Gang gang… Let’s talk about bird watchers for a second.

Their khaki seventeen-pocket vests and their binoculars that cost more than your rent. Standing in a marsh at 5:47am in breathable waterproof trousers, completely still, waiting for something rare that everyone else will walk past without blinking.

Didn’t we used to laugh at them? Well, we were wrong and we are sorry.

Bird watchers are the most culturally ahead people alive. They woke up before you. They have an underground network sharing coordinates on rare sightings before anyone else knows to look. They’re not reactive nor algorithmic. They are in a field, in sensible boots, clocking something beautiful and obscure, completely unbothered by whether it trends.

Turns out, we’ve been bird watchers this entire time. Someone pointed out that what they liked about our very first SOURCE CODE was that we took a “true bird’s eye point of view” on culture when listing 91 names we believe you all should take a closer look at. So we’re rolling with it. From now on Dot Nation, call us the Triple-Dot Bird Watch Association. Scanning the tree-lines of our feed all day.

In a way it’s true. SOURCE CODE is an index of rare sightings. Let me be honest with you. This series was going to be called Blueprint when I created a folder on my Instagram early last year where I save interesting creatives for this list whenever I scroll IG. Then I changed it to Source Material BUT WE FUCKED IT when I by accident sent our glorious Creative Director Colin Doerffler the wrong name of the series and we ended up rolling with it.

Colin by the way nominated a number of the stellar names inside our rare sightings log below. None are ranked because there is no biggest bird, there is only who you spotted first.

So put on your big boy quick-dry Fjällräven G-1000 pants and be the bird watcher yourself. You don’t want to be the person who shows up after it’s fled and asks what they missed… right?

Now for those who know jack shit about bird watching (not us!!!), a brief and essential glossary:

Twitching | Urgently travelling to see a rare bird someone else already spotted. Originally a British thing. Now a global condition. In culture: arriving late to a name, acting like you didn’t. We see you.

Lifer | A species you’re seeing for the very first time ever. Serious birders keep a physical life list. Thousands of entries requiring years of dedication.

Dipping | When you travel to see a rare bird and it’s already gone. The cultural equivalent of googling someone the week after their Super Bowl ad drops and telling people you’re “a big fan.”

Jizz | The overall feeling a bird gives you before you’ve properly identified it. Gut. Instinct. Believed to derive from GISS (General Impression of Size and Shape) a term originally used by military pilots to identify aircraft before they could read the details. It migrated into birding and never left. We did not make this up. Please, please believe us.

Pishing | Making a “pssh pssh” sound with your mouth in a field to attract rare birds. It works because it mimics alarm calls. Birders do this in public, confidently. Respect honestly.

Armchair Birder | Someone who identifies birds purely from photos without ever going outside. Mildly offensive within serious birding circles. Culturally: the person writing a trend report without being part of the culture. I see you LinkedInfluencers… Not you. Never you. You’re outside. You have the trousers.

For our next volume of SOURCE CODE we want to hear from you. And so… send us your nominations to dotdottdottmedia@gmail.com

14 People Whose Visual Fingerprints Are Everywhere

• Henry Goodfellow | Photographer

• Charli Chops | Director & Photographer

• Danica Arias Kleinknecht | Director

• Khalik Allah | Photographer

• Asher Hyde | Visual Designer

• Giorgia Rose | Photographer & Videographer

• Evan Swords | Visual Designer

• Daniel Derro | Director & Photographer

• Aus Taylor | Creative Director & Stage Designer

• Cameron Strand | Photographer

• Stephanie Stamatis | Art Director & Set Designer

• Chloe Chippendale | Photographer

• Yago Hunt-Laudi | Editor

• James Brodribb | Photographer & Director

8 Talents on Both Sides of the Screen

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DISCLAIMER: Ice cream. This entire article is about ice cream.

We’ve written just over three and a half thousand words (with McKinsey citations, BCG research, and market size figure) on a frozen dessert that melts before you’ve finished photographing it. There are a handful of interviews with ice cream makers who operate at the intersection of food and fashion culture. There’s a section about the psychology of status objects that takes a good four minutes to read. All of it is about ice cream.

If you’re one of those people who claims not to like ice cream: this week’s newsletter is not for you. We don’t want you here. You will find this piece deeply alienating and frankly so will we if you read it. Ice cream is mentioned a staggering 43 times, there are approximately a dozen photographs of it, and we have spoken to people whose whole lives are organized around making it well. You would be miserable. Go outside. Come back next week when we do something else.

For those who DO like the joys in life… tuck in.

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My feed over the past few days has felt like a fever dream I find oddly comforting. Moncler’s latest Puffy summer campaign using bright red, pink, yellow and blue ice cream on a stick in the colors of its new puffer jackets. MAIN ROSE (Zara Larsson’s new lingerie line) posting bright, multi-layered ice cream in line with her Midnight Sun album roll out.

Folderol in Paris (the ‘it’ natural wine bar and ice cream shop in the 11th) got so crowded it hired a bouncer and hung a sign reading no TikTok, which did nothing. The concept spawned imitators in New York, London, Tokyo, and Detroit. Jesus, we really are millennials.

But something more structural is happening beneath all of this. What ice cream is actually mapping, in real time, is a fundamental reorganization of where an entire generation parks its desire, and what it now costs to feel like you belong to something worth belonging to.

You know the image. Girl, great coat, impeccable in that way that looks accidental. Soft serve in hand. Her boyfriend in the frame (Jaded London jeans, washed-out pastel cardigan, small chain, slightly overgrown moustache) tolerating this photograph with the energy of a man who has been asked to be in many photographs. The cone is picture-perfect against an exposed brick backdrop. She has not yet eaten the ice cream. She is waiting for the light. The ice cream does not care about the light. The ice cream is melting. Even better.

I’ve seen this image outside Chunk Provisions in London, Gelateria DODO in Seoul, Erewhon in Silverlake, Ijskuypje in Amsterdam where the queue wraps around the block as if it’s a Supreme drop, Tano Gelato in London where you need to know where the entrance is (which means the photograph also carries the social capital of I found the secret door, as Dot Dot Dot friend Tora Northman tells us).

A Windsor ice cream shop posting daily scoops shot on an iPhone. Its recent berries and clotted cream video got 53 million views, chocolate orange 5.5 million. Criminisi Ice Cream’s Blue Bubblegum Blitz gelato: 44.1 million and counting.

Then there’s Dylan Lemay, a former Coldstone Creamery employee who built a social following of over 15 million people doing nothing but making ice cream and is currently the number one creator on TikTok in the food and beverage space.

What the hell is all this then? Well, ice cream is a category so visually inherent and emotionally immediate that it creates content as a side effect of simply existing. And that makes for quite a Dot Dot Dot story…

Ice Cream, You Scream, We All Scream

Start with the economics, because they explain everything else.

The global ice cream market sits at approximately $113 billion today and is expected to grow annually by 5.8% at CAGR over the next few years. It held firm through a pandemic and through the sharpest inflation in a generation. More important than the size is where the growth is concentrating: the premium and artisanal segment, driven disproportionately by younger consumers.

@dylanlemay#Toni #husband #cake #icecream #hbd #hbday #satisfying #soothing

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Half of Gen Z and millennials in the US report actively seeking out new ice cream experiences more often than the year before. Between January and May 2025, American ice cream spending surged 26.5% year-over-year, with Gen Z identified as the primary generational driver.

The same generation every luxury brand describes as aspirational but financially constrained is spending measurably more on premium ice cream. The price floor of aspirational fashion has risen so aggressively over the past decade that what once functioned as a reachable symbolic purchase now requires a genuinely different income bracket to justify. The Bottega Veneta pouch. The entry Loewe puzzle. The “accessible” Saint Laurent bag. These were never cheap, but they were once legible as achievable.

That era is functionally over. Brands made a deliberate decision to compress their customer bases upward, toward the ultra wealthy. It produced a generation with deep brand literacy, genuine aesthetic investment, and a structural inability to participate through product.

According to Boston Consulting Group, 73% of Gen Z actively cut everyday spending to redirect money toward experiences and quality goods that reflect their values. McKinsey meanwhile states that groceries (not fashion, not travel, not even dining out) rank as the number-one category where Gen Z and millennials planned to increase spending. Groceries. The category that contains the $20 Erewhon smoothie, the €7 seasonal soft serve, the artisanal gelato with the queue. The category that has quietly absorbed the aspirational energy luxury fashion spent decades trying to own.

Economists have a term for this—”affordable indulgence substitution”—but the term flatters the theory by making it sound more stable than it is. What’s actually happened is a structural collapse in the price of social status. The Diptyque candle, the Charlotte Tilbury lipstick, the “small luxury” that the original lipstick effect pointed toward were still objects meant to be enjoyed individually in private, still sitting on a shelf communicating taste to nobody but you.

Ice cream, iced matcha, the $9 pastry from the right artisanal bakery, the bubble tea drop that lasted one weekend in one city aren’t substitutes for the bag in the way a candle is a substitute for the bag. Clearly they are a different category of transaction entirely. One that figured out that the social signal doesn’t require a moment or a location or a community of people who made the same choice. It’s become more important than a durable object.

The candle costs €60 and nobody knows you own it. The soft serve costs seven euros and it’s been seen by two hundred people by the time you’ve reached the corner. Luxury spent a century building the infrastructure of desire around scarcity and exclusivity. This generation found a shortcut that costs less than a glass of wine and delivers the same feeling of being in the right place, with the right people, at the right time. It’s important to understand the scale of this structural repricing of what status costs as it has very significant implications for every brand that built its identity around being expensive.

Yeha Shin, founder of Korean gelateria DODO which was founded in 2020 and operates five locations across Seoul, and who has collaborated on ice cream projects with everyone from Salvatore Ferragamo and Hublot to Birkenstock and recently those Moncler animal-shaped popsicles, agrees: “Ice cream has become more than food in that it sits somewhere between nostalgia and aspiration, which makes it surprisingly powerful as a cultural object.”

To promote this article, we partnered with Shin at DODO’s Gangnam location on a yoghurt raspberry swirl flavored ice cream with our Dot Dot Dot logo chocolate buttons. All inspired by our logo. How fun!

“We live in an era where people want to share things that feel beautiful, fun and emotionally resonant. Ice cream delivers that instantly. This emotional reaction in a very short moment is accessible, unlike luxury fashion. Almost anyone can participate in it. In that way it can feel like a small, accessible luxury [in its own right].”

The Queue Is the Product

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Image… You’re standing in front of an ice cream parlour window after waiting 17 minutes in line despite you being in a back alley. The glass is smudged with the greasy fingerprints of at least forty children who came before you. It’s 32 degrees Celsius, so naturally you’re sweating through your shirt. The person behind the counter is looking at you. And somehow, in this moment, under this pressure, with the full weight of summer bearing down, you’re genuinely considering rum raisin.

WHO ARE YOU???

I’ve always thought that ice cream reveals something true about a person. The flavor you choose, yes. But more than that: how you eat it. There are people who bite directly into a scoop with the casual violence of someone who also reclines their seat on a one-hour flight. Monsters.

Then there are the slow lickers (methodical, almost meditative, rotating the cone with surgical precision) making eye contact with you the entire time for reasons nobody can explain. CREEP!!! There are the people who let it melt and then drink it from the cone like a warm dairy shot, which is disgusting and also somehow always a man in his late thirties. There are the ones who eat it so fast they get a headache and then act surprised, every single time.

Psychologists will tell you that high sensation-seekers prefer bold, unconventional flavors while more conscientious types trend toward the classics. That people use food choices to signal identity and group belonging in ways they’re not consciously aware of. That nostalgia activates the same neural pathways as reward. That ice cream, specifically, triggers an almost universal positive emotional response in a way that almost no other food category does.

Which is, it turns out, exactly why half the fashion industry has apparently decided to use it as a marketing tool simultaneously and we cannot stop noticing.

In the past month alone, Rhode, Zara Larsson’s lingerie line MAIN ROSE, Burberry. Miu Miu, and Moncler have all leaned into marketing with ice creams and popsicles as the main act. What’s actually happening here? Is this a trend? A strategy? A collective hallucination? Is there something about a cone that communicates something a campaign can’t?

We got obsessed with this question, so we went deep. We spoke to ice cream shop owners who operate at the intersection of food and fashion culture and we came back with some answers. That piece drops next week here on Dot Dot Dot.

But while we’re finalizing it (and while we’re leaning into our commitment to doing more IRL with Dot Dot Dot, like we did with Stone Island during Design Week in Milan) we’ve organized something for the week. Get ready…

We’re Giving Away Free DDD Gelatos in Korea!!!

We hit up our new friend Yeha at DODO.

If you don’t know them: DODO is a Korean gelato brand that launched in Seoul in 2020, now operating five locations across the city. They’ve developed over 200 recipes in-house, and have become the quiet go-to for luxury and fashion brands who want to do something with frozen dessert. Their collab list includes everyone from Diptyque and Jo Malone to Salvatore Ferragamo and Birkenstock, Most recently Moncler with whom they launched the viral animal-shaped popsicles for their summer campaign.

We like that DODO treats every collaboration as storytelling where they use the gelato as the medium (flavors reference the brand’s heritage, packaging mirrors the visual language, the pop-up becomes part of the brand world). How Dot Dot Dot! So this felt right.

On Thursday 28th May (the day the article drops) at 11AM local time, we’re giving away complimentary Dot Dot Dot x DODO Yogurt with raspberry swirl (inspired by our Dot Dot Dot logo) gelatos to the first 50 people (or while stock lasts).

Location:
DODO Gelateria Parnas Mall

B1 R-36, Parnas Mall, 521 Teheran-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea

It’s simple. Show up. Get a gelato. Read the article on your phone while it melts.

Our treat…

Tell your friends in town and don’t forget to take a snap and send this to us at @dotdotdot.zip or email us at dotdottdottmedia@gmail.com

Dial +1 (234) 332-1782 and hit that volume button, because you’re going to want to hear what this month’s VOICE MAIL Dot Dot Dot friend has to say. And… our audio is low for some reason this time. Speakerphone it is…

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This time I called the delightful Lydia Pang.

Co-founder of London creative strategy studio MØRNING and its newly launched production sister EVENING, which also runs the stellar Substack newsletter BURN AFTER READING. She picked up from London where she’s spending a month away from home in rural Wales!

Before MØRNING, Pang did the whole circuit properly (Refinery29, ad agencies in London and New York, then Nike HQ in Portland, where she met co-founder Sam (hi Sam!). Two people who looked at each other across the swoosh and clearly thought: we could do something smarter. How smart!

Oh, and she wrote a book. Eat Bitter is a memoir rooted in Hakka Chinese culture (“eat bitter” being the proverb for enduring hardship to taste sweetness) run through burnout, fertility, grief, and bone broth boiled in a New York apartment while homesick. Eight recipes. All guts. One of the must-reads of 2026.

We spoke about what taste really means, why it matters more in an age of AI, what anyone trying to break into the creative industries needs to actually hear, and what the foodie is eating tonight.

Enough… Now dial in. Listen. Chew it over. And complain to us one more time about how all our VOICE MAILS route to US numbers and you Brits can’t call in. We promise, we’ll listen… maybe.

Well… you know, this month’s number does after all route to Lodi, Ohio. The oldest settlement in Medina County and the home of the now cancelled Sweet Corn Festival! And we find it just that much more important to tell you that then to make your lives easy. Go eat a crumpet or something.

Cheerio…

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.

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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.

Didddddddd you miss us?

Well. We were in Milan during Design Week, taking this whole Dot Dot Dot thing live for the first time. Mad fun. Genuinely.

We took Product Anatomy off the page and into a room, and we were very deliberate about what kind of room. We didn’t want a generic panel or a boring talk. Not another evening of people on stools pretending to have a spontaneous conversation. We wanted something that felt true DDD and more like an investigation than an event, so that’s what we built.

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The occasion was Stone Island’s unveiling of a new chapter of NO SEASONS (a capsule rooted in an original Massimo Otti project first introduced in 1989) and the product couldn’t have been more fitting. A garment with literally no seasons and for all seasons as it comes in various fabrics. Exactly the kind of thing we started Product Anatomy to understand.

The space was a drained swimming pool inside Capsule Plaza (one of Milan’s most interesting hybrid venues). The ceiling was a 4x8 metre LED screen. The seating was upholstered in NO SEASONS fabric. The sound system was a Friendly Pressure Studio One, retuned for 2026 and genuinely immersive. Archive folders designed to look like Stone Island research files were passed hand to hand through the audience. A custom data animation hung above everyone. The Stone Island team explained the jacket’s nerdy make-up to the crowd and demonstrated the fabric construction in real time, uncomfortably close, which was the point.

The main conversation was held together by the great Robin Mellery-Pratt, Juliana Salazar, and Jake Woolf bringing the editorial and cultural perspective. Katy Lubin from Lyst brought the data. Stone Island’s Alberto Ghidotti walked us through the jacket itself in nerdy detail. Stefano Caccini from Stone Island and Gennaro Boccia of Pezze Vintage (the Naples institution that has done more for how a generation understands the badge than most official channels) closed it out.

Thank you to Stone Island and the Lyst teams for making this what it was. Also to the great great great creatives Colin Doerffler and Christine Papst at CD HQ. The room truly felt like their work. And to everyone who came, passed an archive folder to a stranger, or stood in a drained swimming pool in Milan on a Wednesday to simply say hi. You made it all the more special.

Now… we’re not done with this one. October. Stone Island. Product Anatomy pt.2 We’ve seen the visuals already and they’re striking. There may be something live again, and if you’re in London, pay attention. More when we’re ready.

Back to regular programming from next week. First up: Kid Entrepreneurs??? Be in touch…

Around 2018, while working as a young editor at The Business of Fashion, I was sitting in the Fitzrovia offices of my boss and company founder, Imran Amed, when Virgil Abloh, who I had interviewed a few months prior, dropped by ahead of a DJ set in London that evening.

In between conversations, he made a point that has stuck with me ever since. While most creative directors, he said, operate from a distance (observing culture from above in their ivory towers) he wanted the opposite. He wanted to be in it. On the ground. In direct conversation with the youth shaping it.

At the time, it felt like a clear articulation of his own approach. Looking back, it feels more like an early blueprint for where brands, culture, and the relationship between those who make and the audiences who consumer, were heading. As a true position.

Eight years later, the most interesting conversations in culture are no longer happening between brands and consumers, but between musicians and fans. And the gap between how artists are navigating that relationship (and how brands are still fumbling it) has rarely felt wider.

What Abloh was pointing toward, before it had quite been named or overused, was relatability. Not in the flattened, marketing sense the word has since taken on. Rather, something more specific: the feeling of being inside something while it’s still unfolding, instead of encountering it once it has already been packaged and presented.

It’s a quality that’s easy to recognize and strangely difficult to manufacture. It’s also, increasingly, where the most meaningful signals are coming from.

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Nowhere was this more visible than at Coachella last weekend, where relatability quietly became the dominant aesthetic across stages. Justin Bieber, in his return to the desert, pulled up old YouTube clips of himself mid-set and sang along to them, collapsing a decade-long career into something closer to a bedroom memory. Elsewhere, Geese performed with live Omegle chats projected behind them, while Karol G’s billboard took the form of a simple text message. Different artists but the signal they presented was the same: “I’m not above this, I’m in it with you.”

I was reminded of this approach to “relatability” a few weeks ago when musician Fred again.. uploaded the full-length recording of the final night of his USB002 tour to his YouTube page.

The show at Alexandra Palace in London itself was already a moment when Thomas Bangalter (one half of Daft Punk) made an appearance, a figure who, by most measures, simply does not show up. He had not performed publicly since the duo dissolved in 2021. His presence alone compressed decades of electronic music history into a single evening.

It could have been framed that way. Elevated, preserved at a careful distance. Instead, Fred again treated the upload as a moment to be re-entered. He wrote out the full tracklist with timestamps and then, almost like a fan watching the video himself, began annotating it in the same loose, associative way that devoted fans colonize the comments beneath long DJ sets. Explaining transitions. Flagging emotional peaks. Capturing details that never are uncovered because they have no strategic value and carry everything else.

In the comment section, the artist wrote about building ideas with Bangalter in the studio that week, then shifts, almost without transition, to Bangalter’s son (barely a year old the last time his father performed) now standing in the crowd singing every word. At one point he writes simply: “look at that face man, this is the face I remember most clearly.”

It does almost nothing in terms of information and everything in terms of feeling, and in that simple moment, Fred sat alongside everyone else. The fans loved it. He was speaking to them on their level.

The Architecture of Realness

Fred again is by no means an anomaly so much as a particularly legible example of a wider, accelerating shift. Look closely, and you see something interesting happening in artist-fan interaction. There is a single counterintuitive principle: incompleteness is the point.

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What? Did you think we had all the answers? Absolutely not.

At Dot Dot Dot, we spend most weeks doing what this industry expects: observing, analysing, packaging things into something that just remotely provokes thought and just looks cool. The usual stuff.

All (loosely) informed by conversations with the people who are supposed to know of course. The creative directors, strategists, founders, the ones shaping and running the multi-billion dollar brands everyone references. Access to them certainly helps.

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But if we’re honest, a lot of what we do is just trying to make sense of things in real time. Same as everyone else.

And in between all of that, we’ve been collecting questions. The small, big, and slightly obsessive ones. The kind that come up after a show, mid-meeting, or halfway through a commute on a metro.

They’ve been sitting in our Notes app for the past six months. So this week, instead of pretending we’ve cracked anything, we’re just putting them out there. Because chances are, you’ve been thinking about some of these too.

We really want to know answers to these questions, so if something sparks, respond to this email with the number of the question and your answer, or hit us up in DM at @dotdotdot.zip. Here, over the next few days, we’ll open a few of these up properly and share what comes back with you all!!! Let’s chat.

And if you’ve got questions of your own, send them through. We’ll probably turn them into something later on…

53 Questions We Want Answers To…

1. What even is “luxury” today?

2. Why do the most expensive brands so often feel the most creatively risk-averse?

3. Are creative directors still hired for taste, or just for recognisability?

4. Did Pep Guardiola actually get a stylist?

5. How many people working on a brand would actually buy it full price?

6. Why are run clubs suddenly the most effective brand-building tool in every city?

7. How many people in the room actually like the idea, but don’t say anything?

8. How many people are using the word “community” without knowing a single actual customer?

9. Why do some internet-native brands feel outdated after two years?

10. How much of a brand’s tone of voice is actually just one person internally?

11. What are the best tactics for emerging designers/artists/musicians to break through?

12. Do we think Jacob Elordi’s character Nate in Euphoria Season 3 trailer wearing all Bottega Veneta is a sign for more to come in the ambassador-entertainment cross-over?

13. How real are “sold out” moments?

14. Why do certain agencies keep winning work, even when the output feels interchangeable?

15. Why do certain brands suddenly become “cool again” overnight, and what actually changed internally?

16. How many people in a meeting are just waiting for someone senior to go first?

17. Why do some logos feel instantly trustworthy?

18. How many layers of approval are too many before a campaign becomes impossible to care about? LOL

19. We all like the Burberry social content, but do we even care about their product

20. Does anyone really enjoy a sober coffee rave? Seems whack…

21. What paper (weight, quality, finish) does Hermès use for its show invites?

22. Why are some PRs so incredibly out of touch?

23. How many ideas get killed because they were “too early” rather than actually wrong?

24. What editors are still truly critical of their peers?

25. What fashion food place is actually worth the hype?

26. Who decided that putting a founder in front of a camera automatically makes something “authentic”?

27. What’s the one detail insiders always notice first that no one outside ever picks up on?

28. What is the maximum price a simple t-shirt should ever be?

29. Are we in the era of post-authenticity? (A lot more on this in a bit)

30. What happened to all the diversity progress the industry was making?

31. Are agencies still shaping taste, or just presenting it back more neatly?

32. Why do so many people in fashion keep working for arseholes?

33. Where do LinkedIn-fluencers take their partner on a date?

34. What brand is truly leading the next era of fashion? Who’s “got” it?

35. Who decided every “creative” person needs a Substack? And who is actually reading them?

36. Why do some founders talk about their brand like they’re not the reason it’s confusing?

37. Why do some founders dress exactly like their brand, and others look like they’ve never seen it?

38. How do we differ between creators with actual taste and those who learn how to imitate it convincingly?

39. How would a truly original company even launch today without being immediately compared to something else?

40. If everything is “on brand” for a brand, what actually stands out anymore?

41. How many moodboards are just screenshots of other people’s campaigns from two seasons ago?

42. Why do so many luxury brands always have “limited budget”?

43. Why do certain brand events feel like everyone is waiting for something better to happen later?

44. How many people are involved in a decision that should’ve been made by one person?

45. Why are so many people so fast to forgive Ye?

46. What is the cheapest way for a brand to blow up?

47. What media titles still truly move the needle when it comes to authority?

48. Where does culture actually start now, and how long before a brand gets there

49. Where did all the Triple S Balenciaga sneakers go?

50. If Art Basel expands to Paris, should Paris Fashion Week move to Basel?

51. Which car brand is brave enough to copy Ferrari’s Luce interior?

52. What does Jony Ive think about Teenage Engineering?

53. What would Virgil Abloh be doing in 2026?

Now, answer that…

You rang already?

Dial +1 839 777 9076 and land in Los Angeles where this week, I called Jesse Lee ahead of the second edition of Basic.Space LA which returns to the Pacific Design Center this weekend.

Lee is founder of Basic.Space, agency brain, cultural operator (yes, one of those, but then he actually truly is) and, more importantly, someone who’s built a career on knowing what feels right before everyone else does.

Lee grew up between Seoul, Chicago, and California, early on moving things, ideas, taste across borders before that was a business model (developing an instinct for what travels, what sticks, and what’s worth bringing back). Parents in leather goods and art. Cool from the start. You get the picture.

Before Basic.Space, he ran his agency dFm, working across fashion, art, and music, where he built the kind of moments around Art Basel, SXSW, and Fashion Week that actually made an impact in culture. These environments where taste gets shaped in real time.

Then came Basic.Space. What started as a tightly curated resale project quickly turned into something closer to a platform for taste, good taste that is. Good taste in furniture, good taste in fashion, good taste in art, good taste in objects. All sitting next to each other like they belong. All through a clear POV.

Since then, he’s expanded the whole thing outward: acquiring Design Miami, and taking over Platform, the online marketplace originally launched by David Zwirner. Moves that extend that same eye into spaces where taste becomes physical. Actual infrastructure.

We spoke about building quietly, about knowing when to add and when to leave things alone, and about that strange middle ground between culture and commerce where everything either works beautifully or completely falls apart, and where taste is often the only real compass.

Somewhere in there, we drifted into mutual friends (including the great VOICE MAIL alumni Juliana Salazar!) who, as expected, remains ahead of all of us.

I called from here. He picked up from there. The line held.

Anyway. Call us and listen in.

See what sticks.

Bye now.

PS. DDD got a sneak peek of the collection on display this weekend. We curated a great selection. Can you spot a theme here???

Now, we know we’re cool AF at Dot Dot Dot. And it is our beneficiary duty to make you, our reader, subscriber, Dot Dot Dot nation (working title…), just as in the know as our crew is. You are part of the crew after all!!!

So welcome to SOURCE CODE Vol 005 (our running index of the people shaping culture slightly ahead of the moment it becomes obvious). They’re the photographers, designers, thinkers, and operators whose fingerprints tend to show up everywhere a few months later.

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We try to connect the dots early for you.

Now, some names you’ll recognize immediately. Some you’ll pretend you already follow. Others will feel like homework, hopefully the good kind.

Nothing here is ranked. There’s no “top,” no podium, no big reveal at the end. Just a collection of references worth knowing if you care about where culture is actually moving. Think of it as source material for the culturally curious.

If you already know half the list, welcome back, if you don’t, even better. Let’s begin.

P.S. Every now and then someone is so in the know that asking them to nominate just a few people feels a bit restrictive. When that happens, we give them a section of their own (like we did with Pam Boy two issues ago).

This time we asked Ira Tassoulis (Louis Vuitton, Global Talent & Influence) who’s currently on her radar. Naturally, she made the list as well… finally.

We’re watching who’s next. Send over your submissions and ideas to dotdottdottmedia@gmail.com and we’ll be in touch…

13 True Artists Who Make Us See Differently

• Poppy Jones | Artist

• Trey Abdella | Artist

• Minjae Kim | Artist (Nominated by Thibo Denis)

• Gilleam Trapenberg | Artist

• Julian Fetterman | Stylist

• Willem de Schryver | Actor

  

• Chris Luu | Art Director & Designer

• Anna Claassen | Stylist

• Niki Rollof | Interior Architect

• Miyako Bellizzi | Costume Designer

• Lisa Jahovic | Artist

• Flowerovlov | Musician

• Ollie White | Music Producer

17 Cool People Cooler People Think Are the Coolest People

• Ira Tassoulis | Global Talent, Louis Vuitton

• Terrence O’Connor | Photographer & Creative Director

• Jack Briger | Co-Founder, Lemon Inc

• Olga Doch | Model (Nominated by Nenthe)

• Sophia Stel | Artist & Producer

  

• Edouard de Weissenbruch | Designer, Celine

• Momo Boyd | Musician

• Tan Suan | Influencer (Nominated by Tiffany Godoy)

• Feng | Musician

• Charlotte Collet | Stylist

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The following article is part of Dot Dot Dot’s ‘Pulse Check’ series that provides real-time industry analysis by connecting the dots between trends, brands, and wider cultural movements.

For the past few years, few artists have blurred the line between musician, internet diarist and cultural main character quite like Fred again..

The British producer has made a career out of turning everyday moments into music (voice notes from friends, late-night recordings, fragments of conversations) and then letting fans watch the whole thing unfold in real time. Studio sessions appear on YouTube hours after they happen. Songs get tested live before they’re even finished. Collaborators wander in and out of the process. It’s spontaneous by design, and millions of people are following along like it’s a live documentary.

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His latest project, USB002, might be the purest version of that yet. Instead of a neat, orderly album rollout, the project has unfolded like a constantly updating feed. New tracks appear. Live edits evolve from show to show. Collaborations surface unexpectedly. Fans decode clues, follow location drops and turn up in droves. Somewhere along the way, the “campaign” becomes part scavenger hunt, part community event, part internet rabbit hole.

Helping shape the visual world around all of this is Explorers Club, the London-based strategy and design studio founded by Strategy Director Ayo Fagbemi and Creative Director Aaron Skipper. Working closely with Fred’s team, they’ve been responsible for the visual direction around USB002 (from tour flags and stage graphics to location announcements, out-of-home posters, merch and the wider graphic system that keeps the whole thing feeling coherent while it’s constantly evolving).

It’s the stuff fans screenshot, repost, wear, wave in the air and occasionally queue three hours for.

Now, rather than doing a sensible interview over Zoom with the gusy, we asked Ayo and Aaron to take us with them to the final night of the tour in London. Throughout the show they sent us voice notes, screenshots, blurry photos and quick texts, answering our questions in real time while watching their work play out in front of thousands of people.

And then… one half of Daft Punk appeared on stage. Suddenly the legendary French duo’s tracks were blasting through the arena alongside Fred. The crowd completely lost it. Phones went up (despite the non-phone policy). The internet began preparing itself.

And through our WhatsApp thread we were basically there too. Kind of. This is what it looked like through their eyes.

01. Guys, where are you standing right now?

02. When you first heard the album, what was the visual or emotional world you saw for it?

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“Someone said if Apple ever made shoes, it would look like this,” Caspar Coppetti, co-founder of Swiss sportswear phenomenon On, tells me and a group of journalists over lunch in Busan, South Korea.

It’s here, on the southern coast of the country, that the brand (fresh off record 2024 revenues of CHF 2.32 billion (approximately $2.6 billion) and already at CHF 2.27 billion (around $2.7 billion) in net sales for the first nine months of 2025, up more than 32% year-on-year) is unveiling what could be its most disruptive move yet, as competitors like Nike and adidas watch its ascent with increasing attention.

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LightSpray, its futuristic technology that sprays the upper of a sneaker into existence, is now moving closer to global-scale production. First introduced in 2024 for On’s elite professional runners, LightSpray condenses a traditional upper manufacturing process (typically around 200 steps, often spread across multiple factories) into a single, fully automated sequence.

A robotic arm sprays 1.5 kilometres of specialized filament onto a last, forming an ultra-light, seamless one-piece upper in roughly three minutes. The efficiency gains are significant: minimal material waste, approximately 70% less carbon emissions compared to On’s other racing models, and a drastically reduced physical footprint required for production from start to finish.

For runners, the numbers translate into something far more tangible. The LightSpray shoe weighs around 420 grams per pair, roughly 50 grams lighter than a comparable traditional running shoe. In elite sport, 50 grams is the kind of difference athletes obsess over.

That compactness is the first thing that strikes me when we step inside the new Korean secretive facility. Instead of cavernous halls filled with long human assembly lines, the space feels controlled and precise. The ambition here is clear: to increase annual LightSpray production from a few thousand pairs to hundreds of thousands annually.

On is achieving this by investing heavily in 32 custom-built, LightSpray robots, up from the four machines it operated at its Zurich headquarters just months ago. What would traditionally be a labour-intensive assembly process now resembles a robotic automotive plant. The result is roughly a 30-fold increase in output compared to the original pilot.

With more than 200 patents covering both the material and the robotic systems themselves, and a team of around 400 R&D specialists (including material scientists, roboticists and AI engineers) the brand is aiming to own the technology globally. It’s an ambitious proposition.

“I think laced shoes are old-fashioned. LightSpray reminds me of the iPhone,” Coppetti says. “When [the iPhone] came out, you no longer needed a keyboard or a [stylus] pen. That’s my dream. One day, laced shoes will look ugly.”

The first major product bringing this technology to a broader audience is the LightSpray Cloudmonster 3 Hyper, a chunky yet ultra-minimalist, high-top slip-on with little more than subtle On branding printed across its sides. It’s visually distinct, intentionally so.

During the factory tour, different colored uppers and soles line the production area. The founders and much of the team are already wearing the model almost as a uniform, a quiet signal that of the leadership’s belief in the product.

When the founders walk onto the factory floor, there’s a noticeable pause. For a moment, the conversation quietens as they look out across the robots moving in near-silence. What began years ago as a question “What if running could feel different?” has materialized into something tangible.

Olivier Bernhard, former professional athlete and Co-Founder, frames it simply: “It was never about creating another running shoe. It was always about creating a different running sensation.”

He adds: “Progress isn’t comfortable. We always question the existing, always pushing the boundaries.”

From Challenger To Infrastructure Builder

To understand why LightSpray matters, it’s worth zooming out.

On has spent the past several years expanding well beyond its original performance running niche. It’s built credibility with elite athletes, pushed into tennis and training with the signing of athletes including Iga Swiatek and Ben Shelton and celebrities like FKA Twigs and Zendaya, expanded its lifestyle offering, and strengthened its premium positioning globally.

Approximately 60% of its business now comes from the United States. Revenues are approaching the scale where it’s no longer simply a disruptor, but a serious competitive force.

On has said it is on track to approach $5 billion in revenue this year, a number that will become clearer in its upcoming earnings report.

Yet culturally, it remains committed to keep its testing ethos.

“We’ll never lose the mindset of being a challenger brand, even if the day comes that we’re surpassing Nike,” Bernhard says.

When asked directly about competition, he doesn’t shy away from it.

“We looked at the competition, and maybe it’s an athlete thing, but without it, it would be so boring. We love to be challenged. We need to keep pushing the boundaries.”

That attitude has shaped its approach to innovation. Rather than simply iterating on midsole foams or tweaking uppers seasonally, On has invested in rethinking production itself. Where larger incumbents operate vast, deeply entrenched supply chains, On has the relative agility to re-architect parts of its manufacturing model around automation from the ground up.

Scott Maguire, the company’s Chief Innovation Officer, explains the difference. “In traditional footwear, you design the product and then figure out how to manufacture it. From an automation perspective, you have to design the product for automation.”

This is where many past industry automation experiments stalled. Products weren’t conceived with robotics as the starting point. LightSpray was.

The integration of innovation, creation and production happening simultaneously (rather than sequentially) allows development cycles to compress from the typical 18–24 months to potentially three to four months. Hardware and software updates tested in Zurich can be deployed directly to Busan’s machines, all with the click of a button. It’s an operating model closer to the tech sector than to traditional footwear.

If successful at scale, this could alter the economics of premium performance footwear, improving responsiveness, reducing shipping timelines and lowering emissions, while maintaining design control.

The Aesthetical View

If scalability has historically been the barrier to automated footwear production, On appears to have addressed that operational hurdle. The Busan facility demonstrates that LightSpray can move from thousands to hundreds of thousands of units annually.

The next question is aesthetic adoption.

The Cloudmonster 3 Hyper doesn’t disguise its origins. The sprayed upper has a distinctive texture and silhouette. It’s laceless, high-cut and deliberately modern. Coppetti’s comparison to the iPhone is telling: the ambition is to change a shoe’s form altogether. Making everything else look antiquated.

But footwear isn’t purely functional. Consumers respond to familiarity, identity and cultural cues as much as they do to weight savings or emissions reductions. Most of us simply see tying our sneakers as part of the ritual of getting dressed.

Coppetti acknowledges the balance required. “If it would look too much like a typical shoe, it would be detrimental,” he says. At the same time, LightSpray is currently operating at only a small fraction, “maybe three or four percent”, of what the founders believe it can ultimately achieve.

To help shape perception, the brand is leaning into collaborations in the next quarter (perhaps with Loewe), a deliberate tactic to guide how LightSpray is understood aesthetically.

“We want a significant part of our production to be around LightSpray,” Coppetti says.

This means as the material science advances (more colour options, structural variation, and broader category application) the visual language of LightSpray may evolve. The coming 12 to 18 months will likely determine whether the aesthetic becomes as compelling as the engineering.

That said, early drops of the shoe sold out almost instantly, a signal that there’s appetite for something visibly different, particularly when performance credibility makes it.

Only the Beginning

Coppetti recalls watching On athlete Hellen Obiri test LightSpray in competition ahead of the Olympics. “We were sweating,” he says. “We didn’t know if the shoe would hold.”

It did.

That validation now underpins the push toward democratization. With Busan, On can finally move from limited drops to meaningful volume. But scale is only part of the story.

The larger ambition is structural. LightSpray is a new way of thinking about footwear production, one that blends robotics, AI, sustainability and performance into a single operating model.

And it ties into a broader shift in how the brand sees its consumer.

“The new luxury consumer no longer just wants the newest materials or expensive bottles of wine or cigars,” Coppetti says. “They want to live longer. Everything goes through that lens.”

Lighter shoes. Lower emissions. Faster innovation cycles. For On, performance and longevity are part of the same equation.

As we wrap up in Busan, Olivier leaves me with one final line: “We will create the future.”

And with a grin from Coppetti that perhaps sums up the spirit behind it all: “We’ll hopefully never be accused of being boring.”

The following day, I sat down separately with Coppetti, Bernhard, and Maguire for a deeper discussion on robotics, AI and how LightSpray is reshaping the company internally and what comes next. Listen to the full, unfiltered, recordings below:

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It’s mid-July. The air smells like sunscreen and pine sap. The shrill cry of a whistle punctuates a languid silence. There are matching camp T-shirts hanging to dry on a wooden railing. As the sun sets, attempting to start a fire with theatrical level of seriousness.

A hand-painted sign reads: ARTS & CRAFTS CABIN THIS WAY →

At first glance, it looks like any other American summer camp. Until you notice the tote bags, and the Salamons that have never seen a hiking trail.

They’re Canvas, of course. Mostly from The New Yorker. A few from independent bookstores in Brooklyn and Silver Lake. The campers aren’t twelve, they’re thirty-two. At breakfast over artisanal sourdough, a heated debate breaks out over whether Coppola’s Virgin Suicides is the defining vision of girlhood. There’s a screening schedule pinned to the mess hall wall, and if you were wondering, includes a 16mm projector.

No one is here to “disconnect.” They’re here to immerse themselves even deeper.

They’re Letterboxd power users. The liberal Matcha elites. They own at least one A24 screenplay in paperback. They’re self-styled auteurs who see the world with a cinematic romanticism.

Half of them work in “strategy.” The other half are “between projects” but somehow still in Lisbon twice a year. The mysterious income is mysterious incom-ing. The natural wine they drink poured into enamel mugs. They insist it tastes better outdoors. They call the lake “liminal.”

They take their culture seriously, very, very seriously, and themselves just seriously enough.

And they have paid good money to be here.

Welcome to A24 Summer Camp.

What The Hell Am I Reading?

You’re reading MOONSHOT. Dot Dot Dot’s new bi-monthly series exploring what brands should build next, if they stopped thinking incrementally and started expanding their universe properly.

MOONSHOT takes a cultural signal, pairs it with a brand sitting on obvious but unrealized potential, and builds the expansion that actually fits. We interrogate why it makes strategic sense, how it strengthens the ecosystem, and what it would take to bring it to life, commercially, culturally, operationally.

The ideas can sound slightly delusional at first. That’s usually a good sign.

This series is a brain child between ourselves and Edmond Lau: cultural strategist, writer, meme theorist, and recovering IP lawyer, whose work on internet aesthetics and the politics of taste has been cited everywhere from The New Yorker to The Atlantic. Lau understands how culture mutates online. We’re interested in what happens when you turn that understanding into infrastructure.

We’re kicking off the series with a MOONSHOT question 001: What if A24 Launched a Summer Camp?

Take it away Edmond.

Introduction to A24

Daniel Katz first conceived of A24 in 2012 while driving down an Italian highway of the same name. A few years later, reflecting on Moonlight’s Best Picture win, he told GQ the name held no special meaning—it was simply where he happened to be. Yet along that non-descript patch of motorway, a studio was born that would come to define an entire sensibility of film in the modern day.

Over the past decade, A24 has quickly become shorthand for its particular brand of provocative auteur cinema. Sit down in the theatre and it doesn’t matter who’s in the movie or what it’s about, before you’ve even watched a single second, the ‘A24’ logo flashing across the screen has told you all that you need to know.

It’s the magic of a film studio that has, more than any other studio in recent history, been able to carve out a brand that surpasses the recognition of the films it produces. Miramax in the 1990s may have been able to develop a reputation for delivering interesting indies, but you never would have heard someone describe Miramax as the sort of ‘cool’ brand to be rattled off in a list alongside fashion brands and cool cities of a certain milieu.

A24 has uniquely become a cultural juggernaut even as its indie reputation persists. Producing over 20 films a year, A24’s prolific output puts it on par with much larger players in the game like Paramount.

The studio has never produced a traditional blockbuster. Its annual share of the US box office has never exceeded 2.45%. Yet it consistently punches far above its weight in both critical acclaim and commercial interest. In 2023, it became the first studio to sweep every major Oscars nomination category. Its most recent funding round valued A24 at $3.5 billion, placing it on par with mid-tier studios like Lionsgate despite its far smaller scale.

A24 has also proven to be a star-maker. Behind the camera, it has elevated directors such as Ari Aster, Barry Jenkins, and Celine Song from relative obscurity to prominence, Meanwhile on the screen, its films have provided the launchpad for the likes of Lucas Hedges, Alicia Vikander and Florence Pugh into proper stardom. It has also proven capable of engineering complete career renaissances, most notably for oscar-winners Brendan Fraser (The Whale) and Michelle Yeoh (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once)

Yet, a juggernaut cannot persist on the strength of its films alone. Nor does it seem that A24 wants to stay contained to the four corners of the silver screen.

Slowly and steadily, A24 has expanded across multiple verticals. In fashion with merch collaborations alongside indie brands like LA label Online Ceramics. In music, with its own music label, A24 records, and recently, an actual theatre with the acquisition the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village. Slowly it’s penetrating the walls of fiction and entering into the realm of the real world.

It’s the very last example that offers an interesting question. What does a physical experience look like for a studio like A24? Typically the answer’s been theme parks but that requires a particular brand of IP that can be easily turned into amusement rides, cartoons, shows, spin-offs, licences and more. Universal for example has its action franchises like The Fast and Furious that lend themselves to high octane thrills.

Disney meanwhile has its kid-friendly properties that it can leverage to create activations that speak to children and the child within, later doubling down on IP acquisition when it purchased Pixar (Toy Story, Inside Out) for $7.4 billion in 2006, Marvel (The Avengers, Iron Man) for $4 billion in 2009,Lucasfilm (Star Wars, Indiana Jones) for $4 billion three years later and most recently 21st Century Fox (Avatar, Planet of the Apes, The Simpsons) for a whopping $71 billion in 2019).

We doubt that anybody is in the mood, however, for a Hereditary roller coaster or a Ladybird popcorn bucket. With its more mature, sophisticated audience, what does a stamp in the real world look like for A24?

Who Even Is the A24 Consumer

Before we think about how a physical space could hold A24, we must figure out who it will hold. The “A24 fan” has, by now, become a cultural shorthand. It’s an archetype that’s been depicted ad nauseum through endless meme iterations. In the collective imagination, the mere mention of A24 evokes a distinct figure of the downtown aesthete found oscillating between an art house screening and a niche coffee shop. It’s a stereotype rooted in truth though.

After all, the studio has deliberately courted the urban creative demographic. The venn-diagram between the A24 “aesthetic” and the bicoastal creative elite may as well be a circle.

Yet to stop there; to define the A24 audience an enclave of self-aware cinephiles and Togo-fiending aesthetes would be a crude oversimplification. A24’s reach has long exceeded the cultural geography of New York and Los Angeles. Its films have circulated across streaming platforms and social feeds, slipping into suburban living rooms and dorm rooms alike.

For every self-conscious fan who sees A24 as an emblem of taste, there’s another who simply likes the movies. In this sense, A24 has managed a rare feat. It has created a brand of discernment that feels both elite and accessible, niche and mass at once.

The better question, then, is not who watches A24, but why so many feel magnetically drawn to it. The answer lies not only in its sustained commitment to novelty and its reverence for auteurship, but in how it provides a vision of the future for a demographic of people who feel as if they are losing control.

A24 already knows its audience is intelligent or at least likes to perceive. This isn’t up for debate. What it may not, or choose to keep close to its chest, is how A24’s films provide a lens through which its audience can find meaning.

A24 isn’t actively trying to psy-op us into believing a particular set of values. That’s not what we claim. What it does, however, is elevate lesser known voices and make movies that challenge and polarize, which in turn expands the angles from which we view societal mores. Angles which have previously been overlooked or obscured by legacy media.

The aesthete’s status in the modern day is precarious. Around half a century ago, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described taste as a mechanism for emulating the upper class Today, wealthiest are ghoulish and culturally bankrupt. Last week, Paul Graham, co-founder of start-up accelerator Y Combinator, blabbed on about how “taste is the new moat” for escaping the permanent underclass, only to quickly follow it up by insisting that what you wear doesn’t matter. Clearly, the ties that once bound cultural and economic capital have torn.

Why is this relevant? When we think about physical spaces and why “community” has become such a loaded, overused term, it’s because the contemporary landscape rarely rewards cultural capital. More often than not, it extracts it at the creator’s expense.

What aesthetes are really after, then, and why A24’s community has become so magnetic, is refuge. Spiritually, it’s a place for the like-minded to gather, and a way (at least in the imagination) of keeping the (cultural) barbarians at the gate.

Designer furniture and obscure references scattered throughout these spaces are aesthetic choices, but they are also signals, designed as much to repel and force self-selection as they are to attract the right crowd. Where other studios double down on sequels and superhero franchises, A24 continues to bet on singular visions. It has turned creative risk into its defining product, a kind of contrarian assurance that whatever bears its serifed logo will at least feel new.

In an entertainment landscape numbed by algorithmic predictability, A24’s devotion to creative freedom has become a signal that genuine authorship still matters. Theirs is an identity ecosystem that rewards curiosity.

Why a Physical Space Now?

But why a physical space? And why for this demographic?

Because attention has moved back to the body. After a decade of chasing ‘frictionless’ (derogatory) ‘Air Space’, texture feels elusive. Amongst mass disconnection, the only true luxury is the time you spend in physical spaces.

A Harris Poll data from last year states that 81% of Gen Z expressed a wish to disconnect from digital devices, and brands are rapidly acting on this desire. Starbucks, previously criticized for its currently sterile ‘in and out’ experience, is shifting its strategy towards creating places to linger. Digital-only brands like Revolve and SKIMS have over the past several years decided to take a stab at brick and mortar. In New York and London, a seemingly never-ending stream of private members clubs have popped up as sexier, more visceral places to play than the feed.

The gap however, is in the execution. Despite their recent resurgence, most so called ‘third spaces’ feel like nowhere at all.

In the early 1990s, anthropologist Marc Augé introduced the concept of ‘non-spaces’. For Augé, ‘non-spaces’ were a symptom of our state of ‘super-modernity’. The places we inhabited had become spaces we merely pass through rather than places we intentionally belonged.

And so has begun the rise of ‘third spaces’ as a response: member’s clubs, run clubs, ‘soft raves’, all with the aim of bringing people together in new contexts. Brands have also been keen to jump in on this. Every second week, there’s a new ‘brand activation’ somewhere vying for your attention.

Yet, all these brand activations tend to be pop-ups and ephemeral experiences. UGC farms which lack opportunity for connection between the attendees.

In the same way that A24 has built a brand on a foundation of deeper intellectual depth, there’s an opportunity here to build a physical experience that allows people to connect. If you treat your audience as serious, intelligent people, the experience you give them must likewise be equally intellectually hefty.

Cherry Lane Theatre and the ex-Frenchette helmed restaurant that it holds are thoughtful expressions of the A24 ethos in physical form already. What they also are however are fleeting experiences.

The maximum time you can spend inside the space is a few hours at best. A dinner and a movie. What A24 is missing is a place to completely enamor. A place takes someone and transports them completely into the universe of A24. Days, not hours. Entering Disneyworld literally feels like entering into another universe. How do we capture that feeling for a member of AAA24 (their monthly membership)?

The Itinerary

DAY ONE — ARRIVAL / ORIENTATION

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Story time…

A few months ago, Edmond Lau, the terrific Australia-based strategist and straight-A meme-ology student (who you may know from his LinkedIn graph-style depictions of micro cultural trends) and I met.

We started talking about the rise of “thought-fluencers” and asked a simple question: how can we get out of the constant rut of analyzing what is current?

We weren’t interested in another round of clever brand reporting or culture-chasing analysis, the kind you can find everywhere nowadays. What we were circling instead was something stranger and riskier: properly scoping out blue sky ideas that sound implausible at first. Blockbuster fantasies with no neat case studies or historical proof to lean on.

The kind of big thinking that might feel nonsensical or delusional, right up until the moment you realize they actually make perfect sense. For instance…

• What if IKEA made furniture designed to be split up after a breakup?

• Why isn’t Aesop, a stalwart of tastemaker bathrooms everywhere, creating bathroom furniture?

• What if clean-girl favorite, Rhode, started selling injectable peptides that renew from outside in?

• Or what if Equinox, the king of luxury gyms, created a hotel? (Oh wait, they already did. Well… then our thinking is heading in the right direction)

That’s because brands are already expanding their ‘Brand Universes’ at speed in a bid to remain culturally legible to audiences who no longer experience culture in neat, single-channel ways. Attention is won through ecosystems and places people can step into, return to, and participate in.

It’s why we’re seeing brands tackling food, film, art, and fashion simultaneously, seeing these fields as true extensions of their universe-building exercise. Every great brand, sooner or later, stops behaving like a product and starts behaving like a universe.

Brands in general now expand in layers, moving from cultural experiments and hype moments to fully institutional, capital-intensive businesses. What starts as marketing can evolve into infrastructure. What begins as a product can become a place, a movement, an expansion of any kind. Read from smallest to largest and most entrenched, the hierarchy looks something like this:

1. Shock Objects (smallest / attention-first): Meme-ready or unexpected drops designed for cultural discourse rather than monetizable scale (i.e. Supreme brick, MSCHF’s viral stunt products, Liquid Death “coffin cooler”).

2. Community as Product (fastest-growing layer): Run clubs, creator collectives, Discord groups, live events and membership ecosystems where belonging drives retention and revenue (Nike Run Club, Patta Running Team, Duolingo Discord groups, The North Face XPLR Pass, Gymshark meet-ups).

3. Lifestyle Extensions (category expansion): Brands moving beyond their core product into adjacent verticals like cafés, homeware, media or wellness (Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar, Prada Caffè, Goop wellness summits, Apple Fitness+, Versace dogwear, Jacquemus beach club takeovers).

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Luxury is being questioned.

Not in the predictable, cyclical way that follows every downturn, but in a quieter, more consequential register.

Among people who actually buy, wear, and care about fashion, there’s a growing sense that the relationship between price, product, and meaning has slipped out of alignment. For years, the industry relied on a simple assumption: that value naturally compounds with heritage, that price increases can be absorbed as long as a brand feels culturally important, and that trust (once earned) could be endlessly drawn down.

That assumption held through streetwear’s boom, through the pandemic’s spending distortions, and through the early phase of “quiet luxury.” Now, it’s thinner. Not gone necessarily but just conditional.

People still want luxury. They still want beauty, excellence. and escape. But they are far more alert to the mechanics behind it. They notice when “craft” becomes shorthand rather than substance. They sense when change is framed as rupture but behaves like preservation. And they can tell when a so-called “reset” is less about imagination and more about risk management.

This was the mood hovering over the Spring/Summer 2026 collections. What was framed as renewal revealed something else: an industry more concerned with protecting what works than inventing what comes next. Less aesthetic upheaval, more ideological consolidation.

Which brings us to what’s actually at stake now.

The past decade expanded luxury’s reach but its justification got blurred too. Streetwear promised access. Quiet luxury promised taste. Sustainability promised conscience. Each offered a language of value, and each, over time, became diluted through overuse as more consumers entered the “luxury” ecosystem as luxury brands focussed heavily on the middle class. Don’t you feel like luxury is being asked to show its workings again? Like what really is luxury today? Is it worth it? Where is it going next? Is it too far out of touch?

This is where Dior becomes decisive.

Dior is navigating consequence. Few houses have ever achieved its level of global cultural saturation. It exists simultaneously as couture authority, red-carpet shorthand, beauty empire, museum fixture, and global aspiration. For many fashion-conscious consumers, Dior has moved beyond evaluation into a realm where the brand is a household name that simply is…

And assumption changes the nature of desire.

When a brand reaches this level of inevitability, the question stops being “is it relevant?” and becomes “what does it mean now that it is everywhere?” Dior sits at the top of luxury’s cultural hierarchy, which means where it goes next won’t only shape its own future but naturally set the tone for what luxury itself is allowed to mean over the next decade.

And that’s something worth analyzing.

[SIDE NOTE: Curious to go deeper into this report or others? Book an intro call with Early Studies here].

Jonathan Anderson and the Recalibration of Power

In April 2025, Jonathan Anderson was appointed creative director of Dior Men. Two months later, his remit expanded to include women’s ready-to-wear and haute couture, placing the entire house under a single creative vision for the first time in years, under the ownership of LVMH. A master plan was put in place.

Anderson isn’t known for instant disruption or viral provocation for the sake of viral provocation. His reputation has been built on something slower and more structural: the ability to turn a fashion house into a cultural system. One that extends beyond clothes into art, design, craft, publishing, film, sport, and intellectual life. Seamlessly, without collapsing into spectacle many of his peers have diverted to in bids to stay relevant.

At Loewe, he reframed playful craft as a creative language that should be understood by any consumer. Whether you were a VIC client of the brand, or simply followed the company’s social media page and wanted to buy a candle.

He made process visible without demystifying it. He treated making as an art form anyone could get into and therefore connect with. And he expanded the brand laterally: into exhibitions, artist collaborations, cultural programming, cinematic universes and more. His vision for Loewe was so consistent that different customer segments and regions would get a different version of Loewe without the brand itself feeling fragmented.

That approach matters at Dior for two reasons above all others.

First, the luxury customer has changed. It’s just… saturated. Today’s luxury client already owns luxury goods, the bags, the coats, the watches, the fragrances. When everything is beautiful and expensive, those qualities stop being differentiators. What they want now is something else: meaning, perspective, a sense that a brand actually understands the world they live in.

And luxury clients obviously don’t only buy luxury. They live full cultural lives: watching films, scrolling apps, buying coffee, furniture, toothpaste. Brands have finally recognized that relevance now comes from expanding their universe intelligently, and moving beyond the boutique without losing coherence. Craft enables that expansion. It carries a brand’s DNA, allowing its values to translate across categories and contexts without dilution.

Jonathan Anderson has mastered this at the highest level: extending brand worlds across high and low culture with total fluency. Think livestreaming runway shows on Grindr, designing teapots, and at the same time staging elaborate shows with artists like Linda Benglis. The point is a consistency of vision. A brand that knows itself deeply can exist everywhere without becoming generic.

Second, for Dior, craft is what makes expansion credible. It gives the house permission to move beyond fashion even further (into culture, objects, entertainment and experiences) without abstracting value or weakening meaning. Craft keeps the brand legible as it grows, grounding scale in substance.

Now this narrative of course isn’t new for the brand. Craft is what the house has always traded on. What’s shifted is the point of view around it. For decades, craft functioned as an assumption. Something that was understood by insiders, protected behind closed doors, rarely articulated for a broader cultural audience.

Today, that opacity is a liability. If craft is once again what people are actively seeking, then the challenge is around defining what Dior’s version of craft means now, and making it readable at scale. This of course goes far beyond the occasional “behind the scenes in the atelier, how it’s made” video on social.

Luckily this recalibration is already taking shape. It’s the exact reason Anderson was hired. After the creative director’s first couture show last week, the runway show’s location including displays of its garments were left open to the public in an unprecedented move, allowing people to engage directly with creations usually reserved for a few. Rick Owens and John Galliano passed through. Hundreds of kids were invited in to experience the work up close.. A deliberate effort to show how Dior understands craft: as process, intelligence, and labor.

That tension between the old and new, and the attempt to resolve it, defines the moment Dior is in today. And it’s precisely here that the Brand mRNA data becomes useful. We know Dior is powerful, but how do people expect this power to be exercised next? That’s where the numbers come in. But first…

What Even Is Brand mRNA?

Brand mRNA is Dot Dot Dot and Early Studies’ bi-monthly cultural health check on fashion’s most talked-about brands, always asking the same question: Is the brand still producing the right signals for the world it’s moving through?

If a Brand’s DNA makes a brand recognizable then Brand mRNA makes it move.

DNA is the fixed code (the values, heritage, identity etc). Brand mRNA is what activates that code in real time. It’s how a brand responds as culture shifts, speeds up, and mutates. And culture no longer moves in decades. It moves between a TikTok, a group chat, and a screenshot.

Which is why brand health can’t be measured by identity alone anymore.

With our friends at Early Studies (a cultural signals intelligence firm based in London and ran by the great Alfred and Sam) we developed Brand mRNA to translate static brand truths into live cultural behavior. Using their Future Perfect method, we ask representative luxury consumers in key markets (this time the US, UK and Japan) not what they think, but what their style-aware friends believed in 2020, believe now in 2026, and expect to believe in 2029.

That social-circle lens is the point. It cuts through aspiration and virtue signaling to surface what’s actually circulating. We’ve used it for deep dives on everyone from Ralph Lauren and Loewe to Miu Miu and Gentle Monster. Now we’re applying the same lens to the biggest and baddest, Dior—tracking which signals are strengthening, which are stalling, and which need to be coded next.

So we try to understand what elements of a given brand will drive demand and relevance going forward. We translate those shifts into “proteins” (signals that are growing, plateauing, or declining) so brands know what to amplify, what to fix, and what to retire before the system weakens.

Now let’s hit you with the stats…

Dior Has Already Won Cultural Power

When we asked respondents which fashion houses their fashion-focused friends see as the most culturally impactful, Dior stands out on the top by a mile. Its perceived cultural impact rises from 67.2% in 2021 to 88.2% today, before easing slightly, yet remaining on top, to 83% by 2029. No other house sustains anything close to this level of authority across time horizons.

That projected softening in 2029 is the first meaningful signal. It most likely indicates saturation. Dior has already crossed the line from momentum to inevitability. At this scale, cultural power no longer compounds automatically and will have to continue being stewarded. That makes sense and parallels can be made between Loewe’s arguable saturation in the market over the past few years.

The Performance of Status Is Changing

Despite widespread anxiety about luxury losing meaning, Dior’s role as a status signal remains strikingly intact. When asked “What role does Dior play in your fashion conscious friends’ lives?” “A way they signal status” was the number one answer, sitting at 56.1% in 2021, rising slightly to 59.7% today, and remaining high at 57.20% by 2029.

Prestige around the brand has changed is the way that prestige itself is expressed. Over the same period, perceptions of Dior as “logo-centric, buying for the brand name” fall sharply, from 48% in 2021 to 32.9% toda, and further sliding to 27.8% by 2029

This decline is paired with a rise in quieter, knowledge-based signals. “A real appreciation for fabrics and textiles” grows from 30.5% in 2021 to 40.11% today, holding at 39.9% by 2029. Reserved and understated taste increases along a similar trajectory. Dior which is very known for its logo mania will have to build further brand signatures and new hit product for those in the know. Can Jonathan Anderson create the Dior version of the Loewe Puzzle bag? Time will tell.

What’s clear is that status has become harder to perform. Recognition alone no longer convinces. Dior’s authority is increasingly expressed through discernment, literacy, and material intelligence. The craft narrative is therefore a natural narrative to double down on in communications, albeit an obvious one.

Heritage as Infrastructure

If we look at how Dior itself is being defined. “Heritage haute couture house” rises from 44.5% in 2021 to 50.3% today, before declining to 42% by 2029. In contrast, “cultural pioneer, in fashion and beyond” climbs steadily, from 35.7% in 2021 to 46.7% today, reaching 53.1% by 2029

The role of heritage here is interesting, as it’s no longer expected to function as Dior’s sole identity. Something many Creative Directors that came before Anderson have very heavily referenced. We then also think about “pioneering culture in and beyond fashion” (again, something Anderson was hired to do exactly) as future heritage. Instead of overly relying on the past of the house, what will people reference in 30 years when they look back at the house’s “heritage” which is playing out in this exact moment. That’s the opportunity.

Supporting signals reinforce this shift. “Boundary-pushing, experimental design” grows from 17.4% in 2021 to 18.4% today, then accelerates sharply to 33.9% by 2029. “Archive reimagined for today” can’t completely be dismissed of course as it rises from 11.6% in 2021 to 17.2% today, reaching 26.6% by 2029.

The audience clearly is asking Dior to not be so precious with its cannon.

From Aspiration to Interpretation

In the meantime, Dior’s emotional role is changing alongside its cultural one. Seeing Dior as “a source of aspiration for the life they want” rises from 43.4% in 2021 to 53.9% today, before dropping to 37.26% by 2029. At the same time, seeing Dior as “more art than fashion” climbs steadily (from 26.7% in 2021 to 33% today, reaching 42% by 2029

We believe this marks a subtle but important transition. Dior is moving away from being something purely to want and toward something to engage with. Less of a distant fantasy only experienced through giant billboards and fancy ads shot in the palace in Versailles. And once a brand enters the realm of art, it is judged differently. The challenge but also the opportunity for Anderson here will be about breaking down what he’s doing on the highest level with the Couture house for that masses, without alienating any specific group or without watering down the overall vision.

Luckily when we asked people what tensions in fashion Dior can solve, the top answers were “exclusivity versus accessibility” which rises from 35.6% in 2021 to 38.5% today, reaching 42.4% by 2029, as well as “tradition versus innovation” which rises from 44.1% in 2021 to 46.9% in 2029. Clearly the people have trust in Anderson’s vision.

Craft Becomes Explanatory

It will be the re-interpretation of craft that people believe will be Anderson’s secret weapon. A perfect pairing at Dior.

When respondents were asked what Dior values more than other luxury houses, answers cluster tightly around the same ideas. “The craft of how things are made” sits at 42.2% in 2021 rising to 45.4% by 2029. “Pieces that last for years” grows from 41.3% in 2021 to 46.5% today, reaching even 54.8% by 2029. “Using couture to test ideas” rises from 29.8% in 2021 to 37.3% by 2029. And “Reworking its archive with purpose” jumps from 25% in 2021 to 32% today, reaching 45% by 2029

In a moment when luxury is quietly being questioned as we said, craft becomes Dior’s most persuasive argument for why its scale and authority still make sense.

Why Authorship Now Matters More Than Brand

One of the most consequential forward-looking shifts appears in how people read who Dior belongs to creatively. “Appreciation for the designer, more than the brand” increases from 23.7% in 2021 to 38% by 2029. This signals a move away from institutional anonymity toward authored authority, something we’ve seen becoming more important over the past decade and clearly still holds true today.

Dior’s future credibility is increasingly tied to Anderson’s point of view and his interpretation of both the house’s heritage and culture at large today. This context is essential to understanding Jonathan Anderson’s role.

Why Jonathan Anderson Fits This Moment

When respondents were asked “what impact Jonathan Anderson has as a creative director on the brands he works for?” “reinvents for the modern fashion landscape” the trust he actually will have is expected to grow to 60.3% in 2029 up from 43.3% in 2021. Closely tied is “making the unexpected feel wearable,” which grows from 31.5% in 2021 to 48.1% by 2029.

This explains the logic of his appointment. Anderson isn’t perceived as a shock-merchant or a nostalgic caretaker. He is perceived as a translator, someone who can move ideas from craft to culture, from experiment to adoption, from atelier to scale without hollowing meaning.

That trust is reinforced when respondents were asked what their fashion-focused friends think about Jonathan Anderson’s leadership and career. Seeing him as “cemented in fashion history” rises from 23.78% in 2021 to 47.51% by 2029, a near doubling that signals long-term confidence.

Where the Audience Is Pulling Dior Next

Finally, when respondents imagine what their fashion-conscious friends would prioritize if they took over Dior, the direction sharpens.

“Pushing what fashion can look like,” “exploring music and film through fashion,” and “teaching craft through exhibitions and bts access” all came out on top. Most notably, they would “lead on sustainability and repair services,” which rises from 24.9% in 2021 to 34.7% today, and expected to more than double to 50.9% by 2029

What This All Means

Clearly out Brand mRNA signals show Dior is in no way in danger. There’s a clear confidence in Anderson’s ability to translate house codes into the future with both commercial and brand growth to follow as a result. The house remains the most culturally credible force in fashion. But credibility at this scale no longer runs on assumption. Power has to be explained. Craft has to be shown. Meaning has to be continuously produced.

Dior is not being asked to be louder, faster, or more accessible. It does a fine job at that. But for heaven’s sake, can it please be more focussed. For Anderson and his team, the work now is to state (clearly and without apology) what Dior’s authority is for. If they get this right, Dior will redefine what power in luxury is allowed to mean in an era where belief is no longer automatic, but earned.

All data provided by Early Studies uses their proprietary Future Perfect methodology, speaking with over 300 representative luxury consumers in depth across the US, France, and Japan.

Not long ago, a hit had a shape.

It arrived with some routine ceremony—press, radio, retail placement, a campaign, then perhaps a tour. It peaked, then declined, then maybe settled into the slow archive of “remember when.” A second life was possible, but it tended to come with a reason that looked like time. Think an anniversary, a reunion, a reissue, a new generation discovering something old.

Sure, that arc still exists. But it’s no longer the dominant one.

What we’re seeing now is something stranger: hits returning faster, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes before they’ve even fully disappeared. These kind of short-loop resurgences. Perhaps even going so far as saying that lightning can strike twice (occasionally even three times) within the same cultural weather system.

Now, nothing about this is a coincidence and it certainly isn’t just happening in music. We believe this structural shift is simply how culture will circulate, increasingly, in the future.

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The Flattening Is Real, Incomplete

The prevailing diagnosis of the moment we all like to shout out goes something like this: “culture feels flat!”

W. David Marx, writing late last year in Make Culture Weird Again for The Atlantic, captures the contradiction cleanly. He states that everyday life has never contained more cultural material (songs, images, ideas, memes, statements) yet audiences sense that something is missing. For all the output, little feels truly new. The canon simply casts too long a shadow over the present.

This flattening is usually described aesthetically. “Everything looks the same. Everything references everything. Subculture leaks before it can coagulate.”

But the true, deeper flattening is infrastructural. For most of the 20th century, culture was paced by bottlenecks. Editors, buyers, critics, radio programmers, department stores, broadcasters, producers, studio heads etc. They decided what mattered, and more importantly when it was allowed to matter. Culture moved in stages, and scale arrived slowly, often deliberately.

Those systems sure still exist, but for quite some time they’ve no longer controlled the timetable. Today, scale can arrive sideways.

Context Becomes Distribution

What replaced the old funnel is a sweet word called adjacency.

Today, something can become big if it’s placed meaningfully. A song inside a scene in Bridgerton. A jacket on Kendall Roy in Succession. A new White Lotus hotel as the backdrop to what will later become a cultural moment. A retro Nike sneaker glimpsed incidentally in Stranger Things, then circulated deliberately.

Spencer Kornhaber (again writing in The Atlantic) points out how acute this has become in music. In 2024, new releases made up only a little over a quarter of album consumption in the U.S. The majority of listening now goes to “catalog music” (tracks at least 18 months old). Labels and private-equity firms have spent billions acquiring publishing rights, betting that the past will outperform the present.

The emblematic case was Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” which re-entered the Billboard charts in 2022 (37 years after its release) because of a brief, emotionally precise placement in Stranger Things. An old song, given a new narrative container, outperformed most new releases globally.

Fuck nostalgia. Meaning placement, meaning placement, meaning placement.

The Archive Never Closes

Here’s where the shift becomes unmistakable…

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Hello stranger.
Did you miss my voice?
Do you know who I am?
Do I know who you are?
Let’s not complicate this.

The phone number +1 806 542 2599 you’re calling today happens to be based in Happy, Texas. Yes, that’s a real place and very fitting for this week’s guest…

For this edition of VOICE MAIL, we rang up our dashing old friend Myles O’Meally, the UK-born, Amsterdam-based, designer who I met about eight years ago. Where, when, how? Neither of us remembers, which feels correct. Perhaps through his equally dashing sister Fenn, my old colleague at Highsnobiety who is a true force in the directing and film-making field.

Now, you might know Myles mostly for his footwear creations through his studio, Areté where he’s worked on projects for Raf Simons and Stone Island to Marc Jacobs, ERL, and Skepta. You’ll certainly known the shoes when you see them. Before that, he spent years inside Nike, helping bring parts of Virgil Abloh’s ‘The Ten’ era to life among other in-line sports products.

While this number lives in Happy, Texas, Myles is calling in from Vietnam, a place dear to him and where he’s spending a few weeks meeting suppliers and long-time contacts for upcoming projects. He’s already told me what they are. I can’t tell you. But watch that space at Areté.

These days, he’s expanding beyond footwear, into spaces, objects, and marketing creative. Quietly before. Formally now.

Oh, and full disclosure, him and I are working on a secret project together. No spoilers just yet but hopefully with you by the end of the year. It’s big…

So call the number (listen to this one on speaker for optimal quality).

Smile while doing so, you’re already in Happy after all.

PS. We’ll be in NYC the first week of February. If you’re around, hit us up on our secret IG: dotdotdot.zip. Loose lips, etc.

There are three ways to evaluate a luxury fleece. Two are inadequate. One explains why this one ended up everywhere, and why we’re writing this article.

A: The Technical Read
You simply see the fleece for what it is. A piece of outerwear: it’s warm, durable, has quality fabric, a good construction that keeps you protected from the elements. By this logic, the viral Miu Miu fleece fails immediately. For a fraction of the price, Patagonia or Canada Goose will sell you a fleece that is most likely warmer, tougher, field-tested in actual climates, and backed by a repair program.

Judged purely as a garment, the Miu Miu fleece is irrational. For most.

B: The Lazy Luxury Explanation
You treat it as shorthand: expensive because it’s exclusive and desirable because the right people wore it first. Closer, but still wrong.

Luxury is full of thousands of expensive objects every season that never escape a small, stylish ecosystem. Plenty of “right people” wear things that never become culturally magnetic. Just because something is expensive doesn’t immediately guarantee cultural obsession.

C: The only explanation that works
You read the fleece as a cultural object. The Miu Miu fleece is a wearable argument about how taste, comfort, and status work now. Forget its practical or even socio-economic appeal. The item is selling legibility. In simple terms: the ability to look relaxed without looking irrelevant.

And that’s why a $2,500 fleece that is almost aggressively unremarkable has become the one that lodged itself in your algorithm, crossed into mass recognition, and turned into a proper noun: the Miu Miu fleece.

To understand why, we need to talk about what might be the defining consumer force of the decade: the reassurance economy.

But first…

What Even Is the ‘Miu Miu Fleece’?

Picture, for a moment, the most generic fleece you’ve ever seen. Not “outdoorsy hot” fleece, I mean corporate fleece. The kind that enters your life via a lanyard in a tote bag after attending a three-day summit on Scaling Synergy in a hotel ballroom that smells faintly of printer paper and mid-manager ambition or something.

It’s grey. It has a zipper. It has pockets. It has that little stand-up collar in case you encounter wind.

Now imagine that exact fleece, but with a Miu Miu logo stitched on the left chest. That’s basically the product.

The Miu Miu fleece zipper jacket is oversized, unlined, long-sleeved and, structurally speaking, a fleece. It has no dramatic cut. No architectural intervention. No “hand-finished artisanal blah blah” you can cling to when explaining to your fashion friends why you spent this much money on it (did we tell you it’s $2,500!).

Its nylon composition only adds to the comedy, because nothing says luxury fantasy like the same word used for gym shorts and umbrella linings. And yet, annoyingly, this is where its intelligence lies. (Or are we wildly overanalyzing this??)

The jacket is almost aggressively unremarkable. It doesn’t want to impress you but blend in just enough to be plausibly accidental. Which is exactly why it works as a status object.

Because it’s not remarkable enough to look like a flex, but not normal enough to be mistaken for a free conference jacket. It lives in that perfect modern luxury uncanny valley: basic, sure, but only to the untrained eye.

How We Dissect

To fully grasp how a $2,500 fleece escaped its functional category and became a cultural object, we’ve applied our usual Product Anatomy framework.

That means looking beyond hot takes and price-point outrage, and instead layering together:

• Demand signals and visibility momentum (including proprietary insights from Lyst).

• Cultural fieldwork: how the product actually circulates across social, editorial, and street-level contexts

• Kotler’s Five Product Levels, to separate what the fleece is from what it does

The aim isn’t to debate whether the jacket is “worth it.” That conversation rarely leads anywhere interesting. The aim is to understand how a deeply basic object became remarkably powerful culturally and commercially.

The Breakout Moment

For most of its life, the fleece belonged to two very specific groups.

First: outdoor people. Dads, hikers, outdoor loyalists. The ones who can identify a microgrid texture at fifty paces and will explain breathability without being asked.

@hypebaeA$AP Rocky arrives at the Miu Miu FW25 show ⭐️ Video: Hypebae #tiktokfash #asaprocky #paris #parisfashionweek #miumiu

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Second: corporate and finance bros. Startup founders, VC analysts, mid-level operators in black-on-black fleeces worn as soft armor while saying “let’s circle back.” The fleece was merely functional, nerdy, and borderline anti-fashion.

The Miu Miu fleece didn’t truly become a product until 2024 when two things aligned at once: category readiness and brand authority.

By then, quarter-zips, zip fleeces, and campus-adjacent layers were gaining traction. Comfort dressing was intentional even after the pandemic’s athleisure boom. Looking relaxed became a skill.

At the same time, Miu Miu entered a new phase of cultural momentum. Across 2024, the brand consolidated its role as a tone-setter for the entire luxury industry. That matters, because products rarely break on design alone but when the brand carrying them is trusted to define “now.”

The brand’s fleece benefited immediately. By mid–late 2024, interest spiked. Search demand on Lyst surged a triple-digit month-on-month increase around August–September 2024). The fleece was now being actively sought out.

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Some words stay in circulation long after their meanings have frayed. They continue to appear on decks, websites, and LinkedIn bios, buoyed by habit and professional courtesy. “Insight” is one of those words. It still does a lot of work. It just no longer agrees with itself.

At its most traditional, insight looks like the long report. One hundred and fifty pages forecasting the future of X. Generic-looking charts, matrices, caveats. Think McKinsey. Think Bain. Sure, these documents still matter. They carry rigor, institutional memory and trust, and structure, of course. They also move slowly, speak upward, and often arrive once the world they describe has already shifted.

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Then there’s the more digestible version. The “insight” that arrives as a panel talk or a tight deck. A familiar constellation of speakers flown in to discuss the future of something conveniently abstract, staged inside an office designed to signal taste as much as thought. Drinks are provided by a brand client who values the association. Photos are taken, circulated, archived. Is anything really remembered?

The language is lighter. True. The conclusions are calibrated. True. The proximity to actual decision-making is carefully maintained without ever becoming too close. Sure. You’ve seen this version. You may have been on that panel. I know I have…

More recently, insight has taken on the logic of content. The LinkedIn monologue. The carousel slide. The Reel or TikTok delivered often by people observing strategy rather than shaping it. Some of it is genuinely perceptive. Much of it privileges reaction over consequence. It travels fast, rewards ego, and disappears just as quickly.

Now, between the PDFs, the panels, and the posts, insights tend to become either too fixed or too fleeting. All this is the landscape us at Dot Dot Dot stepped into when we launched almost a year ago.

From the beginning, we called Dot Dot Dot an “insights brand”. Perhaps the phrase is a bit abstract, but we believe it carries weight, and we wanted that weight. It keeps us honest. It gives us something to live up to.

The phrase lived quietly on our About page while we focused on the work itself, trusting that practice would eventually catch up to language. Looking back, the first year was about testing an intuition. We tried things. We paid attention. We watched what held and what dissolved.

The ambition, however, has always been larger than any single format, cadence, or channel. That’s the belief we’re doubling down on going into 2026.

So what do we mean when we say insight brand?

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Since Dot Dot Dot launched in February, a few pieces have quietly (and sometimes loudly) pulled ahead of the rest. Just some ideas all of you, our valued readers, kept coming back to.

Below are the ten most-read Dot Dot Dot articles of our inaugural year. It’s a poignant view of what actually held your attention in 2025, whether that was cultural déjà vu, brand behavior under pressure, or simply taste doing more work than trend ever could.

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Respond to this email to let us know what you want to see from us next year, and make sure to follow our members only secret IG page which can be found: here.

Enjoy your New Year’s Eve tonight. Hug your loved ones, make memories. We’ll be seeing you next week, month, year…

1. Fashion’s problem isn’t the algorithm ‘slop’. It’s us.

2. Introducing the cultural figures fueling the industry’s best minds.

3. The best brands are making their internal systems, not their products, the main act.

4. Decoding the musician’s distribution playbook that propelled LUX worldwide.

5. 25% of the brand’s revenue now comes from non-product. How?

6. How the world’s hottest brand can keep its cool.

7. How taste became a strategy (and a safety net) for next gen athletes.

8. The origin feed for the references you’ll hear at panel talks in six months.

9. How Vibram’s FiveFingers went from Paleo punchline to the it-shoe of the summer.

10. What will be the Korean eyewear brand’s next move?