It's a Good Time to Be Weird

Viktoriia Vasileva on Addison Rae, Daniel Craig for Loewe, and leaning in to letting go. Scroll down for links from Daisy and Walden.

This article was originally published in Vik's Busy Corner.

Addison Rae is fun to look at. Drawing inspiration from Britney Spears, Lana Del Rey, and Madonna, she’s been trying to turn her accidental internet fame into a pop star career. Not everything she’s done landed—this Petra Collins project is phenomenal and the Von dutch remix feature gives me goosebumps, but the Diet Pepsi music video and the 2010s Photo Booth filters take some time to get into. She is approaching this so-called “rebrand” with the innocence of a child that’s yet to know what it’s like to feel self-conscious and the skills of an amateur who committed to putting herself out there despite the self-induced cringe.

Is this the real Addison though? A girl next door from a small town in the South turned model, “budding starlet,” and LA party girl? Her transition doesn’t feel sudden or forced like Camila Cabello’s or Katy Perry’s, but it’s definitely reminiscent of rampaging through your mom’s closet and putting together crazy outfits that teleport you into the wild fantasy worlds you make up when you are bored. She alludes to playing with characters in an interview with Mel Ottenberg when she talks about her current obsession with wigs: “You can get away with anything when you’re wearing a wig…I wore a wig last weekend and it was a pink little bob moment with bangs, and we called her Ms. Lovely. I love assigning an alter ego to a wig because it really gives me the permission to be bad. I’m like, ‘Oh, we don’t even have the same name. She’s someone else.’”

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WELCOME TO TASTELAND

It’s taste’s world, we’re all just living in it…

That’s the premise of our new weekly podcast, Tasteland, co-hosted by Daisy Alioto (CEO of Dirt Media) and Francis Zierer, the editor of Creator Spotlight—a weekly newsletter about creators across the world of newsletters.

The podcast will drop weekly on Wednesdays, and periodically feature guests from the media, marketing and technology world. Want to be alerted every time a new episode drops? Click the button below to subscribe.

In this week’s episode, Daisy and Francis are joined by Casey Lewis to talk about the blurred line between amateur and professional writing online, “aesthetic” culture, Casey’s new podcast, and Tumblr…

This freedom to experiment without commitment is what normcore was supposed to be about before it got widely misinterpreted as stripping away everything unique in favor of the mass retail brands and the mundane: “Normcore knows your consumer choices aren’t irrelevant, they’re just temporary. People compromise, people are inconsistent. Making one choice today and a conflicting choice tomorrow doesn’t make you a hypocrite. It just makes you complex.”

When this message got lost in translation, instead of leaning into curiosity and adaptability to navigate microtrends and logomania, we flocked to products, taglines, and cultural shifts that emphasize the importance of searching inwards and finding your real self—from makeup brands that call for embracing your natural imperfections to expert advice on how to develop a personal style. Everything real exists in direct opposition to fake, produced, and manufactured, and we are obsessed with being able to differentiate between the two and call out the posers—to the point where the main message often flies over our heads.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• “That’s My Floor” by Magdalena Bay (Spotify)

• Daniel Bromfield reviews Chuck Johnson’s Sun Glories (Pitchfork)

• Daisy curated this week’s playlist on Sam Valenti IV’s Herb Sundays: "I can’t see the ocean for the majority of the drive, but I can smell it, layered under pine and the occasional puff of woodsmoke." (Herb Sundays)

• In the first installment of a new series, DJ-turned-music writer Son Raw reflects on the state of music journalism today (Passion of the Weiss)

• Cringe millennials rise up! Here’s 100 pieces of pop culture that defined “Obamacore” (Vulture)

• The Athletic is partnering with eBay to cover trading cards and sports memorabilia (Adweek)

• Alexander McQueen’s Fall 2006 couture collection, because why not (YouTube)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Sending pictures of these $5 Target birds to every group chat I’m in with the caption “us” (The Wall Street Journal)

• Kate McCusker travels to Ireland to parse the country’s literary dominance (The Guardian)

• Think sports betting (bigger than ever) and sportswriting (ostensibly falling apart) have nothing to do with each other? Think again (Bloomberg)

• Grace Robins-Somerville interviews twee icons Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia, AKA The Softies (Paste)

• Under the asset economy (not to be confused with the taste economy), how much is a college education really worth? (Harper’s)

• “Doesn’t Google make Bouvards and Pécuchets of us all?” Aaron Schuster for the LARB Quarterly on Flaubert’s prophetic vision of ChatGPT (Los Angeles Review of Books)

• One of those stories we wish we wrote: TikTok’s #Restock trend as its own kind of doomsday prepping (Bustle)

• Contributor corner! Angelica Frey shares 10 essential Italo-Disco singles for Discogs; Terry Nguyen writes about Paris by Night for Still Alive! mag; Marissa Lorusso reviews Charly Bliss’ new album for Pitchfork

• A perfect Rockaway Beach vignette (Curbed)