Hello and happy Friday!
The inadvertent theme that emerged in this week’s links: Wow, our choices in the past 30 years have caught up with us — and not in a way that can be easily ignored by retreating into nostalgia-fueled pop culture.
On the plus side, there’s a lot we could learn from how Taylor Swift operates.
3 Retail Reads for Monday
Before we get into these reads, allow me to share one of my favorite passages from Christopher Moore’s comedic novel about vampires finding love in early-1990s San Francisco, Bloodsucking Fiends:
Ten salespeople, all young, all dressed in generic cotton casual, looked up from their conversations, spotted the money in her hand, and simultaneously stopped breathing -- their brains shutting down bodily functions and rerouting the needed energy to calculate the projected commissions contained in Jody's cash.
One by one they resumed breathing and marched toward her, a look of dazed hunger in their eyes: a pack of zombies from the perky, youthful version of The Night of the Living Dead.
"I wear a size four and I've got a date in fifteen minutes," Jody said. "Dress me."
They descended on her like an evil khaki wave.
And now …
1 — How Gap lost its khaki soul (Retail Dive)
Money quote: “Gap at its peak was all about mundane product with brilliant marketing.”
Money quote: “We're not trying to offer the cheapest product. Quality might suffer too much to get the price point really down to a super democratic place.”
3 — Your Sweaters Are Garbage (The Atlantic)
Money quote: “The majority of clothing sold in the U.S. now includes at least some plastic content. Brands generally rely on consumers not to be interested enough in fabric content to check the tags before buying.”
3 Taylor Swift Reads for Tuesday
1 — The Last Great American Hideaway (Vulture)
Money quote: “Try to imagine a chillier welcome than an entire state attempting to create new tax legislation that was not just aimed at taking your money but was also named after you.”
Money quote: “Taylor Swift frees women to celebrate their girlhood, to understand that their womanhood is made up of these microchapters of change, that we’re not different people than we were then.”
3 — The Eras Tour Film Is Sequined Asset Management (Vulture)
Money quote: “On the surface, Eras is a logical expansion, another exercise in big-league capitalism from an artist who has used pizza boxes and UPS trucks as promotional platforms.”
Bonus read because me and karma vibe like that —
Money quote: “In ‘The Eras Tour,’ she has taken full command as a dominant chieftain in the experience economy.”
Cultural Critics Can’t Even With 3 Wednesday Reads
1 — Our closets are in chaos. Good. (self-promo, but it ties into the next 2 reads)
Money quote: “The hope seems to be that by hitting a reboot or revival button on cultural norms, we can reset the underlying society that spawned those cultural norms.”
2 — Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore (New Yorker)
Money quote: “A handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems.”
3 — Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill (NYT)
Money quote: “To audiences in the 20th century, novelty seemed to be a cultural birthright. Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change.”
3 Sessile Reads for Thursday
Money quote: “People who worked out but then plopped into chairs for 10 hours or more were as prone to dementia as people who hadn’t exercised much at all.”
2 — How Does Urban Sprawl Affect Public Health? (The National Institutes of Health)
Money quote: “Urban sprawl is detrimental to the physical health of males & females. Younger groups are more vulnerable to physical & mental health damage from urban sprawl.”
Money quote: “For all that we spend as a nation on transportation,[we have] stopped meaningfully investing in it. Investment involves using today’s resources to make life better in the long term.”
3 Chill Friday Reads on the NorCal Vibe Through NYC Eyes
Editor’s note: A persistent source of amusement for me is how this paper covers northern Californians just living their lives.
1 — From LSD to IPO (NYT)
Money quote: “Rather than following elitist or whimsical trends, he wants Birkenstock to be perceived as a producer of steady, democratic goods.”
2 — Utopia Rules at Sea Ranch, a Community Born of ’60s Idealism (NYT)
Money quote: “In many ways, Sea Ranch is the urtext for all that is most coveted today: fresh, local food, minimalist clothes, midcentury interiors.”
Money quote: “It’s amazing how much of the organic skin-care movement was spearheaded by little companies that sprang up all over Northern California.”
Bonus read — The story of how I biffed a job opportunity while trying to grope toward a grand unified theory of NorCal culture and commodification —
Money quote: “The brands were perfectly positioned to provide a visual representation for an emerging cultural sensibility.”
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That’s it for this week! Thank you for reading and feel free to shoot any interesting links my way in the comments below this post on Substack, or via Bluesky — lschmeiser.bsky.social.