In partnership with Chris Morency of .

North West was only six-years-old when she performed her first track during her father Ye’s YZY Season 8 at Paris Fashion Week. It was a remix of “What I Do?” by ZaZa, a rapper who was five at the time. West is now twelve. In the years between she’s featured on her father’s records, toured stadiums with him—most recently the Bully stadium tour—collaborated with FKA Twigs on “Childlike Things” and, controversially, with Sean Combs. She’s also voiced a character in Paw Patrol: The Movie, appeared regularly on Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and been shot for i-D and Interview Magazine.

Earlier this month, she dropped her debut EP— NOrth4evr, originally conceived as Elementary School Dropout, a nod to her father’s College Dropout—and she’ll make her festival debut at The Summer Smash in Chicago this year. She’s also reportedly weeks away from launching her own fashion brand, NOR11. West hasn’t even graduated elementary school.

West isn’t the only (pre-)teen taking over your feeds.

Max Alexander is ten years old and has already realised what he calls a “lifelong” dream by showcasing at Paris Fashion Week. Salish Matter, 15, created an exclusive line for Sephora called Sincerely Yours. Nate Colley, 19, is reportedly pulling $400,000 (USD) a month from Fisch, a Roblox game he built himself.

When did the hustle get so young? How? Why?

On the surface, this looks like a familiar story: precocious kids, ambitious parents, platform fame and the usual chorus of alarm bells. And yes, the nepo-adjacent machinery is hard to ignore—North West and Salish Matter are both offspring of entrepreneurial moguls, and the infrastructure of opportunity that surrounds them isn’t available to most children. But the instinct to reach for precedent is also a way of avoiding the question. We’ve been here before, haven’t we? The Jackson Five. Drew Barrymore. Justin Bieber. The Disney conveyer belt of ultra-talented “triple-threat” kids.The green slimed school of Nickelodeon.

Except we haven’t. Not quite.

Those were industries choosing children. What’s happening now is children choosing industries, and building their own. The distinction matters.

Children have always worked, performed, sold, and entertained for generations (and the darker version of that story is well documented in the Born To Be Viral: The Real Lives of Kidfluencers documentary, streaming somewhat ironically on Disney+). What’s happening here is different. These are teenagers building legitimate commercial ventures, largely on their own terms, inside a creator economy that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.

Young entrepreneurship, as a whole, isn’t new either. But the conditions and infrastructures around it that make it possible at scale are. The pandemic was the accelerant no one planned for. For an entire generation, it collapsed school, social life, entertainment, identity building, and creative expression into the same few apps. In the UK, 52% of children reported a significant increase in screentime during lockdown.

But the important shift was more structural. Over the last decade, the floor for starting something has collapsed. Roblox turned game-making into a creator economy. TikTok Shop fused discovery, entertainment, and checkout into a single motion. Depop transformed resale from a Sunday vintage market browse into an always-on hustle. Canva, CapCut, Figma—each one shaved another layer off the barrier to entry.

The numbers reflect it. In the US, 24% of late teens said they’re already acting as entrepreneurs. In the UK, 82% of late teens said they’re considering starting their own business. And then AI arrived and superchanged all of it. According to Pew Research, 38% of American teens are already using it to create and edit content. And boy do they make content.

Online Fluency = The Young Hustler’s 10,000 Hours

Here’s where the conventional wisdom about young people and screens falls apart. These young hustlers don’t have the years under their belts to call themselves experts, but the very idea of expertise is quietly being dismantelled around them anyway.. They aren’t seeking mastery in the traditional sense, because the traditional sense is losing its value in real time.

For previous generations, credibility was built through time: at the sewing machine, in the lab, behind the counter, in the studio, on the shop floor, or deep in the software suite. Accumulated hours were the currency of authority. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 rule was a cultural contract. Put the time in. Wait your turn. The world will recognize you eventually.

That contract is now being voided. For this generation, the hours are still there but they’re screen hours.

And not passive ones, but active cultural absorption: watching formats, decoding tone, understanding parasocial frequencies, tracking in-jokes, learning what makes people stop, save, share, buy or remix. It’s in its own way a rigorous education, just not one that institutions have yet figured out how to credential. Salish Matter built a content empire (alongside her family) before she launched her own beauty brand last year. The content simply was an apprenticeship directly impacting profits.

That’s the modern youth hustle in miniature: observe fast, build faster, and monetize the momentum. But why? What compels younger people to hustle with such relentless, almost insatiable, hunger? Call it passion, yes. But, in a more unsettling sense, call it protection.

All these young hustlers need to do is look around them. In the US, 89% of college graduates fear AI and automation will replace entry-level jobs. In the UK, 26% of young adults have stopped applying for a job altogether. The unemployment rate for young graduates in the US is already at its highest level since the start of the pandemic.

Education, meanwhile, is struggling to keep pace. Best practices are becoming perishable goods—outdated over quarters. Only 10% of UK graduates say a university degree prepares them for the future.

The degree, once the most reliable return on a young person’s time, is starting to look like a four-year delay in a race that won’t wait. So a cottage industry has grown up around the cracks: YouTubers and coaches charging up to $1,500 for “degree hacking” sessions, online colleges offering bachelor’s degrees completable in months, students road-testing credentials before AI renders them obsolete.

Young hustlers aren’t simply trying to get rich quickly. They’re trying to reduce their exposure to systems they no longer trust to protect them.

This reframes everything. When 57% of young Americans claim they want to be influencers (and 53% calling ita “reputable career”), the easy reaction is to eye-roll. The more honest reaction would be to recognize it as a coherent strategy. When institutions feel unstable, betting on your own personal brand starts to look less like narcissism and more like contingency planning.

The self-actualized, get-your-bag mindset of younger generations cannot be simply dismissed as good old materialism. The younger generation is doing the actuarial math and arriving at a logical conclusion: own your platform, own your audience, own your income stream. When eleven-year-old musician ZaZa steps out in Nike Dn8s on a paid partnership with the Swoosh, the comment section is impressed.

But resist the urge to flatten them into a category. These young hustlers are anything but your average cookie cutter influencers. They’re entertainers, hobbyists, artisans, commentators, builders, and niche obsessives. Their power comes from depth as much as visibility. Take Freddie Williams, a teenage fragrance aficionado giving informed scent recommendations to everyone from schoolmates to high-flying holidaymakers. What makes his content compelling is the seriousness of his interest, young age aside. Scroll through his comments and you find genuine conversations about longevity, skin chemistry, value for money, and how a scent behaves in different environments.

It’s easy to shake our fingers at young hustlers and mourn the loss of a “normal childhood.” The concern isn’t entirely baseless. There are real questions around pressure, exposure, labor laws, parental involvement, and the incentive structures baked into the platforms themselves. But if moral panic is the only register we can access, we’ll miss what’s actually worth paying attention to.

The Unjaded Generation

There’s a particular kind of industry wisdom passed down like scripture: find your voice, pay your dues, wait for the world to decide you’re ready. What the young hustler has figured out— perhaps because no one told them otherwise—is that the moment is a myth.

Personal brands are built through point of view, speed, and proximity. And it turns out that youth, long treated as a liability in creative industries, is one of the sharpest points of view available.

FKA Twigs, who collaborated with North West on “Childlike Things,” told Rolling Stone that what struck her was the absence of jadedness—an unwavering conviction unclouded by industry cynicism.

Nobody deploys it better than Taylen Biggs. At 13, she’s become a fixture across runway and red carpet coverage, known for fearless, disarming interviews with some of fashion’s biggest names. Her advantage is that she doesn’t mimic her older peers.

Biggs’ secret is about pulling these larger than life figures into her orbit. In an interview with Donatella Versace she asks: “When you were around my age, what did fashion represent to you?” It’s a simple question, but it reframes the interaction. Instead of asking a fashion icon to perform authority, she invites her to remember feeling. The result is a softer, more joyful, more revealing exchange than many adult interviewers could access. Biggs is carving out a clear lane in the media industry that only her age and approach could afford.

Max Alexander, the then year old we mentioned earlier who is also a Guinness World Record holder for the youngest person to design a runway show, puts it plainly: “There’s kind of no difference between me and older designers. Just because adults are older doesn’t mean they have to like fancy stuff, and as a kid I have to like other stuff.”

That line quietly detonates one of culture’s laziest assumptions: that taste has an age range. Creativity doesn’t always respect hierarchy. Sometimes the best ideas arrive before someone has been trained out of having them.

The Young Hustler is Not a Target Demographic

Here’s where brands need to tread carefully.

Studying the psychology of the young hustle cannot be about learning how to sell to children. Brands must learn from the conditions kids are building inside these ecosystems. Because what these young hustlers are modelling is a fundamentally different relationship between brand, audience, and authority. Legacy brands operate on a clean separation that made sense for a different era: we speak; you listen; we launch, you respond. Young hustlers don’t recognize that separation. Their audience is part of the operating system.

Followers correct them publicly. Comments become product feedback. Criticism becomes content. Actual communities teach them the rules in real time, and mistakes don’t disappear into post-campaign analysis decks. They happen live, in front of everyone, with receipts.

The real lesson here is in control. Or rather, the willingness to relinquish it. Young hustlers let audiences shape the journey, pressure-test the product, challenge the expertise, remix the output and participate in the making. Legacy brands love to call this community, when we all know it isn’t.

The young hustle shows a more uncomfortable model: community as co-author. They treat the market as a live feedback loop rather than a final exam.

None of this means brands should start mimicking young hustlers. Nobody needs a 47-year-old brand director captioning campaign posts with “chat, are we cooking?” The opportunity is recovery—of curiosity, of specificity, of the willingness to experiment before the category has given you permission, to form a point of view before the data has confirmed it’s safe.

The brands, institutions and individuals paying attention to how these kids are building (not what they’re building) will be the ones who realize that unjadedness is a competitive advantage.

The young hustler already knows better than anyone that waiting your turn might be the riskiest move of all.

In collaboration with SportsVerse.

Basketball once ruled the fashion world with full court force.

Dial it back only a few years ago, and everything from Marni Jersey Bags to the Nike x Dior Jordan 1 to Tiffany & Co. Basketballs were hot shit. Jerseys, sneakers, equipment – anything remotely basketball related – became a sure fire way for fashion to generate heat. Then things suddenly went cold. Nike Dunks became a punch-line, NBA Jerseys became trash, Tunnel Walk gods began to retreat. Basketball suddenly began to lose its air of fashion prominence faster than a punctured Aime Leon Dore x Tyrell Winston basketball.

The numbers don’t lie. When it comes to the bellwether of basketball fashion – the sneakers – things aren’t looking great.

According to market research by Circana, basketball shoe sales declined by 11 percent in 2025. NPD Group backs this up; five years ago basketball sneakers accounted for 13% of the US sales; they’re down to about 4% today. Meanwhile, basketball singlets have been replaced by football kits from everywhere from the streets to the runway.

There are signs of life, of course. New signature models across the NBA and WNBA have shown that appetite still exists when the proposition feels fresh. The Adidas AE 1, Nike A’One and Converse Shai 1 prove that basketball can still create demand. But a few sell-outs do not equal a full category refresh in the fashion space.

So the real question is not whether basketball can come back. It can. And it eventually will. The question is how it can speed things up.

While the tumultuous gusts of fashion trends will always influence success, there are ways to pragmatically position the sails.

Three words: refocus, repurpose and recontextualise.

Once the master, now the student – basketball needs to learn from the successes of its sporting peers. Football, running and outdoor have all experienced lasting energy in the fashion space over recent years. Not through nostalgia alone, and not through endless collaboration fatigue, but by reshaping who the category is for, what its products can become, and where its culture can show up.

THE THREE STEPS TO RE-ENERGISING

REFOCUS
Basketball fashion has historically been heavily male coded.

A lot of that came from the 90s and 2000s, where basketball’s fashion power was deeply intertwined with hip-hop masculinity. Think oversized jerseys, throwback silhouettes, swagger as uniform. Snoop in Kobe. Nelly in the backward Stackhouse. Bow Wow in the over-sized Iverson.

Artists like Missy Elliot and Queen Latifah were absolutely part of that world, but the overall tone remained defined by a very particular kind of male energy.

This just won’t cut it today. The sports categories that have grown in fashion over the last few years have done so by expanding beyond their traditional male default. Football kits got away from the blokes, Patagonia vests got away from the Wall St bros and running shoes finally started to get away from the anatomy of the male foot. None of that happened by accident.

As the womenswear-centric lens entered the category, the outputs often become more expansive, more expressive and frankly more interesting. Suddenly we have Liverpool FC kits that have been transformed into frocks. New Balance football boots have become red carpet slippers. Arc’teryx jackets have become wedding gowns. Salomon trail runners have become infused with Margiela MM9 thigh high tech stockings. Basketball needs its equivalents.

Football had the Wales Bonner x Adidas Originals Samba moment. Not just a successful collaboration, but a cultural reset. It re-authored the category through a womenswear-focused perspective and brought a female audience along with it.

While basketball has come leaps and bounds in terms of its representation of women (i.e. WNBA, signing women to signature deals), the translation to fashion is still nascent. The A’ja Wilson A’One sneaker is a great step in this direction. According to Bimma Williams x Tracksuit’s “Collab Of The Year” report, 80% found the collab surprising, which is proof that consumers saw the A’One as a fresh direction for women’s basketball, not just a recycled play. A’ja is one of the best players to ever grace the court. Last year she won the Finals MVP, the Defensive Player of the Year, the scoring title, the regular season MVP and she was a WNBA Champion. The only player in NBA or WNBA history to pull that off in one season. Pair that with her strong fashion game, and Nike doesn’t just have “another Jordan” on their hands — this is A’ja’s world.

Meanwhile, strong moves from Caitlin Clark’s Kobe 6 Protoro’s,the commercial success of Sabrina Ionescu’s signature sneaker line and Paige Bueckers’ hook-ups with Dapper Dan keep the energy swelling. If basketball wants to regain fashion heat, women cannot sit in the supporting cast. They need to lead the creative direction.

REPURPOSE

High top basketball sneakers just haven’t been “it” for a while. While the rise of the Shai 1’s might make me eat my words soon enough, the high top silhouette just isn’t for everyone. Moreover, the basketball jersey is still a staple on game day, but its street appeal has lacked the same fashion appeal for a while. Too much of basketball’s product language still arrives exactly as expected.

That is a problem because fashion heat rarely comes from the expected version of a thing. It comes from the translated version.

This is where football has been especially smart. Football attire became source material, transforming into everything from Umbro x Slam Jam’s chainmail suits to Martine Rose’s football suits. The football boot itself — which was previously an unwearable style off pitch — has been successfully retooled by experiments like the Nike Cryoshot where the studs are cleverly wrapped in gel to maintain the codes of on-field play without the hassle. The balance between form and function will win here - a chainmail suit wins the feed with unexpected form while a football boot with gel studs wins the day with a functional retool. One is theatrical. One is practical. Both expand the imagination of the category. Basketball could study the tapes on these.

Not every breakthrough has to be a total silhouette reinvention either. Vibram soles have become the “gorp” accent of shoes that should never set foot on the outdoor trail. Loafers, ballet shoes, even drink coasters have received the Vibram treatment.

How can basketball translate?

Let’s take a look at the AE1’s, one of the best and most commercially successful basketball shoes of recent years. The signature metallic grate could easily live in other places. In fact, it already is: the AE1 NFL cleat was debuted by Travis Hunter earlier this season. That’s a great sport crossover between basketball and football, now how can Adi bring the signature accent of the AE1 to more fashion crossovers? Bags, eyewear, jewellery, luggage, recovery products, furniture details, retail environments. Not as gimmicky, but as a recognisable material signature that helps basketball live beyond the shoe itself.

That is the broader challenge. Basketball cannot rely on sneakers and jerseys to do all the cultural lifting anymore. It needs a more flexible design system.

Some brands are starting to move in that direction. Way of Wade x Li Ning’s focus on post-game recovery is interesting here. Recovery is a real part of basketball culture, but one that has rarely been treated as a lifestyle opportunity. It’s no secret that basketball athletes are switching to more comfortable footwear for their post-game recovery. Why can’t they look good doing it?

RECONTEXTUALISE

To break out of a fashion funk, basketball needs to break out of its sport altogether.

Cultural relevance now lives in crossover, not containment. Footballers like Kylian Mbappé sit courtside at the European NBA games. Lewis Hamilton is often seen hanging out at Mile High, watching the Denver Broncos (a team he co-owns). If Caitlin Clark isn’t owning the court, she’s likely owning it on the LPGA tour. In a paper I wrote for SoccerBible in 2024, 89% of their audience said they loved it when they see athletes crossover into other sports. So what about products?

When football’s Total 90 — an iconic 2000s footwear and apparel line designed by NIke — was finding its way back into the cultural bloodstream, one of the smartest styling moves came through tennis. Last year, Carlos Alcaraz showed up in a sleeveless T90 warm up tee - a look that straddled Joga Bonito Ronaldo and 2000s Lleyton Hewitt. Simple pairings like this can set the social world alight. Football and tennis may seem like unlikely bedfellows in a sporting context, but in a cultural context - Alcaraz is a die hard football fan of Real Madrid, David Beckham (ex Real Madrid) comes to watch him play at Wimbledon, the Spanish national football team stops practice to watch him win the French Open, and he is regularly was even recently spotted playing keepy-ups with tennis balls. Crossing over nostalgic performance products between tennis and football, and using dynamic sports icons like Alcaraz to platform it - it’s a heat play that gets the sportstyle spaces talking.

Not only should one recontextualise the product, they should also recontextualise the culture. Recently, Nike ACG took to the mountains to cast an unexpected outdoor lens over football. It took All Conditions Gear very literally, and hosted a football tournament in the snow with Inter Milan. The match, played five-a-side over two 30-minute halves, followed the so-called “rules of nature”, with snow, rocks and trees acting as obstacles – or opportunities – within the game. All players wore the new and exclusive Nike ACG x Inter fourth kit, featuring the iconic Black, Hyper Blue and Safety Orange colour palette. The entire collection was unveiled outdoors through a striking open-air installation. We’ve seen in-game jersey reveals before – Jordan x PSG, Palace x Adidas x Juventus – but to completely recontextualise the game of football through an outdoor lens, with new rules and a dynamic outdoor product display, this stylistically changes how a sport can be seen. The Nike ACG x Inter Milan kits then come to symbolise this idea - making them infinitely cooler than your run of the mill collaboration.

Basketball Will Come Back. But Not By Running the Same Old Drills

The trend cycle moves fast, and it will undoubtedly return to basketball.

There is already movement. Signature shoes are regaining energy. Athletes like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, A’Ja Wilson, Anthony Edwards, Sabrina Ionescu, Angel Reese and Tyrese Haliburton are giving the category a new personality. Designers like Willy Chavarria are bringing unexpected heat to vets like James Harden with Adidas’ Vol. 10 model.

Even resale signals suggest that key basketball franchises still hold serious cultural equity when the proposition is right. Travis Scott’s fragment Jordan 1 had 4.4 million sign ups late last year, setting an industry record.

So no, the category is not dead, nor will it ever be. It just needs an energy rehaul.

Fashion trends will always move in cycles. Heat cannot be controlled. But it can be influenced. For basketball, that means doing three things well.

Refocus who the category is speaking to.
Repurpose the codes into new product forms.
Recontextualise the culture in unexpected spaces.

And as you may have worked out by now, this isn’t just a recovery strategy for basketball. It’s a blueprint for any sport trying to matter in fashion again.

Collaborations are heat projects. Duh. But in today’s landscape, is that really enough?

The tried and tested playbook looks a bit like this. Create something that’s surprising. Create something that’s scarce. Create something that’s limited.

A recipe for combustion. A quick flash. Maybe even an inferno if you’re lucky. But once the flames have fallen, what’s left? A decent StockX resale price? A placement on the “best collabs of the year”? Some surprise appearance on Uber? While these might be fun and sometimes unexpected KPI’s, ultimately they’re more quick flashes.

Where’s the lasting power?

And no, I’m not talking about the classic sustain phase theatre. The “surprise colourway” a few weeks later. The dutiful UGC prompt that reads like it was written by a brand manager who’s being held hostage by a Figma “campaign inspiration” board. We’re talking about something that lasts. Not in a shouty way, but in a sincere way.

Staying power and collaborations don’t usually share oxygen. Palace x Nike changed that.

Their move was disarmingly simple: don’t just invest in product, invest in place. Not a pop-up where the queue has more cultural weight than the product. Not a launch party with free drinks and a branded photo booth. A place that actually sticks around. Somewhere that actually fulfils a community need for footballers, skaters and artists alike.

But wait. We’ve seen this right. What about the Kith x Wilson tennis courts? Or even the Pigalle x Nike basketball courts? Yes, this has been done before on a collaborative level. The idea of “collaborative public space as a brand world” is not new.

But this is different.

Manor Place was the headline of the Palace x Nike link up - and for good reason. It’s a renovated bath house in the south of London that acts as a hybrid space between football, skating and art. Sounds like a tired marketing line, but it’s actually an architectural spectacle. One building, three use cases - many lives legitimately made better for it.

@vsrsusWe asked people about the importance of Nike and Palace’s free-to-use community space at Manor Place. #nike #palace #london #skating #football

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And in London, that matters. Space is tight. Funding is tighter. Access to decent facilities is uneven, and creative infrastructure gets treated like a nice-to-have, right up until the city needs to build another suite of empty luxury apartment blocks. Packing three disciplines into one place isn’t just a PR moment, it’s design necessity. “We saw it as a project for London,” said Lev Tanju in an interview with GQ Magazine.

Manor Place also landed at the exact moment “third spaces” are back on the agenda, not as a cute urbanist concept, but as a coping mechanism. People are craving more IRL texture and the stats are basically begging for it: Eventbrite found 95% of US 18 to 35 year olds want to explore their online interests through in-person events and experiences. At the same time, loneliness is getting less poetic and more measurable. Matter cites The Financial Times reporting that the share of young people who don’t socialise at least once a week has jumped from 10% to 25%. Layer in the cost-of-living squeeze and you get to the crux of the brief: we need places to exist that aren’t paywalled by a £7.50 pint. - maybe that’s why searches for “cheap activity” is +129% YoY on Google search. Manor Place answers that demand with something rare in brand land: a free, functional third space

This analysis comes almost three months after Manor Place opened - and that’s deliberate. I wanted to see whether Manor Place was legit. I wanted the lived experience, not the honeymoon phase. Was this a cultural stunt with a few months’ rent attached, or is it actually a permanent place? I’m delighted to say that it is the latter. Not only has it stuck around, it’s hosted football tournaments, skating lessons and artist residencies - all while staying open to any old punter who just wants to come along and skate for a bit or kick a footy around. All for free.

That’s the bit that separates “brand experience” from “community infrastructure”. While it’s nice for brands to say “fully sold out” 48 hours after a drop, it’s far more impactful to see “fully booked” slots at Manor Place three months after it opened - a civic KPI of sorts that keeps paying social dividends.

‘Lev (Tanju) and I wanted to try and create something new, something that’s really community-based. That’s a word that is often bandied about without any real meaning behind it,’ said Gareth Skewis, Co-Founder of Palace, in an interview with Wallpaper. He’s right. When it comes to brands, community is a concept that’s almost as fleeting as collaborations. Host a workshop, sponsor a run club, throw a dinner party - and bam, you’ve apparently earned yourself the right to claim community. It’s a situationship, not a relationship.

Manor Place is proving to be long-term material.

And of course, we got all the trimmings of a classic Palace collab. The Lucien Clarke’s and Rory Milanes’ standing alongside football royalty like Wayne Rooney and Leah Williamson all captured by Alasdair McLellan. The 24-piece collection, all adorned with a slick Palace x Nike lock up. The cheeky British copy. The special Palace x Nike store. And no doubt, we’ll get these all again in upcoming seasons. All the expected signals, delivered properly.

But Manor Place gave those signals weight. The product wasn’t just an object, it became a souvenir of something real. That’s the shift. Not collab as combustion. Collab as contribution.

These are some learnings for others looking to strike a similar chord:

Solve for actual community needs, not just brand narratives

Yes, brands have built courts, parks, pitches and ramps. That’s not new, that’s an established genre. What is new is building something genuinely hybrid.

Manor Place doesn’t pick a lane. It lets football, skate and art bump into each other without forcing an awkward “culture crossover” campaign narrative. The collaboration isn’t just two logos sharing fabric, it’s two brands underwriting a space where scenes can actually collide.

Takeaway: If you want to contribute to the community, stop programming it like an event and start funding it like infrastructure. The best community play is the one that still works when the brand isn’t in the room.

Clash fandoms to build new ones

Fandoms are highly motivated groups that consume narrative. Nike knows this from their big roster of sporting teams. Palace knows this from their link ups with everyone from Doreamon to Juventus. Those partnerships work because they plugged into worlds that already had narrative gravity.

Manor Place is an attempt to create that gravity from scratch. A destination that encourages a new kind of blended fandom, where football, skate and art aren’t separate subcultures but a shared multi-verse. Nike and Palace aren’t trying to be the main character here, they’re positioning themselves as the enablers. The people become the plot.

And here’s the long-game upside: the next breakout footballer, skater, or artist might trace part of their rise back to that building. That’s not a “brand moment.” That’s provenance.

Takeaway: The strongest fandoms form around places and practices. Build the arena and let the heroes emerge.

Make product a souvenir, not just a spike

When product is tethered to a place, it gains a second life. It stops being just “the drop” and starts functioning like a souvenir. It’s the same reason people buy merch at the Tate or MoMA - it’s about taking a piece of the place home with you - attaching yourself to the stories that take place there.

As artist residencies rotate, football teams compete, and skaters keep skating, Manor Place accumulates lore. The Palace x Nike collection becomes a marker of that living history, not just proof you were quick on SNKRS.

Takeaway: If you want collab product to outlast the heat, attach it to something that keeps generating meaning after the sell-out.

Palace x Nike have taught us that if you don’t fixate on the scarcity, the limited and the fleeting alone - you don’t have to lose the impact. Maybe the most surprising collaborations of the future will be those that are most sincere. Or maybe (probably) we’ll just get a load more joint merch ventures.

The cult of Satisfy is strong. So naturally when the brand finally released its own trail running shoe – TheROCKER – the approach would seem pretty simple. Get it on as many athletes as possible and let their legs, lungs and Strava uploads do the talking. Logical. Sensible. Predictable.

Yes, Satisfy did this, from critics like Believe in the Run to ambassadors like Max Joliffe.

And any half-awake brand would do the same. One must prove the product.

But this is just table stakes. Satisfy was built on big bets.

Desert marathons. LSD runs. Hole-ridden cotton shirts. Man vs. Horse races. These aren’t sensible ideas. They’re acts of lust – for discomfort, for the edges of running culture. The kind of lust that turns performance into poetry. Seductive enough for competitors to flat-out steal them.

Over the last 13 months, TheROCKER’s story struck a balance between logic and lust.

Showing up on the feet of athletes, seeding to running critics, deep-diving on design and tech – that’s logic. Turning the shoe into an RC buggy, sticking bumper slogans on Cadillacs, taking over Mental Athletic magazine – that’s lust.

Logic is credible risk management, testing and trust-building.

Lust is irrational desire, mythology and play.

Satisfy knows its audience is a strange and brilliant blend of purists and pleasurists. The purist hunts for proof. The pleasurist hunts for feeling. Logic reassures the purist that the shoe won’t fail them. Lust convinces the pleasurist they can’t stop thinking about it. TheROCKER rallies both, arriving at that rare state of brand nirvana that happens when logic and lust finally meet – love.

Two Archetypes, One Shoe

Picture this. You’re at Knees Up in London. Someone’s just finished a 5-mile Saturday run and is catching some rare winter sun in the courtyard. Another is inside, sipping coffee and flipping through Mental Athletic, decompressing from a long week and a longer inbox.

Satisfy surrounds them – from the books on the wall to the MothTec shirts hanging off the rails. Both are wearing TheROCKER.

The pleasurist and the purist occupy the same space. Yet they’re pulled by different gravities. One leans toward performance, the other toward aesthetic. Neither lives purely in one world. Satisfy understands that tension. During TheROCKER’s rollout, it placed its proprietary tech at the centre of that push and pull – a swivel point between pleasure and purity – and built a campaign that embraced the complexity of its community.

Lust: Personifying The Tech

TheROCKER’s story begins on the back of a Cadillac in Austin, Texas. “My other ride is TheROCKER,” reads a bumper sticker. The same sticker shows up on a Ford pickup and an Isuzu estate.

Wait, what is this?

From there, Satisfy introduces the shoe’s proprietary tech – the TuneLug™, the Euforia™ and the Rippy™ – through a series of CAD shots and digizines. All of a sudden, a model RC shows up with the line again “My other ride is TheROCKER.”

Ah…the shoe has a stunt double.

Performance brands have personified their tech before. On’s CloudTec made the world soft. Nike’s Air Max pumped it full of air. But Satisfy made its RC buggy a protagonist, not an afterthought. Lust was baked in from day one. While On makes you feel like you’re walking on clouds, and Nike on air, Satisfy makes you feel like you’ve strapped two grip tyres to your feet and launched yourself into Joshua Tree.

The RC showed up at every stage – tease, release, sustain – taking us along for the ride. As TheROCKER evolved into new colourways, the RC evolved too, reappearing as a 4x4 Fiat Panda for the debut of the Grenoble Green drop. Same Vibram tyres, different body. The lust endures as the line expands.

Logic: Validating The Tech

Beyond the RC, Satisfy knew it had to earn technical credibility for TheROCKER. Instead of treating the tech as a static spec sheet, it treated it as a living experiment – outsourced to trusted voices who would do the talking for them.

Diligent fans could see Satisfy athletes running in TheROCKER only a few months after they were teased in late 2024. That signalled something important. The shoe was not a mood board fantasy. It was being stress-tested in hard conditions, from the Chianti 120 to the Cocodona 250.

Around release, TheROCKER was then handed over to trusted running critics. We saw reviews from critics like Believe in The Run, Conversational Pace and Run4Adventure. These are the habitats of the purist – where technical scrutiny replaces hype. They want candid takes on midsole behaviour, lug pattern, durability and whether the upper will explode on day three of a desert race, not fit-pics of some Real Housewives of Clapton-esque “runner.”

Throughout the rollout, Satisfy left a breadcrumb trail of transparency: lab research environments, Mental Athletic takeovers, POSSESSED print spreads with unfiltered reviews, right through to detailed product breakdowns on the landing page. Logic, in Satisfy’s hands, becomes a trust-building exercise – exposure over mystery, ongoing experimentation over finality.

No purist expects perfection straight out the box, but showing every iteration along the way proves intent.

What Can Brands Learn From This

We have spent years telling ourselves that younger consumers are reckless and impulsive – nothing but a “buy now, think later” punchline. But recent studies would suggest otherwise. In a two-year study on the shopping behaviours of Gen Z, Vogue Business and Archrival discovered that in fact 66% of Gen Z are doing a lot of research before buying, while only 34% buy impulsively. Meanwhile, 77% are still regularly seeking out inspiration in the brands and products they choose. This reinstates the importance of lust and logic. Here’s what brands should bear in mind when designing for lust and logic in their go-to-market plans:

Lust and logic is about balance: Being too lustful will make your product superfluous, being too logical will render it bland. Finding love is a mix of art and science. Of course you must set KPIs. Reach, engagement, click-throughs, sell-through. All useful. Just do not let the spreadsheet suffocate intuition. A life-size RC buggy will never make sense in a conservative budget meeting. Yet it makes perfect sense when you see the film, the photography and the way people start talking about it.

Some of the best ideas blur lust and logic together: Sending the product to athlete Max Joliffe, logical. Enabling Max Joliffe to place 3rd in the Mammoth 200, lustful. The product is validated and mythologised by the same man. Fostering moments of genuine breakthrough qualifies your product with the purist while intriguing the pleasurist simultaneously.

Lust and logic is a decentralised approach. Ideas can begin with the brand, but they’ll need to be carried through their acolytes. From founders to athletes to critics to collectives – lust and logic was carried forward by the tight-knit community around Satisfy. With 57% of Gen Z preferring brands that are unique and beloved by a tight-knit community – brands must rally their own around stories of lust and logic to land their product.

Holding Rhythm On Jagged Ground

TheROCKER is said to hold rhythm when the terrain loses shape. It is a great technical claim, but it is also a neat metaphor for what Satisfy pulled off with this launch.

When it comes to creating energy around a new product, the terrain is jagged, unpredictable and unforgiving – without a balanced cadence of lust and logic, you might be carried off at the halfway checkpoint, barely able to stomach your last energy gel.

TheROCKER didn’t just hold rhythm in the rollout, it set the tempo for the rest of the performance footwear industry.

In days gone by, music was something to build your entire identity around. What you listened to dictated who you hung out with, how you dressed, where you loitered and even the kind of virtues you upheld, on your own or part of the collective.

Emos, mods, rockers, punks, hip hop heads. They still exist, but largely as fleeting trend-du-jours; aesthetic codes that are mined for a shot at getting ahead of the next feed-flooding ‘core.’

Amongst this sea of sameness, there are mavericks with distinct taste. Some of them use the “sameness” of our musical landscape as a way to be familiar yet surprising. Some subvert by using “bad taste” as a breakthrough. And some are in a constant “create and destroy” cycle so that the word “same” never shows up on their Pitchfork album reviews.

“Taste is something money can’t buy. It’s about identity. Do I know who I am? Do I know what I enjoy? We need to be very careful in judging what good and bad taste is,” Jonas Weber, CEO of ColorsxStudio tells us.

Taste is an important form of self-knowledge. That’s why it still matters.

In the final piece for our three-part ‘Understanding Taste’ study, we’ve analyzed the audiences of taste mavericks Chappell Roan, TOMM¥ CA$H and Tyler, The Creator on the KX Radar in a bid to understand today’s taste landscape and how the best are navigating it.

Chappel Roan: Familiar Yet Surprising

Chappell Roan’s craft takes her into many different taste communities on the KX Radar. Her audience clusters around queer, fashion-savvy, and politically vocal communities. The fascinating thing about Roan’s music is that it strikes the balance between feeling familiar and enigmatic. She occupies a world that’s vaudevillian, expressive, infinitely quotable—perfectly optimized for modern attention economy.

As NTS DJ and producer Peach puts it, “Working in music, your taste is everything. You’re constantly trying to showcase it, while also trying to refine, grow and develop it.”

Roan understands this. Her work adopts codes, remixes conventions, and offers nostalgia threaded through zeitgeist. It’s less about breaking musical form and more about knowing exactly which forms to bend and how to repackage what already exists.

Roan isn’t random or superfluous for the sake of it. She plays credibly into drag culture and the intricate sensibilities that make it up. She then uses her catchy music as a gateway to pull new people into these more complex worlds.

This kind of approach keeps things fresh but consistent, and to do so must be underwritten by a firmly established sense of taste. Something built upon an appreciation of contemporary convention, and the cultural tradition you’re looking to work within.

TOMM¥ CA$H: When Bad Taste Wins

There’s a strange side effect of algorithmic culture: at scale, irony is indistinguishable from appreciation. Content spreads whether people love it or hate it—so long as they share it.

Being horribly bad at something can be as virally valuable as being good.

Estonian maverick, musician, and serial high fashion muse TOMM¥ CA$H understands this intimately. He creates confusion. While others merely adopted irony, he was born in it. It’s identity-motivated misdirection.

Weber notes, “We shouldn’t look for formulas. What works for someone like TOMM¥ is that it’s authentic. If you really know who you are and what you stand for, that’s worth more than following a recipe.”

Looking at the KX Radar results, CA$H knows that he speaks with avant garde online communities that are already fluent in irony, memes and cultural trolling. These younger, progressive audiences are also more open to critical perspectives on social and systemic norms within music, which is exactly the terrain CA$H plays in when he leans into the grotesque, the kitsch and the “too much” as raw material.

The irony bit can get you to the top, but it’s not as simple as being as bad as possible for the sake of it. It’s about appreciating a certain audience perspective and then constantly yanking it into interesting directions. One used to catch CA$H front row at Rick Owens, Vetements or Diesel in some wild costume, which became expected. Then in 2025, we saw him take to, Eurovi*ion singing a song about Espresso in a mock Italian accent to a global audience of people who barely knew better. Misdirection a’la CA$H.

He never lets us know his next move. He’s a Rick Roll wearing Rick Owens — ready to clog your feed at any moment. CA$H is a genius at content gamesmanship (turning the bad into the unmissable)— where taste can be found in a pair of bread loafers.

Tyler, The Creator: Create & Destroy

Looking at Tyler’s KX Radar results, you can see the effects of his full character reboot for each album scattered across the map. Goblin, Wolf, Cherry Bomb, Flower Boy, Igor, Call Me If You Get Lost, Chromakopia, Don’t Tap The Glass: every era arrives with its own color palette, typography, silhouettes, video language and emotional register. This rallies existing taste communities and creates new ones simultaneously.

Yet all of this feels unmistakably him. As Weber explains: “You shouldn’t try to reinvent yourself every record for the sake of it. There has to be a connective tissue — and often that’s taste, an artist’s intent expressed through different iterations.”

Tyler’s connective tissue is his taste: a self-authored operating system he updates, destroys and rebuilds with each project. Each cycle pulls in a slightly different cluster of people: skate kids and Odd Future diehards in one moment, soft-focus internet romantics the next, then luxury-curious preppies, then filmmakers and architecture students.

His steadfast confidence in his own taste, and the trust that his millions of fans have in him give him the permission to explore all of these fields that play into the wider Tyler brand. It keeps his audience engaged well beyond the traditional album and touring cycle, and makes him an invaluable asset to cultural progress.

Tyler, The Creator is a master of curation. He never gets caught in an era. As other artists catch up to his sounds, he’s already busy creating the next thing. Letting go to stay ahead is the drum that he bangs.

How To Work With The Taste Mavericks

So what does this all mean? Well, these taste mavericks aren’t your typical artists. For brands wishing to partner with them, the classic this x that sponsorship won’t cut it. Weber challenges us to ask: “Is it additive or is it exploitative?”

Here’s how to effectively work with the taste mavericks:

• Give them something new to play with: Vans gave SZA an artistic directorship. Converse are bringing back Rubber Tracks, a fabled program in service of access, resource and skill sharing for emerging artists, which doesn’t rely on star power at all. Give the artist tools that they can work with to make something that challenges, excites and appeals within the framework of what they like and what sounds or looks fresh to them.
  

• Don’t follow the audience, follow the artist: Rick Rubin’s Creative Act works against every marketer’s intuition. True artists don’t create for an audience, they create for themselves. As a brand, you must work with artists to free yourself from the confines of your community by curating things outside of your immediate orbit.
  
  If you stay within the algorithmic whitewash, you’ll just move with the trend tides — wash in, wash out — forgotten. Paddle out and catch a big one. Maybe you get dumped, maybe it’s the best ride of your life but either way you’ll be remembered for it.
  

• Trust the people they trust, and don’t be afraid to relinquish control: If you’re working with an artist, allow them to bring their creative partners along. Just look at PG Lang from Kendrick Lamar — not only is he building his own creative universe, he’s building it for others now through a new creative collective turned agency Project 3.
  
  Artists are often surrounded by the best of the best. When you work with them, they need to feel like their vision is being multiplied, and their close collaborators often hold the keys. Don’t force the process on top of them, trust it.

In the end, taste shouldn’t be an algorithmic formula but a navigational system. Crucially, it’s how artists, audiences and brands learn to move through a landscape where everything looks the same on the surface yet lands very differently in the gut. The acts that cut through are the ones willing to curate with intent, weaponise their weirdness and treat bad taste, nostalgia and novelty as materials rather than masters.

Taste is the only real instrument left that can still change the tune.

Having some kind of taste today beyond the sport professional athletes play has become the new standard expectation.

This year’s basketball MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s pre-game fits hit as hard as his step-backs. Runner Sha’Carri Richardson sells beauty as fiercely as she sells speed. And Chelsea F.C. footballer Cole Palmer attacks virtually in EA FC as well as he attacks physically in the midfield.

Years ago, athletes were told to “shut up and dribble”, to leave their tastes and passions behind, to stay focused on their sport. Those days are well and truly gone.

“The traditional criticism that athletes should ‘shut up and dribble’ has always been flawed. It doesn’t take into account the fact that athletes have an obscene amount of free time when they aren’t training and competing,” says Daniel-Yaw Miller, editor of SportsVerse, a bi-weekly publication covering the intersection of sports, fashion, and culture.”They’re human beings and deserve to pursue interests, hobbies, and business endeavors.”

The Name, Image & Likeness (NIL) phenomenon in US collegiate sports represents the pinnacle of this shift. Athletes are now being scouted as much for off-pitch audiences as on-pitch skillset. Personality after all sells tickets, therefore engagement becomes equity for the players themselves, their teams, and brands wanting to partner with them. This draws in a different breed of sports fan, one who cares more about the spectacle than the stat sheet.

“High taste levels are signalled not necessarily by the largest reach or scale, but by aura, a creative sensibility that co-exists with and transcends traditional success metrics,” explains Holly Gilbertson, Managing Partner at sports-focussed brand strategy agency PACER.

Beyond the US, global athletes are cottoning on to the value of expressing one’s taste, and dovetailing it into business. The likes of Hector Bellerín and Lotte Wubben Moy have bolstered their careers through their tastes in fashion and art. Andres Iniesta has his own wine brand. Naomi Osaka has her own suncare brand. The list goes on.

In the second edition of “Understanding Taste”, we mapped the taste profiles of Angel Reese, Jackson Irvine, and Thomas Müller through the KX Radar tool, not to measure their fame, but to understand how taste can function as strategy in and far beyond the world of sports

The New Age Difficulty Of Performance Over Taste

The purists still exist. Lionel Messi. Aitana Bonmatí. They channel everything through the game. Their personal brands, if they have one, are made of restraint. Yes they probably have stylists, social media managers and possibly even brand directors, but football is where they channel their focus, and they don’t deviate too heavily from the brief.

“There are other avenues for football ‘purists.’ Some people want to enjoy a quiet retirement, others could go into coaching or broadcasting or ambassador roles for various federations,” says Miller.

But purity no longer guarantees permanence. The culture today expects something different. When it comes to football specifically a whopping 95% of Gen Z love seeing players follow their creative passions beyond football. Taste is the drowning war cry after the final whistle, the standing ovation after the final substitution. It’s legacy beyond the field of play. Brands are eager to work with those who go beyond playing minutes.

“Brands that are sophisticated know that they’re going to get way more out of an athlete with 300 thousand engaged followers and a distinct POV than they will from a star player with millions of followers who just posts highlight reels and has no personality,” says Lore Drops’ Chris Eyerman.

For highly accomplished footballers like Müller his results appear almost exactly as his career suggests.

Staying the Course With Thomas Müller

Müller’s audience is anchored in traditional sports megastar communities, with only lighter links into fashion forward or progressive clusters. In data terms, that means his cultural weight sits where the trophies sit. The graph shows a profile that is incredibly valuable inside football, but relatively contained beyond it. Müller gives us a baseline of what “just an athlete” looks like at scale: huge within the game, thinner everywhere else.

“I’m less worried about athletes like Thomas Müller for whom ‘relevance’ beyond traditional football circuits or mass football audiences isn’t paramount. Yes he’ll lose relevance, but he’ll be fine, there’s still enough mass audience football interest to go around,” says Gilbertson.

But in the absence of in-game superstardom, other athletes that place all of their attention on their sport risk losing relevance and commerciality at the end of their careers.

“Taste can compensate for an athletic ceiling or limited star scale,” she adds.

Taste then becomes a kind of insurance, a parallel career that outlasts your contract. This has given rise to a new crop of athletes that wield taste as a differentiator across different levels of performance.

Meet The Tasteful Tacticians

The Local Hero: Jackson Irvine

Jackson Irvine sits in that sweet spot between football cult hero and journeyman. Yes, the Australian athlete is the captain of the Socceroos, but he’s not the headline act in Europe’s top leagues. Despite this, he’s made himself unavoidable through the texture of his world. His tattoos, post-punk sensibility, strong political views, and the way he drifts from the pitch to community radio in Hamburg all add up to something that feels deliberate.

“For mid-tier athletes and rookies who may fly under the radar, transitioning smoothly into their post-career means the need to lean on taste — whether that’s entrepreneurship, design, art, wine — this is essential for staying relevant,” explains Miller

.On the KX Radar, Irvine’s footprint stretches from sports megastars into younger communities orbiting music and activism. He’s not “just an athlete” but a connector. Whether it’s hosting radio shows, backing local artists, or showing off vintage Socceroos kits, his brand of taste makes him feel like a mate with exceptional style who also happens to be a football player.

This has attracted shoots with adidas Originals and cover stories from style focused football publications like NSS Sports and SoccerBible to King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard co-signs. He makes football feel porous again, plugged into the same creative currents that shape underground scenes. Irvine is a tier of athlete where performance may not ensure ongoing relevance, yet he proves that curiosity can.

Takeaways From Irvine

• FOR ATHLETES
  For athletes who don’t have a rolling global spotlight, cultural gravity starts in the community. Show up. Participate. Root your brand in a local scene until it feels lived-in. In Hamburg, Irvine is a radio host, a vintage scavenger and a post punk stan. He’s building gravity from where he stands.

• FOR BRANDS
  Brands should treat these figures as cultural insiders. Not ambassadors, but antennas, connecting sport to local scenes that global athletes are often too big to see. Work with these athletes to localize your message by creating stories around the scenes they operate within.

Owning the Moment: Angel Reese

The WNBA has been on a cultural tear and it’s thanks to charismatic figures like Angel Reese who speaks to the sports fan and the fashion fan simultaneously.

Angel Reese map shows what happens when taste becomes a bridge. Her footprint stretches from professional sports audiences into fashion and hype driven micro communities, with several equally large clusters rather than one single home base. In other words, the data is not just telling us she is popular, it is showing how many different rooms she can walk into without changing who she is.

While her on-court schedule still dwarfs in comparison to the NBA, Reese’s cultural presence gives her lots more to do. She walks for Victoria’s Secret, models for Juicy Couture and has her own Reebok signature line. Although, while these big signings are a testament to Reese’s wider appeal, it’s also a playbook that we’ve come to see in major sports time and time again.

“I feel like we’re now seeing the cut and paste return of the big brand x athlete signature shoe, signature logo, signature collection, in the world of women’s sport. I don’t find this evolution particularly inspiring and I think it will saturate fast (again),” notes Gilbertson.

“In my opinion, the more interesting moves aren’t driven by big brand blueprints, but by athlete-led creativity, cultural entrepreneurialism, or unique vision. The best ventures go beyond the initial logo to create whole ecosystems around ‘taste’.”

Going beyond signature signings and sponsorships, Reese has full court vision on this kind of new ecosystem thinking. As the most followed player in the WNBA on Instagram (5M+), she’s making the most of her platform.

She recently joined TOGETHXR as a founder, an emerging women’s sports media empire with Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim and other sports legends. She has even started her own women’s football team in Washington DC. Reese acknowledges the moment. Her cultural stage is a chance to elevate women’s sports beyond basketball alone.

On a more playful side, Reese even finds ways to channel the haters into revenue streams. While being a beast on the boards has earned her nicknames such as “Windex Cleaner”, it’s also rallied the trolls to invent a word called “mebounds”, which criticies Reese for getting rebounds off her missed shots.

Instead of sulking, Reese trademarked the term, sold it as merch and even gave a portion of the money to her cyberbullying foundation. If this wasn’t enough, Reebok then proceeded to call the Angel Reese 1 “Mebounds” - consecrating the moment as a shoe. She shows that taste isn’t just about the long game, but about knowing when to cut into the cultural conversation and grab a monster rebound. Taste with timing turns culture into collectibility.

“If you turn every viral moment into a drop, fans tune out. But if you create a narrative where you’re owning an insult, or celebrating a dunk, or flipping a headline, your product becomes a cultural artifact, not just merch. It becomes something collectible,” says Eyerman

Takeaways From Reece

• FOR ATHLETES
  For modern athletes with a significant platform like Reese, they need to know how to play both slow and fast tempos. Building long-term ecosystems like TOGETHXR or Power FC is the slow work, the kind that compounds over time and cements legacy. But culture also rewards speed. When a moment hits, whether it’s praise or backlash, responding quickly and with intent turns noise into narrative. Timing decides what becomes legend.

• FOR BRANDS
  Reese shows that real cultural capital comes from infrastructure. Brands that want to work with these kinds of athletes should look at how they add to their infrastructure. That means thinking less about one-off sponsorships or capsule collabs and rather designing frameworks that let athletes author culture alongside them.

Taste Is A Tactic, But Time Makes It True

Athletes are no longer solely rewarded for how loud their names are chanted in the arena, but for how deep their lore runs. The ones who endure beyond their careers are the ones building their brand off taste.

But even this today is table stakes. Going deeper is now an expectation.

NBA’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and rapper Lil Yachty for Canada Goose. Courtesy of Canada Goose.

“I would say we are now seeing deeper taste dimensions rising too, as being ‘culturally fluent’ is becoming table stakes for new gen athletes. Taste is increasingly defined by intellectual curiosity, niche interests and expertise, creative entrepreneurialism or inclusion in interdisciplinary networks / circles that stretch beyond sport.” says Gilbertson.

So yes, niche can be optimized, but beware of faking taste for the clout.

“It has to be something you genuinely want to spend time on outside your sport. Not just something that aligns with your taste on paper, but something you actually care about enough to be involved in when you’re exhausted from training, when you’re traveling, when you’re in the middle of a season. Because if it’s not, it’s just going to become an obligation, and you’re going to resent it,” says Eyerman

In the end, taste is about choosing where to put your energy, whether that’s through local scenes or ecosystem building. Taste is an essential tactic. Because in the end, deepening it is the X-factor that separates the athletes who endure from the ones who fade.

This article is the first in a three-part series titled “Understanding Taste” in partnership with Say Less & DotDotDot.

The real value of the Creative Director in fashion’s heralded maisons is constantly being questioned.

Who should be a Creative Director? Should it be bonafide fashion designers with the know-how? Should it be culturally connected celebrities with the know-who? Everyone agrees that it should be “someone with unmatched taste”, but what does that even mean?

For our first instalment of “Understanding Taste”, we spoke with J’Nae Phillips of Fashion Tingz and Robin Mellery-Pratt of strategic intelligence company Matter on the taste communities behind Jonathan Anderson and Phoebe Philo.

What is clear is that taste is no longer a monolithic concept. The Creative Director’s strength is not solely a god-level vision, but how effectively they deploy that vision to their taste communities. The story might begin with the Creative Director, but the legitimacy is determined by how the message is carried by their acolytes.

This is the polyphony of taste in fashion.

“The Creative Director still acts as a symbolic anchor, curating coherence and translating heritage into vision, but its power is now interdependent: audiences co-author taste through remix and resistance, algorithms dictate what gains visibility, and cross-industry creatives shape aesthetic codes that fashion then absorbs,” says J’Nae Phillips, founder of Fashion Tingz “The future horizon of taste is polyphonic rather than monophonic.”

When it comes to polyphony in fashion, there are two approaches we can see across both Creative Directors. The first is “going wide”. This orchestrates a symphony of taste communities through one vision. It is about variety. It is about straddling subcultures. This is very much the bag of Dior’s Creative Director Jonathan Anderson.

The second approach is “going deep”. This zeroes in on a concentrated taste community and hyper-serves them. It is a vision with conviction. These are the true thousand fans that rally behind Phoebe Philo’s unwavering vision around modern-day womanhood

“Today, taste is less about fixed aesthetics and more about an ability to edit, contextualizse, and give meaning in a culture of infinite choice,” says Phillips

The wide and deep phenomenon was explored by I-D’s Editor-in-Chief, Thom Bettridge, in his Op-Ed “Go Big or Go Hyper-Niche” which he wrote for The Business of Fashion in 2023. This piece seeks to deepen that perspective with recent data from Kemmler Kemmler’s KX Radar.

Going Wide With Jonathan Anderson

Anderson has been categorised as a “meme maker” at the highest level, turning luxury into internet culture. As he moves into his new role at Dior, our first glimpses at his collections suggest less memethink. Yet his ability to reach into multiple subcultures and connect the dots still holds true.

“Jonathan Anderson proves that fashion can metabolise subcultural codes into luxury languages without losing credibility,” explains Phillips

Subcultures were once silos, operating on the fringes and not speaking with each other. But the TikTok-ification of culture today means everything can be remixed, even between groups that once sat at opposite ends of the spectrum. Anderson understands this innately. During his tenure as Creative Director at Loewe, and leader of his namesake line JW Anderson, he brought together Studio Ghibli stans with middle-England teetotallers.

He made high-low culture and its crossover his signature which made Loewe one of the hottest brands in the world, and grew the business by millions of revenue a year.It was for different crowds, with different products yet he specialised in finding dialogue between one another.

His ability to wield different communities at once comes from his unique view of craft.The thing that everything he did orbited around. It is not simply a creative process, but a cultural engine. An eggshell heel can be craft. A tomato air balloon can be craft. Not because of the materials behind it, but because of the hours of discourse that spill out from it. In essence, the craft here comes from an ability to stir conversation again and again across multiple spaces.

“He isn’t just reacting to virality but reprogramming luxury’s codes through humor, absurdity, and hyper-referentiality, turning the disposable into the collectable,” Phillips says.

Anderson’s spread across taste communities, from established connoisseurs to hype seekers, speaks to his skill in balancing the “then and now”. He proved this at Loewe by excavating house icons of the past and moving them forward. More traditional taste communities admire the homage while more progressive ones admire the relevance.

At Dior, his output is clearly different, but his ability to simultaneously charm different groups from cinephiles to aesthetes to historians is still a key element of his unique power.

“He judges access and exclusivity very well and has an excellent talent team working on brand ambassadors, driving international awareness. He is extremely able at creating clothes that reflect the tone with which consumers want to express themselves,” says Matter’s Robin Mellery-Pratt. “With Dior’s financial backing and ambitious commercial objectives, his relevance is likely to increase. He may even become a household name.”

The Anderson Playbook for Going Wide

Going wide is often criticised as a loss of focus and a dilution of taste. Anderson proves the opposite. For him, going wide is about unearthing connections between groups. It is not about trying to appeal to both but about creating something familiar yet different that gets them talking. Ideally to one another. Anderson stages the clash and opens dialogue.

Here are some takeaways from his approach:

• Make craft conversational: Design objects that spawn discourse, from materials to proportion jokes to archetypes. The talk is part of the value. The “Natural Fake” Spring/Summer 2023 flower top at Loewe exemplifies this. This gets the botanists and the fashion heads talking on the same forum.

• Route via an eclectic mix of ambassadors: Create diverse community nodes, from artists to archivists to pop figures, who translate the code into their circles.

• Use heritage as syntax, not script: Reference the archive to gain trust, then update the sentence so it reads in today’s terms.

Going Deep With Phoebe Philo

Opposite to Anderson, Phoebe Philo builds in silence. She keeps the circle tight and trusts density over reach. That restraint creates pressure, a small room with heavy gravity. It is the same physics that make The Row feel louder the quieter it gets.

A broadcast powered by absence and immaculate coherence. It is the same approach to taste that has built Martin Margiela, early Vetements, and Helmut Lang.

“Phoebe Philo demonstrates that smaller, more intimate communities can hold disproportionate cultural power through refinement and restraint,” notes Phillips.

Philo’s audience was raised during her time at Chloé and “Old Céline”. When she left, those pieces became relics and the resale market proved the point. So much so that both brands could not resist reissues. Now her eponymous brand digs even deeper into the quiet, moving away from the cacophony of the present day.

“Philo’s smaller taste community is ultimately a strength, because in an age of algorithmic sameness and mass visibility, intimacy and scarcity generate the deepest forms of cultural capital,” Phillips adds.

Philo’s advantage is not silhouette alone but a sense of lineage and lived memory, (from Chloé to Céline to the present). This element is stitched to a community fluent in the codes and the occasions they serve. Dupes can mimic outline and AI can hallucinate a moodboard. Neither can mint myth or confer provenance. Myth slows the scroll, reintroduces patience, and raises the cost of indifference.

“Probability (AI) can discern tastefulness and emulate it, but by its inherent nature it cannot transform it. You need creative genius and authority to do that. Anna Wintour’s first Vogue cover with denim and couture, Demna [Gvasalia]’s first show at Balenciaga combining couture techniques and streetwear silhouettes, these jumps forward cannot be born out of recycling what came before without idiosyncratic sparks,” says Mellery-Pratt

Philo’s taste map is testament to her discipline. The power players from indie culturalists to edgy intellectuals occupy her tight orbit as she sits staunchly within the avant-garde.

The recent Phoebe Philo Collection C materials underlines this conviction. Precision tailoring, tactile surfaces, silhouettes that hold their own air. Clothes that feel authored for a particular community rather than engineered to capture the masses.

The story stayed deliberately minimal, with her signature red font across mood-driven visuals, pushing attention onto how pieces sit on the body and into a life, not simply into a feed. It is a refusal to play the content economy on its terms, and it works because the audience was trained for this kind of reading.

The Philo Playbook for Going Deep

For brands looking to go deep, much can be learned from Philo. Here are some takeaways from her approach:

• Keep the room small: Optimise for density over reach. A tighter circle raises pressure, memory and price integrity. Anchor on timeless products that carry the code, then let the faithful do the distribution.

• Publish sparingly: Say less, mean more. Silence is a strategy: use it to point attention at the work, not the marketing.

• Guard provenance. Lineage matters, both past chapters and present chapters. Archive, date and authenticate so dupes die on contact.

Taste Does Not Scale in a Straight Line

Anderson widens the room by authoring a clear code and inviting many readings. Philo deepens the room by keeping the circle small and the signal exact. Both models work because they respect how culture actually moves now, through networks of people who translate, remix and vouch for what they love in polyphonic symphony.

“What’s interesting is not their divergence, but the way they map the plural futures of taste (from niche intensity to major theatrics) showing that luxury no longer moves in one direction but operates as an ecosystem of coexisting, often contradictory, cultural economies,” says Phillips.

The practical rule is simple. Choose your room. If you go wide, stage the clash, keep the codes legible and let ambassadors do the routing. If you go deep, keep the cadence sparse, protect provenance and let the faithful carry the story. Breadth routes. Depth roots.

There’s levels to taste.

People, things, places whose ability to make us feel things seems almost transcendental. So when dealing with the ineffable, the indescribable, with that which leaves you speechless; how are you ever meant to find the words to define it? And who has the authority to decide what good taste is?

Why does Mk.Gee’s debut album sound like nothing we’ve ever heard before? How can it be that everything Teenage Engineering or MSCHF does seems so full of life and ingenuity? Why does Jacquemus have such a consistently “tasteful” eye to everything he captures?

As long-suffering brand strategists working at the intersection of fashion, entertainment and online culture, we have spent long coffee breaks trying to analyse things that really ought to be left as they are: pure, complete, unquestionable.

And how can we help our clients be more like those who identify, hold, and show us taste?

We want to take practical steps to guide the people, platforms and brands we work with to build things that invoke deeply emotional responses from their target audiences.

It’s all a matter of taste. It always has been. But just because you know a thing to be true, it doesn’t mean you automatically have the words to prove it. What are the real rules of creating influencer and crafting taste?

Taste is slippery. Esoteric. Subjective. Yet it’s the single thing that will dictate whether what you make will land. And, more importantly, will last. This is because connecting with people through taste rather than through trend-driven ubiquity, means that your work is lighting up parts of their brain reserved only for the things they care most about. Music connecting to food, connecting to childhood memories, connecting to sneaker nostalgia, connecting to unforgettable hikes.

A person’s sense of taste is developed by all the things that have ever been ‘good’ in their life. Trigger that in the right people, and you’ll stay with them and everyone they influence, long after the TikTok algorithm has forgotten about you.

Unfortunately, without the beard, clout or creds of Rick Rubin, we aren’t really allowed to collate our thoughts as a series of philosophical tidbits written to inspire more than inform. We need to dig trenches into the mechanics of taste, in order to try to get to the bottom of it with regards to the three fields we think about most often.

Music, fashion, and sports.

The things personalities are built on. Pseudo-religions in godless times.

How do we decide what’s cool, or at least what’s going to stick around in our wardrobes, playlists, and fantasy selects?

Can we predict taste? Perhaps even craft it from scratch? Now, wouldn’t that be something?

Ambitious, but this is something we wanted to discover with “Understanding Taste”, a three part paper, written by SQR EYE Studio and Say Less in collaboration with Kemmler Kemmler (who gave us access to the KX Radar, an innovative audience segmentation built on cultural preferences and real-time social media behaviour), and exclusively brought to you by our friends at Dot Dot Dot.

The series serves as a tool for cultural connectivity that shows you how one thing doesn’t always lead to another, and how lateral moves along synapses of taste can open up new worlds of possibility for plot, discourse and impact. The big three.

PART 1: Understanding Taste in Fashion

Written by James Davis of SQR EYE Studio (Released Friday, November 28th)

Including conversations with J’Nae Phillips of Fashion Tingz and Robin Mellery-Pratt of MATTER where we dissect the creative director du-jour and the values of going wide vs. going deep - as originally proposed by cultural oracle Thom Bettridge. Case studies include those on Dior’s Jonathan Anderson and Phoebe Philo who have been analysed through the KX Radar.

PART 2: Understanding Taste in Sports

Written by James Davis of SQR EYE Studio (Released Wednesday, December 3rd)

Including discussions with Daniel Yaw-Miller of SportsVerse, Holly Gilbertson of PACER, and Chris Eyerman of 77x (Luka Dončić’s media brand) where we speak about how taste is an essential tactic of sports talent in differentiating themselves from the games they play. Angel Reese, Jackson Irvine and Thomas Muller have been analysed and compared through the KX Radar.

PART 3: Understanding Taste in Music

Written by Robbie Russell of Say Less (Released Friday, December 5th)

Including interviews with Peach of NTS Radio and Jonas Weber of ColorsxStudio about the importance of using taste—be it good or purposely bad—to break up with the algorithm and run free. Tyler, The Creator, Chappell Roan and TOMM¥ CA$H have been analysed and compared through the KX Radar

Follow along over the next two weeks across Dot Dot Dot, Say Less and SQR EYE Studio’s channels.