Hi hi hi!
Hope you’ve been having an exceptional week against all odds. I can’t really explain it, but I feel my current state is perfectly represented by those Portland protestors dressed up in inflatable frog costumes. Internally, raging against the state of the world and our government, externally, lightly jiggling around seemingly without a single thought in my head.
As I wrote last Friday, I had a friend in town visiting over the weekend, and it was so fun and so nice to see her, even if she ended up leaving early out of fear of that much-hyped storm that never actually flooded us. Despite the abbreviated timeline, we still managed to squeeze in a classic girls’ night, staying up way too late gossiping and then waking up bright and early the next day to grab bagels and spend some QT with my best friend’s two-month-old baby, who promptly fell asleep on me!!! I cry. I can’t wait to spoil this kid at every possible turn.
In further preparation for the rainstorm that never was, I did indeed pursue my dream of making cinnamon rolls from scratch. A dream that failed me pretty spectacularly, as my yeast had apparently expired and I heedlessly forged ahead anyway because I did not wish to go to the store. Needless to say, the results were not particularly fluffy and the crumb was abysmal, but honestly, enough cream cheese frosting can fix anything that ails you.
I also just need to relay that I saw a woman on TikTok this week trying to convince me to buy a dickey, while adamantly refusing to use the word dickey the entire time she was selling it. What are we doing here, folks. I promise that wearing sleeves and fabric around your torso is not the burden this product would like you to believe that it is. Leave the dickeys with the tuxedos where they belong!
On Wednesday, I did a fab livestream with
which you can watch back here. We talked all things Jane B., and if you want to learn even more I highly recommend you grab a copy of Marisa’s great book. At the very, very least, I need you to go take a gander at this incredible tabloid cover of Jane and Serge Gainsbourg that I think might very well be the couple’s costume idea of the century.As you may have noticed, I’ve really been abusing the livestream feature on Substack this week, because that very same night I was also joined by ~100 folks to watch the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and I thought it was…fine, actually! At least, it was not the great comedy of errors that was last year’s extravaganza, so that’s something! And I think Adam Selman is a fabulous choice of creative director for the brand. It’s still a media spectacle I feel we’ve moved past the need for culturally, but oh well.
In the future, I think I’m going to do most of these livestreams over on YouTube because I learned there’s a program I can download that will show my screen on stream so everyone can see what I’m seeing in real time which feels more fun for all involved. Anyway, I wasn’t planning on publishing that VSFS commentary, since it seems more interesting in the moment than in the aftermath, but I guess I’ll leave it up to you guys — is there any interest in me publishing that so you can sync up my commentary with the show and watch at your leisure?
With these sundry matters now out of the way, let’s talk shop.
To begin, I wanted to assuage all of your fears after raising the alarm last we spoke regarding the shocking dearth of staged Halloween-themed celebrity imagery in the tabloids this month. Since then, thankfully, Olivia Rodrigo has attended the Universal Fright Night thing that so many famous people before her have been contractually obligated to attend. Which, I’m guessing, is also the situation here given not only Olivia’s Interscope hat but also this facial expression that I feel speaks volume.
That said, there’s still been no sign of a paparazzi’d pumpkin outing……what has become this beloved seasonal Hollywood pastime. Has the patch become passé? The gourd farming season gone poorly? I need some boots-on-the-ground reportage on this front.
Does the Carpet Match the Drapes?
Well. Cue Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed,” because Kim has once again proven she’s my biggest fan, plucking yet another of my cursed ideas directly from these pages. And I wouldn’t be so mad about that except for the fact that she insists on executing all of them terribly instead of just paying me to do it correctly.
Because just like the skull Spanx, why am I not seeing this trompe l’oeil full bush on Kimberly FIRST? Again, what is the point of owning your own paparazzo if not to debut shocking and difficult-to-pull-off fashion moments such as these? Of course, the headline is that these are already sold out, but how many of them do you think Skims really made? And how many of those customers bought it just to make the TikTok, outrage-bait, and then return?? That said, I look forward to seeing the target customer for this product and what outlandish costumes they cook up with their $32 plastic pubic hair. I also look forward to Kim putting her money where her mouth is and modeling her own wares now that I’ve told her to.
And while I do not believe this customer actually exists, at the same time, I’m going to need Kim to expand upon this line of body hair wigs tenfold because this is a gorgeously stupid manifestation of my bodies on bodies trend that we must now follow through to its logical conclusion. If the public truly craves merkins, surely an armpit weave can’t be too far behind. And the fact that she hasn’t already released compression tights flecked with fake strands of leg hair feels like a gross oversight to me. But I’ll stop giving her free ideas now because I’m becoming more and more convinced by the month that she genuinely has a spy in our camp, and you better believe I WILL be ferreting them out. One terrible red herring of an idea at a time.
Of course, while this mass-produced merkin feels like a direct attack on me personally and everything Mess stands for, this is actually just Kim knocking off yet another high-fashion brand she’s worked closely with over the years, Maison Margiela. The first brand to fulfill all my long-held bush thong fantasies with their incredible couture show at the beginning of last year A copycat moment that also PERFECTLY demonstrates what I was trying to explain to you all the other week re: Nike about the way Kim flattens these brands and absorbs them into her own image while fattening her bottom line. One more couture brand added to the Infinity Gauntlet.
The Return of King Kylie
This week also saw the return of King Kylie. If you were somehow so blessed as to miss this era of pop culture entirely, King Kyle was Kylie Jenner’s teenage digital alter ego circa 2016, when she first launched her Lip Kits, which I would argue was also the height of her cultural influence and relevance. So, in that light, while I think the phrase has become wildly overused in the past few months, to me, this revival reads more as a recession indicator than a victory lap for the business.
But I primarily wanted to bring this up not to delve into the financials of Kylie’s potentially flagging cosmetics empire, but because in the first promotional images for this new makeup collection, we finally got a famous person demonstrating the correct application of glitter body paint. Well, almost. Could the hands and the neck be more opaquely smeared? Absolutely. But the rest of the body is so thoroughly spackled I must applaud it. Now, much like those monster platform flip-flops she was wearing last month, I say: Go walk around outside like this! Show off your Edward Cullen hide to the world!!! I’ve been saying for at least a year now that the Clermont Twins were really on to something with their paint-by-number party outfits, and I can’t believe no one actually famous has caught on to that particular PR stunt yet.
Anyway, as for the concept itself, once again, it’s immense validation of all of my theories on this family, as I’ve often pointed out that they are the masters of self-perpetuating their own iconography in a way that mimics real cultural impact. They’re very good at generating nostalgia for themselves. To put it simply, as Peter Griffin would say, it insists upon itself. I think a perfect example of this is the now-shuttered Kimoji corporation. A business built on taking the most “iconic” moments from Kim’s career, as chosen by Kim, and animating them for her fans’ dissemination, thus reifying these symbols artificially constructed importance.
And, as Dwight Macdondald would say, creating something that comes with a built-in emotional response for the viewer (i.e. these are the most legendary, iconic moments of Kim’s career because Kim tells me they are) is thee hallmark of a MIDCULT product. But I suppose that’s a larger discussion I can save for the book club meeting!
The last thing about this new meta PR tactic that I wanted to highlight is the trailer that accompanied it which picks up where the 2016 video left off. It’s so funny to me because in an alternate timeline, this would’ve been Kylie’s Kendall giving the cops a Pepsi moment. Instead, nobody cares. In the intervening decade, we have been outrage-baited to the max. We can be baited no more. What is a little sexy prisoner cosplay from a world-famous billionaire in the face of the rise of real fascism, ya know? That said, it is still, obviously, a wildly out-of-touch and tone-deaf commercial, which I guess aptly mirrors our post-woke culture right now. Perhaps this is Kylie’s way of soft launching her own MAGA lite rebrand. We are talking about a return to the days of “Kylizzlemynizzl” after all….
Ok, after the paywall, I’ve got Charli’s fashionable retort to Taylor Swift’s diss track, a REMARKABLE new dress shape, the return of clown couture, and all of my thoughts on the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
If that’s not for you, no worries — I’ll see back here next week with even more nonsense. <3