Available on my webshop here.

Someone Should Stop This is a big step on from what people normally know me for (“that sustainable fashion guy / that guy with the book with the cool name”). It’s a bigger scope this time around. It’s more about a global crisis than trend cycles and sneaker hype.

I’ve talked a lot in the past about fashion’s impact on the planet. But after years of panel talks, conferences and opinion pieces about sustainability, I started to feel the need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

The future is looking, err, not so good. There’s the growth of far-right political movements, the Big Tech billionaires, the AI models that we’re told will wipe out our jobs and/or the human race, the skyrocketing cost of living and the politicians who don’t seem to be able to do anything about anything.

Which brings us to climate change, which is in my opinion one of the most fascinating (and, yes, depressing) things going on in the world right now. It reveals so, so, so much about the world we live in and all its failures. It’s about greenhouse gases, sure, but also democracy, individualism, consumerism and corruption. Out-dated ideas on economics and societies that are failing to imagine something better than online culture wars and a grinding rate race. The growth of right-wing podcasts, echo chambers and political movements, and the toxic ideas that power them.

Climate is often seen as this niche issue, something that only vegans, Scandinavians and electric car drivers care about. That’s wrong, just btw — research shows consistently that almost everyone cares about climate change, but we underestimate how much the rest of society cares about it (this is especially important for Americans — even as Trump yells “drill baby drill”, it’s only 26% of your fellow citizens who don’t think climate change is an important issue).

I get why people find the subject intimidating — carbon emissions, supply chains and fossil fuels are complicated things, and you need to do a lot of explaining for people to get their heads around them. Also, the climate movement has spent a lot of time and energy fixated on the terrible impacts of consumerism and modern lifestyles, rather than the bigger picture playing out in the background, as income inequality skyrockets, politics becomes increasingly corrupt and quality of life drifts out of reach for ordinary people.

I wanted to change that, to show how our collapsing atmosphere connects to the many other crises of our times. It’s not just that we are failing to stop the planet from boiling, but we’re also failing to deliver prosperity for ordinary people, failing to imagine a future that’s worth believing in and failing to stop the growth of this darker form of politics. It’s all connected.

This all coincides with the growing tidal wave of popular political movements that are demanding and end to our skyrocketing inequality, unaccountable tech billionaires, collapsing ecosystems and crumbling quality of life. It’s Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York, Zack Polanski tripling the size of the British Green Party in six months, James Talarico raging against billionaires deep in the heart of America’s oil country. I’m really excited about where this movement is headed, and it’s a big part of the book.

I also wanted to provide some perspective so that people could stop feeling guilty for living unsustainable lifestyles. I am much less interested in beating you over the head with scary science reports, and much more interested in the many ways the world is failing to offer us a future to believe in. That’s why I find climate so interesting: it’s the biggest sign that the world we live in simply doesn’t make sense anymore.

Someone Should Stop This is the same format as The World Is On Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes — pulpy paper, a glossy cover, a tiny format not much bigger than an iPhone.

Next week, I’ll start posting some extracts and snippets. Then, I’ll be getting started with that podcast I keep mentioning.

Preorder Someone Should Stop This here. Shipping late June, early July.

And one more time, the credits:

Self-published by Alec Leach
Creative direction by Alec Leach
Print design by Studio Pyda
Cover art by Elliot Beaumont
Produced by Kris Latocha @ Casimir Books
Edited by Heather Snowden and Yasha Wallin
Website design by Martin Major
Website development by R11N

Finally, finally, finally, my second book is here.

Someone Should Stop This is about the future, and how the world is failing to imagine a future that doesn’t completely suck.

You can preorder it here.

Here’s how I put it on the back cover:

The future looks kinda scary, doesn’t it?

There’s the wars, the fascist politics, the unaffordable economy, the burnout jobs and the Big Tech billionaires. And then there’s climate change, looking like the final boss of it all.

But what if climate change could show us the links between far-right politics, toxic masculine echo chambers and our declining quality of life?

That’s what this book is about. It’s about carbon emissions and solar panels, but also new ideas about wellbeing and belonging, fairer economics and ambitious political movements that refuse to accept a broken status quo.

My first book was about making sense of shopping in an age of crisis. This time, I’m thinking about the future, and how the path toward a stable atmosphere could take us away from this darker form of politics — and toward something better.

It’s the same size and format as The World Is On Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes — a lil pocket-sized thing not much bigger than an iPhone, printed on pulpy paper, with infographics and typography designed by Kris, aka Studio Pyda, who I worked with on book #1.

We are putting the final touches to the design and then it’s done. Preorders will be shipped late June, early July.

In the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about the motives behind the book, and I’ll tease some chapters as well. Not long after that, I’ll be back here with a podcast.

Paid Subscribers: you will get a copy for free. I’ll be in touch via email to get your shipping address.

I’m very excited to be beginning this next chapter. Thanks for sticking around.

Preorder Someone Should Stop This here.

Credits

Self-published by Alec Leach
Creative direction by Alec Leach
Print design by Studio Pyda
Cover art by Elliot Beaumont
Produced by Kris Latocha @ Casimir Books
Edited by Heather Snowden and Yasha Wallin
Website design by Martin Major
Website development by R11N

The last time I was in your inbox, I wrote something along the lines of “it’s been a while, longer than I’d hoped, because I’m so busy writing this second book” and well, surprise surprise, it’s the same deal this time around. An October deadline turned into a November deadline and now I’m staring December in the face. Quick hint to anyone who’s thinking of staring a creative endeavor: it takes twice as long as you think, and it’s twice as hard as you think.

And regarding this newsletter, if you feel like your paid subscription hasn’t been a great deal then get in touch and I’ll refund you the past couple of months. Just reply to this email (nobody else will see it) or DM me privately via the Substack app/site. I understand that a lot of the time people are paying for subscriptions to support someone whose work they appreciate rather than expecting to get a certain amount of content delivered to them, but that relationship goes both ways and I have obligations to you as well. TLDR: hit me up if you want a refund.

Back to the book: it is real, it is happening, and it’s good! Despite the stress of ever-shifting deadlines, I’m having a lot of fun writing it, and it feels great to be stepping beyond fashion and into the broader story of what’s going on in the world these days. Here’s what I wrote in my last newsletter:

Book #2 is very much a thing now. And it’s about climate change. Or, more accurately, it’s about the things standing in between us and a healthy planet. And how these obstacles are making the world suck in many other ways. While fashion is one of the world’s biggest consumer industries, it’s still just one piece of a confusing, messy, destructive puzzle. Fashion is about consumerism and identity, sure, but also manufacturing, supply chains, logistics and finance. That’s what makes the industry so interesting, but it’s just one part of a much bigger story on how the world works. Book #2 takes many of the themes from The World Is On Fire… and puts them into a much bigger, more global context.

And as I wrote last time, 2026 will be the beginning of a new chapter for me: a new book, yes, but also a podcast and a much more ambitious vision for what this space, aka Ordinary Delusions, is about. I’m excited to get it all out there.

But first, I need to finish this book. However, as I said already, I’ve been way too quiet on here, so what I’m gonna do is start posting snippets from my book. Here, an exclusive first teaser of book #2:

Okay, a screenshot isn’t much. I’ll post the full section next week. And from then, I’ll post more and more until I’ve leaked a full chapter. Hopefully that’ll bring us up to the time when I can start making things a bit more official: launching a preorder, unveiling the title and cover, and then getting moving with that podcast I keep talking about.

See you again, soon.

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It’s been a while. I’ve been deep in the weeds with my next book — 23,000 words deep — and all the writing, rewriting, thinking and rethinking has used up all of my headspace. I did not mean to go this long without an update.

If you're a paid subscriber: thank you. I know you're not getting great value right now, and I really appreciate your patience. I want to acknowledge that, because your support genuinely helps makes my work possible — book writing included.

For everyone: my second book is happening. It’s starting to feel like a real thing. I’m aiming to release it in October, but before then, I’ll have more updates. I’ll preview some of it here, too.

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I wrote my first book in a 3-ish month sprint and it was…a lot. Would not recommend. What could have been six-ish months of steady work was instead a stressful, exhausting marathon where my whole life revolved around the contents of a Google Doc. I would love to tell you that I learned the lesson this time around, but I did not. For many boring, tedious, uninteresting, and kinda embarrassing reasons, I’ve done the exact thing I said I wouldn’t do again. Hence all the time away from the newsletter.

But Book #2 is very much a thing now. And it’s about climate change. Or, more accurately, it’s about the things standing in between us and a healthy planet. And how these obstacles are making the world suck in many other ways. While fashion is one of the world’s biggest consumer industries, it’s still just one piece of a confusing, messy, destructive puzzle. Fashion is about consumerism and identity, sure, but also manufacturing, supply chains, logistics and finance. That’s what makes the industry so interesting, but it’s just one part of a much bigger story on how the world works. Book #2 takes many of the themes from The World Is On Fire… and puts them into a much bigger, more global context.

Also, solutions. Lots of solutions. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the world’s miseries and lose sight of the way forward — especially in the midst of Trump 2.0, and especially when you’re writing about climate — but for almost all of the problems we’re faced with, there are answers. A big frustration I have with left/progressive/liberal politics is that we do not focus anywhere near enough on the answers. We’re lost in the discourse, the meaning, the symbolism, when we could be focussed on the solutions instead. Turn climate inside out and you’ll find all sorts of ideas for how the world could be.

Which brings me to my next update: the future.

As I wrote a few months back, I’ve relaunching my newsletter under a new name — Ordinary Delusions — to reflect how this project is evolving. Rather than sticking to one fixed niche, this space is growing and shifting alongside the messy realities of life under late capitalism. My aim is to give readers (and myself) a way to make sense of the chaotic world we live in — and maybe even learn how to thrive within it — by navigating the cultural and economic forces shaping our everyday experience.

Here’s how I put it a while ago:

The story we were told growing up is that the world is on a steady upward trajectory, that slowly but surely, capitalism and technology and democracy will fix all our problems. We will grow up and work the jobs of our dreams, make loads of money and own fabulous property. Our kids’ lives will be even better. Clearly, that’s not what’s happening. Life in the 21st century has so far given us climate meltdown, fascist politics, burnout jobs and unaffordable rent. The dream we were sold does not seem to be coming true, and that’s what the name Ordinary Delusions is about.

Ordinary Delusions builds on all the themes my newsletter and book(s) have touched on so far — fashion, consumerism, sustainability, climate, the economy and what they all mean for us as human beings. It will also focus on personal, everyday issues that are increasingly shaped by the world around us. How do we feel fulfilled at work while navigating a constantly shifting — and in some cases disappearing — career ladder? How do we prepare for an uncertain future while thriving in the here and now? How do we build wealth when the world is full of so many cool but expensive distractions? The world is scary, life is hard, but let’s figure out a way to thrive despite it all.

I’ll be doing this with this newsletter, and adding a podcast into the mix as well. And working on Book #3, which will be spread out over a year rather than jammed into a few months. It’s a lot, but it’s exciting.

Thank you for being here. Again, I’m sorry it’s been so long. I think you'll find my ideas sharper after this time away.

Alec

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If you follow me on Instagram, you might have noticed I posted an ad a while ago. It’s for a collaboration between Wikipedia and Armed Angels, a sustainable fashion brand from Germany. I did a fun lil video talking about how I use Wikipedia and why it’s such an important part of the information landscape. There’s a few shots of the collection at the end.

This was the first time I’d ever done a ~brand partnership~. I’ve written a lot about consumerism and what this means for the future of the planet, so the cognitive dissonance is real. But in the end it was pretty easy to say yes — Wikipedia is something that is very worth supporting, and Armed Angels does a lot of sustainability work (it would have been a different story if it was Wikipedia x Zara).

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But also…money.

ICYMI, the economy is kicking almost everyone’s ass, and has been for the last 20 years or so. Everything is more expensive now, and most peoples’ earnings have not caught up. And on that same timeline, the traditional revenue streams from creative work have been “disrupted” (aka collapsed) and replaced with something much less profitable for almost everyone.

Take TV: back in the good old days, a film or show would play on a channel, where there were ads. That model would get replicated all over the world, so the cast of Friends would make a ton of money when the show was broadcast on NBC with ads for the American market, but also on British and German and Australian channels which each showed their own ads as well. Now, whatever gets streamed makes a fraction of what it used to because there’s way less ads, if there are any at all, and the revenue from subscriptions doesn’t come close to making up the difference. Why do you think Sydney Sweeney does so many brand partnerships?

It would be one thing if the price of houses and the cost of living went up but the business models stayed the same. But now everything is more expensive and it’s harder to make money???

It’s this double whammy of economic bullshit that has made the nepo baby phenomenon so inescapable, because ordinary people are getting locked out of culture industries. But it’s also why so many public figures are cutting deals with brands, or even launching their own (Hailey Bieber sold her skincare brand for a billion dollars). When your work doesn’t pay as much as it did back in the good old days, then you can just sell your personal brand instead. Welcome to The Sellout Economy.

Selling out used to be a fraught experience. In an episode of How Long Gone, Thursday singer Geoff Rickly explained how at the height of the 00s emo/post-hardcore scene, American Express once offered the band a pile of money to do an ad. They said no to it because they felt like they were betraying the values their scene was built on. If they’d known that the digital revolution would soon obliterate their CD sales, maybe they’d have made a different call (there’s a whole book about punk bands signing to major labels: Sellout by Dan Ozzi. Geoff Rickly is on the cover). The sellout discourse was kinda toxic in hindsight. The idea that bands should be forever untainted by capitalism also implied that musicians should never aspire for financial security.

Which brings us back to me and my 29-second Instagram reel.

I’ve been self-employed since Silicon Valley wiped out my old line of work. I started off as a generic freelancer going from gig to gig, but since my first book came out I’ve been trying to build my own thing, where I’m fully supported from my own work (thank you to everyone who’s bought a book and/or subscribed to my newsletter). I’ve made money from my book, speaking engagements, Substack, consulting and now, the one solitarily ad that I did. It’s a lot of different revenue streams, and the idea is that when they grow, or at least some of them do, I should be able to build a pretty good career for myself while producing work that’s meaningful.

But writers are generally not comfortable with personal branding. Most people aren’t naturally born to be brand ambassadors, and there’s always going to be a lot of very talented people who don’t want to do it. This is very understandable. It feels weird! It’s not natural! By selling out, we are exploiting ourselves for capitalism, allowing neoliberalism to stretch its greedy tentacles all over our souls. And if we say yes to it, it’s yet one more thing we need to be good at — there’s the writing itself, plus taxes and managing unpredictable income and staying on top of social media and replying to emails. And now we have to have great skin and look hot on camera and be able to talk real good about moisturizer / running shoes / supplements? It’s a lot, and not what most people signed up for when they got into writing.

You can see this in the psychodrama that unravels every time Substack introduces a new feature: notes, videos, podcasts, whatever, people just want the platform to be about writing. Again, very understandable, but I think we need to be a little realistic about the kind of industry we’re operating in.

The paid newsletter phenomenon has been an amazing addition to the media landscape, but we need to be honest about its potential to build wealth for every writer that puts up a paywall. The most valuable newsletters are anchored in professional niches — it’s content that people need to read to do their jobs, and they can put the subscription on their company card. The layer under that is politics and shopping, where people are willing to pay for content that appeals to their ethics and rich people want someone to help them spend money. There’s always exceptions to the rule, but in general, those are the verticals that do the best. And of course, Substack is funded by venture capitalists whose incentives will not always align with writers’, to put it lightly. TLDR: for most people, now is not the time to rely on just one source of income.

It’s actually a pretty good time to be a solo operator in media in general, though — there’s a lot of opportunities to build a business with self-publishing and subscriptions, while audiences have adapted to a media diet built around relatable individuals rather than old institutions. Add on the usual revenue streams of speaking engagements, consulting and, yes, sponsored content, and there’s the potential to build a very realistic business around meaningful work. Yes, there are downsides to this, both for the people trying to hustle their way to financial security and for the media landscape more generally, but the fact is that if you’re good at what you do, can tolerate the risk, have the financial cushion and are prepared to get your hands dirty then there are more opportunities than there were five years ago.

The caveat to that is that writing is just one format of many in the information landscape (hence the notes, video and podcast feeds on Substack). If you ask me, the real business is ideas (Brian Morrissey, who I referenced a while ago, has a very helpful explainer on this here). There are still opportunities to make money from writing, but there’s also speaking (definitely do speaking), consulting, a subscription product of some kind (it could be a newsletter, it could be a course) and, yes, ads.

Of course, it gets way more complicated when your work is examining the many crises of our times. The contradictions from critiquing our very flawed, very capitalist world while also doing ads are obvious, but I’m not sure we’re in the kind of economy where writers should shy away from additional revenue streams for an abstract sense of ideological purity that almost nobody else has, and no audience is really demanding anyway. The Sellout Economy is so pervasive that the vast majority of people don’t really care when they see someone doing an #ad. You don’t need a degree in economics to understand that times are tough for pretty much everyone, including the people we follow online. People get it.

Clearly, we need boundaries here. It’s not like I’m going to start doing ads for e-cigarettes or bitcoin or fast fashion, and I’m not saying that’s the kind of thing we should be aspiring for. But, to repeat myself, this is not the kind of economy — or the kind of industry — where it’s generally a good idea to rely on one revenue stream for everything. For every Matt Yglesias — who’s making a killing on Substack — there’s a thousand writers/creators/podcasters/Youtubers who are hustling just to keep the lights on. So long as it doesn’t undermine the fundamental message of the work, I don’t think we should be afraid of sponsored content. You’re telling me we’re supposed to create meaningful work and deal with unpredictable income and navigate a constantly changing media environment and leave money off the table while we’re doing it?

Writers can complain all they want about not getting $5k to write a magazine article like the good old days, but where do you think the money came from back then? From all the ads.

Welcome back to Ordinary Delusions, a search for answers in the 360-degree calamity that is the year 2025.

I recently spoke to The Trend Report for their series on personal taste. You can read that here. It was a long and interesting conversation, thank you to Kyle for having me.

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There are many types of guy to be found in the murky cultural swamp that is the manosphere. The hustle bros are the ones rubbing banana peel on their faces, documenting their absurd morning routines and insisting that getting up early can solve all your problems. They squeeze their lats into cheap skinny suits and wear pastel colored sportswear while they drive their leased G Wagons. You probably shouldn’t buy their courses or supplements.

It doesn’t take a PHD in psychology to notice that there’s a lot of anxiety under the surface of the hustle bros and their bizarre rituals of self-control. “A man offering a caricature as comfort, selling certainty to those unsettled by change” writes Derek Guy in Bloomberg, in an essay on the changing aesthetics of the alpha male.

Here’s what I wrote a while back, when Ashton Hall’s absurd morning routines went viral:

“There’s tons of this kind of stuff online and it says a lot about where men are at in this era.

Controlling behaviors are driven by “high levels of internal anxiety” according to Psychology Today. “The impulse to control serves a protective function against feelings of vulnerability, which controlling people associate with powerlessness.” And boy is there a lot to feel anxious and vulnerable about these days! There’s no good jobs anymore, houses are unaffordable, rent is a rip off and going to university will put you in debt for most of your life.

Facing a world that is senselessly unfair, the hustle bros turn inward and control.”

Their outfits and habits are absurd, but the feelings are familiar. The male psyche has a lot to worry about: money, our place in society, work and our futures, but also our body fat percentages and our hairlines. And, of course, our outfits.

It was not always this way. When I was a teenager, back in the 00s, putting too much thought into your appearance was superficial, effeminate, even gay. And as Derek Guy points out in his Bloomberg piece, lats and abs were not aspirational back in the 19th century. The guys with real status were soft, pale wimps who spent their days drinking tea and ordering servants around.

But now, clothes are a big deal. The menswear space has exploded in size, and it’s replicated the same structures and habits as womenswear — a swirling cycle of trends, collections and runway shows, with a cohort of blogs, influencers, shopping newsletters and podcasters to help you make sense of it all (this is what I did before Silicon Valley “disrupted” my career.)

Honestly, the market for men’s clothes has never been better. Here’s another thing I wrote a while ago:

“We have thankfully moved on from the stiffness of the #menswear era, when brands made excellent clothes in restrictive silhouettes. We have also forgotten the silliness of the hype era, when brands pumped out nonsense collaborations splattered in embarrassing logos. Whatever you’re into, someone’s making a good version of it somewhere. Guys wear kilts and nail polish now. The future is here, and it’s good!”

The massive buffet of menswear is awesome if you’ve spent your adult life fixated on style, but confusing if you haven’t, which is probably why so many of the guys responding to a recent Feed Me survey on menswear referenced Throwing Fits, Blackbird Spyplane and How Long Gone host / internet cool guy Chris Black. Men need to look good now and it’s not as easy as it used to be. You don’t look iconic by putting on the same suit as everyone else and carrying a briefcase into the office. The menswear influencers are here to help.

Unlike the hustle bros, who sell a cartoon vision of masculinity with very dangerous side-effects, these guys are not toxic, they will not destroy democracy, and they won’t even try to sell you an online course. They’re here to shoot the shit about clothes, so that ordinary guys can figure out how to get dressed.

(If you want my advice, it’s this: figure out which tiny slice of the market resonates with you, which shapes look the best on you, and within those boundaries slowly but surely build a wardrobe of well-made stuff that you wear a lot, or just pick up a copy of my first book)

I’m not the kind of guy to give too much thought into the symbolism behind trends — I’ve spent enough time in the industry to know that most of the time, people just wear stuff because they like the way it looks. But there’s an undeniable sense of uncertainty, ambivalence, maybe even anxiety running through men’s style these days.

In the mood board accounts filled with old photos of old-timers like JFK junior and Robin Williams, there’s a suspicion that things were better in a previous era.

It’s fun when Harry Styles puts on a dress for Vogue or Paul Mescal wears a tiny cardigan or guys get into nail polish. But in these nods to femininity, there’s also a rejection of something, too. Maybe even an acknowledgement that men are a bit of a problem?

The trashed Carhartt and Realtree camo that’s become a uniform in Brooklyn and Hackney is kinda ironic — the hardest work anyone is doing in those clothes is passive-aggressive emailing — but it’s also the most macho men have looked in a long time. It’s cosplaying as a construction worker, sure, but it’s also reassuringly manly in a time when nobody knows what that even means anymore.

We should not be surprised that guys are getting lured into the manosphere, a bizarre swamp that tells people to live like digital cavemen. It’s the disappearing career ladders, economic turmoil and unaffordable houses, but also the discourse about straight men being a threat to everyone else. Toxic masculinity is a problem, but what about regular, ordinary, textbook masculinity? Is that bad too? IDK, it’s confusing.

“I want men to be able to see themselves in the accepting world we all deserve,” wrote Duncan Meisel a while back, in Blue Bonnets. He’s spent his career in climate, and also deadlifts.

Maybe we need to spend much less time thinking about what it all means and much more energy on just, y’know, getting people to believe in a better future, where we all enjoy affordable homes, a stable career path and a world not ruined by fascist gazillionaires.

Welcome back to Ordinary Delusions, a newsletter searching for answers in the fever swamp of late capitalism. I’m currently deep in a sprint on my second book, which I’m very excited about. It’s about climate, and how our rapidly heating atmosphere connects to all our other present malaises. Despite the, y’know, somewhat apocalyptic subject matter, I’m having a lot of fun writing it. However, my brain only has space for so many words, so this is the last essay I’ll be publishing for a while. I’ll still be landing in your inbox in the coming weeks, but it’ll be with a punchier format. Thanks for being here.

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The nepo baby discourse was cultural dynamite when it blew up a couple of years ago. It tapped into something everyone knows to be true, but it took on a life of its own because we have grown up in an economy that’s turned nepotism from an annoying fact of life into an unavoidable force that’s felt in every corner of our cultural spaces.

It’s always been kinda like this. Brighton, my hometown in the UK, became famous in the 1800s because the son of King George III built a palace there that’s modeled on the Taj Mahal. The Prince Regent was obese, possibly addicted to opium, and spent most of his life spending taxpayers’ money. "A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist” wrote one of his aides.

British society is so aristocratic that you can spot old money a mile away if you know what you’re looking for, but it’s murkier in the US. Take The Strokes: the singer’s dad founded Elite Model Management and the guitarist’s dad wrote songs for Celine Dion and Whitney Houston. The band met at private school, but the lore leaves out that part.

The nepo baby discourse touches a nerve because nepotism has become such an inescapable feature of life in the 21st century. But people aren’t mad that nepo babies exist, they’re mad that there’s no chances for the ordinary babies anymore.

The big cultural capitals are unaffordable for regular people. Just going to university is a luxury. Career ladders are disappearing as tech rewires entire industries. Getting onto the property market is a fantasy if you don’t have a few hundred grand lying around. And if you’re in the US, you can add the giant scam that is health insurance to the list of financial “headwinds” you have to grind through just to keep the lights on (the American Psychiatric association reports that money is the number one cause of anxiety for Americans).

These problems are much easier — if they exist at all — for the kids of the 1%. They have connections that open doors in cultural spaces, and the money to sit around doing cool stuff without having to worry about paying the bills. And beneath them is what Xochitl Gonzalez calls “the comfort class” — people who got a head start in life because their parents got on the property ladder at the right time, even if they worked very ordinary jobs and were paid very ordinary salaries (you can put me in this camp).

But if you weren’t born on the right side of the intergenerational wealth chasm, just working in a quote-unquote cool industry is becoming a luxury in itself. Many of these spaces never paid well to begin with, but they’re now having to adapt to new (and in many ways worse) economic models thanks to Silicon Valley. Think Hollywood and the shift to streaming, magazine writers pivoting to newsletters and musicians trying to eke out a living when their work has been made essentially free by Spotify. And on top of that, inflation is making everything more expensive.

The nepo baby phenomenon is what happens when social mobility tightens, or just disappears altogether — it’s not about this or that actor being an entitled douche who doesn’t know how lucky they have it (although they might be!). It’s about the framework of our economies and how they open so many doors for the rich and well-connected, and slam them shut for almost everyone else. It all comes down to the boring, unsexy ways politics shapes our lives — it’s the laws and tax codes that concentrate wealth at the top of society, the property markets that push home ownership further and further out of reach, the neoliberal policies that keep people trapped in poverty.

Clearly, it’s deeply unfair, but it doesn’t bode so well for the future of our culture more generally. Culture is supposed to be a way for us to come to terms with the slippery, indescribable parts of the human condition. What does it mean when it’s only a tiny sliver of the population that’s able to do that?

It’s telling that one part of our culture that is thriving is podcasting, a medium where being a regular Joe can be a massive plus. Sure, the manosphere is clearly making a very big (and bad) impact on our political climate, but you wouldn’t accuse them of being nepo babies. Joe Rogan did construction work and delivered newspapers while he was starting his comedy career, and Theo Von was legally separated from his parents at 14.

Just throwing this out there, but maybe the nepo baby economy is part of the reason those guys are drawing such huge audiences? When ordinary people know that “proper” culture is only for the privileged, then they’re going to look somewhere else when they want to make sense of the world.

You can trace a pretty direct line from Bernays up to the present day, where our hopes and dreams are projected onto mass-produced objects. That whole it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism thing? That’s not because we humans yearn for bond markets and commodity trading. It’s because we love shopping. Consumerism is how America projects soft power around the globe: everyone wants Coke, Big Macs and Nikes. Making stuff more expensive is the third rail no politician will touch.

In the 80s, politicians in the rich world rewired their economies. Companies that made stuff would go do it somewhere else, where wages were cheaper and there weren’t so many rules. If places like Detroit and Sheffield lost all their good jobs, then it wouldn’t matter so much because all the car makers and fast food chains and iPhones would make so much money from their factories in Asia that it would trickle down to everyone else and we’d all live the good life. Clearly, that’s not what happened. The death of manufacturing wiped out the stable career ladder that gave ordinary people the chance to build long-term wealth, the billionaires got so rich that they bought politicians and the rest of us got Shein and Uber eats.

And the products got shittier too. As supply chains got longer and murkier — to the point where a lot of companies genuinely don’t know where their raw materials come from — they formed a giant new-stuff machine pumping out mountains of ultra-cheap nonsense. Stuff is cheaper now, because there’s sweatshops and children working in mines and rivers flowing with chemicals. And most of the massive brands at the top of it all are just design and marketing machines: they pay factories to make all their stuff for them abroad while they take over the Olympics and sell limited edition sneakers. That’s how we end up with the oxymoronic made in China MAGA hat, and how one boat clogging up the Suez canal blocked $9bn worth of stuff every day it was stuck there.

The global new-stuff machine is set up around volume: any technological innovation that makes things more efficient gets used to make even more stuff (aka Jevon’s paradox). But the world only needs so many washing machines and iPhones and printers, and so once companies get to a certain point they have to make previous customers buy new versions of the same thing. That’s how we ended up with such a fast trend cycle in fashion, but also unrepairable washing machines that break as soon as the warranty expires. Then there’s parts pairing, where tech companies make repairing stuff cost a fortune by locking components so that you can only use an authorized dealer (aka the guys who sold you the thing in the first place) to fix your stuff when it breaks. Apple is notorious for this.

This is the world Trump’s tariffs have set fire to. He can’t make the world’s supply chains come back to the US, no matter how much he shouts about it. The ecosystem of workers, factories, equipment and suppliers that made stuff in the the rich world has migrated overseas, and you can’t expect that they’ll magically flourish again once you put a paywall around the American economy (just look at what happened when Louis Vuitton tried to open a handbag factory in Texas). There’s also the fact that young people don’t want to work in manufacturing anymore. People want flexibility from work now, and factory work is anything but: when you’re working on the shop floor, shifts are timed and holiday dates are fixed so that the production line can keep moving.

When disaster happens there’s always a certain kind of temptation for the talking heads and columnists to whip up a spicy take, speculating that maybe this is going to be a good thing in the long run. Maybe Trump tearing up the global economic playbook is going to make the good jobs come back and everyone will be more sustainable? IDK, nothing makes sense in the upside down world of Trump’s America. Speculating about the potential upside to all of this reminds me of when trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort predicted a “quarantine of consumption” when covid first broke out (the exact opposite happened).

There is somewhat of a silver lining here, in that the tariff rollercoaster brings to the surface just how weird and shitty contemporary consumerism is: all these companies who don’t make their own stuff, who don’t even want to make good stuff, trying to growth-hack their way to the top with marketing gimmicks. And if one guy — or a stranded ship — can throw the whole system in turmoil, then rewiring the system starts to make business sense too. Plus, right-to-repair laws are coming into effect across the US and EU.

In Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World, Jason Hickel outlines a more common sense approach to economics. He tackles a big misconception thrown at climate campaigners: that they want everyone to give up owning things and live in tree houses, or something. Rather, the idea is that very large parts of modern economies are devoted to really dumb things and that we’d be a lot happier if we spent our energy on education, caring for each other, doing therapy and creating art than working in logistics and spending all our money on stuff that falls apart as soon as the warranty’s over. Some concrete steps in the Hickel book: outlaw planned obsolescence, shift society from owning many products to just paying to use them (say, power drills and cars) and drastically slash the cost of education, housing and healthcare. Again, this is where the easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism thing comes up: it sounds like utopian nonsense, until you remember that present-day consumerism would have sounded like a fantasy to anyone living in the 60s and 70s, back when rich countries still made things. Again, I don’t want to get all every cloud… about the situation the world is in, but turmoil creates space for new opportunities. Volatility is just the way things are now. And the rest of us, more with less seems like a good mantra to carry with us into the chaos.

Here’s some more of my recent work. If you find my writing meaningful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Silicon Valley killed my dream job

Capitalism’s toxic positivity

Destroy your t-shirts

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So that’ll be the third “once in a lifetime” financial crisis since I turned 18. What a time to be alive.

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I just got back from speaking at a project management conference in Barcelona run by the Project Management Institute (thanks for having me guys). I hosted a panel looking at the challenges of implementing sustainability in large businesses. It was a nice reminder that there are many people working in the depths of capitalism trying to make this thing 0.0000001% better. It’s not the whole answer, but good things can happen there.

Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff war is going to do very bad things to lots of industries, but fashion is in a particularly hard place (Business of Fashion is already calling it a “covid level” crisis). I’m thinking a lot about all the indie brands and multi-brand retailers out there. They’re lucky just to keep going from one season to the next, and now they’ve got huge and completely unnecessary costs eating into their margins, which were never great to begin with, plus the very real prospect of everyone buying much less stuff because the economy has gone to shit. Oh, and there’s no clear path forward because the global economy is at the mercy of a guy who makes zero sense. Here’s a quote from Feed Me that really brings that last part home:

“You could make short term decisions that eviscerate your business over the long haul. Or, you could be slow to react and cripple your business.”

Last week’s newsletter on the more-with-less era feels even more relevant now that we’re staring another economic meltdown in the face. This is an idea I’m going to be coming back to a lot: how we can get more from life in an era that’s defined by contractions, slumps and crises.

This week we’ve got:

→ More new models for work

→ Miniature life hacks

→ Some of my recent(ish) work in SSENSE

→ The Substack middle class

→ Searching for my people on Bluesky

But first:

The enviable charm of being ordinary

While we’re on the whole more-with-less thing, Madeleine Holden has a very good (and very funny) investigation into ordinariness: “What’s so bad about being mid?”

Being average is, by definition, not bad. But the most brutal burn across the ages is to tell someone they’re in the middle. Today, the preferred insult is “mid”. In the 2010s, what really stung about the “mediocre white men” slogan was, of course, the “mediocre” part. Other cousins in recent years include “basic”, “normie”, “NPC”, “local”—how embarrassing, to live in the ordinary town where you live! To be similar to other people! Look at you, you adequate dork, in the middle of an OK mass.

Maddie was one of the best/funniest writers I worked with back in the Highsnob days. I am very happy that now she’s now on Substack! You can expect very, very good prose — here’s another piece about the Chappell Roan x parenting discourse and how it connects to the time she stopped someone from getting sent to prison.

Miniature life hacks

I’ve always got time for David Cain and his life hack content (Maddie in fact introduced his work to me a million years ago, and I used one of his pieces as the basis for the “shopping is a relationship” idea in the last chapter in my book). This one’s about the hidden potential of doing a bit more of whatever you’re doing.

The only way to know whether your usual standards are serving you is to surpass them on a regular basis and see what happens. And each of us has our accustomed standards for everything: how much sleep is enough, how much screen time is okay, how much effort at work to put in, how proactive to be in your friendships, how much or little to eat, how much news to consume, how disciplined to be with household order and cleanliness.

We’ve all settled somewhere on each of these questions and countless others, probably out of inertia rather than principle. It’s unlikely our standards have randomly landed in their respective sweet spots. For each standard you’ve adopted, there might be a significant spike in the payoff not too far beyond it. (Or perhaps you’re doing too much for little gain.)

The Substack middle class

Chris Gayomali, the writer and massage enthusiast behind Heavies (another newsletter you should follow) has gone back into the full-time world as deputy editor of SSENSE (before going freelance he was editing GQ).

I slid into Chris’s DMs to find out what was behind the move, and here’s what I got back:

“The luxury of a more permanent gig is that I can still freelance but can take interesting assignments that are more creatively rewarding but might not pay that great…I see it all fitting into a three piece pie chart with the main steady gig, rewarding freelance work, and of course continuing to write HEAVIES, which is still growing and might one day be the big pie slice.”

There’s an interesting story here about the middle class of the creator economy. Most of the big success stories out there are writers who are either filling a lucrative niche in the business world (like Lenny Rachitsky) or mega-famous ones who brought their followings over from legacy media (think Paul Krugman).

There’s a growing second wave of culture writers who have built newsletter businesses from scratch — Emily Sundberg and Feed Me is a big one, and in fashion there’s Magasin and Blackbird Spyplane. But for every star creator with a gazillion followers there will be many more talented people juggling various jobs and paying the bills with a patchwork of revenue streams.

Fashion’s soundtrack guy

I forgot to post this when it went online a month or so ago: I interviewed Michel Gaubert, fashion’s biggest soundtrack guy, for SSENSE. He’s had a pretty wild life — he partied with Karl Lagerfeld in the 80s, and soundtracked his shows and Chanel’s since then. Monsieur Gaubert was very nice and even asked me if I’m into Shazam (I am). Despite all the ~criticism~ I do here I still really enjoy dipping back into the fashion industry whenever there’s a place for me. Read the full piece here, and thanks to Chris Gayomali (who I literally just mentioned) for commissioning me!

New models for work

As I wrote in last week’s newsletter, media is a helpful place to look for new ways of navigating a “disrupted” job market. The industry has been dealing with Big Tech’s bullshit for so long that new models are starting to emerge from the ashes of all the bankrupt lifestyle blogs.

Eighteen former workers at Deadspin started Defector, a sports and culture blog that’s run as a worker-owned cooperative. 404 Media is doing the same in tech — its revenue is evenly split between its four founders, who decide each month how much they’ll pay themselves (everyone gets the same amount). The collective model is catching on in media. A crew of ex-Pitchfork writers started Hearing Things and for local news in New York there’s Hellgate.

These sorts of companies are inevitably going to be small but it’s an interesting way of looking at the situation: if you’ve spent 10+ years working in an industry that’s been wiped out by tech, why not leverage all the technology out there to make something of your own?

Sure, there’s probably no offices, no first class flights on the company card and no aspirations of becoming the next Vogue. You can forget living Graydon Carter’s lifestyle, and you’re probably not going to stay at the Chateau Marmont for a week while on writing assignment.

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But media is also an interesting place to look for positive stories. Because the industry is in its second decade of disruption (I hate that word so much), there’s been time for people to figure out some answers in the rubble of bankrupted newspapers and digital lifestyle mags (RIP Vice). The publishers that are still going are getting leaner, and they’re competing not just with each other, but with newsletters and podcasts and Youtube channels, who are either run by individuals or tiny teams of a few people. Media analyst Brian Morrissey calls this the more with less era. As in, success is about building a relatively niche business that’s nicely profitable, rather than trying to be the next GQ.

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This tracks with what some of my former Highsnob colleagues have been up to. Robbie Russell started his own project connecting musicians with brands (Say Less), Emily Dreesen is at a boutique strategy and research consultancy (Matter) and George Hammond joined a creative agency in the culinary arts (Sips). These businesses are all built around one person, or a handful of them, who then bring in freelancers to plug in the gaps on specific projects (I often work in this way with Jeppe Dalsgaard, aka Large Office, a digital marketing micro-agency).

And of course, there’s the creator economy. The newsletter writers and podcasters and Youtubers and Tik Tokers and Twitch streamers are solo-preneurs who build careers out of their own niches (sometimes those niches are very, very big — MrBeast has 380m subscribers on Youtube).

During the first Substack gold rush, a bunch of already-successful journalists started their own newsletters and almost instantly made a lot more than they did at their old job (Paul Krugman ditched the NYT a few months ago but already has the purple tick on Substack, meaning he has at least 10,000 monthly paid subs, meaning he’s making over half a million on here already, lol). But starting on a platform from scratch is a very different story, and a bit of a chicken-or-egg dilemma. You have to work on it a long time before it’s worth your time…if it ever will be. There is only so much space for paid newsletters and famous podcasters. A lot of aspiring creators will stay stuck in the middle class, grinding away on work that is neither stable nor lucrative.

There are no easy answers here, but people are starting to find a way through the mess that Silicon Valley dumps on us every time they invent a new app (we’re all downstream from something). And that often means doing something much smaller than the companies our parents worked at. It’s not guaranteed that these projects will scale in the same way that your pay would climb after a few decades in an office, but for a lot of people it’s the best option available to them.

Even working for the tech overlords isn’t safe. Just Google and Facebook laid off over 22,000 people in 2023, and last year the US tech sector as a whole cut almost 100,000 jobs. We can expect that the path ahead will be more about taking a step forward and seeing where it leads, rather than clocking in at the same place for 30 years straight (Risha Tobaccowala has some helpful insights on how to make the most of full time work, if that’s where you’re at).

And then there’s specialization. We’re supposed to become specialists at work…but what happens if a chatbot learns to do your specialization? Just another one of the impossible Catch 22s young people are supposed to figure out (how much disruption is one generation supposed to endure? IDK but I want it to stop.)

But at least we’re still young-ish. A recent story in the New York Times, appropriately titled The Gen X Career Meltdown, profiled a group of 40- and 50-somethings whose careers were wiped out just as they reached their peak earning years. If you’ve spent your entire life working in TV and the industry slips into a death spiral…what do you do? Those interviewed in the piece have sold houses, downsized their lives and their ambitions, or just switched lanes entirely. One former magazine editor retrained as a therapist, probably the safest career you can get into these days thanks to, well, everything.

The reverse of that is true too: Gen Z is having a hard time even getting into the job market. Here’s Scott Galloway’s newsletter:

“Entry-level jobs that once served as stepping stones are vanishing. In fields like law, finance, and tech, tasks traditionally assigned to junior staff are either being fully automated or completed more quickly by fewer workers using AI.”

We are living through an era that’s more about contraction than growth. Work, quality of life, democracy, money: none of it is easy anymore (thanks neoliberalism). The “my parents in their 30s” meme is a classic because it is so painfully true.

Brian Morrissey’s more with less idea is essential if you’re working in media, but let’s just imagine for a moment that we applied it to life more generally. A tough economy means getting smart about money. Brutal property prices means being realistic about where you can afford to live. The erosion of democracy and the climate means accepting that many things in life are simply out of our control.

And a turbulent job market means not getting too emotionally invested in your idea of a dream job. Maybe it means working a regular 9-to-5 where you don’t get to travel business class and stay in fancy hotels. Letting go of things is sad, but healthy! We’ve heard enough anecdotes from people on their deathbeds that work isn’t the only thing that matters.

The silver-ish lining to all of this contraction and disruption and disappointment and glaring, senseless unfairness is that we know more than ever that the real sources of human happiness are much easier than making a $500m exit or becoming Youtube famous. It’s about surrounding yourself with awesome people, doing work that feels meaningful, and having a healthy relationship with yourself. Quoting ancient philosophy is so cringe at this point but sorry, can’t resist — here’s some Socrates: “he is the richest who is content with the least”.

Welcome back to Ordinary Delusions, a newsletter searching for answers in the sea of bullshit that is 2025.

This week we’ve got:

→ The hustle bros and their $200 facial tape

→ Beard transplants, which are apparently a thing now?

→ My work in GQ and SSENSE

→ The promising seeds growing in the shit of Trump’s America

→ The rich Americans buying an exit plan

Ashton Hall, one of those fitness influencer / hustle bro / personal trainer / life coach guys, has broken the internet with videos of his insane morning routines. He gets up at 3:55am, removes his $200 facial tape, does some Patrick Bateman skincare, accidentally smashes a fancy bottle of sparkling water after doing some push ups (he has someone to pick the shards up for him), uses another bottle to give his face an ice bath, dumps his essentials into a Goyard duffle before hitting the gym. At 9am he hops on a work call and tells someone they need to get at least 10,000 of…something. He cruises around in a G Wagon and has a lot of muscles and a penthouse. And someone to hand him his clothes.

Ryan over at Garbage Day points out that this unhinged day-in-the-life content mixes together a bunch of Tik Tok trends (apparently rubbing a banana peel on your face is a thing on there). Which probably explains why it’s gone so viral: according to the New York Times Hall has racked up nearly a billion views on them. Guys with “alpha male” in their usernames are calling him king.

There’s tons of this kind of stuff online and it says a lot about where men are at in this era.

Controlling behaviors are driven by “high levels of internal anxiety” according to Psychology Today. “The impulse to control serves a protective function against feelings of vulnerability, which controlling people associate with powerlessness.” And boy is there a lot to feel anxious and vulnerable about these days! There’s no good jobs anymore, houses are unaffordable, rent is a rip off and going to university will put you in debt for most of your life.

Facing a world that is senselessly unfair, the hustle bros turn inward and control. Life is a spreadsheet and all the numbers need to go up. Inner calm is a productivity hack, not something that’s just, you know, human. Optimize your sleep patterns by viewing sunlight at the correct time of day. More from Psychology Today: “people with controlling tendencies are frequently successful in their careers. They manage people, meet goals, and are relentlessly goal-driven.”

When everything is within your control, then anyone who can’t hustle their way to the top is a loser. Lots of these guys sell supplements. Ashton Hall’s training plans start at $3300. The platinum program is $8250.

You can see how this mentality easily leads to Trump and Elon, two mega famous narcissist gazillionaires. We can assume that anyone who goes to lengths this extreme to optimize their life and chase success is also kinda miserable. Do any of these guys have friends?

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Speaking of weird shit men are doing, apparently beard transplants are a thing now.

GQ interviewed me about the #NoBuy trend that’s been brewing on Tik Tok recently. The clue is in the name: the kids want to quit shopping. Tik Tokers are giving out tips for reusing everything in their wardrobe (awesome), the categories they’re avoiding (clothes, but also beauty products, fragrances and tech) as well as budgeting advice for what to do with the money you’re not spending on clothes (also awesome).

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Welcome back to Ordinary Delusions, a newsletter searching for answers in the shit show of late capitalism. I rebranded a few weeks back and am exploring new directions in my work. Read more about that here.

I am opening this new chapter with three stories about how technology and the economy shaped my 20s and 30s. The first one was about how Big Tech killed my dream job. Then I wrote about the economic forces that shaped my work in sustainable fashion. This week, it’s the decision I made to leave the UK for Germany. If you find my writing meaningful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Britain sold its water and now its rivers are flowing with shit, wet wipes and sanitary towels. Most of the country’s water industry is owned by foreign investment funds like the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Just one company, Southern Water, poured billions of liters of raw sewage into the sea to cut costs. Instead of investing in Britain’s water supply, the companies running it all have paid shareholders billions in dividends.

It’s a gross example of what neoliberalism has done to the UK.

In the UK, generations of neoliberal politicians have told us that the best way to push society forward is to cut as much money and regulation out of public life as possible, and to turn services like water into profit-making businesses. The idea was that all these businesses competing against each other will naturally lead to the best outcome for everyone. What really happened was that public services got worse and life got more expensive, but the people at the top of it all made tons of money.

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Neoliberalism really got going in the 80s under Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. Most of the english-speaking world followed, and many poor countries in the global south got it forced down their throats. It has had a terrible impact on quality of life in every country it’s touched. The American healthcare scam is the best example of how neoliberal politics ruins lives.

In the UK, you’re lucky if you don’t spend half your salary on rent. Independent businesses struggle as corporations take over entire industries. Students are drowning in debt by the time they leave university. Tower blocks are covered in material so dangerous that construction industry analysts describe it as solid gasoline. And as life got more expensive across the country, working class people have been systematically shut out of creative industries.

Neoliberalism’s gradual degradation of British life has been going on my whole life, and it’s only getting worse. My mum paid £60 a year to go to university, and bought a flat in London when she inherited some money from her uncle in the 80s. Its value has gone up 1,000% since then. You’ll find neoliberal fingerprints all over the climate emergency, too. It’s all connected.

It was against this backdrop that I moved to Berlin in 2014. I was interning at Carhartt at the time and living at my mum’s in London, but it was already clear that a career in fashion was going to be really tough in the UK. Plus, it was hard making new friends and it took hours to get anywhere.

Life in Berlin is just…easier. Rent control creates stability. It’s not like people are chatting non-stop about how much they love housing regulations, but it has an undeniable impact on your peace of mind when you know your rent isn’t going to get doubled next year for no reason. It’s harder for companies to fire people, and anyone with a full-time job has their healthcare paid for them. Life is slower here. Making friends is easy because people have the time for it. Your social life does not need to be non-stop networking. Everywhere feels like a neighborhood because there are way less chains (there’s 246 Starbucks in London, in Berlin it’s 18). And it’s easy to imagine settling down when there’s free kindergarten, universal healthcare and university costs a few hundred euros a semester. It’s a place to be human.

Regulation and welfare spending are not the kind of things you dream of growing up, but they shape our lives in so many ways. They can either open you up to new opportunities — because you have the safety net, the financial cushion, the headspace to take risks. Or they can close them off, as ordinary people can’t afford to do anything but chase money and climb the corporate ladder. If your dream job requires you to intern for years with no pay, then the only way you’ll make it is by being on the right side of the intergenerational wealth gap.

I still go back to London a few times a year. The change in mentality is stark. DM someone or bump into them on the street and it’s all let’s catch up but when it comes to actually making plans, nobody has the time for anything. People are doing work calls on the bus while everyone else stares into their phones. Life is a hustle. It feels like part of the atmosphere, but really it's down to the decisions made by generations of politicians who decided that corporate profit and economic growth are more important than human wellbeing.

A big part of my career path has been shaped by the fact that I do not want to live my life like this. When I quit my old job at Highsnobiety, there was basically nowhere else in the city I wanted to work. I could have gone somewhere else — like London or New York — but I didn’t want to walk away from the peace of mind I have here. So that meant going freelance, which led me to writing my book. And writing my book led me to writing this newsletter. But fashion is still a very IRL industry, and when you’re far away from it all, people kinda just forget you exist. So I’ve pivoted my work into other topics. It all comes back to the rent control, the healthcare, the rivers that aren’t flowing with shit.

I’ve been here almost eleven years, and I’m a dual national now, with a German passport and everything. IDK how I feel about living here forever, there are many drawbacks to life in Berlin and aspects of the country that are toxic in their own ways. Expat life has its own downsides that regular Germans never experience. I really miss my old life sometimes. I don’t really feel like I “finished” the fashion chapter of my life. I didn’t give it up, Silicon Valley killed it. Sometimes we have to leave unfulfilled parts of ourselves in the past.

Over in the US, Trump is tearing neoliberalism apart and trying to replace it with something even worse. Most of the democrats, the quote-unquote good guys, are still on neoliberal autopilot, convinced that all the health insurance scams and millions of homeless people are the best life can be and that anyone who doesn’t shill for corporate lobbyists is living in a dream world.

One of the great ironies of the 21st century is that many of the countries standing at the top of the capitalist food chain are tearing themselves apart. Generations of politicians told us that economic growth would make everything better, that slowly but surely we’d fix all the world’s problems, one quarterly report at a time. Instead of the promised land, the neoliberals led us into fascism, climate meltdown and student debt. Maybe we need to stop listening to them.

Welcome to Ordinary Delusions, a newsletter searching for answers in the chaos of late capitalism. I rebranded a few weeks back and am exploring new directions in my work. Read more about that here. If you find my writing meaningful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I am opening this new chapter with three stories about how technology and the economy shaped my 20s and 30s. Last week’s newsletter looked at how Big Tech killed my dream job. Next week, I’ll be writing about how I ended up living in Berlin for over a decade.

I was in Paris for fashion week when the Brexit vote happened. The morning after the news broke I was sitting at the Margiela show and cried (or almost cried, IDK it was a long time ago). Luke Leitch, one of Vogue’s menswear correspondents, mentioned something about the miserable atmosphere in his review and I assumed he was referencing me because I was sitting across the runway from him. This was June 2016, a few months before the first Trump election.

Brexit was the moment the world began turning in a different direction. After this, it became clear that all the other bad things were going to get worse too. I shouldn’t have been so surprised about Brexit, though. Before getting into fashion I’d spent seven years in Sheffield, an industrial city in the north of England that sunk into poverty after the great hollowing out of British manufacturing in the 90s and 00s (watch The Full Monty if you haven’t already). It was very clear even then that there were two Britains, and that I’d grown up in the one where life was easy.

Brexit turned up the volume on all the world’s miseries and in the years after it happened I found it harder and harder to ignore them. The homelessness in London and the refugees on the streets of Paris started to really etch themselves into the back of my mind. Around the same time, sustainability started to become a bigger topic in fashion. I got really into it. I was tired of the non-stop consumerism and this seemed like a bridge between that and the political backdrop of our times. It wasn’t the only reason I chose to leave my Highsnob job but it was definitely part of it (Big Tech had made my line of work kinda pointless by then anyway). I’ve always loved clothes but I was exploring a lot more in my life at that point, meditating every morning and binge-reading Alain De Botton.

This was 2017, 2018. Sustainability was not a big thing in menswear but there were a few smaller brands who were trying to figure it out. GmbH was doing some really nice jeans with recycled cotton, Alyx had a whole line of recycled tees, and Noah used their platform to talk about what was going on in the world more broadly. They were cool brands, and they cared!

I did not have much of a plan, but I figured I could piece together a career as a brand strategist, but working specifically in sustainability. I’d help brands navigate the ins and outs of sustainability while calling attention to the big issues on Instagram (I was posting a lot on Instagram under my old account future__dust back then). Most sustainability professionals work in the supply chain, which I definitely could not do, but there was a big need for someone to make the issue less wonky and more relatable. Nobody else was doing this and it seemed like the kind of thing the industry needed. The first Trump presidency had woken people up and I could see that many of my peers in the industry were thinking more critically about their role in the world. I had vague ideas of writing a book at some point but I never imagined it’d make money.

I didn’t think much more into it but I’d just turned 30, was happy with not much and living in a cheap apartment with rent control, so I figured I’d roll the dice on this idea and see where it went. It didn’t seem like I had any better options and I knew from my old job that there was almost no money in freelance writing.

I was not expecting corporate apparel manufacturers to save the planet, it was pretty clear already that a lot of the big companies were bullshitting and that sustainability wasn’t something that consumers were willing to pay for, but there was a general feeling that the industry would be a much better place if it took its impact on the planet seriously. It seemed like enough brands in the industry wanted to be sustainable, even if they weren’t going fast enough.

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This is not how it turned out.

The first thing people need to understand about fashion is that it is just not a good way of making money. It costs a lot of money to produce a collection, you have to guess what people will want six months in advance, and there are so, so, so many brands out there that there is a very real chance that the world will simply forget you exist. The shitty economics of clothing production mean that the industry is highly consolidated, especially at the cheap and expensive ends. If you’re not a giant corporation, you’re gonna have a really hard time.

And the middle of the industry, where most of the smaller brands are, is squeezed the hardest. They can’t keep up with the fast fashion below them, and the luxury brands above them have almost unlimited marketing power. The brands I was expecting to be most open to sustainability have the least resources to actually do it. (Mara Hoffman had built probably the most convincing concept of a sustainable fashion brand: a deliberately small collection made with great fabrics that repeat season after season. Her brand closed down last year.)

The second thing is that brands don’t make their own clothes, they just pay factories to make them for them. But the biggest impact of the fashion industry is making clothes. If brands wanted to fuck up the planet less, they would need to be more responsible for how all their stuff is made. But if you are a giant corporate apparel maker there is basically zero incentive to do this. It costs more money, for a start, but it also creates legal liability. If you make your own clothes, then it’s your fault if the people making them aren’t paid properly or if chemicals are being dumped into a river. Big brands do not want this level of accountability. This is the most important thing to understand about fashion and its massive impact on the planet.

This is the fundamental tension at the heart of sustainability in fashion, and many other industries as well. It is an attempt to reconcile the damages of capitalism by working inside a system that has very few incentives to change. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to do good work within the industry — it definitely is. But you will always be fighting against the fact that the biggest and most powerful companies make too much money from things staying the same.

The geopolitical situation in the past few years has pushed sustainability even further down the agenda, even as the impacts of the climate emergency become more and more severe. When Putin invaded Ukraine, he set off a chain reaction of inflation that’s had a knock-on effect across the industry as teams get downsized and brands go under. And because sustainability doesn’t make a brand more profitable, it’s one of the first things to get cut.

And now Trump wants to kill “woke” capitalism. We can assume that Big Fashion has even less enthusiasm for sustainability now that the second Trump presidency is going after diversity initiatives and shutting down environmental programs across the board. It is a really, really tough time for people working in fashion, and I feel for the sustainability professionals especially.

The real fight for a better fashion industry is not about corporate sustainability anyway. It’s political. And it’s part of a much bigger picture. The reason it’s so difficult for fashion to clean up its own act — those disconnected supply chains — is the same reason places like Sheffield and Detroit have sunk so deep into poverty and social exclusion. Decades of neoliberal politics have abandoned millions of people in the rich world while giant corporations trash the planet and exploit workers on the other side of the globe. This is a big factor in the resurgence of right-wing politics. It’s all connected.

This is one reason I’ve decided to take my work into new directions (more about that decision here). My writing is at its strongest when it’s connecting elements of our everyday lives (like fashion!) into a much bigger story of why the world is the way it is. I am not the kind of writer who wants to go deeper and deeper into one issue, and there are already some excellent reporters on the front lines of the sustainable fashion conversation (like Sarah Kent at Business of Fashion, Bella Webb and Emily Chan at Vogue, and Brooke Roberts-Islam at Forbes).

When I left my old job, I wanted to do something that felt meaningful. This is where I ended up. I did not have a master plan, or a five-year strategy. I still don’t have one, beyond just writing more here, doing more books and maybe at some point a podcast. This is something I went into last week — you cannot have it all figured out in advance because on this timeline, everything is constantly changing. The big Substack / podcast / Youtube success stories could not plan it all out. There are many things we can do to push our lives forward, but we are all at the mercy of forces much bigger than our own imagination and abilities. My Highsnobiety job got killed by Big Tech. My ambitions in sustainability collided with corporate power and inflation. We’re all downstream from something.

This will be a storyline I’ll be returning to again and again — how the political and economic chaos of our times impacts ordinary lives, and what we can do to thrive in spite of them.

Welcome to Ordinary Delusions, a newsletter searching for answers in the chaos of late capitalism. I rebranded last week (just my name in caps lock was kinda boring, I like this much more). I will still be writing about fashion, but I am exploring new directions as well. Read more about my new direction here. If you find my work meaningful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I am opening this new chapter with a trilogy of stories (or a triptych?) about how disruption in technology and the economy shaped my 20s and 30s.

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The word “downstream” has been knocking about in my mind for the past few weeks. It’s business/corporate lingo that means a lack of power compared to something else. We are downstream from the economy, downstream from Big Tech, downstream from the laws of physics. We can’t stop the climate emergency or democratic erosion or the insane billionaires, but we can shape our reaction to them, and maybe make the world 0.000000001% better while we do it.

There is a lot of talk about AI right now, and how LLMs and data centers and Sam Altman are going to make us all unemployed — or how they’re not. Is AI going to make us slaves to Silicon Valley like in the Matrix, but with Marc Andreesen as Agent Smith? Will it make everyone more efficient, so that we all get universal basic income and work two days a week? Or is it just going to make it easier to find recipes? Clearly, none of us have an answer to that, but what I want to do here is show how a previous technical revolution upended my own career path a few years after I started on it, and how it’s left me better prepared for the future. Writing this makes me feel old, but it wasn’t even ten years ago. (How much disruption does one person have to live through? IDK, I get tired just thinking about it.)

2014 was a good year for streetwear, and 25 was a good age to be working at Highsnobiety. Supreme was just a handful of stores with a small army of kids queuing outside, Raf Simons had just done his first Sterling Ruby collaboration, Long Live A$AP had just dropped and Virgil Abloh was just about to debut Off-White. Highsnob was just a little blog back then, 10 or so people plugging away in a tiny office in Berlin with a few freelancers scattered across the globe.

On my first day in the office I was posting about motorbikes and one of those computer generated architecture concepts of a glass house nestled in the side of a cliff. Probably a bunch of Nikes as well. I was writing about stuff I hardly knew about, but it looked cool on the homepage. From then on, I would bang out 10+ posts a day. I was blogging.

As streetwear got bigger, Highsnobiety got bigger. More money was coming in from ads and sponsored content, and marketing execs were realizing that this streetwear thing was going to be huge. I ended up being the guy in charge of the fashion content. I went to a lot of fashion weeks. It was awesome.

I was traveling non-stop, meeting interesting people all the time, plugged into one of the world’s biggest cultural spaces and seeing how it all worked. And in the office, I felt like a valuable part of a company with a bright future ahead of it. I loved writing and I was good at it. My life was a total blur at the time, but I remember a few distinct moments of clarity where I was like, this is my dream job. I wasn’t making a lot but I was in my 20s, happy with not much, and figured my salary would grow much bigger down the line.

I assumed I’d follow in the footsteps of the previous generation of fashion editors. I’d make good money working at a company where the business model stayed the same for decades. I’d go to lots of parties and hang out with interesting people. I wasn’t expecting Conde Nast levels of luxury, with a driver and a clothing allowance, but it seemed like the future was bright.

Like all digital publishers, Highsnobiety made money from people looking at its website. The Nikes and Adidases of the world need to reach young men with money to spend, and putting ads on highsnobiety.com was a very good way of doing that. My job was to make sure the fashion content was really good, so that guys would keep coming back to the website, while also making sure Highsnob was the kind of space brands would want to advertise on. The content was the product.

This was the late 2010s, what media people now call the .com era. Publishers made money from traffic going to their websites. Social media was not the center of the information space at this point. Influencers were an annoying trend, not a built-in feature of capitalism. But Facebook was a goldmine. The early news feed gave a lot of weight to online publishers, and we’d get consistently crazy numbers for anything with Kanye/Supreme/Rocky/Kim Kardashian.

That started to change once Trump got elected the first time around and Facebook got the blame for platforming Russian misinformation. Facebook responded to all the heat it was getting by pivoting the algorithm away from external sites and prioritizing users’ own content. Traffic fell off a cliff for the entire media industry.

Meanwhile, social platforms were slowly creeping into everyday life, and before long they’d taken over the information space. The audience got their news from Facebook or Twitter or Instagram rather than typing a url into a browser or pulling up a bookmark. And the platforms built advertising technology so that brands could reach audiences themselves without having to buy ads on somebody else’s homepage.

The smart publishers quickly pivoted into doing agency work, and Highsnob did a very good job of it. They went from serving ads to making ads. If you were a major brand wanting to get young men interested in what you do, then you could go straight to Highsnob for the strategy, creative, research, events, everything.

Content wasn’t how media companies made money anymore. And my job was content.

The editorial team was slowly sidelined, under increasing pressure to do more with less while the agency made all the money. This was not a happy time. There were lots of Slack arguments and passive aggressive meetings and unanswered questions lingering over everyone’s heads. After a while, it became pretty clear that content was not the future anymore. The business model had changed. I left.

I didn’t go to another magazine because I knew from talking to editors at other titles that everyone was going through the same shit. Nobody else felt like they had a bright future ahead of them either. The writing was on the wall by that point. Silicon Valley had changed how the world got its information. The era of .com content was over, and it wasn’t going to come back.

Honestly, the transition into freelancing was kinda like starting again. I crashed through it blindly, and ended up making some pretty significant mistakes. And this is where all this ancient history becomes relevant again, because when the next round of career-changing disruption comes, I’m not going into it blind.

Learn from my mistakes:

— I was telling myself stories. I was living in a fantasy world where everything was going to stay good forever. I didn’t seriously consider that something bad might happen to my line of work like, you know, Big Tech destroying its value.

— I did not lean into any of the side hustles that I could have gotten into. Online editorial teaches you a ton of stuff that you can turn into something valuable later down the line. I saw my job as a steady path where success was laid out in front of me, rather than a place to learn skills I might need to take somewhere else. I hardly posted on Instagram, let alone got into consulting or speaking.

— I did not understand the value of having my own platform. When you work on the front end of media, there is an expectation that you are going to be part of the conversation. That doesn’t mean you need to become a micro-celebrity, but there is a level of commitment that you need to give to social media if you want your work to resonate. The same goes for networking in other jobs. You need people to know you exist. I didn’t take this seriously until I was freelancing, and I wish I’d started earlier.

— Probably the biggest one: I was not keeping track of what was going on in my industry more broadly. I knew the situation in online media was bad, but I was so caught up in my own experience of it all that I did not see that there were also opportunities ahead of me. The bigger picture is so, so important, because that’s what’s going to change your life, for good and for bad. We’re all downstream of something.

This all comes down to being more responsible for yourself, which is a pretty unimaginative piece of advice to give when you’re 36, but also, it’s the truth. Something freelance life teaches you very quickly is that the biggest obstacle between success and failure is yourself. If you do not keep your mind open to new opportunities, if you do not have the confidence to try new things, you’ll sleepwalk into a dead end. If you do not have the discipline to show up for yourself every day, you’ll drift into a slump and not realize until you’re already there.

Brian Morrissey likes to say that media is “an execution business” — it’s about getting shit done and rolling with the punches much more than it is about having the perfect strategy. Another way of putting it is “fail fast, fail often”.

These are lessons that freelance life teaches you, often brutally. And media was one of the first casualties of the social media age. But the world is in the midst of so much disruption (aka the polycrisis) that these are lessons that I expect people in all lines of work will soon have to learn.

As a survivor of the media apocalypse of the late 2010s, it’s easy to hate Google and Facebook for eating up the ad dollars that used to pay my bills, but even those guys aren’t safe. There is a very real possibility that AI chat bots make search engines and social platforms irrelevant. Instead of hitting up Instagram to see what’s up or typing a question into Google, you could just get your AI to update you instead.

The same goes for the businesses parallel to fashion media: the creative agencies, the multi-brand retailers, the brands themselves. They are all under pressures of their own, forced into new directions by the disruption around them.

I still miss the Highsnobiety days. It was a really special time for me, but also for fashion. There was so much energy in streetwear that it felt like I was really in the middle of something. And I loved being part of a team. I’m sad that it’s gone, and I never really allowed myself to feel it because my life got so chaotic in the years afterwards. But I could not get that part of my life back if I tried. The job I had barely even exists anymore and fashion itself is in a really weird place.

I have decided that building a voice around the things I think are important is the best way ahead for me. I do not consider myself a Substack writer or a book writer or a content creator. My message is the product. I do not want to marry myself to a single way of working, let alone a specific platform. I do not feel great about spending decades in front of a laptop, but if I’m very good at anything, it’s writing.

We are all going to have to internalize the brutal truth that there are very few steady career paths ahead of us, that almost any industry you can make your money in is vulnerable to changes in technology / politics / the economy. Can you think of a more stable career than accounting? Well, what happens when you can get a chat bot to file your tax return for you?

This will be a storyline I’ll be returning to again and again — how these huge changes in the world shape our lives, and how we can thrive in spite of them.

Next week I’ll be looking at how my experience in sustainable fashion has been impacted by the global economy. The week after, I’m going to talk about how the political situation in the UK shaped my life in Berlin.

I knew nothing about building a newsletter business, and assumed it would work out just fine if I continued the themes and format from my first book. So I started writing opinion pieces with a big focus on sustainability and greenwashing in the fashion industry. I didn’t even give the newsletter a name. It was an experiment — would people pay for my writing, would I like doing it, could it be an actual source of income for me? The answer to all of those was yes, and it wasn’t long before I was able to pay my rent and health insurance with my writing here.

But I started getting tired of making the same points over and over again (reform the fashion industry, buy less and buy better, etc. etc.). I’m a pretty wide reader, and that’s a big reason my book worked so well. I threw a lot of stuff into the mix — insights from therapy, a quote from Karl Marx and a little anecdote about my favorite hardcore band. I am interested in much more than just fashion, and as time goes on and the industry continues to stagnate, it’s getting harder to imagine a future where that’s all I do.

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So it’s time for new way of working, with a new direction and a much bigger vision for the future of my work here. I’m rebranding.

From today, this newsletter is called Ordinary Delusions.

It’s about the huge, unspoken paradoxes that lie in the background of life in the 21st century. We all know they’re there, but we rarely talk about them or try to understand them.

—> Modern life feels empty and overwhelming at the same time

—> We know shopping is bad…but we still like it

—> Work sucks but we all want to be someone

—> The future looks so dark but what are we really doing about it

These contradictions will be at the heart of my writing. Ordinary Delusions is a roadmap for how we can flourish in a world where quality of life, prosperity, mental health and hope for a better future are all under threat.

Fashion will still be a big part of my work! It’s impossible to ignore the industry as a force in culture, and like every other corner of society, it’s going through a lot. There’s the growing conflict between Trumpism and more ethical ways of doing business, the collapse of multi-brand retail, insane luxury prices, unbearable pressure on independent brands, low wages and the industry’s continued failure to account for its impact on the planet. And despite it all, there are still so many brands out there making great clothes. I am really excited to continue my work critiquing the industry and seeing how (if?) it breaks out of the bizarre place it’s in.

What makes fashion so interesting to me is that it holds up a mirror: it’s about how we see ourselves and how we spend our money, but it’s also about how our personal lives are shaped by the workings of capitalism. These are themes I will be returning to again and again in my work here.

But it’s important to be transparent with everyone reading this that this space will be changing. I want to make sure you know what’s happening here so that you can still feel like you’re getting value out of my writing, especially if you have a paid subscription.

The story we were told growing up is that the world is on a steady upward trajectory, that slowly but surely, capitalism and technology and democracy will fix all our problems. We will grow up and work the jobs of our dreams, make loads of money and own fabulous property. Our kids’ lives will be even better. Clearly, that’s not what’s happening. Life in the 21st century has so far given us climate meltdown, fascist politics, burnout jobs and unaffordable rent. The dream we were sold does not seem to be coming true, and that’s what the name Ordinary Delusions is about.

The name change is just a facelift — none of my old content is going away. You’ll find me at the same url as before (alecleach.substack.com), and your subscription details won’t change either. What will be changing is the content I write about. A phrase I keep coming back to is thriving in an apocalypse (IDK, it just came into my head one day and now it won’t leave). That’s how I’d sum up what I’m trying to do here.

The next few weeks of content will be completely free. I will be starting with a series of stories on how my own life and career has been disrupted by technology, politics and the economy. After that, I’ll be switching back to a cycle of free and paid content. I’ll be posting once per week, but I am hoping to increase that to twice a week later in the year.

It’s a deeply complicated, confusing and scary time to be a human being. But it’s also a time for new ideas, new ways of moving through the world. This is another theme I will return to often.

I’m a little bit scared, but very excited about taking this new path forward and I hope you’ll join me on it.

Oh and the mascot for this page is this funky lil’ sun I found in a zine I had lying around my apartment. No real reason, I just think he just looks cool.

See you next week, and thanks for sticking around.

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That was four years ago now, and my relationship with clothing is much, much better (kinda has to be when you write a book about it). A big part of that process was going through my wardrobe, doing a bunch of clearouts, and being a bit Mary Kondo about it all — asking myself what had gone wrong, why I only wore those Needles track pants or Gucci loafers a couple of times even though I’d spent so much money on them. At the beginning of last year, I wrote about why I still do a wardrobe audit once a year, figuring out if there's anything I’m not wearing and then selling or donating it.

One year later and I’m not sure I need to do one at all. I just moved into a much bigger apartment with my girlfriend. We have one of those huge Ikea wardrobes in our new place and…..I have so much space. I don’t even take up half of it. I never considered myself a minimalist but for someone who had a shitty relationship to shopping in the past, this is very good. I wear basically everything here, and I don’t want to get rid of any of it. I either love it or wear it often because it’s practical. The only things I don’t wear are the things I wanted to sell last year but didn’t.

So instead of revisiting the audit story, I’m gonna shout out the clothes that I’ve worn the most since I wrote my book — and the brands who made them. Honestly, I’m not sure if I’ll write another one of these next year — I am very much a BIFL kind of guy and I don’t think it’ll be so interesting reading about how I’m still wearing the same motorbike boots in 2026.

Disclaimer: I’ve worked in fashion for ten years and built a decent-ish sized platform around what I do, so I get a good amount of hookups and/or discounts. I’m not going to say which pieces here were gifted and which I paid for because they’re all great and if I’d paid full price on them it still would have been money well spent. Also, I don’t accept hookups for anything that’s a) not very good and b) I don’t truly want. I’m pretty religious about not bringing anything into my life unless I really need it. That’s especially true for clothes.

Cannot recommend vintage Carhartt enough. This is one of the pieces I mentioned in the book, and by a long way the hardest working piece in my wardrobe. Seriously, these things are built like tanks. I paid something like €70 for it on eBay. Obviously, someone wore it a lot before I did. Compared to the newer WIP stuff, the fit is much boxier, which I like much more. 10/10, best piece I’ve ever owned.

Vintage True Religion leather blazer. Pretty much every date night/dinner/event/party I go to, I’ve got this on. I got it on American eBay and a friend in NY brought it over with him when he visited Berlin. I’ve only had it a couple of years and already had to get the lining replaced, which somehow cost €120, but I guess that’s what fixing good clothes costs these days.

I ended up buying two of these Diesel jackets because the fit is just so good. Boxy with long sleeves is a theme I will be revisiting here. The model is D-Barcy. The quality is not spectacular, the black one even has a button hole stitched into one of the pocket flaps, lol.

Oh and this Grammici down liner. It is absolutely not sexy, total dad energy, but a life saver in winter. It’s pretty compact and doesn’t have a collar ruining the rest of your silhouette like most of the liners out there.

There’s a lot of interesting denim out there, but most of it is too short for me. There’s not that many brands that do not-boring jeans in a loose fit *and* do them in a 34 leg. So I’ve worn these three a lot. From left, the Sunflower Loose are in an overdyed black/indigo, so as they’re worn in the blue becomes more and more visible. Love them. In the middle is the Vega from Jeanerica. They’re modeled on a really old pair of washed out black jeans, with the crease lines and everything. And the light blue pair is from Livid, a Norwegian denim brand. The fabric is excellent and the fit is super nice and loose. Brands from Scandinavia occupy like 80% of my wardrobe at this point.

Shirts are a bit of a funny category for me. Most of them are Our Legacy, and the blue denim shirt I mentioned in last year’s story is still very dear to me (I own a lot of Our Legacy). The weather in Berlin swings pretty brutally from cold to hot, so most of the time I’m only wearing shirts when I’m doing something fancy and honestly…that doesn’t happen so much atm. This second book ain’t writing itself.

Knitwear is a) hard to make b) often boring and/or delicate and c) expensive. If I’m to give you a lesson here, it’s that if you find a good knit that looks cool, can be worn a lot, and won’t bankrupt you, then just pull the trigger. Winter in Berlin is much more fun now that I have some great knits.

The winning combination for me is a cropped-ish fit, dropped shoulders and long sleeves. The brown one is from Berner Kuhl, a small-ish brand from Copenhagen who does Jil Sander-ish stuff but at a much more realistic price. Excellent quality, great fit and I love the funky lil thumb hole. The cardigan is from Mfpen, who I wrote about before. The fit is perfect and Sigurd’s up for an LVMH prize!

Tees are the most abused garment in the world. Literally everyone makes them and…IDK, it’s not up for me to say who should and should not make clothes, but does absolutely everything need merch these days?

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I’d love to support bands I’m into but the quality of merch these days is so bad that I just buy weird vintage ones off British Depop instead. Trawling for single stitch tees is so much fun. What is Maudite? Momix? No idea. The Sunflower one is from a bike shop, I think. Not the guys whose jeans I love. Who’s 1996 tour am I representing? IDK.

The Modern Life Is War one I wrote about in my first book is still going strong, after years of damage. Doesn’t even have any holes in it. If only band merch was still this good. Not pictured are the longsleeves from Asket that I wear 80% of the time in winter. Best value for money basics on planet earth. They come in different lengths and I get the shorter versions cos I like things boxy.

This will be the sixth year of my black Our Legacy Camion boots. I’ve had them resoled once and they still look kinda brand new, somehow? The brown ones are in a lacquered leather and are starting to look pretty tired even though they’re so much newer. You see a lot of these perfect looking leathers with a mirror shine on them in shops and trust me, they won’t look that way forever (more info on that here). It's regular un-treated leather only from now on for me.

The biker boots are from Sancho, a brand from Spain nobody has ever heard of. There’s a ton of Spanish brands doing similar stuff — Sendra, Mezcalero, Mayura etc. — and the only real difference most of the time is the fit. Honestly, I’d spend the rest of my life in cowboy boots if I could, but they’re always too narrow for me, so it’s square-toed biker boots instead. I guess some things are meant to be admired from a distance.

[The closest I’ve come to a regret purchase since I did the book was a pair of Our Legacy mules, and that’s not because they’re bad, it’s just that they’re pretty impractical for someone who walks and bikes a lot.]

Fashion’s huge environmental footprint has created some pretty interesting ideas of how we could shop. There’s the capsule wardrobe, which is a great idea but feels a bit oppressive if you’re someone who really loves clothes. There’s the pledge to only buy x amount of pieces per year, which is a really nice way of looking at it once you get to the point where you’ve got all the basics covered. I always looked at it like furniture: only buy it if you really want to own it. Buy the right piece and it will still be making you feel good years and years later.

One of the biggest traps people fall into is letting their phones have too much influence over what they wear. You end up buying stuff that only looks good on a screen, or in one specific situation. This piece will look great when I wear it with this. Total waste of time and money, don’t even bother, IMO. The same goes for uncomfortable shoes. Life is not a runway show, and the real reason for shopping is to spend money on things that make you feel good when you wear them, and then wear them a lot. It’s not hard, you just need to spend a bit of time figuring out which tiny slice of the clothes out there work for you and then avoid the rest of them.

Oh and one more tip, be brutal about stuff fitting you. And don’t be scared of showrooming. I return stuff all the time if it doesn’t fit right. Life is too short for less-than-excellent fitting clothes!

So much of the fashion industry revolves around making us feel inadequate, which is how people end up with such huge amounts of shit they don’t want or need. The big thing I learned early on in this process is that shopping properly means being laser-focused on what you want and basically just ignoring everything else. As you can tell from all the stuff I’ve posted here, I like washed out fabrics, dark denim, dark colours, leather and boxy knits. That’s kinda it. I don’t have a magic rule to any of it. There’s plenty of things I’d still like, sure. But in general, I’m good. The main thing I want to do this year is work out and eat better. I’m happy with my clothes.

TLDR: buy good clothes, wear them a lot, enjoy your life.

I’m a little late this week. My girlfriend and I finally found a new apartment — anyone who is familiar with the property market in Berlin will know that this is a very big deal! — and I’ve spent most of the week buying and assembling Ikea furniture.

In this week’s newsletter:

→ Grasping for sanity in the polycrisis

→ Where the luxury industry goes from here

→ The fashion act reaches California

→ Tech’s right-wing shift and the future of work

Trump meets the polycrisis

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Adam Tooze calls the polycrisis: the web of interlocking catastrophes that converge and magnify each other, like the climate emergency, spiraling inequality, misinformation, fascism, etc. etc. You can probably guess why thoughts of catastrophe have been running through my mind for the past week or so — the Trump administration is dismantling entire parts of the American government, with the help of the world’s richest man.

I am not here to write about hard politics, but now that we are staring Trump 2.0 in its terrible, ugly face, it’s important to acknowledge that we’re witnessing events that will have repercussions for everything else we care about. Fashion, work, consumerism, the environment, sustainability, inequality — all of this will be shaped by what’s happening in Washington. No matter how this turns out, history has been made.

The polycrisis is a scary concept — stare into it too long and you’ll lose your mind — but it’s a helpful way of understanding why the world is the way it is. Instead of drowning in countless catastrophes, we’re in the midst of one big one. And because the polycrisis is a web of interconnected bullshit, doing good in one area has knock-on effects somewhere else as well. Saving American democracy would be a very good thing for, well, everything. Vox has a helpful explainer on what Americans can do to fight back. And many of them are, as Sherrilyn Ifill points out in her newsletter.

For the rest of us who aren’t in the US, we have no choice but to watch it all play out through our phone screens. Whenever I feel frazzled by the world and all its bullshit, I like to come back to the serenity prayer, first coined by a Protestant theologian but made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous:

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

If theology isn’t your vibe, then Jeff Guenther aka @therapyjeff posted a video on Instagram saying more or less the same thing. Bless his soul.

The luxury pivot

Fashion is going through its own transition moment as well.

Gucci’s creative director, Sabato De Sarno, is gone after a year and a half on the job. His seat is still empty, and while it’s been a long time since I’ve made these kinds of predictions, my money is on Hedi Slimane as his replacement.

Kim Jones is also leaving Dior. Jonathan Anderson is rumored to be his replacement, potentially doing both men’s and women’s collections. Nobody personified the luxury-streetwear mashup like Kim Jones did, and if we’re lucky his aesthetic will leave with him. The whole idea of luxury houses collaborating with streetwear brands was a car crash from day one, back when Jones unveiled Supreme x Louis Vuitton. Things only got worse from there. When the streetwear industry exploded in size, execs saw dollar signs and everyone started making thousand-dollar sneakers. For years afterwards, we were forced to endure horrible collabs like Gucci x Palace and Dior x Stone Island.

Matthieu Blazy’s move to Chanel from Bottega Veneta is a pretty good indicator of where the industry might be headed.

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We’re back. Taking a few months off from writing here has been very good for me, I feel motivated and clear-headed and excited about where my work is headed. I’m unpausing this newsletter and will be hitting your inboxes once a week from now on. I’m switching paid subscriptions back on as well. Thank you to everyone who has stuck around with me so far — this year is going to be a big one.

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So, Trump 2.0 is somehow even more apocalyptic than our worst nightmares. The news cycle is a gateway to hell. The scariest part is that Elon Musk and a team of interns have reportedly been given access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, which manages five trillion dollars of US government money. Trumpism always makes people draw comparisons to the past, but there is no moment in history where the world’s most powerful country let the world’s richest man run wild inside a five trillion dollar bank account, a few weeks after he did a nazi salute in front of the entire world. We are truly witnessing history being made. It is terrifying and it is very real.

The American election was always going to cast a long shadow over, well, everything, but what’s different this time around is that so many powerful people are pretending that what’s happening is kinda normal, or worse, bending over to kiss the ring. A recent piece in Business of Fashion pondered Is Fashion Learning to Love the Trumps?, which is a very good question to ask when members of the Arnault family were sitting at the inauguration, Ivanka Trump was wearing Dior and Givenchy on the big day and one of the industry’s most well-known critics praised the guy who dressed the new First Lady.

The first thing we need to understand here is that the people at the top of the fashion industry — actually, any industry — do not spend much time thinking about anything other than their own business. The second is that if you’re running a business with a big footprint in the US, then Trump can really fuck with your shit. And that’s the big difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2. He’s made it very clear this time around that he will be running the world’s superpower like Tony Soprano, and if you don’t play nice then he is going to make your life hell.

Just look at Mark Zuckerberg. In August, Trump threatened to throw him in prison. In December, Meta made a $1m donation to the Trump inauguration fund. On January 7th, Meta axed its fact checking program, and three days later, its commitments to diversity. Ten days after that and Zuck is sitting front row at the inauguration. The background to all of this is that Zuck needs the US government on his side so he can fend off Tik Tok and all the pissed off governments around the world that want to regulate Meta. Better to be in Trump’s pocket than on his hit list.

I would be very surprised if the people at the top of the fashion industry weren’t making similar calculations. The fact that so many members of the Arnault family were at the inauguration is a sign of where things are headed. Let’s imagine for a second that LVMH was looking to buy an American brand — let’s say The Row — or was facing tariffs on exporting bags into the US. Do you want the mob boss running the world’s biggest economy on your side or not?

And if it’s clear that Big Fashion is getting into bed with the Trump administration, then you can expect everyone else to fall in line as well. No doubt there are many CEOs out there thinking about their DEI programs with a finger hovering over the delete button. Don’t be surprised if we see Ivanka and/or Melania at the Met Gala this year either.

The other thing we need to remember is that the fashion industry in 2025 is completely out of balance. It looks like a dumbbell. Big at the ends, narrow in the middle. If you’re ultra-cheap or ultra-expensive, then you’re having a great time, because there’s a lot of people struggling and a lot of people who have so much fucking money. This is why luxury prices since the pandemic were so completely detached from reality.

Trump’s plan for the American economy is going to make income inequality even worse. His massive tax cuts will be excellent for the people buying all the Chanel bags and terrible for everyone else. If his plan goes ahead, we can expect an era of obscene price tags and terrible people flaunting terrible status symbols. Back to Zuckerberg for a second: he wore a $895,500 watch while announcing that he was cutting back on Meta’s fact-checking program. Cool guy.

Things are going to get complicated because even the most morally vacant CEO still has to think about the people working for them. Fashion professionals are generally progressive and open-minded and diverse and they will not feel great if their bosses give in to the world’s angriest mob boss. Trump might be hell-bent on making DEI and corporate sustainability go extinct, but it’s going to be very hard for companies to walk back from their commitments. Once you’ve told the people working for you that you hate racism and/or want to save the planet, they expect it to mean at least something. The obvious answer will be for CEOs to quietly cut all the woke capitalism stuff and hope that nobody notices, but when the next racist cop goes viral and the climate disasters keep coming…that’s where things will get interesting.

The old fashion mindset goes something like this: status can be bought, and we will not ask questions about where the money comes from. That mentality problematic in all sorts of ways but also…it’s old. Many of the people coming up in the industry actually care about what’s going on in the world, and it’s easy to forget that Trump 1.0 also gave us AOC, the George Floyd protests and the Sunrise Movement. All the noise companies were making about civil rights and sustainability were a direct result of people being fucking pissed about the direction the world was headed. That energy isn’t going to go away.

So if you see the people at the top bending the knee to fascism, you can be outraged, or you can forget they even exist and listen to AOC instead.

Me and my girlfriend are spending the month in London. We had the opportunity to stay here rent-free for a while, and I’ve been in Berlin for over ten years now, and sometimes I miss the UK and all its bullshit (and there is so much bullshit here). You really feel like you’re in the center of the universe here, for better and for worse. The consumerism is both inescapable and tedious (almost everything here is a shop, and almost all of them are a Sainsbury’s Local), the city is enormous and epic and diverse and filled with amazing food. You can really feel how neoliberalism weighs on the British psyche — everyone is preoccupied, squeezing in a run on their lunchbreaks, staring into their phones on the street and taking work calls on the bus. I love it here, but my heart knows it belongs in Berlin.

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Now, an update on the second book. I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m working on a follow-up to The World Is On Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes, but I haven’t said much more than that. With wildfires swallowing Los Angeles, this feels like the right moment to say that it will be about the climate emergency, and how we can come to terms with our own role in it.

I was originally going to write something about greenwashing, but the big bad thing that happened in America last November changed all that — I don’t think the world’s biggest polluters are going to even pretend they give a shit during a second Trump administration.

The LA fires, and the 40 trillion gallons of water that Hurricane Helene dumped on the east coast before it, are a sign that the climate emergency has truly landed in the rich world, after years of death and destruction in the Global South. The next few years are going to bring climate into much sharper focus. It’s not this scary thing happening in the future anymore. It’s in the here and now. This raises some big, important questions about who we think we are, and who we want to be. Is this really our fault? Can we do anything about it, when one person’s actions are so small? These are difficult things to wrestle with and they will be at the heart of my writing.

Clearly, this is a little different to what I usually write about here, which brings me to my next point: where this newsletter is headed. I’ve mentioned this here and there as well, but in the future this space will be expanding to include more than just fashion and sustainability. Honestly, my connections to the industry have slowly weakened since I left my Highsnobiety job — it’s been a long time since I was a regular at Paris, and there was never much of an industry in Berlin to begin with. I read, think and talk about much more than fashion, and any writer will tell you that their work is strongest when it’s most clearly reflecting their own passions.

Fashion will still be at the heart of what I’m writing. The turmoil gripping the industry won’t be solved any time soon (Y/Project shutting down sucks), and neither will its enormous impact on the planet. I am still part of the coalition of people and orgs aligning around The Fashion Act, and we are back this year trying to get this groundbreaking piece of legislation passed in the New York State Assembly. If you want to be a part of that fight, find out more here or just drop a comment down below.

But I will be bringing other things into this space as well. I’ve already dipped my toes into new ideas here and there — like last year’s pieces on neoliberalism and toxic positivity. A common theme throughout my work — both my book and the words I write here — is how we can make sense of the many awful and intersecting crises unfolding around us, how they shape the way we live, and what we can do to thrive in the midst of so much turmoil. I feel like this space will be so much stronger if I expand my vision for what my writing is about — and honestly, I need to be writing about more than just fashion.

So in 2025 you can expect my coverage of the New Clothes Industrial Complex to continue, but the bigger themes behind my work will only get bigger.

I’ll be spending the next month on my book, and I will be back writing weekly here from the middle of February.

Thanks for sticking around <3

Alec

I started here a little over a year ago because I wanted to be more ambitious about what I could achieve as a writer. What if I made all my money from my own words, instead of writing being a “fun” side project while I pay the bills with client work? The whole Substack-Patreon-subscription model gives writers like me (i.e., ordinary people) a real shot at building a long-term revenue stream for ourselves. And given that my book was such a success, I thought, why not think bigger? Why not dream of a career where I can support myself entirely from writing about the things that matter to me?

One year later and things are looking pretty good. At the time of writing, I have 253 paid subscribers, enough to pay my rent and my health insurance. This is a pretty big deal, considering I entered this with basically zero expectations. The fact that 253 people out there want to pay for words that I write every month is low-key amazing to me — thank you to every one of you who’s decided that my writing is worth paying for. 

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However, 253 paid subs is not a full-time salary. As well as my newsletter, I also make money from selling my book — which has been a really good source of revenue, mainly because I published it myself. I also do speaking gigs and client work. All of that combines to make a pretty ordinary middle class income, enough for me to pay my bills and treat myself to nice things without the fear of bankruptcy. 

However, a big factor here is the fact that me and my girlfriend share a small flat in Berlin, which is extremely cheap thanks to Germany’s very German commitment to rent control. We are, frankly, going a little bit insane sharing a 48sqm place in what feels like the center of the city’s alcohol/heroin/crack epidemic, and would love to move somewhere that’s a) bigger and b) surrounded by less public substance abuse. I also don’t have any of those big grown up things like kids and a mortgage, and would like to feel that at 36 years old that I can plan a future for myself that doesn’t depend on extremely low living costs (it would be literally impossible for me to do what I do in the US, and extremely hard back home in the UK).

I also need to be realistic about the fact that my first book won’t sell forever, and that newsletter businesses need to be constantly growing otherwise they’ll shrink through subscriber churn. If I’m going to make this freelance thing work then it needs to really work. I need to discard my emotional baggage about capitalism and be a bit of a capitalist. I need to grow my business!

That means I need to build a much bigger and more ambitious strategy for this newsletter. 

It also means I need to write another book.

I’ve worked in media for over ten years now, so I’m used to juggling a bunch of stuff at once. But I do not have the capacity or the headspace to build a new Substack strategy and write my next book and keep on top of my client work and keep posting here. Or at least I can’t do it without burning out, which I did once already and don’t want to do again, or without doing a shitty job of it all, which isn’t an option either.

Something needs to give, so I’m hitting pause on the newsletter.

I won’t be posting here for the rest of the year, and all payments will be paused until I’m back.

If you’re on a monthly subscription, your payments will stop until I start posting again, and if you’re on an annual plan then the year you paid for will carry on once I’m back.

This will give me the space to plan a bigger and more beautiful future for my newsletter, while also diving headfirst into my next book. It’s very exciting! The biggest thing I’ve taken away from the success of my first book is that I am at my best when I’m thinking big. Rather than strolling through life going from one thing to the next, I want to be more ambitious. The parts of my book that got me truly excited were connecting the dots between fashion and what’s happening in the rest of the world.

That’s why I’ve been slowly experimenting with other topics — like capitalism’s toxic positivity and the hidden philosophy behind so many of the world’s crises. That’s the direction I’ll be going in the future. Writing about fashion, yes, but also about the bigger picture and where we belong in it. Actually, my next book isn’t about fashion at all. It’s scary, but exciting. I’m also learning to loosen my writing — which is why I’ve started experimenting with broader roundups (see here and here) as well as the opinion pieces that people mainly know me for.

TLDR: I won’t be posting here for the rest of the year, and I’ll be back bigger and better in early 2025. You won’t be charged a cent between now and then. 

Thank you for reading, and thank you to everyone who’s paid for my work since I’ve been here.

See you in 2025.

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