salt, to taste - how to get ahead of 2025 consumer trends
pt 2: hegemonic shifts, culture, and the consumer -- a case study on patterns & trends
Alaia wants to sell you a niche curation of coffee table books, Prada wants you to eat their pasta, and Louis Vuitton wants to make you an LV cappuccino for breakfast. Why? What does this mean? And what does it tell us about what we can expect in 2025? Part two of last week’s letter is here — let’s dig in;
Does everyone remember the viral Fendi Pasta in 2020? You could only secure a box if you were invited to the Fendi show. And dare I say, this is one of the most important signals of modern culture?
At the very least, it’s a nuanced and tangible bridge between luxury’s dalliance with peak logomania in 2016 and the chaos of luxury trying to find her footing in the 2020s (dopamine dressing to quiet luxury to core-core nano cycles).
How did we get here?
To be very clear — 2016 Logomania was a 1:1 throwback of Dapper Dan’s legacy in 90s streetwear. It’s an undersell to say it was merely influenced by — copy, paste would be more accurate.
From a vibe economy POV, the 2016 logos made sense. The economy was great, the Kardashians were still able to sell us lip kits, and instagram + reality tv made Flaunting Ur Wealth Hot Again. So much so, that everyone expected that the 2020s would become Gatsby’s gilded age, and tbh economic uncertainty felt improbable (despite nascent shifts in the global economy…. like Brexit…..).
Hence, the brilliance of the Fendi pasta. We were ushering in a new era with a reinvention of the same. Don’t just wear your logos, eat them too!
Then, ofc, it all went to a wee bit of sh*t. Geopolitical crises, a literal pandemic, global lockdowns, a global inflation crisis, and mooooore upended us. It was both a consistent trickle and a monsoon, never ending yet catastrophically overwhelming.
There are a billion ways to analyze what happened from 2020 to now, but I want to point out one very important mirror: from 2022-2023, we started seeing a different type of 90s aesthetic (this time 90s minimalism = quiet luxury) mirror the economy (the 90s inflation crisis was combatted by a rare & exceptional “soft landing”…. the same approach expertly leveraged by Joe Biden from 2022-2024).
Since last week’s letter (a bit more meta and less about food being fashion, moreso leveraging the mirror to reflect consumer habits for 2025), the following things have happened:
Guys on tiktok are talking about walking around with voss, mountain valley, and erewhon water bottles as a signal of wearable status — starkly similar to the cultural utility of luxury purses…. entirely corroborating the mirror between food, fashion, status, and culture.
Alaia announced a new bookstore and cafe in London.
- reported on Feed Me that Prada is opening a restaurant beneath their Soho location in NYC (rip lure?? a gr8 tuna salad).
OK, so what’s up next?
Last week, I wrote: “If you believe that these 3 things tend to happen in a decade, then you’ve also neatly bucketed the trends of the past and future: