The F#$@ You Shopping Era
You can never be too rich or too Tiktokable
We used to be advised to amass F#$@ you money - a cash cushion for future liberating life choices. F#$@ you money would let you walk away from a job, man1, city or any life circumstance without fear.
Well, index funds and financial security be damned. In our current era of nihilism, screenlife and billionaire worship, I’m seeing a lot of F#$@ You Shopping. Overpaying for useless but clockable status. Buying stupid because you can. Because you must. So others think you win. To be followed. Most importantly: because others can’t!
Conspicuous consumption was coined in 1899 by economist Thorstein Veblen in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. It popped in the 1980s, it was made famous at Versailles. But Marie Antoinette and Anna Wintour have nothing on algorithms.
In the current era there’s an aggression, a creator-economy desperation and perhaps even a fake-it-til-you-make-it talisman buyer’s logic at play. It goes beyond Keeping Up With the Jones, because the Joneses are now uber-rich people you’ll never know. And they may not actually be that rich.2
The Monsters In Your Head: The Labubu Delulu
It’s fitting that the Labubu/handbag charm craze is small demonic monsters. Gargoyles of a little girl’s toy possessed to attach to your (designer) purse. You know, where money and keys and beauty products are kept - totems of women’s security.
Part binkie, part superstition, part telling on yourself.
These stuffies and figurines made Pop Mart's CEO now China's 10th richest person. The company’s market value rose to nearly $34 billion, an all-time high with 9x growth in the USA in Q1.3
“The Labubu rise in popularity is a one-of-a-kind moment,” Wilson says. “There is interest across categories—we’re seeing luxury bag buyers, sneaker heads, blind box enthusiasts, and toy collectors joining in on the trend.”
Part of the allure? The Blind Box where you find out what figure you have after you buy it. I thank LOL Surprise Dolls, who brought this to the US masses—albeit to elementary school kids. You never know what you’ll get! Kinda like life these days. The secondary market for these dolls has gotten big on StockX and Ebay, often reaching up to $1000.
Prada, Hermes and other designers are on it, often selling into the $500 range. Not to be outdone, Louis Vuitton just announced their new stuffie charms, starting at $1,2704 because they are made real luxury finishes (i.e., manufacturing scraps) like leather!! Preorder now on the LV app!
“What Mental Illness Is It…”
Then there is the $295 Loewe beeswax candle. Not the most expensive candle you can buy, but one whose basic premise has been sold at your local Farmer’s Market pretty much forever:
Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud Gina—but Sydney.. WHY??! ⬇
Noticed it looks like Soft Service’s $62 hand cream, which at least sells refills for this giant hunk of plastic. But their feed is cool, following is cool girl vibes.. buy?
Add to Cart While Rome Burns
Not all F.U. purchases are fun or even obvious. These totally basic flipflops are the type you’d pick up at a tourist shop for $24.99 (outrageous! they should be $14!!) because you forgot to pack yours.
The Olsen Twins are selling them for $750.
It’s not even Quiet Luxury because these materials suck. It’s pure F@#$ You shopping:
Old Idea: Cult Brand. New Idea: F#$@ You Shopping.
Becoming a cult brand was the original virality, and I was once pivotal in one.
But the attention, uber charisma and time build that requires now feels quaint or incredibly expensive. A cult? No honey, there’s no time for that. The feed is too vast, too fragmented and there far stronger cult leaders at work than your average beauty founder or corporate brand entity. In the chaos, it takes force.
There may need to be a sense of utter absurdity, obscenity, excess, “mental illness” or, increasingly, the online gambler’s rush of the blind box purchase and the E-Bay or StockX thrill to feel anything anymore.
Let alone to get someone to hit like or buy for a price anything beyond commodity level.
The rub-your-face-in-it or fake-it-til-you-make-it and the numb-it-out are all kind of the point. Can’t afford these flipflops? NPC.5 You Fail.
Buying is Weird Now
Increasingly, a very small part of the populace will be the target market for almost everything that isn’t commoditized.
We’re already in a world where:
💸 Everyone embraces the dupe
💸 Wal-Mart’s fastest growing shopper base is high income (though in fairness, they already had most of everybody else so where else would growth come from)
💸 Private label is the new label in CPG
💸 Dollar General saved the stock market’s ass this week
💸 Girls of the West Village choose unbashed, pleasant, comfy and familiar luxe comformity is the sorority-security for women over 21.
💸 Designer clothing is struggling but luxury novelty is KILLING IT
💸 59% of parents still financially assist their kids who are 18 to 34
💸 The generation that rails against fast fashion the most also buys it the most — yet has also raised the prices on second-hand to the point where fast fashion is cheaper than thrifting (hey, Gen Z)
🆘 The architects of the economy/military/work find people unnecessary
🆘 Your feed will show videos of shocking brutality from LA, from a town hall meeting, from a corner in your town—swiped between an ad for chocolate-peanut butter colostrom so you NEVER age + a waterskiing French bulldog.
In this economic and actual violence, everything is verging on F#$@ You.
Hunger Games, the Wedding
The ultimate F#$@ You purchase? This week’s wedding cost $50M. Note: Jeff kindly tossed $1.14M to Venice the city. 2.28%, what a terrible tipper. Another FU, boo.
The pay-to-play cash for a Vogue cover is nothing to a guy with $232 Billion6, and you’d have to be GenX7 to even want to do it. May as well be a telegram from Horseless Carriage Quarterly. But it does make for a quickly shareable and commentable post:
The nuptials were protested by thousands who apparently were not busy online shopping. Many of the protest actions looked more like performance art—take a note Indivisible! They showed more originality and art than many of the wedding guests have for several years, despite the Grammys, Emmys and Oscars on the dance floor:
Nearly 100 private jets flew into Venice (hey, Oprah!) for the wedding of Jocelyn Wildenstein Lauren Sanchez Bezos.
Whether we like the look or not, let’s call it the F#$@ You Face. Tina Brown’s scorcher of a piece says it better than I could:
I’ve been thinking this lately, too:
Presumed.
But also, this:
What the girlies buying into the wife model don’t yet know or believe: after 40, the FU face will be worn out and is often replaced by a younger model.
I will give Bezos this: he married in his own age group.
And his ex-wife has given away over $19B since 2019. Probably the ultimate F#$@ You money/shopping in one.
🙏» Please hit ❤️ and/or comment if you enjoyed this post! Algo overlords must be fed!
Yes, man. We don’t anticipate lesbians destroying each other as financially as we expect in hetero life, to my knowledge.
But may have been indicted at some point
Note: Our country underwent a wild culture swing in Q1. Coincidence??
Random number, maybe playing into that intermittent reward/gambling/ya-never-know-what-it-is vibe of today
“Non Person Character” for those who do not know how tech/manosphere/Gen Alpha insults people
Estimated, but of course
Mrs. Jeff Bezos is 55
Another great one Julie!
Great one Julie.