Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking slop’s relationship to fashion, Dylan Mulvaney addressing Trump’s obsession with her, Saucy Santana’s new hit, and that adorable kid on a bike that TikTok is in love with.
Last Friday in Barcelona, me and Nicolas Cevallos and mar vallverdú had a great chat about SLOP on the occasion of Culture Slop’s launch. You can listen in to the (Trilingual!) conversation here, but I wanted to focus your attention on one part that came up, as Mar was speaking about Paloma Wool slop and we were musing on if slop is unique-to-now or if it’s always existed. That sparked an idea for me —
I feel like the origins [of slop] — they would never admit this — is in the fashion industry…Fast fashion was exactly that, and that has existed since the late ‘90s, and even before then. A knockoff was that. It’s funny because fashion would never admit that, but also — ironically — that’s why I think fashion loves using AI because it’s giving them the same result in ways. They can cut around people, the same idea of “They made it in China.” but it’s this computer over here that’s fucking shit up.
I very much doubt that I was the “first” person to think this but, when we consider a subject like slop, it is a crude recreation of something better that cuts out the process of creative labor and critical thought to simply imitate an end result. It is an idea or a culture made flat, created through creative and industrial exploitation. This is why the results are so cheap and poor quality and less meaningful: that is a definition of slop — and that is also a definition of fast fashion. That’s why so many clothes from H&M and Zara and Shein have not only clogged thrift stores but entire swaths of land in Ghana and Chile and your homeland too: fashion has done the same thing to the world that slop has done to the internet — and these industries are hoping people don’t make these connections, to keep on shopping and swiping without critically considering the fast approaching chokepoint. The fashion industry as a whole — like the tech industry as a whole — has invented this enshittification mindset, the difference being that fashion’s enshittification is physicalized, as evidenced by decades of waste in the form of needlessly produced and pushed clothing that is piling up everywhere. Fashion’s enshittification predicted the way in which creators and writers and web pages alike would be recreated digitally, polluting the internet with needless content. Be it “fake” clothes infiltrating the market or fake content entering the internet, the end result is always disposability. Are tehse not the same mindsets? While people think really deeply about tasteslop and “the rise in fashion slop,” I think we’ve missed the point: fashion created the slop mindset, the means of abusing and taking advantage of people and resources for a quick buck. Now, tech companies have applied this logic to anything and everything — and we’re finding out in real time what happens when the whole of culture takes on a fast fashion mindset. And it sucks! This is exactly why fashion and tech are getting so cozy: they are the same industrial mindset expressed and sold in very different ways. Both are increasingly evil with very few still maintaining the dignity of what these domains once were. This is very much why I have increasingly become as anti-fashion as I am anti-tech, or at least approaching such retail industries and “points of sales” with the same discernment: they’re the same worlds. Thoughts? I’d love to hear what you think on this and, for more deep dives on the now, grab a free copy of Culture Slop here.
Barely anyone seemed to notice the redo of the White House Correspondents dinner happened last Friday. The only breakout was Trump’s awkward speech, made most notable thanks to a very dated Nicki Minaj twerking joke. But something else happened: he apparently mentioned the name of trans creator Dylan Mulvaney four times. Huh? What year is it? It doesn’t matter, as we know the right wing mind is locked in an atemporal anti-chamber that they’re trying to drag us into. But Dylan is taking this in strides, sharing a response on Sunday that I found to be a great reminder of why women, queer, Black, disabled, immigrant, and so many more people are the targets of such far right hate — and why she continues to stay on their mind.
Why is it so important to them that I don’t find success? What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my god: freedom! I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience and they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has like zero contingency on what they can provide for me because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self in every day since…They don’t want me to be able to share that because it would mean young people realizing that, if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.
So well said — and truly one of the more patriotic and pro-freedom sentiments to come out this year.
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