In Screenshot Saturday, I’ll share the top screenshots from the most unfiltered and unhinged album in my personal camera roll, along with a little background on why I saved this image, and what it tells me about trends I’m seeing and keeping tabs on. I wrote this in small bursts this week on the metro to work.
Let’s dive right in.
1. Split screen.
Apply our multitasking, multiscreen behaviors to photographs. Instagram is flooded with these split-pane images, forcing us to process several perspectives at once. It’s the photo equivalent of looking at one screen while another plays in the background–like that wild era on TikTok when Subway Surfer or Young Sheldon played on the bottom half of the screen while another story played above it. My friend Emma said that the two videos playing at once wasn’t a distraction; it actually helped her focus on the one that matters.
2. Produce marketing.
It’s not an orange; it’s a Sumo. Natoora, the excellent produce vendor that got me through the pandemic, which has direct ties to farms and restaurants, posted about flavorful niche tomato breeds in the northern hemisphere in the winter months. I’ve also noticed fancy, new niche produce coming up in conversation. In Paris, produce is generally very seasonal. While I can find Driscoll's berries year round, I’ll never be able to buy asparagus or stone fruits like peaches and plums in the winter, for example. The kiwis and citrus–the kumquats, especially, which are like nature’s Sour Patch Kids–sustain my sweet tooth till warmer months. My friends know this about me, so when
discovered limequats at the sublime produce vendor Terroirs d’Avenir, we went wild.3. POS tipping nightmare starting in France.
Except it’s grafted onto a completely different labor standard. If you’ve been to a coffee shop in a major US city in the last five years, you’ve confronted the startling awkwardness of a barista spinning around the iPad and staring while you choose 20%, 25%, 30% or Custom tip. The presets are well above the common 15-20% or tip jar standard. Typically, the thought of entering a Custom tip leaves me with a moral ache, since I know how far below minimum wage many food and beverage service workers earn in the US. In France, where labor practices are fairer, this is not the case. To suddenly request tips feels out of place.
4. Founder social accounts > brand accounts.
Why aren’t we comfortable with companies succeeding without friction? The logic of building in public is now an expectation–not just a tactic on LinkedIn or Twitter, where it’s long been part of startup culture. We expect it on TikTok, Instagram, and everywhere else. If it’s not real enough, and coming directly from the founder, then public perception isn’t interested in following along. Yet the business gets a slap on the wrist if it’s too wrapped up in its founder as a personality (but that’s a story for another newsletter).
5. Proliferation of Substacks.
Substacks became the new magazines; I don’t make the rules. It’s where independent analysis happens. But there are so many of them now. The best ones are personal, like a Tumblr or blog from the early aughts, with an original perspective that could have only come from its author. It’s harder than it looks. Thanks for reading this one!
6. Crafting with friends
For the last few months, my friends and I here have been hosting crafting girls night. Painting tapered candles. Arranging bouquets. Painting watercolors over wine. It’s part of accepting that fast things aren’t always nourishing. Slow things can be beautiful too. Slow girl lifestyle ideas are trending on Pinterest. The right to slow down has become a form of luxury in a world where everything moves too fast.
7. Tiffany-style lamps.
Backlash against minimalist interiors with no personality again. With a dash of nostalgia. This was from a photo Raphael took on his cross-country eating trip, but I’ve been seeing them everywhere in French cities and in New York.
8. C-U-Next-Tuesday-core
The new powerful woman dresses like a jilted lover, a mob wife, a divorcée, a second or third wife, a black widow who mysteriously came into a fortune after her husband disappeared. It’s turning tropes that used to disgrace, disenfranchise, and ruin women into a source of power. It’s a backlash against the muted dress code demanded by “quiet luxury.” Instead of an insult, telling someone their look is garish, over the top, or “giving cvnt” is a compliment about stepping into a vampy, darker feminine power. Standing out is the point. While queer culture, especially drag culture, has been leaning into this for ages (if you watch Drag Race, you’ll know what I mean), it feels as if this current trend has been facilitated by women’s solidarity as they’ve found each other via the TikTok algorithm, feeling seen despite staring at screens independently around the world. Whether this aesthetic translates to actual power in actual IRL rooms or remains a wishful fantasy remains to be seen.
9. Corporate Cosplay
What would it be like to play-act corporate office life to someone who’s never experienced it? Return to office is in full swing. Many Gen Z employees have never really worked from an office. More than three years of remote work is enough to develop a habit that sticks. Even when workers are in the office these days, many prefer to be in small, silent Zoom call rooms, unaccustomed to all of that loud serendipitous conversation executives romanticize. Maybe one day, we’ll be nostalgic for the days of gray wool pencil skirts and mythical water cooler conversation. That’s not a style of dress I’ve ever enjoyed (I prefer workplaces where I can dress like me), but Reformation seems to think its cosmopolitan white collar workforce clientele is ready to play corporate.
10. AI breaking social media.
We can see early glimmers of how AI will inform the way we interact with each other, but we still don’t really know where the road leads. What we do know is that there are the first signs of humans being unable or unwilling to discern between human and robot content. When I notice? When AI hallucinates a person with six fingers in a Midjourney image. Or when I spot ChatGPT-speak in a business communique. “For X and Y alike.” Or “It’s not X; it’s Y.” These markers are so obviously ChatGPT–lazy and stilted. The other AI topics this week with unexpected consequences of the sudden uptake of AI. It’s likely that the share of venture capital that startups spend on AWS will increase. Server farms will proliferate and require a lot more cooling. Chips become the resource of our time.
11. Prep.
It’s the perfect storm of converging trends. Quiet luxury is in full swing among a cohort recently made aware of Loro Piana. Second, we’re on the tail-end of the athleisure (Alo) and irreverent streetwear era (ALD, Kith, etc.). Mixed in a cauldron, and you get brands from Le Fleur to Louis Vuitton and Lacoste reviving a new kind of prep incorporating all of these elements that’s thankfully a lot more inclusive, irreverent, and self-aware than Vineyard Vines and Brooks Brothers ever were.
12. Tablescapes.
It’s not easy to host a roaring party these days. Nobody is drinking. Everyone has their phones out. If it’s going to be documented, at least the atmospheric candles should flicker enough for a short Samyoukilis-tagram or TikTok video. Escape doesn’t have to mean faraway places and intense room decoration; it can be transforming the table itself.
13. MS Paint design.
Big announcements, especially collabos, for hot restaurants are being art directed as MS Paint-core. Feeling ad hoc is the point. Less precious graphic design conveys that it’s just a bunch of friends having fun together.
14. Beauty in the in-between.
Not a trend, maybe just a part of growing up, but it seems as if many people are talking about this publicly now? How small, mundane, incremental routines day in and day out are beautiful in and of themselves.
Honorable mentions:
“I saw the greatest minds of our generation making salmon rice with ice cubes” –a comment on a TikTok my friend
and I DMed about. It’s about how incredibly well-educated women aspire to cosplay a 1950s form of domesticity online, because the life of an influencer really is that appealing compared to available alternative forms of work. The video focuses on Emily Mariko and others.
The number of startup unicorns went down by a lot in 2023.
Startup founder CEOs are tired—many are burning out and stepping back.
Who is this Jacquemus x Nike bag for?
Is TikTok rinsed?
RIP Flaco. Loved you from afar.
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