The death of Dimes Square, Vogue & “marketingggg” as a hot compliment
Fashion media and the brands they write about are becoming more and more… blurred
Hiya.
A slightly late letter this week due to some personal matters I’m actively attending to. It kind of feels like I’m a bit in the wars at the moment (rip)… so I do very much appreciate your patience as I navigate life, work and the rest of it.
Okay, onto the good stuff!
Agenda for today’s letter:
Is the death of Dimes Square upon us?
“Marketinggggg” is the new hottest brand compliment
US Vogue’s September Issue & the state of fashion media
Is the death of Dimes Square upon us?
Oh, how I hope so…
Dimes Square is dead. Or at least, in strong decline. Allow me to elaborate.
For those have been blessed to not yet encounter this interesting corner of culture, Dimes Square describes a New York “art” scene that came into prominence around 2020.
It’s a pocket of Manhattan that has long attracted the young, the creative, the artists, the bohemians. Technically, it’s a physical place - the Lower East Side meets Chinatown - where a restaurant (I’d call it more of a café) sits named ‘Dimes’. I went there in its heyday back in 2018. But having returned just last year, it was clear: the name, and the moniker, had changed meaning.
Capital-D Dimes Square is less of a location, more of an internet phenomenon. In 2020, at the height of peak “woke” culture, it emerged as a counter-subculture. A growing cohort of self-branded creatives, artists and pseudo-intellectuals began pushing “post-woke” or “anti-woke” values. They were intentionally transgressive and post-ironic, rejecting the ideals of wokeness as suffocating, sanctimonious, and, in their words, “lame.”
Their aesthetic was all about edge. They casually embraced regressive, racist and homophobic slurs, perceiving them to be “cool,” a marker of ironic detachment. Many outsiders would call it edge-lord shitposting. They would call themselves progressive artists.
There were many key characters in the scene. Dasha Nekrasova of the Red Scare podcast and musicians like The Dare, among others.
Now, fortunately, it appears the reign of Dimes Square is over. There’s been plenty of speculation about what killed the scene.
One offered reason is the changing cultural mood. Dimes Square was at the centre of the much-discussed “vibe shift”; the changing tide back in 2022 where earnestness went 'out’ and nihilism came ‘in’. But, as noted in The Yearbook Committee’s documentary on the scene, “the transgressions that gave the Dimes Square artists attention during the height of ‘woke culture’ no longer have the same bite as the post-woke art world of the second Trump term.”
It’s a beautiful thing to see that what Dimes Square had once held up as ‘cool’ and ‘transgressive’ is now being interpreted as dangerous and inherently lame. (As it always should have been).
Another reason could be its lack of cohesion and purpose. It was a supposed art scene that, as the Substack Antiart put it, was “as full of potential” as it was hollow. Something that “promised a lot, but never really delivered.”
It’s commonly considered that good “art” coming out of the scene… never really really eventuated. As one Redditer noted, “It’s not really a scene of artists, it’s a scene of cultural commentators. So the main things produced have been podcasts and shitposting twitter accounts.”
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, its mainstream-ification. When H&M releases a Dimes Square t-shirt, the jig is up. Once a scene is commodified by the high-street, it stops being subversive. The commercialisation of the culture was, ultimately, its death knell.
Dimes Square’s demise is, in my humble opinion, a beautiful thing. It marks the collapse of a subculture that traded in the currency of coolness and edge; that held up twisted morals and ethics as a way to gain popularity and social clout.
Could it be a sign that nihilism is on the way out? That earnestness is on its way back in? That the pendulum is, finally, beginning to swing in the other direction?
I hope so.
Oh, how I hope so.
“Marketinggggg” is the new hottest brand compliment
And what it says about our industry literacy
Emily Sundberg for FeedMe reported on an interesting phenomenon in the world of social media and I want to talk about it. As she astutely observed in a newsletter last week “there’s a shift in how young people engage with brand content”.
Today, there’s a new kind of compliment, and it’s not about the products or the model or even the brand. It’s far more targeted than that.
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