Loose Threads
Esquire named Gwyneth: The Biography one of the best nonfiction books of 2025. Grab the book here or at your local indie book store if you haven’t already.
My friend and editor Eugene Rabkin addressed the impact of the software system DMR, which is owned by fashion analytics firm Launchmetrics: “[DMR] works by scanning editorial images of magazines and grading them based on a granular point system. It looks at which brands each image credits, whether it’s a full look, how many garments per brand are featured in each image, how much of a garment is shown, which brands the garment sits next to, how far back in the magazine the image is, and so on. It then grades all of these factors and submits reports to brands. If a magazine does not score enough points with a major advertiser, it risks incurring its wrath: unpleasant phone calls, beratings, vague threats, and sometimes outright pulling of advertising.”
Kyle Chayka wrote for The New Yorker about the aesthetic of brain rot, including jelly shoes, Labubus, and Dubai chocolate. He didn’t mention this summer’s divisive capri trend, but I’d argue it fits with all this.
Louis Vuitton hired Pat McGrath to create a line of luxury beauty products, including $160 lipstick and $250 eye palettes. Reports the Wall Street Journal: “Vuitton superfans can round out their collections with a $2,990 monogrammed canvas mini-trunk for the lipsticks and an eye shadow pouch for $530.”
If you want to invest in something luxury that you can wear every day that will far outlast lipstick, I am a big believer in secondhand luxury watches that allow you to bypass boutique snobbery. Bezel is a great resource for these, and currently lists a vintage Cartier for under $2,500 and vintage Rolex for under $1,000. They have the black, diamond-set version of the chainlink Chanel style I love for under $4,000. If you want the white, non-diamond chainlink style I got secondhand, you can ask Bezel to source it for you.
Wellness Is Gross. That's Why It Needs 'Good Taste.'
These past few months have been dubbed “cringe summer.” There was Jeff Bezos’s wedding and accompanying Vogue cover for bride Lauren Sánchez; the Labubu craze; the Coldplay kiss cam. This was also the summer coffee enemas trended anew.
Seven years ago, Goop made headlines for selling a $135 coffee enema kit by a brand called – you can’t make this up – Implant O’Rama. The kit was part of Goop’s annual “detox” guide. Stephen Colbert joked at the time, “I always say I can’t start the day until my coffee’s had me.”
Today, influencers are filming themselves lying in the shower (or a lawn) while they do the enemas, an alternative wellness therapy that they claim “detoxifies” the body. As with many wellness claims, these are not backed in any sort of science! Doctors and experts have recently pointed out in old-fashioned media outlets that our livers and kidneys detoxify the body for us, and strongly advise against coffee enemas, which have been associated with serious injury and death.
The renewed popularity of coffee enemas, however, illustrates why the wellness industry needs so desperately to align with fashion and good taste. Because much of what it promotes and sells is gross. What better way to paper over that with high prices and a pleasing aesthetics?
In Gwyneth: The Biography, I argue that this was Gwyneth Paltrow’s innovation with Goop. Gwyneth packaged the idea of wellness gorgeously, bestowing upon it her courtroom-famous aspirational good taste, essentially commodifying pseudoscience and unproven health remedies as luxury goods. The allure of wellness has become so powerful to consumers that luxury fashion brands like Dior offer wellness retreats. The wellness industry needs this luxury adjacency because it’s an effective way to get people to pay for things like, in the words of Colbert, “butt-chugging a venti.”
Earlier in the summer, coffee enemas were featured on a Hulu special showing cut footage from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. In the clip, cast member Mikayla, who reportedly talked about coffee enemas daily, gets her castmates to try them lying down on the bathroom floor. She also appears to show them her post-enema excrement in a bowl.
On Instagram reels, some of the most viewed coffee enema videos are by a brand called Happy Bum Co. that sells enema kits for $75 for a basic silicone version, or $100 if you want “The most beautiful enema kit you’ve ever seen!” that “combin[es] luxury with function.” In their reels, people lie down in showers while performing the enemas. One pinned video of someone prone in the shower with a tube extending from her backside has 105 million views and claims that the enemas help with liver health, IBS, anxiety, and more.
Unappetizing alternative wellness therapies hardly stop at coffee enemas. There are leech facials (promoted by Miranda Kerr at an In Goop Health conference in 2017); placenta eating; and the more recent craze for raw or unpasteurized dairy products. Pasteurizing dairy products involves heating them to 165 degrees Farenheit for 15 seconds to kill pathogens that might contaminate milk from cows that are often walking around in their own feces. Charging $20.99 for a gallon of raw milk at Erewhon and slapping an illustration of a feces-free cow on the jug is one way to get people to forget about that. (Immunologist and microbiologist Andrea Love told me, “The only thing that raw milk does is increase foodborne illnesses.”)
Health misinformation expert Timothy Caulfield, author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash and a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta, pointed out that Goop has been effective at creating a community around wellness in part through its luxurious, gorgeous aesthetic that people want to emulate.
“The aesthetic of the wellness industry is brightness and flowers and people running on the street with a sun flare behind them, maybe doing a leap in the air. But it's really about darkness and death and sickness and toxins and all these things we're supposed to fear,” he said.
The luxury industry plays the same tricks on us, psychologically, as the wellness industry. As economist Thorstein Veblen argued famously in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, people buy luxury goods when lower-priced ones would serve the same purpose because they want to be seen using such goods. The more expensive and impractical, the more wealth goods signify (see: Lauren Sánchez’s $15,000 Dior “micro-purse” that is too small to even hold an iPhone).
The same seems to be true for wellness fads, many of which are expensive and impractical at best — and expensive, impractical, and harmful at worst. A while back, people had to do coffee enemas without an audience. Now they can film them for social media with their luxury enema kits, and be rewarded with tens of millions of views.
Get Gwyneth: The Biography here.
