A Fashion Media Weather Report

75 pages on taste, trends, and magazines.

Hey there, sailor. ICYMI, the Martha Stewart essay from Tuesday’s letter is now syndicated over at Dirt. Endlessly thankful to Walden and Daisy for being as cool as they are and letting this piece see a wider audience.

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted this out:

With me being the way that I am, I set off to write the paper immediately and render it perfect (without having to conduct my own polling, which I would’ve preferred if I’d had more time). I wanted to write about three key drivers of fashion media consumer interest: money, power, and glory, and, too, how fashion magazines must respond to a changing online ecosystem. It’s not like I have experience or anything.

I know this all sounds very inside baseball, but I think there’s a lot of good meat, here, for anyone even vaguely interested in why fashion trends are so discourse-laden now and why none of us can agree on the “right” way to dress. I’m exhausted from reading 10,000 essays about microtrends and the elusive ~*algorithm*~, and I’m even more exhausted from reading the 10,000 responses to these essays. I imagine you are, too — hopefully, this report will be a bit of a balm.

A letter is going out Tuesday, but I’m giving myself a Thanksgiving break (Nov. 28-Dec. 3) because I’ve been doing a lot of things, including several projects I can’t even contractually tell you about yet. But I will be online, rest assured — I’d love to chat over break with paying subscribers about their Christmas wishlists, what’s catching your eye right now re: general shopping, what’s on your watchlist, everything and anything. Consider it the Thanksgiving MERMAID CAFÉ cocktail mixer. I’ll start a thread in-chat, but you can also comment down below. I genuinely want to hear from you! To borrow a Charles Brown song title: I just want to talk to you!!!!!!!!!!!

That’s all from me. A song before I go:

See you on Tuesday. ꩜