What interested me was the way that different subcultures and brands were feeding off one another. Lifestyle brands and DTC needed to draw on these subcultural elements—they needed to be the products people buy in order to participate. And in the other direction, product imagery was beginning to play an important role in subcultural formation. In m

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Aesthetically, it was clean and crisp, but also felt fun. It ran in parallel to the rise of Instagram, and it photographed really well. And then they had the backing of Into the Gloss, which they crowdsourced ideas from. And built-in fans, since there was a culty excitement about the site and the people who worked there.