What we're processing 015
Signs and signals we're making sense of right now
End of the Mara Hoffman Era
Or, the Beginning of Ending Things?
Kelsey Steele
Last month, fashion designer Mara Hoffman announced that she’s shuttering her namesake label after 24 years. Having championed ethical and sustainable supply chain practices for over a decade, she’s the most notable in a recent trend of closures of sustainable slow fashion brands. Citing the financial challenges of those commitments in the current fashion industry and questioning the morality of scaling just to scale, Mara told Vogue, “I could just keep going and build collection after collection and try to figure out what a department store wants, sit on piles of inventory because this is how the system is…. but here we are buried in clothes, we’re buried in stuff because we can’t let things die.” Deeply spiritual and ever a visionary, Mara remains hopeful for the future of fashion but hopes her decision can inspire a new era of ethical inaction in business. “Everyone knows how to begin things. People are not versed or trained in our culture to end things because we don’t want to end things.” Maybe now’s the time to start.
The Teen Magazine is About to Make a Much Needed Comeback
Are magazines for teens or old-farts?
Marissa Roberge
The other night, I was scrolling on TikTok as one does and started seeing content announcing J-14 Magazine’s print relaunch. J-14 was a tween magazine, featuring tear away posters and stories about teen heartthrobs that hit peak popularity in the early 2000s. As a young millennial that grew up pillaging drugstore magazine racks for these types of tabloids, the TikToks made me pretty nostalgic and I realized how few glossies like this exist anymore. It sent me down a rabbit hole.
Teen magazines started to drop out of circulation completely between 2017 and 2020. No surprise, there’s a whole world of subcultures surrounding fallen publications. There are super fans selling and buying old issues for hundreds of dollars on eBay. And it’s not just teen magazines, niche publications like SAVEUR, a 30-year-old food and culture magazine, have leveraged their fandom to relaunch print issues that are published less frequently. These quarterlies have become more of a status symbol than the light, timely reading material they once were. But these grownup subcultures can’t be the driving force behind the relaunch of a tween zine. So who is?
Magazines used to be such a big part of adolescence, especially for young women.But we’ve lost those kid specific spaces. I’m not claiming the teen magazines of the 90s and 00s were the healthiest, but they definitely had a safety and youthfulness missing from social media. TikTok is a grownup space that has kids on it, whereas teen magazines were designed for the kids that would be reading them by adults. Could this be why we’re seeing Sephora teens trying out adult anti-wrinkle serums instead of the colorful and sweet smelling chapsticks that consumed my childhood?
And then there’s the Gen-Z of it all. Gen-Z is a bit obsessed with Millennial culture. They’re reviving the flip phone and digital camera in an effort to unplug - so why not magazines? Some are calling this the slow media movement, likening magazines to the revival of vinyl. Whatever the driving force, I’m excited to see where magazine and teen culture is headed.
What’s Even Possible in Tech? I bet Apple Knows.
Where are the genius engineers behind the 'brilliant’ marketers?
Jarryn Shin
Apple released macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 this week with new features like the ability to send scheduled messages, iPhone to Mac continuity, and ChatGPT integration. Definitely cool stuff, but after every WWDC, I see comments from people like this…
It makes me think. Is Apple still innovative? How much is Apple holding back from the people who’ve bought into their world of dependency? These new features often seem to be a sigh of relief from an existing annoyance, rather than a “WOW!” inducing surprise to consumers for an innovation they didn’t realize they needed.
On the other hand, GPT-4o was a surprise to many. The model is freakishly cheeky, practically has eyes, and works far beyond any existing AI models currently available to consumers. One might even argue its capabilities far surpass your neighborhood genius. So where is tech really? I can’t fathom what our tech will be in 10 years, but are we okay with companies like Apple dictating that future? Computer science majors are growing fucking fast, yet tech layoffs don’t seem to stop, so Gen-Z startups… Can y’all step in?
