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Life After Lifestyle
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.
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
I have occasionally been asked why I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous *meanings* that structure our relationships; they are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the ingredi... See more
Toby • 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
Unlimited availability and optionality among consumer goods has staged the final competitive battleground in the space of immaterial value, where there is no ceiling on “cultural value add” managers can jazz up a product with. Is it any surprise that brands want to become culture itself?
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 • 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
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
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
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.