Life After Lifestyle

These artists are performing a kind of service for brands, lending their credibility and enabling the brands to “insert themselves into an existing cultural conversation.” All of these are various ways in which an artist’s work becomes branding.

Stare long enough, and you begin to see the whole: an economy where culture is made in service of brands . To be even more literal: cultural production has become a service industry for the supply chain.

Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that tur... See more

The judge of a subculture is not its stated axioms, but the type of people who identify as its members.

In the most cynical version of this new world, culture designers are inculcating types of guy who are profitable. The customer lifetime value of a believer is potentially far greater than a user.

The realization that producing culture is about producing types of personhood is the central issue of this new cultural economy.

We are transitioning out of the era of Lifestyle, and into an era where the production of culture is valued—both subjectively and financially—on its own terms. From an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs.

The Lifestyle era was not about creating culture; it was about attaching brands onto existing cultural contexts. It was not about shaping people; it was about sorting consumer demographics into niche categories.

Today, social media has become a more perfect tool for culture than Arnold could have imagined, and its use a science of penetrating the mass mind.