Highlights from “Life after lifestyle”
Sep 27, 2022 . 4 min read . 107 views
Following are my highlights from Toby Shorin's essay: Life After Lifestyle
In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands.
In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths.
Liquid cryptocurrency tokens empower speculative cultural projects with monetary policies that create FOMO (e.g. Ethereum, FWB)
NFTs enable membership and monetization of whole aesthetics (e.g. Milady, Nouns).
The lifestyle era: Attach products to cultural contexts.
2010 was the era of lifestyle
Easier than ever to launch a brand. More goods than ever. Software-enabled, integrated supply chain-driven business models. An explosion of online social media cultures.
This was the peak Lifestyle.
Lifestyle was defined by three elements - brands, culture, and supply chain.
- Brands
DTC brands are enabled by tech cutting out the middlemen.
- Subculture
These brands were not just about rapid commerce but rather had a much deeper nuance with the creation of subcultures.
People identified and sorted themselves into these cultures using the internet.
The world we live in is no longer dominated by a single class hierarchy. Today you have art, sport, travel, climbing, camping, photography, football, skating, and gaming. Just outside the mainstream stuff, you have roleplaying game culture, you have furry culture, you have indie music culture…
Cultures have their own language, objects, and knowledge; their own stories, aesthetics, practices, people, and places that all make sense together in a coherent way. They have behaviours they condone and reward, and behaviours they deem unworthy.
And in order to be a part of a culture, you have to learn to participate in these elements.
- Supply Chain
The lifestyle movement turned commodities into cultural items, turning the logic of all manufacturing into this: your brand, our products.
Life after lifestyle: Culture/Community first product later
With the fall of religion and the advent of remote working, what else is stepping in to provide a sense of community and belonging?
Internet-spawned subcultures are providing one answer.
“People consume brands to form their identity”
But just buying is not enough.
Buying Jordans does not make you a pro or buying vans a skater.
The problem with the lifestyle era brands is not with buying but if the meaning they have to offer is cultural membership then perhaps they are not going far enough.
Could we imagine a version of a branded subculture that was both non-extractive and meaningful?
Actual subcultural membership has something more to offer. To be a hiker means participating in a culture of respect and awe for the outdoors.
It involves moral injunctions like leaving no trace, and practices that involve taking care of the earth like shitting far away from fresh water.
Making culture is about more than making music and making graphic design: it’s about making people.
The Lifestyle era was not about creating culture; it was about attaching brands to existing cultural contexts.
It was not about shaping people; it was about sorting consumer demographics into niche categories.
The new order we are entering into reverses this. For some organizations, culture has become the product itself and products have become secondary, auxiliary, to the production of culture.
But in all cases, the branded subculture itself is the main thing, while the role of physical goods is diminished.
Physical goods will not drive value but instead add another layer of depth to the community.
Buyers will then become evangelists, who are incentivized to promote their version of the subculture.