CATCHING FIRE: Loonen, solitude girlies and Patagonia v Pattie Gonia
Do keep up!
Hello! How has it been a week since we last spoke? How?????
Sorry this letter is dropping a little later than usual. I’m in the midst of moving house and juggling some exciting work stuff. Next week that excitement takes me from boxes in London to Charlotte, NC, for the first time. Does anyone have any reccs for me? Please and thank you.
Just a wee flag that my travel plans might mean that next week’s digest will also be a little late. Please bear with me!
In today’s letter we’re taking the temperature of:
The five dollar water loved by celebs
How remote working screwed over Gen Z
Twitter’s new
starshit posterThe person that connects Strangers and The Tell
The new way celebs are cashing in
The women who vlog their life without friends, kids or a partner
How AI broke recruiting
Hollywood finally wakes up to what Gen Z want
The micro drama that got 170 million views
An extremely messy and very public fight between a brand and a drag queen
Paid subscribers get the lot, free subscribers get a preview. Let’s get into it…
So hot right now
Loonen… which has become the new ‘it’ water after a slew of celebs and influencers have been seen clutching the “spring-sourced, perfectly pure” H2O.
Dua Lipa, as well as lifestyle TikTokers Halley Kate and Brett Chody have been pictured with Loonen, which comes exclusively in glass bottles and boasts that the water never comes into contact with plastic.
It appears that the brand, which was co-founded by the guy who brought us Spindrift and counts the owner of flashy NYC grocery store Meadow Lane as an investor, is gifting the product to influencers and then reaping the benefits of it showing up in feeds.
You might be wondering how much 6 x 750ml bottles of this elite water costs? $34.99 on Amazon. That’s $5.83 a bottle. I think I’ll stick to tap.
Trends, trends and even more trends
The solitude influencers… God I hate it when someone else writes a piece I have in my drafts, and that’s exactly what The Cut did with their deep dive on a new set of content creators.
Like the author Rachel Pick, I too had spotted the rise of women posting vlog-style videos about their single, solitary homebody lives.
Some of the most prominent are Lana Isa, My Drama Free Diaries and Paulina Cee who get millions of views for videos with titles like:
pov you’re a childfree and single girl that has no friends and lives alone so this is how you spend your friday night (8 million plus views)
POV: You’re a single woman who lives alone with no kids & no friends so evenings look like this (6.6 million views)
POV: you live alone in NYC and have no friends so this is how you spend your night after work (10.4 million views)
The Cut dubbed them “The Loneliness Influencers”, but my take is that these women are less sad, and more glorifying solitude and romanticising how peaceful living alone can be. The comments sections back that up as they’re filled with envy for the dreamy, silent spaces the women come home to. One went as far as to suggest it was arousing…
Celebs are investors now… This trend has been bubbling for a while but the latest announcement from the AI-powered shopping app, Phia, is confirmation that famous types are very much in their venture capital era.
Reading like a festival line-up, Phia, revealed that dozens of well-knowns - from Sydney Sweeney to Eileen Gu - had stumped up cash to buy a stake in the fledgling company.
It follows Kim Kardashian setting up her own investment firm and Serena Williams making early stage bets via her Serena Ventures outfit.
The deals are a win-win for both the celebs and the start ups. The famouses get to exploit business opportunities with high return on investment potential, while the companies get a piece of the cultural cachet that comes with well known backers. It also makes future partnerships with those influencers have way more synergy.
Everyone’s talking about
Patagonia v Pattie Gonia… We love messy drama here at highly flammable and boy do we have some. It comes in the form of a very public fight between the outdoor gear company, Patagonia, and the drag queen and activist, Pattie Gonia.
There is so much tea that in order to distill it I’m going to have to do bullets…
