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Life After Lifestyle
For the last decade, it has been hard to imagine a world outside of the cultural production service economy. But we are leaving branded lifestyles behind, and stepping into a new world of belief, faith, and meaning. What types of culture is worth creating? What types of people do we want to become? Whether as founder, stewards, leaders, lurkers, di... See more
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
All in all, product marketing businesses can only do so much to situate their goods in these broader cultural worlds without eating into their margins.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
For every new subway ad featuring an online pharmacy and a nice monstera plant, there was a new pop-up skate shop soaking up the runoff of Supreme teens. HSWLD on Delancey, a dozen others lost to memory… Online, I browsed IJJI and v.soon and Anti-Social Social Club on my friend’s Tiny Clothing Stores Are.na channel, this selection a mere trickle of
... See moreToby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
After the DTC era, brands have become present in every part of our lives, ambient, diffuse, meaning things to us. Sports, music, health, sleep, and person-to-person communication have become interpenetrated with brands. We all know that blue iMessage bubbles mean luxury conversation. Is luxury spirituality so absurd?
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it? To do so, they would have to go far beyond marketing, to offer meaningful modes of participation. Is it even possible for companies to be in service of something greater than themselves?
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
Companies like Crossfit and Soulcycle create a sense of consistent space and ritual that inculcate deep loyalty and community among their participants. Reimagine, an organization that describes itself as “the world’s leading end-of-life events platform,” hosts paid gatherings and festivals related to death and healing. Casper ter Kuille and Angie T
... See moreToby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
People are always seeing and being seen, and in some ways, owning products does constitute one form of cultural participation. Yet it is also clear that owning goods alone is not a really significant sort of participation.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
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
... See moreToby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
People are looking for more meaningful narratives and communities than brands can offer, and companies want to supply this “meaning demand”—but are structurally disincentivized to do so.