If you are older than Gen Z like me, and want to have some fun at parties before fall, start asking people in their forties and up if they’re having a brat summer. I recently started doing this and the most common reaction I get is a laugh followed by, “What’s that?” I don’t know what to say beyond “Charli XCX” and “lime green” and “Kamala memes.”
But my inability to explain it is no matter, according to the youngs, who have declared brat summer so two weeks ago, and demure the adjective of now. I asked , who writes the Substack newsletter After School how to explain this demure trend to people who never understood brat summer. “Demure is cutesy! It's sweet. It's a little — to borrow another Gen Z aesthetic — coquettecore,” she said.
Still confused? Fret not, this is advanced stuff. Lewis’s newsletter is a daily digest covering trends in consumerism among young people and it’s been helping me stay up to date since TikTok unleashed a never-ending onslaught of -cores. (This week, she’s also launching a podcast.) Because at some point for all of us, youth culture stops being something we’re a part of and becomes something we have to try to keep up with.
With the kids going back to school, I thought this was the perfect time to ask Lewis to stop by Back Row to talk about trends, the end of brat summer, and more.
Are you Gen Z?
No. I’m a millennial. I just turned 37.
Millennial here as well (I just turned 39). You worked at Teen Vogue and MTV. MTV was one of those things that it felt like all millennials watched growing up. But now, what do young people all watch? Is it just TikTok? Or has media become too fragmented to say?
I believe that there will eventually be some sort of print resurgence, and maybe I believe that because teen magazines meant so much to me. I distinctly remember when Elle Girl launched and I was like, this is the best day of my life, going to the Barnes and Noble and seeing the cover. [Those magazines are] why I went to journalism school and moved to New York. Social media just watered down these publications and made them less necessary. And I think that a lot of these TikTok influencers are basically setting trends and calling the shots and putting people on the map in the same way that editors did.
I don't know if you read this piece in the Wall Street Journal about Demetra Dias — she's a 17-year-old girl who lives in New Jersey. People are obsessed with what she wears. Her style is actually quite basic. It's like white pants from Abercrombie or a flag sweater from Brandy Melville. Her sway over her fans is absolutely astounding — if she says something's cool, then all of her followers will buy that thing. And lots of Demetras exist and have these rabid fan bases who will buy anything that they say. It's almost like the 17-year-old holds the keys to the castle.
As someone who follows fashion, your recent in-depth look at back-to-school trends, including loose denim and dressing for comfort, felt pretty in-line with broader fashion trends. Did any of it surprise you?
One thing that I find surprising is how much “basics” are coming up. People are obsessed with building out their basics wardrobe. I'm just seeing all of these plain tees, which is so boring, but is interesting as a thing that young people are spending money on.
Lots of girls are getting tube tops and they're also getting matching low, low-rise sweats to wear with the tube tops. It's sort of the nineties, Aaliyah tube top with low-slung — in her case it was obviously jeans. But young people, I think, are so obsessed with comfort these days that they are leaning towards sweats. For a couple of years I’ve been distilling the back-to-school hauls, and leggings are mentioned a lot less.
I have to say, I’ve never loved spending a day in leggings.
What do you wear?
I’m embarrassed by how I’m about to typecast myself, but lately on a typical work-from-home day, I’ve been wearing a lot of Vuori. I like their shorts. And in the winter, I wear sweats, which I find to be warmer and more comfortable.
Like the Gen Z girls, Amy.
Don’t give me too much credit, I haven’t worn a tube top in at least 20 years. What kinds of shoes are popular with the youth?
I think Converse are getting ready to come back. The Samba and the Gazelle [by Adidas] have reached ubiquity. My mom texted me yesterday asking if she should get Sambas, which — my mom is wonderful — but that's indicative of something. I think we're going to shift back to sort of the super-classic Converse Chuck Taylor shoe. Also Nike Dunks. Adidas Campus are extraordinarily popular largely as a result of Demetra. She wears them.
Are young people buying uncomfortable shoes?
I've only seen people buying sneakers and Uggs in their back-to-school hauls. That’s it.
How about young professionals?
I think people are mostly wearing the Mary-Jane ballet flat, and maybe the chunky Prada loafer style still.
But not heels.
Not heels.
This shopping ecosystem is one reason we’re seeing affiliate revenue programs at legacy publishers start to struggle after receiving so much investment in the 2010s. Young people do not use SEO articles that come up when you Google, like, “best white jeans” to shop, right?
Young people are not using Google search. They're searching on TikTok. I think that that's why TikTok is pushing TikTok shop so much. They really are making so much money via young people.
I think a lot of people are confused by the celebrity beauty line boom. I feel like I’m reading about a new one every other day — Sabrina Carpenter, Troye Sivan, and Blake Lively all publicized launches in the last month. Is this a youth-driven consumer movement? Will the bubble pop?
Just seeing on TikTok how extremely popular these beauty brands are, I think that the beauty market is so saturated that having a beloved celebrity like Selena Gomez or Haley Bieber attached helps them cut through the fat in the market. Selena has figured out how to capitalize on her candid relatability. Her fans feel as though they have a direct line to her and she feels authentic to them when talking about her imperfections. Hailey Bieber does not have the same sort of relatability, but she does have that rosy-cheeked, girl-next-door vibe that feels like if you use those products, you too can look like her, because she's not doing intense contouring or super-involved techniques.
There are so many beauty brands, not just celebrity ones, trying to get this Gen Z and elder Gen Alpha shopper. It's not going to last. We're going to see roll-ups.
As in private equity roll-ups?
Yeah.
One celebrity brand that I think about a lot is Florence by Mills, which is Millie Bobby Brown’s. Her engagement is crazy, but she is so young. How in the world is she going to sustain this when she gets older? Because it's such a cutesy brand. It's very much her being a young person, dealing with reactive skin.
Luxury fashion is experiencing a slowdown. Are young consumers buying luxury fashion?
Around a year ago, The Cut did that big package on dupe culture. There were so many headlines on dupe culture and how young people think that the fake thing is better than the real thing. But I spend a lot of time watching young people's shopping hauls on TikTok, and I watched a ton of Christmas gift hauls, and I was blown away by how many of them got luxury bags. And they were real — Chanel bags, Louis Vuitton bags. There's an interesting thing happening, where young people, especially really young ones, were into dupe culture, but they're moving away from it because when you have the real thing, you don't necessarily want your friends to have the fake one. It hurts the value of your real one.
A lot of these girls on TikTok are wearing Tiffany jewelry, and there's a lot of status associated with Tiffany jewelry, and it's not the same if you get a Tiffany dupe from Amazon. So it's an interesting tension. Are dupes still cool?
I do think some of these top brands, like Miu Miu or Loewe, have figured out how to cut through youth culture. I think a lot of it has been by their association with the right young celebrities. Sydney Sweeney is one. A lot of education that happens when their favorite celebrities are wearing a designer and then you realize, this is something I should aspire to own. But I think the luxury handbag brand — and I don't even think that you would consider them actual luxury — is Coach, which is far and away the most frequent handbag brand that I seen mentioned among teens. Coach has figured out affordable luxury.
I’m not a Gen Z expert but sometimes I feel like what I’m seeing on the runway is totally divorced from youth culture. Even if your brand targets an older customer, you probably don’t want to not connect with youth at all, right? Like Burberry — which just hired a former Coach executive as CEO — is having a hard time right now and feels disconnected from youth, to me.
When I was a teenager, it was Beyoncé and the Burberry bikini. I aspired to have a piece of that, and I asked for a Burberry scarf probably when I was 14 or 15, I'll never forget it. I still have it.
But now would teens ask for a Burberry scarf?
No, I don’t think so.
After Trump was elected 2016, we saw a wave of consumer activism. Like the #GrabYourWallet movement, where people boycotted companies connected to Trump. However, since then, Shein has also become a juggernaut, Amazon shows no sign of slowing down. These are not values-oriented companies, to say the least. I raise this not to pass judgment on people who buy Shein or who shop at Amazon — it’s hard enough to get by on today’s wages and a lot of shoppers have no choice but to buy the easiest, cheapest thing. But I’m wondering what you make of where activist consumerism stands today.
I think that young people understand that Amazon is inherently bad, but the convenience and the cost and all of that just trumps it. Platforms like TikTok give Gen Z as consumers more power than ever. So if a brand claims to be green or sustainable and then they maybe have a collaboration that doesn't feel sustainable, Gen Z will very quickly shame you on social media, and it can cause pretty significant backlash. That happened with Reformation around 2020, but it's happened with lots of brands since. Parade did a collaboration with Diet Coke and apparently Coca-Cola is one of the biggest, worst offenders as far as environmental impact goes. [Gen Z] staged this huge campaign against Parade for this Diet Coke collaboration. Because platforms like TikTok reward hot takes, they tend to go viral. The hard thing about being a brand in 2024 is balancing what you say you are and actually doing it.
Are you having a brat summer? Or I guess since it’s over, I should say did you have a brat summer.
I would say as a 37-year-old married woman, I am happily not having a brat summer, but I have had so much fun covering it and just seeing how much lime green has been around, especially in Williamsburg [in Brooklyn, near where I live]. But yeah, people are declaring brat summer over.
Brat summer becomes what type of fall?
That’s a good question. I don’t think the people have spoken yet.
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Loose Threads
Blake Lively’s red-carpet tour to promote It Ends With Us continued in Copenhagen with an Atelier Versace dress. Is this dress laughing at The Row or is The Row laughing at it??
Vogue asked fashion PR people for their “craziest” runway show stories. Here’s Gia Kuan talking about Beyoncé attending the recent Luar show: “…[W]e were told about her attendance, but you never actually know, like with any big celebrity, until they get there. She was early, and it was all very organized. What we weren’t sure about was who she would come with—I didn’t know if it would be Blue Ivy, or her mother, or who exactly, so we saved seats for the whole family just in case. We also had to have a tight plan for what the entrance would look like and how she would exit afterwards, but it was all very smooth. What was actually funnier was that I started to get text messages from people, mostly editors, asking if it was true that she was going to be there, and telling me they were on their way.”
GQ photographed Brad Pitt and George Clooney in matching Loro Piana turtlenecks and Tom Ford suits for a cover story to promote their movie Wolfs. They were interviewed at Pitt’s Château Miraval in France. Clooney tells GQ he bought an estate nearby a few years ago, but, “I’ve been there for two years. I’ve never been here. It’s nine minutes.” Yet, the headline here is, “George Clooney and Brad Pitt Are Hollywood’s BFFs.”
I was just thinking this week about how I feel like I’m seeing so much less Kardashian/Jenner content than I used to. Then British Vogue dropped its September cover with Kylie on it. Is this a warm-up to endless fashion week content about them or are they really fading?
’s Annie Dabir rebranded Glossier and I’m into it! She writes, “I personally hate the millennial-pink-to-gen-z-gender-neutral pipeline that all brands seem to participate in. The girls buying Glossier in 2016 are moms now (hello!), and they might feel foolish carrying around the same brand they did when they were 22.”
