chips it does not currently possess, and may in fact be unable to obtain, in an industry where it has no preexisting relationships, expertise or other claim to fame.

This is, I would argue, the type of brazen, self-deluded “pivot” that could only be accomplished by a white man: a rich white man with woolen sneakers on his feet and dreams of corporate reinvention in his head. Imagine, imagine, what you or I might achieve with that level of unearned confidence! Tomorrow, Links could become a fashion Substack despite my irreparably basic, midwestern taste. (I recently bought Allbirds for Jason and still think they’re … fine, actually.)

But that metaphor doesn’t go far enough, does it? Because in it, I — a newsletter-writer — would still be writing a newsletter. And AllBirds, a maker of sneakers, will make sneakers no longer. So in order for this hypothetical to hold, I’d need to spontaneously declare myself an astronaut or a Supreme Court justice or an emergency physician … and someone, someones, would have to believe it. Because as of this writing, AllBirds’ stock price is still up 351% from before the so-called “pivot.”

I’ll say this for America, at least: It’s still a place where — with enough money, a couple buzzwords and a public listing — you can (pretend to) be anything. Or so a little NewBirdie told me.

by Caitlin Dewey, Links I Would Gchat |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Too funny. I love my Allbirds but this has to be a joke, right? Right?]

***

"Following its prior announcement that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell the Allbirds brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group, which intends to continue to build on Allbirds’ legacy and deliver compelling products to Allbirds’ customers (the “Asset Sale”), Allbirds, Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) (the "Company") today announced the execution of a definitive agreement with an institutional investor for a $50 million convertible financing facility (the “Facility”). The Facility, which is expected to close during the second quarter of 2026, will enable the Company to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. In connection with this pivot, the Company anticipates changing its name to “NewBird AI.” [...]

NewBird AI expects to use initial capital from the Facility to acquire high-performance GPU assets, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity. NewBird AI’s long-term vision is to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. Over time, the Company intends to grow its neocloud platform by expanding its compute and service offerings, deepening partnerships with operators and customers, and evaluating strategic M&A opportunities."

She Left a Silicon Valley VC to Solve a Problem Left Untouched for 88 years

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, here’s a little bit of trivia for you: One of the premier patents in bras hadn’t been touched or improved upon in 88 years. That was until Bree McKeen went after it. 

[ed. I'd say this problem has been touched quite a bit in 88 years. But, anyway...]

In 1931, inventor Helene Pons was granted a U.S. patent for a brassiere featuring an open-ended wire loop that encircled the bottom and sides of each breast. That uncomfortable, unyielding design had largely been left unchanged for nearly a century—and remains the dominant style in the global bra market, which is expected to reach nearly $60 billion by 2032.

Nobody had filed a patent for an underwire replacement until McKeen, founder of Evelyn & Bobbie, left her Silicon Valley job to try to fix a personal problem. At the end of long work days working at a boutique venture capital firm doing due diligence on consumer health care companies, she would come home with divots on her shoulders and chronic tension headaches after being hunched over her desk for hours on end.

 

While the world was demanding, the culprit wasn’t her workload. It was her bra.

But McKeen had zero experience in fashion. She studied medical anthropology and earned her MBA from Stanford. The turning point for her, though, came in a physiologist’s office, where McKeen had been working on her posture, along with regular barre training.

“He’s like, your posture looks great,’” McKeen recalled to Fortune. “And I kind of blurt it out: When I stand like this, I get pain from my bra.”

The physiologist explained it was a neuromuscular feedback loop, or the body’s automatic response to pain, like a pebble in a shoe.

“Here I am doing all this work to carry myself with authority and poise, and my bra, I find out, is totally doing the opposite,” McKeen said. “You don’t have to tell your body to curl around the pain. It just does.”

She had zero fashion experience. She filed a patent anyway

That realization kickstarted McKeen on a major career switch, costing her a career in VC—but earning her one of the most quietly disruptive brands in women’s fashion (Evelyn & Bobbie is now the fastest-growing brand at Nordstrom). She moved to Portland, home to Nike, Adidas, and Columbia for inspiration from major brands and proximity to new connections.

She started tinkering with prototypes in her garage and immediately filed for intellectual property rights. That was based on her VC knowledge that a woman’s company would need that to get funded.

McKeen got her first works utility patent (the harder, more defensible kind that covers how something works, not just how it looks) within a year. The brand declined to disclose how much funding it has raised, but now holds 16 international patents protecting its proprietary EB Core technology, which mimics the support and structure of a wire without causing discomfort.

To put into perspective how critical it was to protect her intellectual property, only 12% of patents in the U.S. were awarded to women, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as of 2019. McKeen has six of them, protecting the unique 3D-sling technology in her bras.

The brand McKeen built, Evelyn & Bobbie, was named for her maternal grandmother and her aunt, and operates on a simple premise: a bra that fits well and feels good all day.

“I wanted a bra that made me look better in my clothes,” McKeen said—an inspiration reminiscent of how Spanx founder Sara Blakely started her now-$1.2 billion shapewear empire. “Wire-free bras give you that mono boob—not a nice silhouette. They make your clothes look frumpy. I wanted nice lift, separation, a beautiful silhouette. I could not find that bra. How outrageous, really.”

The average U.S. bra size is 34F. Most brands design for something much smaller

With major brands like Victoria’s Secret, Aerie, Third Love, Savage X Fenty, and countless others on the market, Evelyn & Bobbie is undoubtedly in a crowded, competitive space. But as all women know, not all bras are comfortable to wear, especially for extended periods.

What sets Evelyn & Bobbie apart is their approach to sizing. McKeen designs with 270 fit models across seven easy sizes, grading each style individually rather than scaling up from a single sample.

“Most bra companies have like one or two fit models,” she said. “They’ll make a 34B and just scale it up, which is why it doesn’t fit well in larger sizes.

The average bra size in the U.S., McKeen pointed out, is a 34F, a stat that’s surprising to most people—including initial investors she once had to convince that comfort was even a relevant selling point.

“I had many investor meetings where they were 60-minute meetings, and 50 minutes of it was me trying to convince them that comfort was relevant,” she said. “I mean, Victoria’s Secret kind of figured it out, right? Like it’s just sexy, isn’t that what women want?” [...]

With a luxury product comes a luxury price point: Evelyn & Bobbie bras retail for $98 each. But that price tag could be worth avoiding chronic pain for some women.

by Sydney Lake, Fortune |  Read more:

Image: Evelyn & Bobbie

[ed. An entire article about bras but mostly about protecting intellectual property rights (16 international patents!), never fully explaining what the new technology actually is, other than it uses more fit models to ensure proper sizing. FYI: according to E&B's website EB Core uses "bonded internal structures and a soft, adaptive material, that stretches, molds, and supports—delivering wire-free lift.". Well, guess that explains it.] 

Correct Gray

There may be 50 shades, but there’s only one Correct Grey.

Sometimes a colour name is a whole mood. Rouge Noir: the stamp of cult 1990s glamour. Millennial pink: the colour of overthinking and oversharing. Elephant’s Breath by Farrow & Ball: the imperial age of the gastro pub.

I have a new favourite. Pairs is a lovely little Scottish brand which makes great quality socks at good prices. There are many cute names – Frosting Pink, Milky Tea Beige – but the one I just had to click on was Correct Grey, “a warm grey with nods to a classic British school sock”, according to the website.

Correct Grey nails it, because grey is absolutely correct for right now. Not just for socks, but for style top to toe, it is the coolest shade at this moment. No need to panic. Black is always fine, navy is perennially elegant. Brights are going to make a comeback this year, too. You have options. But grey is the colour that says: when it comes to fashion in 2026, I have understood the assignment.

Those Correct Grey socks are, well, the correct grey. This is a different colour to what I think of as tracksuit-bottom grey. (Was the grey tracksuit bottom the defining object of the first half of this decade? But that’s a question for another day.) Tracksuit-bottom-grey is wan and pale, with all the energy of an old photocopy. If tracksuit-bottom grey were a person, it would be scrolling its phone and not looking up when spoken to. Correct Grey is richer and more intense, with a nod to box-fresh school uniform and a new-term attitude.

But, wait. Didn’t grey used to be boring? How did it become fashion’s coolest colour? Sportswear, for a start. I was slightly rude about grey tracksuit bottoms because I’m a bit over them, but the ubiquity of grey marl flannel has done a lot to reframe grey as a fashion colour. Quiet luxury, with its emphasis on fabric and feel, has helped too, because soft neutral shades – grey, camel, navy – show off a quality fabric at its best. And psychologically, there is something about the liminal nature of grey, standing as it does in direct opposition to the notion that life is either black or white. This speaks to the blur of modern life with its lack of boundaries, of working from home in pyjamas but dealing with office emails on your phone while out at dinner.

by Jess Cartner-Morley, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Pairs

[ed. Works for me.]

The Plastic Surgeon Summit

We’re in a plastic surgery “renaissance period.”

Dr. Yannis Alexandrides: It is busier than ever. There’s a remarkable year-on-year demand increase that we see in surgical procedures, especially for the face, but also for the body. This is a trend that we have seen through the pandemic, but it has accelerated the last year.

Dr. Akshay Sanan: I think plastic surgery is in a renaissance period right now because of people publicly talking about it. Plastic surgery is now part of your wellness armamentarium. People used to flex what gym they went to, that they had a trainer, and now plastic surgery is part of that flex. People love to rock that they had their eyes done or their face and neck done or their body done. It’s just part of the cultural shift that we’re seeing.

Dr. Jason Champagne: This is where social media comes into play, camera phones and Zoom meetings. You see yourself from all these different angles nowadays that maybe you didn’t notice in the past.

Dr. Emily Hu: I find it very generational: Those who grew up in the social media era with a lot of sharing and openness are also very open about telling their friends [about the work they’ve had done].

Sanan: There’s a shift in consumer or patient habits. More people in their late 30s, early 40s, they’re choosing surgery earlier to age gracefully instead of waiting until things are advanced. They’re like, “I’m not going to wait until it drops down further. I just want to be hot in my 40s.”

Dr. John Diaz: It used to be that not everyone had access to a plastic surgeon. That was reserved within the realm of the elite. Well, not anymore. I have celebrities, executives, and business owners come in — but also teachers and waiters. There’s this democratization of attractiveness.

Dr. Paul Afrooz: Patients are very educated these days. They know what they’re looking for, they know what realistic results are, and they have the ability to do a lot of background research and understand who does things at an elite level. [...]

Let’s get into it: Why are we talking so much about facelifts this year?

Diaz: Facelifts have absolutely exploded for a few reasons. A lot of women see celebrities and influencers suddenly looking incredible, and they want to know how. Think about Kris Jenner — she had a huge impact when her pictures came out. And now it’s brought awareness to the fact that we have the technology to be able to take a young-looking woman and make her look better with surgery, without making her look fake. That was a real challenge 20 years ago.

Alexandrides: Kris Jenner was a very hot topic the last few months. Definitely a lot of the patients I see here take her as, let’s say, a model on how they want to look, because she looks fresh, but she doesn’t look pulled. She looks younger, and she looks happy, and you cannot see the scars, at least not in these pictures that we see.

Hu: I can’t tell you how many of my patients are like, “Yeah, my mom had a facelift. She was so scary. I’m never doing a facelift.” I mean, that was their response because they see their mom all bruised and scary looking.

Dr. Mark Murphy: Facelifts historically had a stereotypical “plastic surgery” look. Now people have realized, “I can look like myself 15 years ago and not have to look like a circus freak for it.” It’s become very digestible for patients. Social media is a huge driver behind it. Well, that, and the techniques are better.

So what’s actually new or changing about facelifts?

Dr. Mark Mani: We call it the golden age of facelift surgery. It’s primarily because of the success of the deep plane facelift.

Dr. David Shafer: There’s nothing new about [the deep plane facelift] as a procedure. It’s just very sophisticated marketing that’s being done now, and there are refinements to the procedures. But it’s not some plastic surgeon who’s marketing it now as some magic procedure that he came up with that nobody else does.

Mani: [A version of] the first deep plane lifts was performed in the late 1960s by a surgeon named Tord Skoog in Sweden [though the name came later]. I have his textbook and can show you results that would stand up to the best deep plane surgeons today. It’s not the procedure, it’s the surgeon, and facelift surgery, among all surgeries in plastic surgery, is an art form.

Afrooz: A surgeon named Sam Hamra — he just passed, but a wonderful human being, an extraordinary thinker, an extraordinary surgeon — first coined the phrase “deep plane facelift” in a 1990 paper and laid out some building blocks of the procedure. Just like everything else in plastic surgery, we stand on the giants before us.

Dr. Michael Stein: There are two main facelift techniques: deep plane and SMAS plication. The deep plane facelift is where you cut the layer under the skin called the SMAS, dissect underneath it, and tighten it in addition to the skin. In the SMAS facelift, instead of cutting and elevating the SMAS, you suture it to itself to tighten it from over top.

Dr. Amir Karam: The majority of surgeons, up until recently, have been doing the traditional SMAS technique, which is more or less horizontally pulling the face sideways, and that was leading to a very unnatural look.

Mani: I was the surgeon who wrote the most-read facelift academic article that convinced other surgeons to do deep plane facelifts. It was an article in Aesthetic Surgery Journal in 2016, where I detailed the specific anatomic reasons that deep plane is better.

Stein: The people who only do deep plane facelifts say they have a more longitudinal result, and vice versa. But the truth is, a good result is a good result. It depends more on the surgeon versus technique. A good facelift is a good facelift.

Facelifts aren’t done evolving.

Karam: The consumer is driving surgeons to create better and better results. So there’s been a massive increase in interest for surgeons to level up their strategies surgically and learn new techniques that are not new but new to them.

Afrooz: Even my facelift today is better than my facelift was one year ago. When you hone in on one thing as your career, you’re just constantly looking for ways to improve. It’s the cumulative effect of small subtleties over time and practice that you notice nuanced improvements to your results. One might assume that a deep plane facelift in one surgeon’s hands is the same as it is in another’s, but I’m here to tell you that it’s very much not the same.

Dr. Daniel Gould: There are new layers that we’re adding into the surgery. We’re recognizing the importance of the mid-face and volume position there. I’m recognizing adding fat to the mouth and the areas around the mouth, the chin, because all these areas have been neglected. We are now nailing all the low-hanging fruit: We’re nailing the neck, we’re nailing the face, we’re nailing the temple and the brows. Now it’s time to move forward and continue to innovate and push the limits of what we can really do in facial rejuvenation.

Mani: What I’ve developed is called the scarless lift, and it’s basically a deep plane facelift without a scar in front of the ear, with an endoscope. The endoscopic procedure involves a hidden incision within the hair, a short one behind the ear, and sometimes one under the chin. I still do about 60% open [non-endoscopic], but a good percentage of my facelifts are scarless endoscopic. The results are more beautiful because you don’t have to worry about the scar, and the vectors of lifting are better.

Alexandrides: I don’t think this will be now, “OK, let’s forget about facelifts, let’s move to something else.” What will probably happen is that people will discover intricate little different techniques and say, “You have the facelift that is done like that.” I have patients who ask me very technical questions: How do you design your scar around your ear?

Stein: Facelift surgery has survived the test of time. Every year there are new machines designed to tighten skin, and for some patients with mild laxity, they may see nice results. The truth is though, if you have jowls or droopy skin of the face and neck, the only thing that’s really going to give you the best bang for your buck and directly address your laxity is a facelift.

by Bustle Editors, Bustle |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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The Century of the Maxxer

Most people, being average, do not understand what maxxing really means. Look at me! they squeal. I’m sleepmaxxing! They mean that they’re trying to get eight hours a night. Or they’re proteinmaxxing, which means they’ve bought a big tub of whey powder. I’m such a houseplantmaxxer, they tell the fiddle-leaf fig they ordered online. It’s fun to play around with a new word. But sleepmaxxing does not mean getting a red light and taping your mouth shut; it means putting yourself in a medically induced coma. There is only one way of proteinmaxxing, which is to get one hundred percent of your daily calories from lean protein. Anything else would, by definition, be less than fully maxxed. Doctors will tell you that eating only protein causes something called ‘rabbit starvation,’ and if you keep at it you’ll experience vomiting, seizures, and death in fairly short order. They’re right, but the proteinmaxxer accepts his fate. Meanwhile the houseplantmaxxer has thick mats of algae sliming over every surface, the walls, the ceilings, swallowing the sofa, digesting the bookshelf and all its contents, blobbing and dribbling, wet in the middle of the bed, green on the windowpanes, covering everything except the UV lights and the massive pans of water left on a constant boil in every room, so the air stays oppressively, Cretaceously thick.

This is what it means to be a maxxer. We are a long way away from the optimisation of the self; to maxx is an intense form of asceticism. The maxxer is the person who willingly sacrifices every aspect of their lives except one, the maxximand, which is extended to infinity until it begins to develop the distance and vastness of a god.

Probably the world’s most prominent maxxer is a man called Braden Peters, who calls himself Clavicular. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer; his austerity is to make himself as beautiful as possible. If you’re good looking enough, you can ascend, break out of your genetic destiny and into a new order of being, where the subhumans will crawl after you with lolling tongues. Clavicular started looksmaxxing at the age of fourteen, injecting himself with testosterone. He also shoots anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, peptides, botox, and crystal meth. He’s had multiple plastic surgeries. His other secret is bonesmashing, which is exactly what it sounds like: he smashes his own cheekbones with a hammer so they grow back bigger. It’s impossible to know what he would have looked like if he hadn’t done all this, since his ‘before’ pictures all show a prepubescent child, but it’s hard not to conclude that he’s utterly ruined his body. He didn’t go through a normal puberty; his glands are completely incapable of producing testosterone by themselves, and if he ever stops taking the hormones he’ll rapidly decompose into a genderless lump. The various injections have also left him totally sterile; his balls are almost certainly fucked up in ways we can barely imagine. He is a meth addict. And while he really does have legions of lesser beings crawling after him with lolling tongues, they do all seem to be men.

Clavicular lives in a sort of nightmare clown world, where he is constantly being approached in ordinary shopping centres by small, strange, awkward men who say things like ‘I’m known in Orlando as the Asian Mogger. I would have the honour if you could verify me as the Orlando Asian Mogger.’ There are various misshapen freaks of nature, men with shoulders wider than they’re tall, sinister stalking giants on artificially lengthened legs, who travel across the country to stand next to him and compare physiques. Like a mythical gunslinger, the great mogger needs to constantly watch the horizon for whoever’s coming to mog him. Other men adore him in more nakedly eroticised ways. In one video, he’s live-streaming a fun casual hangout with Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, a bunch of other people sitting in silence looking at their phones, and menial staff vacuuming in the background. One of the men is berating a woman sat in Clavicular’s lap. ‘You are not an 8. You’re not an 8. You’re a thirsty 7, you’re asking for validation, and you’re sitting in a 10’s lap.’ ‘That’s kinda rude,’ she says. ‘That’s kinda rude,’ agrees Tristan Tate. ‘Clavicular’s at least an 11.’ Clavicular doesn’t say anything. What gives the scene its particularly haunting resonance is that throughout this exchange, he seems to be eating soup.

In all his interactions with women that aren’t directly supervised by a Tate brother, Clavicular is painfully passive and awkward. The women who like him are all of a type: hot but autistic beyond belief, brainrotted, barfing up a constant stream of overenthusiastic tryhard 4chan nazi jargon that he seems to find deeply embarrassing. Normal women treat him with undisguised contempt. He is constantly having his cortisol spiked by foids. It turns out that being maximally beautiful is not actually the same as maximising your chances of getting laid. Clavicular will never be a female sex symbol; that role goes to men like Slavoj Žižek and Danny DeVito. But maxxing is not optimisation. The maxxer is not trying to have an enjoyable life. He’s trying to reduce himself to a single principle.

Things get confused when the maxximand is also a generally upheld value like beauty. But every maxxer has his shadow, the person maxxing the opposite principle. Clavicular’s shadow is someone who calls himself The Crooked Man. The Crooked Man is a looksminimiser, which is another way of saying he’s an uglymaxxer. His strategy has been to spend a year working out only one side of his body, which has left him with an enormous bulging trap on one shoulder and nothing at all on the other. He looks like a cartoon monster. He stands around shirtless in his empty millennial-grey house, adrift in some suburb somewhere, grey walls, grey carpet, no decorations except cables snaking around on the floor, making video content. He is a kind of Platonic ideal of the maxxer, far more than Clavicular. The Crooked Man’s house appears to get zero natural light. All his gym equipment is at home; you can see him benching 225 on one side only in one of its many large and empty rooms. Plastic Venetian blinds. It’s night outside. It’s always night outside. The sun never shines on The Crooked Man. Incredible things are happening in America.

There’s a reason Clavicular has become the media’s go-to symbol for maxxing, even though The Crooked Man is a much better exemplar. He keeps things on a very comfortable terrain. Maxxing, the line goes, is an outgrowth of incel culture. It’s about men, the problem with men, the crisis of masculinity; it’s about how men are now facing the kind of toxic body politics that women have had to deal with forever, and how they’re developing their own hysterias in response; it’s about online extremism, it’s about the harmful narratives that seduce young men into various forms of misogyny; before long it’s about how we all need to put the kettle on and have a proper talk about our men’s mental health. They’re not entirely wrong; there really is a crisis of masculinity, it really is expressing itself through the mainstreaming of misogyny and the proliferation of a diseased relation to the self. It’s just that maxxing comes from something else entirely.

Despite what you might have heard, the word maxxing is not originally incel slang. Incels might have appropriated it, but it began with another kind of loser altogether, the tabletop role-playing gamer.

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times
[ed. See also: Handsome at Any Cost (NYT); and, From “Mar-a-Lago face” to uncanny AI art: MAGA loves ugly in submission to Trump (Salon).]

The Willard Suitcases
via:

Sebastien Genez, SH100 Easy Snowshoe
via: Experimenta

[ed. Cool idea (and design).]

We’re All Unique. Or Are We?

Have you ever found yourself in a new place and realized you don’t quite fit in? Your shoes, which made sense at the office, are not quite the right ones for the date after work in a different part of the city. Your hairstyle, which felt normal when you left your hometown, suddenly labels you uncool in a new city.

Or perhaps you’ve had the opposite experience? You feel out of place in your day-to-day circle and dress in hopes that someone with taste as refined as yours will see your attempts to distinguish yourself in your natty suits.

Most of us have at least a passing acquaintance with the push and pull between the desire to fit in and the urge to stand out depending on the setting. Everyone, as some point, discovers the subtle sartorial codes governing their communities and must decide how much to adopt or reject them.

The two have made those sub-classifications the basis of their three-decade-long art project, which now exceeds 200 groups arranged by visual likeness. Each category features 12 individual portraits organized in a grid, named and arranged with the precision of butterflies in a entomologist’s case.

To flip at random through “Exactitudes” (a portmanteau of exact and attitudes) is to be struck by the cleverness and care the artists have taken in selecting their subjects. Looking through each grid is like playing a game. Your eyes dart from frame to frame, in search of the subtle deviances in hairstyles and the way body language speaks volumes.

Now, on the occasion of publishing the seventh and final edition of “Exactitudes,” the duo is putting the project to bed. After three decades of collaboration, they look back in fondness at the time capsules they’ve created. (...)

When they don’t have a firm handle on a subculture they’re photographing, they listen. “Some of the groups, you start and you have a vague idea about them,” Mr. Versluis said. By listening, he said, “you get educated, especially when it’s a super-niche culture or something new.”

Sometimes they wait many days on location before finding enough willing participants. Sometimes the people in the grid know each other, but not always. For the most part, they say, participants are flattered to be included in the project.

‘The diverse human experience of getting dressed.’

Both artists have always worked independently and will continue to do so, though they did not rule out the possibility of a returning if a tantalizing commission comes along. Since they began shooting “Exactitudes,” the world has transformed from an one dominated by analog technologies to one ruled by digital algorithms. Where they were once perceptive humans finding patterns among the other humans, social media now serves up endless micro-trends to viewers the world over. In some way the magic of their project has been consumed by TikTok and Instagram.

by Stella Bugbee, NY Times | Read more:

Image:Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek/Exactitudes

[ed. See also: Behind Exactitudes, the photo series that inspired Vetements (Dazed).]

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Stop, Shop, and Scroll

Commerce has long been central to social media; as long as ads keep the lights on at Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, we will all be pressured to buy, buy, buy. Instagram was a mall even before #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and Pinterest became an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.” The influencer industry — which Goldman Sachs has predicted will grow to nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 — has snowballed into a possible side hustle for anyone with access to a phone. There’s a handful of MrBeasts and Alix Earles at the top and an untold number of micro-influencers hawking goods and services at the bottom. For audiences, it means we have spent the better part of a decade living within a 24/7 digital infomercial, with social media — sponsored content and organic posts alike — resembling not much more than a buying guide, a catalog of unabashed and conspicuous consumption. Some audience members find themselves in deep debt or describe their behavior as a full-blown shopping addiction; others have developed careful strategies in an effort to limit their consumption. We have never been so aware of all the things there are to purchase, and the frictionlessness of shopping apps disguised as social media has created an army of voracious buyers. What has this abundance done to us? (...)

The impulse to shop is not exactly a secret — there’s often a resigned self-awareness to it. In a video viewed 1.5 million times, a woman stitches together clips of herself from random moments in her daily life. With a deadpan voice, and Radiohead’s “No Surprises” twinkling in the background, she recites highly specific products like she’s filling out a Mad Libs page: Chan Luu crystal toe ring. Arc’teryx hiking shoes. Vintage hoodie. “This is just the last 48 hours, mind you,” the caption reads.

This kind of video has become a mini-trend, with the idea being that the mere utterance of a temptation might soothe the part of your brain that wants to buy the item. (...)

We see so much marketing material that in certain subcultures online it is not just common but the expectation. In traditional marketing, it was understood that brands had to expose consumers to their message three times before they actually engaged with it, like going physically to a store to buy a product. In the age of social media and algorithmic overload, that number is now seven, says Mara Einstein, a marketing-professional-turned-critic and author of the book Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. For one, the vastness of the internet has allowed for the number of available products to bloat beyond imagination — there are simply too many things. But how we learn about products has changed drastically as well; as media has fragmented to a million sites, feeds, screens, and algorithms, so too has the advertising we see. There is no one TV commercial a quarter of households are seeing, then telling their friends about. Instead we see a digital display ad here, an influencer’s video there.

“You may be finding out information from people and so on, but you’re increasingly spending time in a space where you’re constantly being bombarded by sales messages,” Einstein says. Influencers know how to stay on message, constantly priming viewers to give in and buy something.

Being influenced is nothing new, of course. But the short- and mid-form video format creates a new type of intimacy and allure, especially if you are already looking for something to buy. It’s hard to argue with a sales pitch when you are watching someone in their home actually using the product they are trying to sell you.

The content doesn’t even have to be explicitly promotional: I recall a video I made last year about my reporting being used without credit by content creators. My frustration had hit a breaking point, so I recorded a selfie-style TikTok complaining about the contemporary media ecosystem. Only my head and a portion of my shoulders were in the video, but someone wanted to know where my blouse was from.

TikTok itself has only bolstered the idea that every piece of content is an opportunity to consume. Through TikTok Shop, anyone can become a digital salesperson. In much crueler, more tasteless examples, TikTok has added shopping prompts to videos coming out of Gaza: A woman in a head covering becomes a promotion for similar-looking garments with headscarves. A bespectacled Israeli activist protesting their government’s besiegement is a billboard for a pair of glasses. (...)

It’s easy to blame the influencers for all of this — and many do, regularly, like clockwork. The most recent discourse cycle, in late September, was kicked off by a TikTok video with 390,000 views and arguments that stretched on for weeks.

“These influencers make way too much fucking money,” the video begins. “You’re just getting paid to sell people shit they don’t fucking need. It’s literally just overconsumption … You’re perpetuating this cycle that’s really keeping us trapped.”

Content creators are admittedly a perfect target for the general rage many of us carry around. Many of them seem unencumbered by the endless horrors of the world, with daily routines that include blocks of time for “warm water” and to-do lists with “plan out mocktails for the new year.” Their digital presence exists suspended in time, where there is always something new to recommend, packages of shiny new things waiting for them, and a willing audience that completes the positive feedback loop. Wouldn’t it be nice — as people are in line at food banks, fighting for a precious few job listings, and snatched off streets by masked agents — to sit in your home and talk to yourself for a living?

But the draw of the influencer is powerful; even if you cannot become her, you can own the same things she does. For Antoinette Hocbo, who picked up hobbies via TikTok, the characters she encounters on her For You page seem effortlessly cool. They have an eye for design, they’re interested in the arts, they drink wine. You buy into the person first, and eventually — hopefully — you buy the stuff, too.

“[There’s] the whole idea of parasocial relationships,” Einstein, the marketing expert, says. “If somebody has gotten to the point where they’re spending that much time online with someone, they’re vested in what that person has to say.” The feeling of intimacy is physical: When followers watch their favorite TikToker, they are literally holding them in the palm of their hand. (...)

TikTok made going viral a possibility for a whole new slate of people. Now the hard part is how to keep things rolling when it happens to you. Most of the platforms themselves do not pay much for views, but brands eager to partner with buzzy people do. Creators often talk about their work in terms of self-discovery or self-actualization: This is who I want to be online, and these are the products and tips I truly, honestly want to share.

The tension comes then with the “very real commercial realities of playing to an audience, bowing to commercial sponsorships if you were lucky enough to have them,” Duffy says. “And then the new dimension, which doesn’t have the same precursors in legacy media, which is playing to the algorithm.” A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of adults on TikTok are there to find product reviews and recommendations — especially young women. (...)

Project Pan, as a concept, is both clever and strange. For years, a community of people organized largely on the internet have committed themselves to finishing their beauty and personal care products — the name coming from your promise to hit the bottom of the pan that holds your blush, for example. It’s smart for the way it gamifies something people struggle with. (Who among us doesn’t have half-used bottles of soap or barely touched tubes of lipstick?) It’s also deeply revealing: These products are meant to be used, and we collectively are so bad at finishing them off that we need a little game to make it happen. Off the top of my head I can confidently say that I’ve never once “panned” a compact of blush; I have expensive tubes of red lipstick that didn’t end up being my color, but that I can’t bear to throw out; and I have four bottles of sunscreen that crowd my cabinet, waiting for the summer they’re finally used up. There are many more products that I could — should — Project Pan that I’ve forgotten I even own.

Cassandra Silva, on the other hand, knows exactly what she has. She knows, for example, that she spent $2,857.98 AUD on makeup in 2024 and panned products totaling $1,654.13. She owns eight eyeliners, but her ideal number would be four. In 2023 she panned seven mascaras, 11 colored lip products, and one blush, among many others, all lined up in a photo of the totally empty containers that show her progress. She keeps all this data in a giant spreadsheet that she shares with me after we talk, and as I scroll through it, I realize I have never seen an eyeshadow palette where every color is completely empty.

“Compared to beauty YouTube, it’s not insane insane, but it’s still more than any one human could ever reasonably use,” Silva says of her inventory.

She watches beauty YouTube channels, but needs to be careful about what she consumes: She tries to stay away from content showing off hauls, new releases, or the ever-tempting limited-edition holiday releases.

“I am as conscious as I can be for a makeup addict,” Silva says. “I try, and I am freaking susceptible. It’s so bad.” Recently, a palette of neutral eyeshadows hounded her Instagram feed — she caved and bought it, only to be thoroughly disappointed when it arrived. As a panner, Silva will be stuck with it for years until it’s finished.

Chessie Domrongchai used to make the kind of content that Silva perhaps would steer clear of — she was the one tempting makeup lovers with all of these products. As a beauty YouTuber, Domrongchai shared in-depth product review videos for brands like the once-buzzy direct-to-consumer brand Glossier and tested fistfuls of lip glosses in subtly different shades for her 40,000 subscribers. She shared new releases, compared similar products from different brands, and recommended items for upcoming sales. In a 2019 video, she walks viewers through her pinky-brown nude lipstick collection — 15 shades, not including lip glosses and liquid lipsticks. She followed makeup brands and watched other YouTubers, accumulating more and more products to explore ($10,000, she says, feels like a conservative estimate of the value of her collection at its peak). In makeup, Domrongchai found self-expression, creativity, and community.

Until one day in 2022, when a switch went off in her head.

“I started to view a lot of the overconsumption that I was seeing online as kind of disgusting and wrong, and I recognized a lot of the way that I showed up on the internet was to overconsume,” Domrongchai says. Not only that, but she felt her online presence also influenced viewers to keep buying more and more.

“These are just regular people that are just now stuck with the burden of their overconsumption,” she says. But as a content creator, it was hard to be part of the beauty space without having a constant parade of new products.

In recent months, Domrongchai has developed a new routine for the many products littering her home. One by one, she meticulously peels off stickers and labels: from shampoo and olive oil bottles, from dish soap dispensers and face wash. Using a mix of baking soda, mineral oil, and rubbing alcohol, she goes to town on brand names printed on the packaging of eyeshadow palettes and lipsticks, scrubbing away their origins and the millions of dollars of marketing that went into them — arguably why they are in Domrongchai’s house to begin with. The result is shelves and countertops full of bare bottles and tubes and pumps filled with product but stripped of just about everything else. Watching her videos, I’m slightly horrified at my own ability to recognize the specific products even without all the labeling, the colors and shapes of bottles acting like an afterimage of a CeraVe cleanser.

“Of course I’m going to buy the face cleanser that keeps my skin clear, but I don’t need it to continue to market to me in my own home,” Domrongchai says. “In the past I had three different [lotions] and all of their labels and their marketing on these products … They’re all kind of yelling at you trying to convince you to use it. They’re kind of [in] competition with each other.” In other words, it felt like a social media feed.

For some panners, finishing a product can elicit the same rush that buying something new does — that same dopamine rush of hitting “place order” creeps in when you hit that pan. Then you post it online for other panners to see, adding to the thrill. Finishing products becomes a task to complete, just like shopping is.

“What it can do — which I don’t love to admit to — is you’ll put more blush on than you would,” Silva says. “You just slather it on.” Silva shows me her spreadsheet page from 2024 showing colored lip products she used up: 23. Silva estimates that the average person finishes maybe one lipstick a year. In order to pan that many products, she was reapplying them 15 to 20 times a day, she says. Sometimes Silva wonders if she should ditch panning, too, like she did consumption-focused beauty spaces.

“When you first get into it, it’s so helpful, and you really get that community and you can turn some products over. Then the longer that you’re in the panning community, it’s like, all right, now panning is a problem,” she laughs. “Now I’ve taken all the problems I had with makeup consumption and translated them into late-stage panning. It’s like late-stage capitalism.”

by Mia Sato, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Cath Virginia

Pretty Girl

Jane Birkin
via:

[ed. How did she get mixed up with that wierd Frenchy guy, anyway?]

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The Utah Look

There’s a Reason You Can’t Tell the ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Cast Apart

Does Hulu’s Secret Lives on Mormon Wives season 3 have you squinting at the TV, struggling to tell Jessi Ngatikaura and Demi Engemann apart with their identical, long, sleek waves and indistinguishable wide, thick lashes? Even diehard fans of the show admit to frequently mixing up the cast. And viewers regularly post about getting castmates confused. “Anyone else watch ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ but can’t keep up bc they all look exactly alike??” wrote one fan on Facebook.

It’s been a hot topic since season 1 and, according to some, this isn’t a simple case of women on reality TV wanting to be conventionally attractive. It’s the dogged pursuit of what many call the “Utah look.”

“Utah has insanely high standards for girls,” says fitness TikToker eharmany95. “Everybody is competing with the girl next to them to be just as perfect, just as tan, just as fit.” Or take it from Vanna Einerson, a 21-year-old Salt Lake City native on the most recent season of Love Island, whose filler and breast implants were a source of judgment and fascination online. “There’s a Utah girl stereotype,” she told castmate Ace Greene. “All the girls are, like, tan, blonde.”

“I have never felt uglier than I did living in Utah,” says TikToker @avemarin in a video explaining Vanna's look. “It’s not just being white and thin that is desired here, but what has been praised the most is extremely tiny bodies, blonde hair, blue eyes, big lips, immediate boob job—like right out of high school—and a very symmetrical face. Hence the filler and lip injections.”

Utah—and Salt Lake City, its capital—is a mecca for cosmetic procedures that help women conform to these standards. Salt Lake City has more surgeons per capita than Los Angeles (and almost as many as Miami). Residents google “breast augmentation” and other cosmetic surgeries in higher numbers than pretty much any other city. One particularly popular surgery is the “mommy makeover,” a combination of multiple procedures, including but not limited to a breast lift, tummy tuck, liposuction and labiaplasty. 

Although Utah is hardly the only place where women feel pressure to be thin and have long hair, by many accounts the expectation here is more intense. At least some of this has to do with the Mormon Church, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A cultural behemoth across the state, LDS members are 90 percent white and, according to some experts, this sameness—in religion, race, and region—leads to an extreme pressure to conform to a very conventional standard of beauty...

Aubree Bunderson, a 26-year-old stay-at-home mom and lifelong member of the LDS church, says she can always tell a fellow Deseret native down to the “Utah curls” (think beachy waves with straight ends achieved with a clamped curling iron) and her very blonde dye job.

“You see a different kind of blonde in different states. It’s not as rich, and it’s not as soft,” she says. “Anytime I’m traveling anywhere, you can almost tell who’s from Utah and who’s not. She’s that bleach-blonde girl with Utah curls. You know she has a woman that specializes in platinum blondes do her hair. There’s not very many blondes out there. And then, here in Utah, we’re full of blondes. We’re full of athletic wear. We love the idea of the gym and being healthy and having the perfect body and beauty standards when it comes to skincare and makeup. We want to look our best and feel our best.”

For Bunderson, the widespread conformity to these ideas of beauty is inspiring. “I’m encouraged by other women that I find attractive. I’m like, I want that body. I want her hair. I want her eyelashes. I want her skin. So many influencers are from Utah. They’re in my face, looking beautiful. They look fake, but they just look amazing in my eyes.”...

Is this religion or just Utah? Can we even separate the two? Bunderson and several other women who spoke with Cosmopolitan mentioned physical “perfection” as the goal of the blonde curls and mommy makeovers. Perfection is a core value in the LDS Church, the Book of Mormon commands followers to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”...

While reality TV stars are anecdotal evidence of this tendency for sameness in the quest for “perfection,” data also bears this out. A recent survey on body image in the LDS church found that 14 percent of church members had a cosmetic procedure compared to 4 percent nationally. The report also concluded that although the LDS church promotes a positive body image, many religious Mormons (particularly wealthy ones) “may erroneously believe that religion is tied to perfection in a variety of ways, including physical appearance or finances, and they may attempt to conform to what is referred to as the ‘thin ideal’ in U.S. culture. Perhaps appearing to be a perfect, worthy, righteous member of the church means ‘looking the part’ as well.”

by Hannah Malach, Cosmopolitan |  Read more:
Image: Mary Fama/Disney/Pamela Littky/Getty Images
[ed. The Stepford look, updated. There's even something called Christian Girl Autumn Look. Maybe we'll see Recovering Tradwife in Therapy look or Housewives of Bulimia look.]