New Releases:

• LUCKI — Last Laugh [archive tape]

• Rocket Rese — The Hardstyle Massacre

• Dylan Thom — The Day

• fakemink + Skepta — “Chiltern Firehouse”

• Sophia Stel - the greatest album of all time

• They Are Gutting a Body of Water - KOOL FAITH / LOOSIES II

• Cindy Sherman’s Fabric Matrons at Hauser & Wirth in London from October 13 to December 23

• Salman Toor’s Someone Like You at the Courtauld Gallery in London from October 2 to January 10

• Isabelle Frances McGuire’s Joy is a Puppet at Bel Ami in Los Angeles from October 3 to November 28

• Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from October 4 to January 31

• It’s Not That Deep group show at Not That Deep Gallery in New York, opening October 16

• Supreme and Martine Rose preview a new fall 2026 collaboration

• Chemena Kamali is expected to succeed Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent

• Seán McGirr exits Alexander McQueen after two years as creative director

• Kim Jones relaunches his namesake label

• Chanel designed the dancers’ costumes for the Paris Opera’s opening gala

• Jonathan Anderson will present Dior’s fall 2027 collection in the Long Room of Trinity College Dublin’s Old Library on December 4, the house’s first-ever show in Ireland

• Psychic Essence Threshold Signal: User Interfaces From Neon Genesis Evangelion by Lock Books

• Dior’s medallion lip balm that sticks to the back of your phone

• Trettitré’s Retro Ambient Audio System

• Bottle openers by @10o1oo

• Hand-painted BuzzBallz by Reuben Dangoor

• Skull zip-ups by Unfinished degree

This Week’s Headlines

A documentary is being made about Young Thug’s trial

Slated for a 2027 Netflix release, the 90-minute documentary will trace the rise of Young Thug and his YSL circle through his infamous RICO trial, the longest criminal trial in Georgia history. Judge Paige Whitaker, who oversaw the case, revealed the project during an interview this week. Netflix has yet to officially confirm the film or release a trailer.

Frieze London report

From our arts correspondent Bryan Munguia who is on the ground at Frieze London this week:

Frieze London and Frieze Masters welcomed art-world VIPs this past Wednesday. The mood across London’s art market appears generally positive, with Hauser & Wirth leading opening-day sales at Frieze Masters with the purchase of a Jan Brueghel the Elder still life for approximately $6.5 million.

The real action, however, was in Frieze London’s Focus section, where solo presentations by younger galleries offered a glimpse of the art world’s emerging tastemakers. Highlights included Heidi’s presentation of Benjamin Lallier, and Ehrlich Steinberg’s presentation of Ella Fleck.

Tesla unveiled its ‘flying’ car

A video of the Tesla Roadster was revealed yesterday, showing the car accelerating up a tall ramp, clinging upside down, flipping, and sort of flying for a few seconds before landing. Musk says the Roadster uses thrusters developed with SpaceX. The car can also supposedly drive upside down using a suction system, while its rocket-assisted acceleration is claimed to take it from zero to 60 mph in under a second. First announced in 2017, the Roadster is now slated for production in 2028, though its flying capabilities are not approved for public roads.

Luca Guadagnino is producing a documentary on Jonathan Anderson’s Dior tenure

After more than a year of being spotted filming at Jonathan Anderson’s Dior shows (he greeted guests at Anderson’s June 2025 menswear debut with a camera and microphone), Luca Guadagnino is reported to be producing a documentary on the designer’s arrival at the house. The pair have a long-standing friendship and creative partnership. Anderson has designed costumes for three Guadagnino films: Challengers, Queer, and the upcoming Artificial, starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Guadagnino also designed the set for Anderson’s first Dior womenswear show.

AI researchers are picking up a smoking habit because they believe AI will cure cancer

According to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, a handful of AI researchers have taken up smoking as a show of faith that AI will cure cancer. Sankar did not disclose the research or evidence behind their confidence. Other Silicon Valley figures have expressed similar confidence in AI’s ability to cure cancer. Startup founder Avi Schiffmann has suggested that AI robots will have cured lung cancer by the time today’s smokers develop it, while Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev joked on X, “Hearing more and more AI researchers are taking up smoking … superintelligence is near.”

Druski is hosting SNL

As just about every media publication has said, Druski will be the first-ever online creator to host SNL. The decision is long overdue, as Druski has become one of the most popular comedians of his generation.

HBO’s Girls is returning for five new episodes in 2027

Lena Dunham announced yesterday that her millennial HBO hit Girls will return for five episodes, featuring most of the original cast. The show has experienced a resurgence in recent years as both a time capsule of early 2010s culture, and a study of early adulthood through the lens of a confused, narcissistic group of young women. Many are wondering how Dunham will tackle the 2020s, particularly the kind of cringe that defined the original series.

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Highsnobiety — Branded Editorial Intern (Berlin, Germany)

Three- or six-month internship supporting Highsnobiety’s branded editorial team across fashion, luxury, and streetwear. Responsibilities include researching, writing, and editing branded editorials, curating imagery, composing social media copy, updating website content, and supporting daily editorial projects. Ideal candidate has excellent written and spoken English, strong organizational skills, a passion for storytelling and content marketing, and an understanding of contemporary fashion, music, art, and streetwear. Familiarity with Google Slides, Keynote, and Photoshop is preferred.

Apply

BAM — Six-Month Internships in PR & Influencer Marketing, Graphic Design, and Event Production (Brooklyn, NY)

Internship opportunities at BAM across public relations and influencer marketing, graphic design, and event production. The announcement invites applicants to apply for a six-month placement, but further details about responsibilities, qualifications, compensation, and deadlines were not included in the provided materials.

Apply

BASTA Magazine — Short Film Screening Series Submissions (New York, NY)

Open call inviting young New York City filmmakers to submit work for BASTA Magazine’s short film screening series. The announcement describes the series as a new opportunity for local emerging filmmakers, with submissions accepted through the magazine’s online form. Further details about eligibility, screening dates, and submission requirements were not included in the provided materials.

Apply

Upgrade to paid

Read more

In early April, 2025, @girl__virus posts six words on X: “you met me at a very chinese time in my life.” Twenty-seven thousand likes, viral candy. Any half-decent meme etymologist traces that straight back to Fight Club.

So began the Chinafication of the Western internet.

Chinamaxxing. Smoking holographic Double Happiness in a BYD. Chinese reels like-mogging Western content. Hot water. House slippers. Lymphatic drainage jumps.

Meanwhile, a certain world-dominating power watched its net global perception fall from plus twenty-two to minus sixteen in two years. China’s, on the flipside, went positive for the first time in the history of the survey. Ask a westerner about the People’s Republic of China, and the sentiment is increasingly that they want to visit.

So the timing is: America stumbles, China rallies, and my feed fills up with beautiful images of the multilayered mountain city of Chongqing, unskippable satisfying shorts of a Chinese guy making tiny dishes and two white boys smashing baijiu and smoking at a roundtable with Chinese uncs.

It’s too perfect. It begs the question, is this a psyop?

I spent the better part of two weeks combing through the internet to see what I could find. What turned up was a chaotic trail of breadcrumbs trailing through CIA-sponsored hashtags, IShowSpeed live broadcasts, and government-funded content quests1. In the end, a fascinating case study in how contemporary influence and modern propaganda operations actually work.

Propaganda is everywhere, East and West. But it takes very different forms.

Unlike in the West, where propaganda is usually vehemently denied by the offending government, in China the state is pretty open about their attempts to shape public opinion, especially on social media. And in the last twenty years, they’ve gotten pretty good at it.

If you say “Chinese propaganda” everyone pictures a room with strip lighting, forty computer screens, and a group of shady figures bustling around terminals. The real thing is much more 1984. Instead of setting a single government-mandated narrative, Chinese civil servants amplify agreeable discourse by liking and commenting on posts espousing it. Some estimates suggest hundreds of million of posts a year are magnified in this way. The result is the algorithmic domination of pro-China viewpoints.

Despite the negative connotations of social engineering, there have been some genuinely good outcomes from this manipulation, especially in rural parts of the country, where content creation has given villages a new industry. Douyin’s rural creator income went up fifteenfold in a single year. But no matter where you are in China, from a mega city to a tier-3 town you have never heard about, you’ll find a patriotic twelve year old streaming to millions of followers and engaging in the social media economy. This is all openly acknowledged, and no one bats an eye.

While that’s happening, the US propaganda apparatus is looking increasingly clumsy.

Between 2020 and 2021, the Pentagon was caught running at least three hundred dummy accounts, weaponizing the Tagalog hashtag #Chinaangvirus in the Philippines. The goal was simple: sabotage China’s Sinovac rollout in the middle of a global pandemic. In 2024, Reuters blew the lid on the Trump-era initiative that survived months into the Biden administration, which only died off when tech executives finally connected the dots. Another investigation revealed the CIA was cleared in 2019 to seed stories about CCP corruption throughout the Global South.

Every one of these moves chips away at the perceived authority of Western governments, leaving the door open for someone else to influence our rotting brains through the black rectangles resting in our palms.

Memes are a great way to enact this influence.

Memetic propaganda is a material force that serious politics hasn’t quite figured out how to handle. There are American Christian Facebook pages, with a humble monthly reach of 75million, being managed by a troll farm in Macedonia. In fact, all fifteen of the top Christian pages and ten of the biggest pages targeting Black Americans, are run by similar operations (yet another point on the list of reasons to stop using facebook). Memes-as-psyop isn’t some exotic new theory; at this point it’s in the air.

So given the state of East-West propaganda, and the grinding power struggle looming in the shadows, it seems almost boringly obvious that the sudden mass Chinafication of the internet was manufactured.

So I went looking for a smoking gun.

And thought I found it.

Very early in our Chinafication era, IShowSpeed toured China. In the background of his videos, there often appeared a middle-aged Chinese man, following him around and handing him food. Stream watchers were quick to assume he was a handler from the government. Speed’s manager put the finances on the table: turns out they received no money from the Chinese government. Even their plane tickets, six in first class, were at Speed’s own expense.

The man trailing Speed, however, was paid. He got handed about 13,800 dollars from the Chinese state for promoting his hometown.

This is because, as it happens, China has a social media bounty board, where creators collect big bags of money for completing various content quests. It’s not a single nationwide list, but a network of public incentives funded by local and regional municipalities.

To take an example: In July 2026, a Chongqing blogger posted a Douyin video of a 2,200 kilometre taxi ride to Lhasa, which hit 20 million likes, and the Xizang tourism department handed him 500,000 yuan. This fulfilled an offer the department had published in advance: clear 5 million likes, collect the half million.

There are countless versions of this, and it’s a really interesting way to push an agenda, precisely because none of it is planned. You don’t need a psyop if you have a bounty board. You just need a lot of people who want money.

So positive content is, to a degree, funded by the Chinese state, but it stays inside Chinese borders, paid in yuan, to Chinese locals. Actual real journalists (unlike myself), at the BBC and the New York Times, went looking for the international version and found nothing: no foreign influencers on the payroll, no agenda pushed, just a media scholar telling the NYT the videos “appear authentic, without the typical hallmarks of state involvement.”

And in regard to all the Chinese YouTube shorts we’re all severely addicted to, well it is mostly just repurposed content, clipped off Douyin and Xiaohongshu then reposted to Western media, done by (allegedly) completely ordinary people barely clearing a barista salary.

But it would be a mistake to chalk the online Chinafication up to this bounty board alone. There are other factors at play.

Late 2025, China opened its tourism borders, waving through 77 nationalities on arrival instead of the notoriously pain-in-the-ass permission process, and the internet flooded with footage from travel vloggers. Which obviously has a massive novelty factor, and gave us a lot of new trends to sink our teeth into.

The grass is always greener, especially when what you have in your own pasture is a crumbling economy, exorbitant healthcare, and dodgy political systems. Four years at an American public university runs fifty to sixty thousand dollars, while the Chinese equivalent is a fraction of that. The average Gen Z American carries ninety-four thousand dollars of debt, and two-thirds of them have already decided they’re never owning a home.

To be clear, even post-Chinafication, Americans still think of China as the bad guy. In March 2026, only 27 percent of those surveyed held a favourable view, and seventy-one percent didn’t. 27 is an impressive improvement from 14 in 2023, but hardly a true flip in public perception.

So what we’ve got is a fascination with an exotic land that seems to be better engineered than our own, but not an entirely clean slate. A twenty-two year old with ninety-four thousand dollars of debt doesn’t need much convincing that something has gone wrong, they feel it in their daily grind. The desire for maxing out on Chinese culture was never direct, but more so an obscure reflection pointed back at us. Which is probably a big part of why the era seems to have had such a short shelf life. We’ll have to see how many Americans are still smoking Double Happiness and drinking hot water in 2028. My guess is not many.

This summer, design across multiple artistic disciplines was infected with the same very specific color palette: electric turquoise, hot pink, and chrome silver.

The trend began innocuously, bubbling up through the aesthetics of niche fashion brands, visual artists, underground musicians, and cultural tastemakers1.

It was initially easy to write off as a superficial micro-trend, just another diluted Y2K revival. But as the aesthetic spread, it became clear that there was more to it than just the colors. There were also visual motifs, like dreamy saturated sunsets. And there was a thematic coherence: an abstract sense of glamour, excess, and messy ethereal bliss.

Taken together, it soon became clear that this design trend is an expression, in visual language, of the spirit of an unlikely city: Miami.

‘Unlikely’ because Miami has long been a cultural punching bag, associated with tawdry commercialism and gaudy maximalism. In recent years, the city has become a sensationalized, absurd backdrop for streamer content farming and aspirational IG-reel-crypto-grind-LARP culture.

But the truth is that Miami embodies much of what American culture is currently obsessed with: unabashed spectacle, a hunger for an unpolished “real” America, a fascination with collapse, and regional identity as mythology.

All that attention, however mocking, laid the groundwork for a major Miami rebound. Conceptions of cool come in cycles. In culture’s never-ending carousel of subversion, it seems Miami is back up.

This is Miami Revitalism.

Miami Revitalism [def]: an emergent design aesthetic embodying (intentionally or unintentionally) the spirit of Miami through an electric color palette, flashy motifs, and an ethos of glamour and relaxation.

Defined by:

• palette: electric turquoise / mint, hot pink, and chrome silver2.

• iconographic motifs: sunsets, palm trees, chrome/neon signage, etc.

• thematic vibe: saturated, messy, ethereal, blissful, brazen, relaxed, glamorous, sexy.

Examples, by category:

Music visual design and world building

Miami Revitalism informed many of this summer’s releases, with a significant presence in the rollouts, album artwork, music videos, and broader aesthetics for pop, electronic, and rap projects.

• JT’s upcoming album Club Cheetah

• B0YG1RL - “Reality”

• Addison Rae’s debut album art direction

• Zara Larsson - “Midnight Sun”

• MGNNA CRRTA

• Camila Cabello’s Miami vlogs

• Kim Petras - Detour

• Tyga’s recent release

• Fenix Flexin - “RUBBERZ”3

  ---

Underground Fashion

Niche fashion and design are definitely where this trend is most concentrated right now, which suggests it is still upstream of the mainstream. Most prevalent on Instagram, the colors, symbols, iconography, and casually glamorous approach of Miami Revitalism have spread across a growing set of labels, designers, and boutiques.

See also:

• Garments and accessories by Rohan Mirza

• Basketball shorts from Imran Potato

• Jacket and zip-up by Jake Burt

• Basketball shorts by Vincent Boily-Chatelain,

• Jacket by Aaron Esh x Post Party LFW show

• Apparel by Malene Specht

• Jeans by Nowherestore

• Stage design and accessories at Bazo’s 119 PFW show

• Vintage piece by Claude Montana

• Party Girl inspired line by lamotragine

High Fashion

High fashion is behind the curve here in recent times, but the palette has bled into 2026 runway shows.

See also:

• “The Island” collection by ERL

• Paloma Wool FW26

• Flip flops have become acceptable in high fashion, even in NYC where they used to be a huge cultural taboo.

  ---

Cultural tastemakers

The lines between tastemakers, it-girls, designers, and artists are more blurred than ever, but many of the individuals operating in this murky space are adopting Miami Revitalism.

Brooke Flecca

Jake John Howard

@samisthecoolest

• See also:

• Frankie B Stark

• Snow Strippers4

Reference lineage

Miami Revitalism is a quintessentially modern trend because it is (a) very nostalgia-driven, and (b) mashes up an incredibly complex array of references, ranging from 1980s pop culture, to South Florida’s Art Deco heritage, to modern digital art revivals of aesthetics like Synthwave or Outrun.

Part of Miami’s pull is nostalgia for the media that defines it. Games like GTA Vice City and Hotline Miami are remembered fondly, and their entire creative direction, from logos to color palettes, has come to embody the city in the minds of many. Miami Vice did even more to shape the city’s identity and fashion, with its white Armani suits and hedonistic, cocaine-fueled glamour.

Why now?

So why is this aesthetic exploding right now?

There are cyclical reasons. Miami Revitalism’s palette breaks sharply from the earth tones of the early 2020s and the black, grey, and white uniforms of minimalist wardrobes and the Rick Owens/Opium crowd. Album art has moved the same way, away from the dark, black-heavy designs female artists favored just a few years ago.

The shift can also be read as a reaction to the internet’s democratization of fashion taste, or more precisely, to the flattening it produced. Algorithmic micro-trends like wide-leg selvedge denim and cropped slub cotton tees are easy to replicate. Miami Revitalism’s higher barrier to entry shuts out anyone unable to assemble its more complex, colorful looks.

And it’s not like this is coming out of nowhere. Miami has true cultural infrastructure. Art, music, and sport each have a defining global event there: Art Basel, Rolling Loud, and the Miami Grand Prix.

But there is also a specific cultural reason that Miami has become an aesthetic focal point right now. The city has long sold itself as a surreal, romanticized pseudo-utopia of American success. This has been easy to see through and make fun of, and as a result, Miami has been treated like the distant, stunted, and tasteless cousin to the shining duo of American cultural hubs, LA and New York.

Over time, this relegation of Miami to secondary city ran its course. Now, embracing it reads as subversive, a fresh alternative to the tired NY-LA pendulum. The colors feel sexy rather than gauche. Vacation lifestyle feels aspirational again. In the midst of a broader cultural turn toward optimism and louder, more individual self-expression, Miami is a perfect fit.

Another part of the answer is GTA VI, the most anticipated video game ever made, set in a fictionalized Miami. The game is both nostalgic and futuristic: a return to Vice City for the generation that grew up on the 2002 original, rendered with a hyper-realism that captures 2026 Miami almost one to one. Its trailers alone have broken viewership records (pulling 6% of the world’s population on its first day), putting Miami at the center of the public eye well before the game even launches.

Miami occupies its own hybrid corner of the country: part mainland, part island; part city, part beach. It is a place of purity, where water, nature, and the human form at its most stripped down all meet. It’s where you’re at your most vulnerable and most beautiful. Miami’s flashy brazenness is a form of authenticity, and it’s one many, apparently, are coming back around to.

As Gianni Versace, whose mansion sat on Ocean Drive, put it: “In Miami, nothing was done until it was overdone.”

New Releases:

• Babyfather + Wraith9 — “Botched”

• toomanystrikers — “Bent”

• LUCY (Cooper B. Handy) — CITIZEN’S ARREST

• Cece Nathalie — “Flood Whole Towns”

• haloplus+ — “Kitchen”

• DJmegan23 — “icy angels”

• London Art Week (10/12–10/19) features fairs including Frieze London (10/14–10/19), Minor Attractions (10/13–10/19), and Paraíso (10/15–10/18).

• PHOTO RYUICHI SAKAMOTO at SAI in Tokyo from October 17 through November 8.

• Michelle Uckotter’s Trap Paintings 4: Step on a Dollar for Good Luck at King’s Leap Fine Arts in New York from September 25 to October 31

• Edward Enninful’s The 90s: Art and Fashion at Tate Britain in London from October 8 to February 14th

• Soldier’s Military Abstractions at Plaster in London opens October 8

• Paris Fashion Week wrapped up this week, marking the conclusion of the major fashion week cycle

• Standout collections included: Celine, Rick Owens, Alaïa, Paloma Wool, Enfants Riches Déprimés, Miu Miu, Chanel, Valentino, Ann Demeulemeester

• Saint Laurent officially confirms Anthony Vaccarello is leaving after 10 years

• Shanghai Fashion Week began this week, running from October 8-16

• Raf Simons announced a rare stock sale from November 9-14 in Antwerp

• Trinkets by Tommy Jack Dovier and Kentucky Boy Tyler

• 1/1 shoes designed by Andreas Aresti and Playboi Carti for Giuseppe Zanotti

• Omnibite, a three-axis joint designed by Eugenio Costa and Nicolò Tallone to connect raw branches and turn them into functional structures

• Paloma Wool’s collaborative collection with Brat Star

• Google Japan’s Gboard Conveyor Belt Version, made for one handed typing

This Week’s Headlines

AI-assisted gaming mash-up mods are viral this week

AI coding tools are helping modders reverse-engineer games and mash them together, producing insane creations like Minecraft inside Elden Ring, Skate 3 in GTA IV, and Spider-Man and Escape from Tarkov in Skyrim. Veteran modders are pushing back against the trend, dismissing some of the results as low-effort “AI slop.” (In other gaming news, the U.S. military is reportedly using Xbox-style controllers to operate laser weapons that shoot down drones in the Strait of Hormuz.)

Recap of the Lucki stabbing saga

• In 2024, Lucki and Carti had a brief online beef that seemed to end with a phone call later that month.

• At ComplexCon this week, an unidentified person allegedly slashed Lucki in the face during a fight outside the venue, while Carti watched from a car window. Four people were hurt.

• Lucki said he was fine that night, then posted on Monday showing his bandages and asking LAPD to return his car

• LAPD is reportedly investigating it as an attempted murder, with no suspects identified and no arrests. Carti’s camp has not been officially confirmed as involved.

Bricks of cocaine are washing up on Florida’s beaches

Recently, nearly 40 pounds of cocaine washed up on the shores of Brevard County, Florida. Bricks of cocaine regularly surface in the Florida Keys (where they’re known as “square grouper”) because traffickers will throw them overboard to evade authorities. This recent wave is exceptional though. Some residents have made fortunes by “fishing” for the packages and selling them.

Jeff Koons is selling 9 incredible pieces out of his art collection in blockbuster auction

Jeff Koons has been revealed as the seller behind Christie’s upcoming $100M Heroes & Lovers auction. The collection includes nine works, including four Picassos, led by Le Baiser (1969), estimated at $40 million. Other artists include Édouard Manet and Cornelis van Haarlem. Koons plans to reinvest the proceeds into his own artistic practice.

3D printed meat is coming to American grocery stores

Steakholder Foods Ltd., a company specializing in 3D-printing technology, has announced a line of 3D-printed, plant-based products, including marbled steak, filet mignon, chicken breast, salmon patties, and white fish patties. Using computer-aided designs, the company maps the precise placement of muscle fibers and fat layers to replicate the texture and structure of traditional meat and fish.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment — A$AP Rocky Full-Tuition Scholarship (Brooklyn, NY)

Four-year, full-tuition scholarship created by A$AP Rocky for an incoming freshman attending Long Island University’s Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment in Fall 2027. The opportunity supports students pursuing education across music, sports, entertainment, and entrepreneurship. Ideal candidates are first-time freshmen seeking enrollment at the school for Fall 2027.

Apply

New York City Department of Cultural Affairs — Individual Artist Grants (New York, NY)

Grant opportunity providing up to $10,000 in funding for individual artists and small nonprofits across New York City. Applications are distributed through borough-based cultural organizations supporting artists working across disciplines, including film, dance, writing, and visual art. Ideal applicants are artists, collectives, or small nonprofits meeting the eligibility requirements of their borough’s regrant program.

Apply

Cold Magazine — Writers (Remote)

Open call for writers across Cold’s eight sections, including fashion, music, art and photography, film and TV, theatre and literature, life and culture, nightlife, and food. Opportunities include writing reviews, interviews, essays, and other stories with a distinct point of view. Ideal candidates have a strong perspective and an interest in contributing original work to an international creative publication.

Apply

Upgrade to paid

Read more

“The Ballad of St Nick’s Park” by 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks is a late contender for the underground anthem of 2026. Over a baroque co-produced concoction of toy keyboard and speaker-rattling bass, 300SkullsAndCounting screams and shouts about adolescent adventures in an uncool English town: filming skate videos and getting drunk in the park with the boys, smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes, potentially encountering a UFO, and being the victim of a particularly unfortunate egging incident.

The discourse kicked off when the “St Nick’s” music video went viral on X. Some viewers appreciated the DSLR depiction of a goofier side of British youth culture; others wrote it off as ‘00s nostalgia bait. Most of the quote posts declared the track a total banger, but there were plenty of haters too. “Truly some of the worst music I’ve heard in my life,” one X user wrote about the weird genre mutation. “It’s almost impressive in how bad it is.”

But 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks are both innovators from separate UK subcultures. So if you want to understand the story behind THIS IS SPA TOWN!, it helps to know each artist’s lore.

In recent years, the Bath-raised, London-based producer Jenny Sparks—whose real first name is Theo—has earned the respect of the UK’s underground party scene. He’s known to DJ at illegal raves and squat parties outside of the traditional club circuit, as well as at sillier, beloved festivals like Boomtown and Balter. His music is a wonky, sample-infused interpretation of bassline, the hard-hitting club genre that crystallized in the mid-2000s at Sheffield’s mythologized Niche nightclub. He’s released three solo albums to date, but really exploded this summer with his TikTok-viral track (that he hates) called “The ting goes quack,” which samples fictional British rapper Big Shaq’s comedic 2017 hit “Man’s Not Hot.”

300SkullsAndCounting, birth name Hal, is a figurehead in the UK’s DIY screamo scene, and plays drums in the band Mitsubishi Suicide. The sound of 300SkullsAndCounting is an innovative take on screamo, incorporating chiptune and breakcore references, which Hal used to release under a spoof label called ‘XD RecAWRdings,’ before being signed by the spoof’s reference, XL Recordings. He is renowned for his intense on-stage performances, which all begin with a 10-minute countup from 0 to 300. A pink microphone is his signature prop.

All this to say: 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks is a very UK collaboration. Even the album’s title is a nod to local culture. “Spa towns” are vestiges of the 1700s and 1800s, when wealthy Georgians and Victorians flocked to towns built around health-giving natural springs. Today, these towns are known as quaint tourist destinations.

300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks both grew up in and around spa towns, and THIS IS SPA TOWN! Is the soundtrack to their personal (and much less quaint) version of life in them.

Context aside, the album has broken containment from their respective scenes, becoming underground culture’s latest sonic embodiment of What’s New.

For their first interview together, we sent their friend Taylor Richardson and photographer Oscar Shepherd to document them in the city of Bath Spa. You’re Welcome.

Taylor Richardson: How did you guys meet?

Hal: My flatmate introduced me to Theo and said, You guys have similar brains, and you’d really get on. Then my friend Trip was staying on Theo’s sofa. I went round to record a song with Trip, and Theo came in, and then we ended up chatting and really getting on. I was like, I really have this cool idea for a bassline remix of my song ‘Eagle vs. Sheagle.‘ Theo was like, “Send me the stems. I emailed you the stems then and there.

Theo: I knew of Hal’s music. Also at a party at the ICA—where everyone’s too cool to say hello to each other—Hal actually came and said hello to me. When we met again at my place, and he was doing fingerboard tricks and being weird, I was like, This guy’s sick.

Hal, what’s your best fingerboard trick?

H: Probably fakey varial flip rewind. That’s not the hardest trick to do, but it does throw people off in a fingerboard game of skate. Or it’s the late front side big heel. I haven’t got that one every time.

Who does what on your album?

T: For the instrumentals, it would mainly be Hal feeding me melodies. He’s pitch-perfect, which I’m absolutely not. So a lot of the melodies were played on Casio keyboards or on like MIDI on Fruity Loops, and then I’d build bass lines and drums around that. Overall, Hal was much more so on like the melodies and lyrics, and me more on the bass and drums. Songwriting was kind of both of us, more so Hal on lyrics.

H: I would take ages.

T: Hal would take a long fucking time, but I think that was good. The sessions I was used to were like two hours, in and out in a rush. But we’d spend entire days together. It was also both of us challenging each other. I’d make a weird bass line and be like, Surely you can’t scream on this? And then he would play a cute melody on a Casio keyboard and be like, let’s make this into a bassline song.

H: It was so fun, because I’d never really experimented with those sounds before. A lot of my music beforehand was really lacking low end bass. I brought a kind of breakcore edge and video game sensibility into Theo’s studio, and then Theo would make it bassliney.

Theo: We were just trying to fuck with each other.

In some of the discourse online [people are arguing that] you could be seen as disrespectful to the genre. What would you say to the people saying that?

T: I mean, I’ve loved bassline since I was about 17 years old. Bassline originated from the Midlands or Huddersfield—although it depends on who you ask—but I was inspired by the kind of wackier, weirder version that came from Sheffield. OffMeNutRecords was a label from there, and I remember hearing a remix of the Pingu theme song on one of their compilations. That whatthefuckness stuck with me and informs everything i do now.

Getting someone who screams loudly on a bassline song sounded like a cool idea to me. If someone screaming over bassline is offensive to you, then I suggest moving to Alaska and shouting at a wall.

H: Honestly, if people in my scenes have a problem with this, then I really don’t give a fuck. My whole life I’ve just been trying to mash things together. We experimented heavily, and this is the product of it. It bangs and it’s from the heart that’s the end of the discussion for me.

That brings me on to the album title, This is Spa Town! You guys both grew up in spa towns. What’s your most tapped hometown experience?

H: I’m from Warwick, which is right next to Leamington Spa. So I’d pretty much spend every day there skating or just hanging out with my friends. And when you do that, especially in a small place, weird things are always bound to happen.

The penultimate track of my album This Is My Zombie-Killing tells one of them.

Another one is that, when I was a kid my parents used to tell me about this kind of famous murderer, and I never really believed it to be real. And then I met him with my friend. He followed us out of the park, and we had to lose his trail.

T: When I was maybe year 11, I had a rap battle with a guy two years above me, a scary guy who always wore a beanie. I couldn’t really rap, but we were all quite drunk in Victoria Park and it was after midnight.

One of my lyrics was something along the lines of You got a stupid hat, and I took his hat off his head as I said it. I got pinned to the wall by his friends. I was sort of terrified. One of his friends came up to my friends and said, He’s either going home with you lot, or he’s coming back with me.

H: What did he mean?!

T: I don’t know what he meant, and luckily I never found out.

Theo, you’ve been going to festivals and parties for quite some time. Boomtown sticks out to me. Do you have any great stories to tell from your times at Boomtown?

T: I’ve been about nine times. It’s quite hard to remember.

I think it was the second year I went, we were in the jobcentre which was a little tent at the top of the hill which basically only played bassline. There was this ginger kid two years above us, running around the venue, rugby tackling people, that was pretty good.

More recently, a kid had a tattoo of my logo on his chest, and he showed it to me in the middle of the set. That was crazy.

Two years back, I was walking back to my tent at 8am, long after the music had stopped, and a guy with a bin and a speaker approached me and said, Would you like to do a set on the top of the hill? And I was like, Sounds like a good idea. I had to run back to my camp, which was about 30 minutes away. Some of my friends saw me, and they said, What are you doing? I said, I’ve got a set. They all thought it was having a mental breakdown, and so did I, but it actually happened, and it was great.

Hal, What’s the most uncomfortable you’ve ever felt on stage?

H: This one time last year, I did a show in a basement in Lucerne, Switzerland. I thought I was really funny, and asked the crowd any questions? at the end of my set. No one asked me a question for five minutes, and I just sat there in silence.

What is your most profound or weird skate park story?

H: One that sticks in my mind. I don’t know if it’s that profound, but it’s definitely memorable. I was sat down next to the skate park, and my friend at the time was putting my hair into braids, they just started pissing at the same time, and then threw up everywhere.

But another one is—and this is in the Ballad of St Nick’s Park video—there was a mysterious black ring of smoke in the sky. I must have been about 13, 14. I thought it was a UFO. Everybody lost their mind. I remember people screaming, What the fuck is that? We’re gonna die! Someone threw their BMX off the top of the hip. It was really like a fuck moment for a lot of people. It stuck with everyone, I hope.

The album’s obviously very personal to both of you guys. What track do you feel most attached to?

T: Probably “Can of K.” I think it was the most fun song to make. I remember us taking quite a while to write the melody, and then when it all came together, we both freaked out.

H: 90% of the lyrics of that song was the first ever lyrics I wrote to a 300Skulls song. I wrote them back in 2023, before I even named the project 300SkullsAndCounting. Those lyrics mean a lot to me.

Favorite UK rap freestyle/cypher?

H: For me, it’s B Don and T1’s “Scene Smasher.” I’ve played that on so many different people’s TVs in the past few years.

T: Mine’s Remtrex’s “Flush Raw.”

Yeah, he’s doing the Big L “Ebonics” thing.

T: He’ll say a phrase and then like to explain what it means. And like during the whole freestyle, his phone’s just going off.

H: Can it be noted that we both chose freestyles from Birmingham.

Dream collaboration, dead or alive?

T: 300SkullAndCounting. Or Whitney Houston.

H: I feel like I was put on this earth to get Skrillex to get the side shave back. And I’m going to be the one to actually shave it as well.

If you had to describe the album in correspondence to a movie, where do you feel it lies?

H: Son of Rambow. It’s about two kids from two different worlds. Theo’s Will Poulter, and I’m the other kid, the Plymouth Brethren one. A lot of the times I was the one going like, Theo, no, we have to concentrate!

T: I would say Shaun of the Dead.

I remember one time after a London Fashion Week party, people were asking each other their favourite film around this table, and everyone was saying some Japanese art film that no one’s ever heard of, and I said Shaun of the Dead, and everyone rolled their eyes and were like, Oh, this fucking annoying boy.

Hopefully one day, there’ll be people sitting around a table after a London Fashion Week party discussing their favourite albums, and someone will say ours, and everyone will roll their eyes too.

Intro: Welcome @welcome.jpeg
Interview: Taylor Richardson @taylor._richardson
Photography: Oscar Sheperd @bewilderhythmic

This is our eighth iteration of Monthly Discoveries, our recurring series where the Welcome team rounds up and shares what we discovered on the internet this past month.

Paid subscribers can revisit the previous seven editions here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

September’s eclectic assortment includes a mirror made of 450 motorized penguins, a lamp built from a cow’s spine, Thom Browne SS27 insect-shaped shoes, a two-day ambient concert aboard a boat, portraits grown from human mold spores, and more.

Happy discovering.

various images of stuffed animals by Trinity Ace

Trinity Ace is a California-based alt-country musician, who has opened for Elias Rønnenfelt, and also a visual archivist who curates the account @dieselsugar. This collection focuses on “bumper plushies,” stuffed animals strapped to the front bumpers of trucks. The tradition grew out of Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) car culture, particularly the bosozoku and drifting scenes.

Soccer tattoo by @tatdatjawn

@tatdatjawn is a New York–based tattoo artist known for colorful, tapestry-like compositions and doodle-style illustrations packed with detail. When a commenter asked whether “antistyle” tattoos were a trend nowadays, the artist replied that his work is, on the contrary, “extra style.” His soccer tattoo from last week is one of our favorites; he manages to fit 10 players in mid-action, tangled and nestled around the letters of the word “SOCCER.”

Gun makeup by @bad___blood___

Using a fine tip liquid black eyeliner, @bad___blood___’s gun makeup look delicately traces an AK-47 rifle across her eyelid.

loneliness…... …. … by Seungmin Kim

Seungmin Kim’s 2024 work loneliness..... .... ..., made in Paris, is a low-resolution digital photo series depicting a lone rudimentary model figure inside a small architectural model. In every frame, a yellow character sits in cold, liminal isolation. The setting is somewhere between a prison, an abandoned hotel, and a waiting room. Details on the piece are sparse, and the only text accompanying it is the caption: “nothing is touching the person, except the sentiments. some moments are not meant to be seen.”

2000s Korean street art curated by @wonofgo

@wonofgo is an archive page curating a very specific kind of 2000s Korean art, pulled from commercial signage, advertisements, and magazines. The art style is known as vector illustration, and recurring visual motifs include ultra-skinny silhouettes, cat-like eyes, and saturated and gradient color palettes. In Korea this art style was commonly found at noraebangs (karaoke bars), local hair salons, Hof bars (beer halls) and nighttime lounges.

残像のリプレイ or Afterimage Replay by Yuka Numata

残像のリプレイ/Afterimage Replay is an installation by Yuka Numata in Gero, Japan, a rural town best known for its hot springs. The installation draws on the memories of the students who attended the former Yuya Elementary School, which was slated for closure. Numata reimagines the experiences of its students through gentle, fuzzy, memory-like traces which appear “transferred into the space from another place or time.” The installation’s rural location reflects a broader trend in Japan of bringing contemporary art to the countryside and repurposing underused public buildings.

Cow Vertebrae lamp by Algol

Algol is an Arizona-based sculptor and interior designer who often makes lamps out of the bones and vertebrae of deceased animals (most of which he finds in the desert himself). This particular lamp stands 6’3” tall, built from a cow vertebrae, a vintage cast-iron base, and a custom shade. It was featured at the Salt Lake City Oddities and Curiosities Expo last month. Algol’s practice is grounded in zero-waste principles, with the rest of his materials primarily sourced from vintage antiques and fabrics.

Exotic flowers/mold garden by Dasha Plesen

Dasha Plesen is a bio-artist whose practice begins with a handful of spores brushed from someone’s skin, which she then feeds and grows over several weeks until they bloom into a colorful, one-of-a-kind mold colony. Each colony is photographed through a macro lens, scanned, and digitized. Then, the original bio-portrait is sterilized with ethylene gas and sealed permanently in epoxy. What makes Plesen’s pieces so distinctive is the complexity of color and texture in each colony, and the gradients and surface variation she can control through her command of the mold-growth process.

OK Computer by @etolayetdinozavr

@etolayetdinozavr is a Russian painter and muralist. We came across his latest graffiti piece in a Moscow train station: a tightly contained composition of purple, black, and red lines resembling audio waveforms. The piece’s vertical lines both contrast with and blend into the station’s dirty tile grid, immersing the work in its surroundings while still catching the eye of passersby. You can observe his process for this piece here.

ceiling service vol. 11 by SIMMONS and ceiling service

ceiling service is a Seoul-based immersive listening and rest series founded in 2024 by Joon Kwak. The experience subverts the stimulation and chaos of a typical concert, replacing seats with beds, a concept which in varying forms has steadily spread through creative spaces around the world, most notably through events like Ambient Church in New York (which has featured ambient performances from James Ferraro, James K, Juliana Huxtable, and many others). A typical session moves attendees through guided meditations, live ambient performances, and a gong journey, with each session lasting 4 hours. Volume 11, however, held last month, was an interesting departure from this format: it took attendees on a two-day journey aboard a two-story boat down the Han River.

Read more

New Releases:

• B0YG1RL— B0YG1RL

• Dean Blunt + Vegyn — “My Movie”

• Fine — “Sometimes i rush”

• kimj — “pooka song ˚.⋆꒰১ ໒꒱⋆.˚.”

• jackzebra — Zhuang Zhuang Mixtape

• Erik Foss’s Dream a Little Dream at FutureFWD Gallery in New York from September 23 to November 1

• Stone Island’s Selected Works ‘982 ‘026 at Selfridges in London from September 21 to November 6

• Martin Margiela’s first German solo exhibition at Konrad Fischer Galerie in Berlin from September 10 to December 19

• Polina Osipova’s Cosmologies at Play at Neun Kelche in Berlin from September 19 to October 25

• Art of Manga at the Brooklyn Museum in New York from October 3 to January 31

• Magdalena Petroni’s I’m Coming for You series at Casa Tabasco in Mexico City through October 17

• Anna Uddenberg’s White Noise at Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York from October 2 to October 30

• Milan Fashion Week concluded this week, Paris Fashion Week began

• Standout collections: Hodakova, Acne Studios, Matières Fécales, Dior, Vautrait, Ferragamo, Moschino, Saint Laurent, Anrealage, Dries Van Noten, Loewe

• Rumors circulated that Hedi Slimane was to be appointed the next creative director of Louis Vuitton; however Louis Vuitton promptly shut down the rumors

• Anthony Vaccarello marked a decade at Saint Laurent with a gold-themed Spring/Summer 2027 collection, amid growing speculation that it could be his final show for the house

• John Galliano’s Zara collection dropped amid controversy over its high prices despite the use of inexpensive materials

• Robert Pattinson nesting dolls by A24

• Handmade speakers by Think Later Studio

• Bottega Veneta’s leather Intrecciato newspaper notebook

• Bird knives by Tiffany Bouelle and Julie Beudin

• DJ stand cigarette holder by Sunken Blimp

• Clock shoes by Canyaon

• Experimental aquatic ties by tie a knot

This Week’s Headlines

Rick Ross got arrested and his judge had no idea who he was

Rick Ross was arrested in Miami Beach on two domestic-violence charges and pleaded not guilty. A woman alleged that Ross struck and choked her during an August 28 incident. During his court appearance, Ross’s attorney cited safety concerns while seeking expedited release, prompting Judge Mindy Glazer to respond, “I have no idea who you are.” Ross gave this very Rick-Ross-style response when he was released.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s partner has suddenly died…

Ken Urker, the partner of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the father of her child, died Thursday on his 34th birthday. Blanchard says he died from an apparent overdose after an unidentified substance was found at the scene. Urker had no known history of drug use. Blanchard and Urker met in 2017 while she was serving a prison sentence for her role in her mother’s 2015 murder. Police say they have not ruled out foul play, and an autopsy with toxicology testing is underway.

Minecraft is getting a new dimension (and its biggest update in years)

The Sift is Minecraft’s upcoming fourth dimension, joining the Overworld, Nether, and End. It will be the first new dimension added to the game in more than 14 years. While full details are being kept under wraps, footage shows a radically different and colorful world with new mobs and biomes. Players can get an early look at the Sift in Minecraft Dungeons II.

Weed is 308% stronger now

According to a recent report from The Washington Post, weed is more than four times as potent today as it was in the 1990s. Average THC levels in confiscated cannabis samples rose from 3.96% in 1995 to 16.14% in 2022, validating the long-discussed millennial talking point that weed just isn’t what it used to be.

Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal actually got the US Senate to pass legislation for pilots’ mental health

As Nathan Fielder’s highly anticipated documentary You Can See Everything approaches, his work from season 2 of The Rehearsal is also paying off: the Senate just passed two bills aimed at improving mental health care for pilots and aviation workers. Reports are that Fielder’s investigation of the topic in The Rehearsal had a direct impact on the staffers who pushed to get the bill across the finish line.

A robotics company made its old robots commit suicide by jumping into molten steel

Robotics company Figure has retired a fleet of old humanoid robots in the most Terminator 2 way possible: by training the robots to jump autonomously into a vat of molten steel. Figure states that keeping the older robots running no longer made sense and dismantling each one would eat into time needed to develop its next-generation robots. In other robot news, the Pentagon announced a killer robot program.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Shá Parlé — Small Porcelain Charm Artist (Sherman Oaks, CA)

Paid artist opportunity creating handmade porcelain charms through hand-painting and small-scale production work. Responsibilities include painting existing designs, following color and artwork references, maintaining production quality, and learning the studio’s techniques. Ideal candidate has strong painting or illustration skills, a steady hand, excellent attention to detail, and an interest in hands-on creative work; ceramics experience is a plus but not required.

Apply

COS — Designer, Runway (London, UK)

Full-time fashion design role shaping COS’s most directional Runway collections from concept through final product. Responsibilities include developing seasonal concepts, researching and sketching, experimenting with silhouettes and construction, leading fittings, collaborating across design and product teams, and mentoring junior designers. Ideal candidate has proven womenswear design experience within a luxury or premium brand, strong technical knowledge, a refined design point of view, and a portfolio demonstrating research, concept development, and finished product.

Apply

Acne Studios — Talent Acquisition Apprentice (Paris, France)

Apprenticeship supporting retail recruitment and People processes at Acne Studios’ Paris office. Responsibilities include creating job postings, sourcing candidates, coordinating interviews, supporting hiring managers and onboarding, maintaining recruitment data, and assisting with employer branding. Ideal candidate is in the final stage of a relevant degree, is eligible for an apprenticeship contract in France, and is organized, proactive, detail-oriented, and fluent in English.

Apply

Upgrade to paid

Read more

Written by Hannah Morgan

People say culture is a pendulum. It swings back and forth, one era reacting to the last, and thereby informing the next.

But the cultural expression of any given moment is not the product of a single pendulum, but many: from maximalist to minimalist, colorful to dark, absurd to rational, all of them swinging at once, competing for influence.

Right now, one of these back-and-forth tensions is shaping the direction of underground music. It is swinging away from a cold and stilted self-seriousness, and toward a soft, earnest sentimentality.

The result, which has been taking shape for over a year, is the emergence of a subgenre that is defining contemporary indie electronica: Laptop Twee.

Laptop Twee was coined by blogger and musician Friends& to describe a burgeoning movement that combines (1) the innocent, simple, melody-driven and lo-fi ethos of twee music with (2) the production tools and sounds of bedroom laptop production.

It has been percolating for years, and recently exploded into nearly mainstream popularity on the backs of artists like ear and Bassvictim. We’ve all heard the music, and plenty of thought-fluencers have made clicky reels ‘breaking down’ its emergence

But truly understanding Laptop Twee requires us to begin much earlier, tracing the lineage of twee music from its 1980s emergence in response to a harsh post-punk scene, through its 2010s revival in response to increasing ironic detachment in underground culture.

By understanding these past precedents, we can see that Laptop Twee is not a standalone modern subgenre, but a predictable reaction against the colder, more detached cultural era of the early 2020s, and a third major chapter in one single twee story, this time shaped by our era’s defining technological tool.

Laptop Twee is a microcosm for understanding how culture changes as a whole over time. Read on for the bigger picture

First, we should understand what we mean by ‘twee.’ It is most commonly understood as a music genre, but has come to be associated with a more general set of aesthetic signifiers as well.

Sonically, twee began as a genre of innocent and unpolished music under the indie pop umbrella. It has historically1 been defined by: lo-fi vocals, simple melodies and chords played on guitars and ukuleles, unpolished sounds (think tape hiss and jangly strings), and deeply personal diaristic lyrics (think Beat Happening or The Pastels).

But ‘twee’ today can also refer to a fashion sensibility: vintage silhouettes, Mary Janes, floral patterns, stripes, colorful tights (in contemporary dress, think Zooey Deschanel or Alexa Chung).

There is also a more general design aesthetic associated with twee: letterpress graphics, pastel colors, scrapbook layouts, retro homage (think Wes Anderson or Tavi Gevinson)

Philosophically, Twee is founded on sincerity and sentimentalism. It prefers sincerity to irony, and favors unpolished, childlike, homemade approaches to creativity.

Twee is fundamentally a countercultural reaction, and it has had two major iterations before this present resurgence.

Twee (1980s-90s)

The original iteration of twee began in the 1980s as a subgenre of underground guitar pop that was distributed on cassette tapes among close-knit fans.

Unlike other popular post-punk music, which often dealt with nihilistically grandiose subject matter (such as The Jam in the mainstream, Nirvana in the grunge scene, or Joy Division in the art-rock wing), twee had a nostalgic sensibility and innocent lyrical themes.

KEXP writes that bands like Beat Happening were “throwing flower petals in the face” of heroin chic and darker dominant cultures.

Other twee bands from this first chapter include The Pastels, Talulah Gosh and The Field Mice.

People seeking respite from sorrowful, cynical ideologies were drawn to Twee, causing the genre (and its associated aesthetic) to spread. After peaking in the mid-’90s, Twee moved back underground as pop homogenized around radio-friendly sounds.

Tumblr Twee (2010s)

Twee’s second iteration, in the early ‘10s, was also a reaction to a self-serious dominant culture, this time one embodied by genres under the hipster umbrella, such as witch house or soft grunge.

The second chapter of twee was facilitated by the newfound popularity of vintage aesthetics on sites like Tumblr. These platforms increased the availability of archival imagery, causing the resurgence of past ideologies.

Twee was one of the subcultural ideology from past underground scenes that began to thrive on this new social media. A new internet context gave twee’s dated aesthetics (like polka-dots and scrappy handmade graphics) a renewed novelty.

As the aesthetic became popular again (in part by riding the coat-tails of a greater curiosity in underground hipster genres), twee ideology spread. Indietronica artists like Passion Pit would fold twee’s charming sincerity into synth-driven production, swapping twee’s jangly strings for cheery samples and glitchy digital textures, while maintaining a wide-eyed, innocent spirit.

Twee’s idealistic philosophy would soon be drowned out by a spirit of excess in popular culture, from the existential self-aggrandizement of trap, to the artificial self-curation of hypebeast culture. As a result, twee’s second iteration was short-lived, but a strong and necessary cog in the cultural cycle.

Laptop Twee (2025-present)

We’re watching this cycle repeat in today’s underground, where sonics and aesthetics have gravitated towards twee once again.

While labeling emerging artists today is notoriously difficult, it is undeniable that a certain subset of recent underground music has displayed a very twee sentiment. Laptop twee is a good catch-all for what unites this music.

• Laptop: glitch production, prominent synthesizers, breakbeats, bitcrush

• Twee: lo-fi vocals, stripped-back arrangement, acoustic incorporation, sincere themes

The sound is still far from a rigid genre, but offers a way to understand contemporary artists like ear, Worldpeace DMT, B7lanket, $quib, ideasforconversations, The Femcels and bbpue as part of a shared aesthetic movement.

These artists express the original twee ideology through contemporary production tools and programs.

Take duo ear as an archetypal example of the genre, the band largely credited for driving Laptop Twee’s newfound success. Their sound is the result of the tension between Jonah Paz’s background in more conventional twee music (see other projects like Sacred Holes and The Pictures) and Yaelle Avtan’s affinity for electronic textures.

ear told Nina Protocol that the music was never “intended to be twee,” but negotiates both the Laptop and Twee influences to create something new. This balancing of nostalgic twee and modern electronic production is what defines other Laptop Twee acts as well.

As with its previous lives, laptop twee is a response to a different genre: what has become known as the indie sleaze revival.

Sonically, contemporary indie sleaze draws from post-grunge indie rock and electronic dance music intentionally reminiscent of MP3 blog and Tumblr-era sound. Musical acts in this genre often lean heavily on references, which can contribute to their feeling contrived, or pretentious, or inauthentic. Much like the genres that twee has always responded to, indie sleaze represents an irony-poisoned dominant culture where meaning is hedged behind cold artifice.

Laptop Twee’s rise through the underground in the past year is indicative of cultural fatigue with indie sleaze, and desire for something softer and more earnest.

And, as in past resurgences, twee is spreading to other genres. Underground rap artists like Feng and Earfzilla are embracing childlike nostalgia through their own work and riding the wave of this cultural reaction. Contemporary talents of the electronic discipline, like Suzy Sheer and Snow Strippers, have sampled artists of the twee discipline.

In the past year, Laptop Twee has exploded out of the niche. ear’s breakout success with their 2024 debut “Nerves” (recorded on iPhone in Bard College’s university library) saw the band garner upwards of 200,000 Spotify listeners in a matter of months, sold-out tour dates, and cosigns from the likes of Yung Lean.

In their jetstream, artists like ideasforconversations and The Femcels have seen steady interest in their music from new audiences, with the former opening for The Hellp this year and the latter billed with the likes of Rooster and Esdeekid.

Just as twee in the past has been a much-welcomed answer to stagnating values in music, it seems underground listenership is captured by the genre’s honesty and simplicity. It doesn’t necessitate being tapped in with online lore to enjoy what’s happening.

Looking ahead, laptop twee is positioned to be the next great export from the underground, especially as a form of resistance to increasingly curated algorithmic self-presentation.

In wider pop culture, we’re seeing the ideology spill into contemporary art with the explosive popularity of hand-drawn illustrations online. (See the work of Martin Tokeshi, Ana Terral or Masa Moore.)

In fashion, twee ideology informs the identities of brands like NiiHai, where nostalgic references and colors are central to achieving a sense of earnest adolescence.

As with any cultural movement these days, the longevity of this most recent twee revival is an open question. Ultimately, it may come down to whether its leading figures manage to create truly enduring works of art.

To get a sense of where they’ve gotten so far, listen to this laptop twee playlist curated by the first person to name the genre, Friends&.

New Releases:

• Che + Tezzus — RICHPHØNKS

• Dean Blunt — “RIPyellowranger”

• 300SkullsAndCounting + Jenny Sparks — THIS IS SPA TOWN

• Worldpeace DMT — “Gabriel”

• smokedope2016 — “Polo”

• Jane Remover — “Beauty Sleep”

• 2hollis — “Warhorse”

• earfzilla – “vintage vuitton”

• Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette exhibit in France at the Palace of Versailles from September 22nd to January 24th

• Denim Tears from the Pool of Black Genius in Savannah, Georgia at SCAD MOA through January 11th

• Yoshitaka Amano’s Big Bang at The Warehouse in Houston from September 23rd to February 7th

• Nico Walker’s Tout est en ordre in Paris at Institut suédois through October 4th

• Jonah Dillon’s first solo exhibit at Foreign Domestic from September 11th to October 18th

• The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon at Prince Consort Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from September 21st to January 3rd

• U-Haul Art Fair in Chelsea, New York from September 25th to 27th

• London Fashion Week concluded this week, Milan Fashion week began

• Demna to present highly anticipated Gucci SS27 collection, “THE STORE SHOW”

• Pierpaolo Piccioli rumored to be leaving Balenciaga after just a year

• A Ken Carson x Bazo collaboration was teased on Instagram

• Supreme x Nike returns for another year

• Miu Miu is opening vinyl club pop ups across the world

• GANG UNIT BRANDING book by Pouria Khojastehpay

• 1/1 Sofa Bags reworked from vintage designer bags and clothing by @guyhwh

• Lenticular slipper flats by LEEANN HUANG

• Holographic and silver metallic beetle shoes from Thom Browne SS27

• J Balvin’s sapphire grills

• Timberland x Number (N)ine boots

This Week’s Headlines

London Fashion Week + Milan Fashion Week notes and standouts

• Standout collections: MM6, Burberry, Diesel, Public School, Mulberry, Geordie Campbell, Prada, Roberto Cavalli, Emporio Armani, Marni, Gucci, Jil Sander, Mowalola

• Glenn Martens’ final collection for Diesel featured a particularly hedonistic audience, with attendees making out, headbanging, and generally giving into the spectacle.

• Collections from London and Milan felt much more compelling, important, and centered around the clothing in contrast to New York

One of the world’s best art book fairs is this weekend in New York

New York’s highly anticipated Printed Matter book fair runs from September 24-27 at MoMA PS1 and, “will feature over 310 exhibitors, including interdisciplinary artistic practices, collectives, small presses, self-publishing artists, rare book dealers, institutions, and distributors.”

Pierpaolo Piccioli is leaving Balenciaga

After just over a year as Balenciaga’s creative director, Pierpaolo Piccioli is reportedly set to step down, according to industry insiders. The departure comes amid reports of weakening sales, particularly in menswear, alongside increasingly mixed reception to Piccioli’s collections. Piccioli never quite filled Demna’s very large shoes, raising the question of who could take over next. Martine Rose, Willy Chavarria, Shayne Oliver, and Mowalola all feel like compelling possibilities.

The Vogue World event embodied the worst of fashion

From questionable sponsors like OpenAI and Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, to bizarre Chinese robots walking down the runway (Miuccia Prada was not impressed), Vogue World was a bizarre event that many felt represented the worst of fashion in 2026: driven by corporate interests, overly concerned with spectacle over substance, and celebrity obsessed. Does anyone really care what Cardi B, Alicia Keys, MGK, Jennifer Lopez, and Matthew McConaughey’s son have to do with fashion? Take a look at Juan Costa Paz’s response to the criticism.

Your favorite childhood cultural rivalries are now owned by the same monopoly

This week, two major mergers were announced or finalized.

• Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon are set to become sister networks following Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which has received shareholder and regulatory approval.

• Halo will now be a part of Activision/Blizzard, which produces the Call of Duty games.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

A24 — Specialty Marketing + Events Intern (New York, NY / Los Angeles, CA)

Part-time internship supporting A24’s Specialty Marketing + Events team starting October 2026. Responsibilities include researching venues, supporting premieres and events, developing programming ideas, managing hospitality reservations, and assisting with event planning. Ideal candidate is detail-oriented, communicative, adaptable under pressure, and available up to 15 hours per week.

Apply

VETEMENTS — Graphic Designer / Print Designer (Zurich, Switzerland)

Design role creating graphics, prints, patterns, and visual concepts for VETEMENTS collections and projects. Responsibilities include developing garments, technical files, show materials, social media content, and visual concepts for stores, pop-ups, and events. Ideal candidate has at least two years of similar experience, a strong understanding of the VETEMENTS aesthetic, fluent English, and the right to work in Switzerland.

Apply

Whitney Museum of American Art — Digital Content Intern (New York, NY)

Paid spring 2027 internship supporting the Whitney’s website, video, and social media channels. Responsibilities include producing short-form video, assisting with exhibition planning, conducting archival research, and supporting livestreaming, transcription, and asset management. Ideal candidate is enrolled in an accredited academic program, has Adobe Premiere experience, and is interested in contemporary art, storytelling, and media production.

Apply

Unlock the full list of job opportunities—from New York and Los Angeles to Paris and London—plus complete access to the Welcome Magazine archive by becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to paid

Read more

^{The Kok Boru teams walk out ahead of the day’s Kok Boru competition at the Cholpon-Ata Kok Boru Stadium.}

Reporting and images by Jennifer Korn

For the last decade, competitive nomadic peoples from around Central Asia and the world have been gathering for the World Nomad Games, a biannual competition oft dubbed the “Olympics of the Nomadic World.”

The events are outlandish:

Kok boru, a twist on polo that uses a 70-pound goat carcass as a ball.

Er Enish, where two competitors wrestle…while both horseback.

Strong man, where large men lift and drag 1300-pound stuffed camels.

Arm wrestling, eagle hunting, tug of war.

In addition to these unique sport disciplines, there are also intellectual-based board game competitions, and over-the-top cultural showcases.

The latest iteration, held in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan from August 31^st to September 6^th, brought together around 3000 athletes from 112 countries. I was there. This is what I saw.

The national and geopolitical context for the games is important. The Nomad Games have become a pillar of regional identity in Kyrgyzstan, a country that has struggled, in the 35 years since its independence from the USSR, to state build. The games help unite the population around a Central Asian nomadic heritage.

^{Archery. A Mongolian archer dressed in traditional national garb aims for the target at Kyrchyn Gorge.}

“At first, [the Games] were primarily designed as an event to rebuild the country following the political turbulence in the 2000s, to create a positive image of the country as a safe destination for foreign investment and tourism,” said Kyrgyz independent researcher Arzuu Sheranova.

But the games themselves are far less serious than their historical context.

Each delegation is urged to dress in their own interpretation of traditional garb for the Opening Ceremonies. Many wear regionally-specific historical garments, but there are also cross-national interpretations: Colombians dressed as Andean highlanders, Iranians as Persian Immortals, Hungarians as Magyar warriors.

It’s a dizzying display of headdress, capes, leather boots, and knee buckling jewelry. These costumes are brought along into the field of play, with athletes competing while dressed in their full native outfit.

^{The Iranian team walks out to the Opening Ceremony in Bishkek Arena, dressed akin to the legendary Persian Immortals}

The Opening Ceremony kicks off the week’s festivities, featuring over seven hours of programming (inarguably too long) that included an indoor waterfall, an extensive firework display, a theatric Mongol invasion with hundreds of horses galloping across the stage to the sounds of booming drums, and a surprise finale that featured Nicole Scherzinger from the Pussycat Dolls singing a few of her greatest hits (“Don’t Cha” hits different in Kyrgyzstan after 6 hours of local, traditional music).

A number of world leaders were present for the Ceremony, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and China’s Xi Jinping in attendance for much of the show.

^{Taigan Zharysh. Taigans race after a motorbike dragging a fox carcass at Kyrchyn Gorge.}

The grand and comically confusing beginning set the mood for a week of chaotic fun. These Games are about culture as much as sport, with over 600 non-athletic events peppered throughout the week.

^{The Brazilian Tug of War team prepares for their match, doing group stretches ahead of taking to the sand.}

^{The Pakistani team struggles to beat the South Korean team in Tug of War. They went on to win bronze in the tournament.}

The competitors themselves range from elite professional athletes, to university students who heard about it while traveling a few months before, to 10-year-old equestrian riders trying to win the prize money before heading back to middle school class.

Numerous athletes I spoke to were pure amateurs who had found the Games randomly. Take Sam Pollard, a tug of war athlete from Great Britain.

“After university, I wanted to do a year traveling somewhere, go somewhere new, somewhere that not many people had really been,” a desire that took him to Central Asia.

He stumbled upon the Games while preparing for his backpacking trip. “It just so happened to perfectly align with when I wanted to go traveling,” said Pollard. “We all previously had a little bit of tug of war experience at university, and so we got other friends that had done it at Cambridge, King’s College, Bristol, et cetera.”

Many of the spectators I spoke to seemed to find their way here in the same serendipitous fashion. And upon arrival, the vibe lives up to expectations. As Andrea, a French fan living in China, put it: “There’s no real country here. It is just a bunch of people who want to have a good time, eat shashlik, watch people do crazy stuff.”

The whole thing is an odd balance of meticulously organized, serious events and incredibly informal, half-baked competitions. Nothing starts on time, there is no published list of competitors. Transport to and from venues is a logistical nightmare, there is mud everywhere. And yet, everyone has a massive smile plastered on.

“I have friends from all these countries. It’s awesome reuniting with old friends from Iran. We know a bunch of those guys. They’re awesome,” said USA Kok Boru player and horseback wrestler Nick Willert. “The Russians play rough. They play really rough, and they go for the jugular, but it’s part of the game.”

Despite hosting countries from all sides of the religious, political and social spectrum—many of whom are in the midst of active conflict—these Games curate an energy of astounding positivity that even the Olympics has been unable to achieve.

“During the Opening Ceremony, I was really impressed by how Iran got a huge chant in the stadium. They were really cheered for, but America got the same cheer,” remarked Andrea. “People are just happy to be here. They don’t care about what Putin or Trump or whoever says. Who cares?”

Yet America could not resist adding a sprinkle of soft power fairy dust. In one corner of the village, the US Embassy in Bishkek erected a group of yurts to celebrate America’s 250^th anniversary. Complete with cardboard cut outs of George Washington, US history trivia and lacrosse sticks, the American yurt was a surprising hit for local tourists.

^{Strong Man. An athlete in the Strong Man competition hoists two 120 kilo weights before waddling down the track at Kyrchyn Gorge.}

If you find yourself itching to see oversized men drag a 1300-pound stuffed camel, your next opportunity is a bit more complicated: the 2028 Games are set to be held in Kazan, Russia, a not-so-gentle reminder that for all the feel-good talk of global unity and shared heritage, nomadic identity is still somewhat of a geopolitical chess piece.

Jennifer Korn is a global affairs and travel journalist.

“Archive Dive” is a periodic series by Welcome Magazine that sources scans from important physical cultural archives, alongside context on the people and traditions behind them. This installment documents MONDO 2000: cyberculture’s most influential magazine.

Before the web, and before anyone was online, there was MONDO 2000. The magazine was assembled by cyberpunks, ravers, and psychedelic enthusiasts, and covered then-futuristic topics such as virtual sex, smart drugs, the hacker underground, and life through a screen.

In other words, MONDO 2000 was describing a world that didn’t exist yet. It certainly exists now.

It’s important to understand that this wasn’t supposed to be a tech magazine. MONDO 2000 was born when High Frontiers, a psychedelic newsletter, and Reality Hackers, a magazine covering the computer underground, merged in 1989 into one cohesive publication run by its pseudonymous editor, R.U. Sirius.

The countercultural background of MONDO’s contributors informed the way they approached the emerging digital world. These weren’t engineers and future IT guys, and their understanding of technology was less technical than spiritual. They thought about computers the same way they thought about psychedelic drugs: as an alien consciousness.

Then WIRED magazine launched, appropriating some of MONDO’s futuristic formula minus the liabilities. Where advertisers struggled with MONDO’s drugs-and-sex view of the future, WIRED’s neutered tech optimism was perfectly business friendly. This hostile commercial environment was compounded by R.U. Sirius’ departure.

MONDO 2000 would shut down in 1998, but the internet it predicted arrived. The magazine’s mix of satire, utopianism, paranoia, and digital art seemed outlandish at the time of its publication, but was actually prophetic of how the internet feels now, especially as AI sentience emerges.

Below are a number of standout scans from issues published between 1993 and 1994. Viewer discretion is advised.

To see the other half of the scans, and access the rest of our Archive Dive series, become a paid subscriber to Welcome Magazine

Read more

New Releases:

• Yeat — COCOON

• Lucy Bedroque — c

• Dragnutz — Waster

• kimj — “o ya u got this”

• Miles Nelson — homesick

• 2hollis — “Sex”

It’s New York art month, so there’s a projected 509 openings exhibits (the highest number in the entire year).

• Thomas Ruff’s jpegs ny at David Zwirner in New York from September 10th–October 17th

• Valerio Adami’s Alice in the Land of Violence at David Nolan Gallery in New York from September 9th–October 24th

• Julia Wachtel’s Return to Content a/b at Klemm’s in Germany from September 10th–October 24th

• Anthony McCall’s Solid Light, 1973, 2020, 2026 at Sean Kelly in New York from September 11th–October 31st

• Melissa Joseph’s Casserole Culture at Charles Moffett in New York from September 9th–October 17th

• Jordan Wolfson’s mysterious show opening at Gagosian in New York on September 18th

• NYFW concluded this week, London Fashion Week just began

• Steven Kolb, president of the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America), assaulted two PETA protesters at a COS show and has since been placed on leave

• Wisdom Kaye received the Virgil Abloh Award at Harlem Fashion Row’s 19th annual awards show

• Dario Vitale was appointed as the new creative director of Emporio Armani

• Glenn Martens is stepping down as creative director of Diesel after a strong 6 years with the brand

• Display Easel, an aluminum pocket tool designed to exhibit zines, cards, and mini printed matter

• Masks of Crime book by Penny Vanhazelberg documenting different masks used by robbers captured from CTV footage

• Mowalola x Air Jordan 14 collection

• Rock jewelry by Shana Cave

• 4K HDR Tropical Beach Waves belt by Daniel Idle

• American Flag Leather Backpack by Goran Tosic

This Week’s Headlines

NYFW notes and standouts

• Standout collections: LII, Sandy Liang, Magda Butryum, PDF Channel, Tory Birch, Elena Velez, threeASFOUR, Anna Sui, Thom Browne, Parsons MFA graduates, 7 for All Mankind

• NYFW’s changing culture was a hot topic of discussion. In particular, people were critiquing the guest lists for shows and after parties, where the same rotating group of micro-celebrities are always invited at the expense of creatives actively contributing to the collections.

• Kai Canat presented the first collection under his eponymous brand, Vivet, to immensely divisive reactions from the public

• John Kiriakou (former CIA officer and whistleblower) walked NYFW for Elena Velez

“Crashout,” “looksmaxxing,” “meme coin,” and 1000+ other internet terms are now officially in the dictionary

1,400 new words and definitions were just added to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, including “cuffing season,” “crashout,” “looksmaxxing,” “meme coin,” “parasocial,” “copium,” “shapewear,” “Sunday scaries,” “uncanny valley,” and “vibe coding.” If you’re wondering how exactly Merriam-Webster decides what gets added, according to its site, “a word gets into a dictionary when it is used by many people who all agree that it means the same thing.” The full process can be found here.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is being recreated and streamed on Netflix

One of the most famous and controversial social experiments, the Stanford Prison Experiment, is being replicated once again, this time by Netflix. The sociological experiment will place 30 participants in a prison, randomly assigning half as guards and half as prisoners. It will examine the systems of power, ethics, and hierarchies that develop even when participants know their roles are fake, ultimately asking: does absolute power corrupt absolutely?

Adrian Bianco, founder and editor in chief of sabukaru Online passed away

Adrian Bianco passed away this week at the age of 40. He is best known as the founder of sabukaru, an independent Tokyo-based digital magazine exploring Japanese and international subcultures through anime and film, fashion, and music. As founder and editor-in-chief, he shaped sabukaru’s distinct editorial voice and built its network of international contributors, ranging from friends and readers-turned-writers, to small creatives and industry insiders.

There’s new information about the music of GTA VI

• GTA VI will have an original soundtrack with 34 original songs

• 6 initial singles dropped with collaborators including Yung Lean, Travis Scott, Pink Pantheress, and Fred Again

• Travis Scott’s song “RHYNO” teases Scott could have his own in-game strip club called “Jack of Hearts”

• Spotify teases potential integration with GTA radio

Kim Kardashian awarded €1 in damages for her 2016 Paris robbery

A Paris court awarded Kim Kardashian a symbolic €1 in civil damages (which is all that she requested) for her infamous 2016 armed robbery at the Hôtel de Pourtalès. The $6 million worth of jewelry stolen during the robbery was separately reimbursed to Kardashian through insurance payouts. In France, the perpetrators have become known as “les papys braqueurs,” or “Grandpa Robbers,” because six of them were over the age of 60.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Mooni New York — Artist Open Call (New York, NY)

Open call for New York-based artists to join Mooni’s gallery roster. Artists working in painting, photography, textile art, mixed media, and sculpture are invited to submit their portfolios and available works. Ideal candidate is a NYC-based artist with a body of work suited to the gallery’s program.

Apply

CHANEL — Store Planning Intern (Paris, France)

Internship supporting store construction, monitoring, and development projects across Europe and the Middle East. Responsibilities include producing AutoCAD plans, creating 3D models in SketchUp and Vray, developing graphic explorations, and preparing presentation materials in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and PowerPoint. Ideal candidate is an architecture student with a passion for architecture, strong organizational skills, proficiency in the relevant design software, and fluency in French and English.

Apply

True Religion — Photographer, PDP & Special Projects (El Segundo, CA)

Photography role producing high-volume product imagery for True Religion’s e-commerce, editorial, and social channels. Responsibilities include shooting PDP photography across men’s, women’s, denim, accessories, and footwear, contributing to editorial and social content, and maintaining studio equipment and technical infrastructure. Ideal candidate has strong product photography experience and the technical skills to manage a professional studio environment.

Apply

Unlock the full list of job opportunities—from New York and Los Angeles to Paris and London—plus complete access to the Welcome Magazine archive by becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to paid

Read more

Reporting and photos by Bryan Munguia

Embedded in our collective idea of cool, is the image (or, perhaps, idea) of Berlin. Smoking artists, all black outfits, Berghain. Its gritty reputation grew out of the fall of the Wall in 1989, when an abundance of space and cheap rent combined with a newfound freedom to create fertile ground for art and culture.

Today, to the outsider, that culture seems to remain exceptionally tolerant of the strange and unconventional. Some Berlin-based artists disagree, though. I have heard more than once that “Berlin is over” from artists bemoaning an increasingly exclusionary art scene and social hierarchies that undermine the free, collective spirit the city became known for.

To better understand the art of Berlin today, rather than the myth of its past, I traveled to this year’s edition of Berlin Art Week, where local galleries and institutions came together for a citywide program of more than 100 exhibitions and events.

Unlike most of the fairs that anchor the international art calendar, Berlin Art Week has no central exhibition hall. The city is the venue. It is the largest coordinated gathering of Berlin’s contemporary art ecosystem, and marks the beginning of the busy autumn art season after the industry’s annual summer lull.

When I arrived in Berlin, I found an urban landscape bursting at its seams. The city is cluttered with images. Advertising and graffiti compete for every available concrete surface. Over the course of the week, this overload takes on a social form. The city crawls with a broad spectrum of art-bound Berlin archetypes, from elites in black silhouettes to art school kids dressed as if they were heading to a techno set. Here, the smoking area tends to be more popular than the exhibition.

One of the main lessons I took from this art week is that in Berlin, absurd is hardly derogatory. From the artworks to the clothing, absurdity seems to capture something much larger in contemporary culture, where constant circulation brings conflicting information into proximity. Images collide, histories overlap, and things that shouldn’t necessarily belong together somehow do. Berlin’s dense arts ecosystem thrives in these eccentric combinations.

So, amid all the excess, here are the exhibitions and artworks that stood out from the overload.

JULIA WACHTEL, Return to Content a/b, KLEMM’S BERLIN

On the second floor of a Berlin business park, panoramic paintings stretch across the gallery walls to form a horizon of memes. It’s American artist Julia Wachtel’s social image landscape, where cartoons, celebrities, political figures, ads, and internet debris rest side by side like a horizontal doomscroll.

Long before social media, Wachtel was mining the terrain of memetic images. She emerged alongside New York’s Pictures Generation in the early ’80s, a group of artists that appropriated images of mass media to make sense of an increasingly digital and commercial culture. Back then, their images came from television and advertising; today, the internet is Wachtel’s primary source.

In her solo exhibition, Return to Content a/b, Wachtel intentionally interrupts her image’s circulation, plucking them from the stream and freezing them onto canvas through a combination of painting and screen printing.

Removed from their feeds, these remixed images begin to form strange new associations with whatever they share the canvas with.

In more recent works like grab A Fucking pencil (2026), the associations become absurd. Susan Sontag, the formidable American writer and culture critic, appears alongside a Shakespearean insult generator, a blurry Eminem meme, and an illustration of Edward Leer’s A Book of Nonsense. High intellectual culture occupies the same plane as internet sludge. Wachtel illustrates a collapsed cultural hierarchy, where Eminem and Susan Sontag are only ever a scroll apart.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, CROSSTOWN, BASTIAN

This suite of Robert Rauschenberg’s work (which is fittingly named because I had to spend almost an hour on the U-Bahn to get to it), feels distinctly Berlin.

Anchoring this pristine, white cube gallery is Crosstown (1997), a sprawling panorama where photographs of faces, buildings, signs, and everyday fragments drift across a hazy surface of transferred images and paint.

Outside the gallery, Berlin seems to adopt a similar rhythm. Perhaps that’s why the work feels so at home here in this city. Like Rauschenberg’s paintings, Berlin seems built through accumulation. Layers of posters peel into one another, advertisements fade beneath graffiti, and stickers conceal street signs. Surfaces collect images without ever fully erasing what came before, allowing unlikely fragments to coexist.

This sort of collision of materials and symbols is fundamental to Rauschenberg’s practice. Beginning with his “Combines” in the’ 50s—a series of works that combined painting and sculpture—he allowed the outside world to leak into his practice, pulling photographs, newspapers, clothes, and ordinary objects directly into his pieces. Nothing was too mundane or out of place to enter the picture. In doing so, Rauschenberg disrupted the boundaries of painting, allowing the mess of everyday life to become part of the image itself.

Today, the use of everyday materials in art is so common that it’s easy to overlook how groundbreaking Rauschenberg’s contributions were at the time.

TAÍNA H. CRUZ, Pixie Theatre, KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER

Located in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood is the Pixie Theatre of rising art star Taína H. Cruz. Cruz is a hot new name in the art market. Recent showings in major exhibitions such as The Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’S Greater New York have only stoked the excitement. Beyond the commercial hype, though, it’s her ability to locate something strangely ancient and uncanny within the contemporary that sets her apart.

Cruz’s paintings live inside their own fairy tales, on the threshold between our contemporary digital ecosystem and something much older, almost folkloric. Her references shapeshift from one painting to the next. In the first gallery, one painting shows a woman mid-Pilates workout, while another captures a cartoonish troll figure that seems to be caught mid-dance. Elsewhere, the canvas is entirely replaced by a screen, where a video work shows two 3-D animated characters gyrating through a pollen-infested New York somewhere between The Sims and Grand Theft Auto.

Energy seems to hold this strange universe together. Up close, Cruz’s brushwork creates a vibrating aura around her figures. Edges blur on bodies that seem caught between forming and coming undone, as if time itself were tugging at their edges.

In the second gallery, Cruz’s figures mutate further. On one canvas is a monstrous ballerina; on another a black-and-white face peers out. Opposite them, two paintings dissolve into an ambiguous blur. One shows a cavernous scene emerging from an amber glow, where figures appear to be engaged in some hallucinatory ritual.

Their obscure faces have the slippery quality of an AI-generated image, as if an image engine had been asked to remix art history with folklore and fiction. Cruz finds something ancient and uncanny lurking in the contemporary. Everything is available at once, from ancestral symbols to cartoons, old paintings to video games, and nothing stays where it came from. In Pixie Theatre, the past doesn’t fade, but mutates.

NIKA KUTATELADZE, Acacia Bloom, Galerie Molitor

Mutant bodies were also a focus in Georgian artist Nika Kutateladze’s solo exhibition, Acacia Bloom. Inside an industrial gallery, concrete walls host small paintings of a man’s face caught in a kind of transmutation. His eyes seem to drift as flesh muddles into earthy color, leaving his face suspended somewhere between portrait and apparition.

In another work, the man now seems to morph into a chimerical jackal. As you descend into the basement, wooden pikes join the paintings.

Kutateladze leans into his architecture background to build an environment that models the disappearing Georgian village that inspired this exhibition. There, locally grown acacia trees are used as fences, creating a peculiar loop of cultivation and enclosure as its mountainside slips away. The artist spent five years alongside the few men who remain in this eroding terrain, often painting their portraits.

In the remodeled basement, makeshift fences of acacia wood divide the space like remnants of a rural dwelling. Portraits of its inhabitants hang on temporary walls, where the painted men become increasingly inseparable from the landscape around them.

MAURIZIO CATTELAN, Night, NEUE NATIONALGALERIE

Serving as an anchor for Art Week is Maurizio Cattelan’s first major exhibition in Germany, NIGHT, at the Neue Nationalgalerie.

If you don’t know the name of this Italian artist, you most likely know one of his most famous works, Comedian (2019), the banana duct-taped to a wall that became an instant cultural phenomenon. Ridiculed, memed, and eventually sold at auction for $6.2 million, it became one of those rare contemporary artworks recognizable beyond the art world’s insular bubble.

Despite the lack of bananas here at Neue Nationalgalerie, Cattelan’s popularity remains evident. On opening night, I was greeted with a three-hour queue to enter the museum. Nearby, a local vendor capitalized on the hype.

Once inside, hyperreal sculptures flood the first floor of Mies van der Rohe’s glass building. Kneeling in the center of the gallery is a small, childlike figure with his back to the entrance, seemingly in prayer before another body suspended face-down over a bed. Walking around to the front of the innocent figure, I was surprised to discover Adolf Hitler. The trick is almost stupidly simple, yet somehow effective. Innocence from one angle is monstrous from the next.

Encountering Hitler in Berlin gives the gag a weight. Cattelan seems most at home in this uneasy space, drawing you in through humor before leaving you to negotiate its darker implications.

Elsewhere, a dead horse hangs from the ceiling, made strangely devotional against the backdrop of the museum’s cool marble. In the rafters, uncanny pigeons have invaded the building. The images register immediately, before you learn anything about the artist or the intellectual critiques associated with them.

This immediacy may be Cattelan’s true skill. He understands culture through its spectacular nature, where an image lands before its meaning. His sculptures exploit that instinct, using visual provocation as an entry point into something more difficult. Cattelan’s images are simple enough to circulate widely, yet strange enough to linger in your mind.

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, seeing sound, hearing time, HAMBURGER BAHNHOF

Inside Hamburger Bahnhof, and past another terrifyingly long queue, Berlin’s noise finally seems to dissolve. Japanese composer and electronic music pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s seeing sound, hearing time unfolds across the museum’s cavernous suite of exhibition halls, which he transformed into a series of sound-and-image environments.

In one room, a piano affected by the 2011 Japanese earthquake mechanically plays a haunting score generated from seismological data. Next door, an expansive screen shows landscapes sliding in and out of existence. Scenes of nature emerge through spectral bands of light before being pulled apart again, as if the world were caught somewhere between rendering and disappearing.

Sakamoto’s melodic environments feel like a fitting closure to Art Week. Rather than offering an overloaded image, Sakamoto leaves you in the dark, simply listening. For a moment, Berlin is made quiet.

• Nine Vicious — SEDITION

• Pretty Sick — Anarchy

• Glasear + Eurohead — “heal”

• Alex G — Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Original Motion Picture Score)

• Elias Rønnenfelt — “LEGION ÆR”

• fakemink — “Bye Bye”

• Tom Sachs’ Chanel-inspired exhibit, 31 Rue Cambon at Tom Sachs Studio in New York through October 11th

• Justine Kurland announces a mini retrospective at OSMOS in New York, opening September 18th

• David Lynch’s photography exhibit, David Lynch: LA, at Pace Gallery in LA, opening September 19th

• Snoop in Style NYC, an exhibit featuring a collection of 1/1 Snoopy and Woodstock plush dolls designed by various fashion designers

• Vienna State Opera’s annual new stage curtain, designed by Herbert Brandl, will be unveiled on September 9th

• NYFW kicked off this week with early previews from Ralph Lauren, Coach, Eckhaus Latta

• Human Made acquires Undercover, reuniting Nigo and Jun Takahashi

• Dior and A24 announce a two year partnership

• Anthony Vaccarello is rumored to be leaving Saint Laurent, with Chemena Kamala rumored to step up

• Kris Van Assche relaunches after a 10 year hiatus

• Alexandr Digenova dropped his sixth collection today

• Snap Jackets by Georgia Lavelle-Martin and Mikaela Kautzky

• Ye and Aus Taylor’s zine documenting Ye’s 2026 World Tour

• Tommy Jack Oddo Verdier’s Ugg-inspired boots

• Silicone gun belts by Rohan Mirza

This Week’s Headlines

NYC artist Lucien Smith passed away

Multidisciplinary downtown New York artist Lucien Smith passed away this week at the age of 37. Smith rose to prominence in the early 2010s, and had far-reaching influence across painting, food, fashion, and film. His contributions number more than could be condensed into this blurb, but his influence on downtown New York and its artists will be felt for generations to come.

We’re getting a new Twin Peaks video game

In a massive leak on Steam this week, the achievements for over 80 games were revealed. Some of these games were unreleased. The most interesting spoiler was for a new Twin Peaks game. A producer of the original series and one of Lynch’s closest aids, Sabrina Sutherland, confirmed the game’s existence.

NYFW is underway

NYC Fashion Week kicked off this week in the midst of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, with brands presenting their Women’s Ready-to-Wear Spring collections across the city.

This week saw notable shows from Coach, Diane von Furstenberg, Calvin Klein, Eckhaus Latta, Tommy Hilfiger, Bad Binch TongTong, Tory Burch, and Ralph Lauren. Off-White and Alexander Wang will present their collections, while Thom Browne is set to close out the week.

Another major art world heist: thieves stole 4 Renoir paintings (but dropped 2 running away)

This week, four Renoir paintings were stolen by thieves from the Renoir Museum in southern France. Two of the paintings were later abandoned, but the two that the thieves managed to escape with are estimated to be worth $10.5 million. Interestingly, stolen works of art like these can be extremely difficult to resell for their full market value, as their provenance and theft records make them highly recognizable and virtually impossible to move through legitimate channels.

4 Silicon Valley blockbuster movies are in the works

2026 is shaping up to be the year of big tech movies in Hollywood. This week multiple major trailers were released. Here’s where things stand:

• Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s secret three-year A24 documentary You Can See Everything about Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, stole the spotlight at Telluride.

• Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial is about Sam Altman’s removal and reappointment at OpenAI.

• There’s also a four-hour Elon Musk documentary, Musk, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and has already been publicly critiqued by Musk himself.

• Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, a companion to 2010’s The Social Network, will premier October 9th.

Highlights from Apple’s latest event

• Apple Watch can now rewind up to 15 seconds of nearby conversations, letting users catch what was just said.

• Apple’s iPhone Duo is a $2,000 foldable iPhone that folds open into a mini iPad-like device, making it Apple’s first foldable iPhone and its most expensive phone ever.

• AirPods can translate languages live in real-time

• One of Apple’s new ads featured ear’s “Threads”

• The event marked John Ternus’s first major keynote since taking over as Apple CEO

Hideo Kojima is taking his new game to Xbox, and expanding into film and television

After more than a decade of partnership with PlayStation, Hideo Kojima is ending his relationship with Sony and joining forces with Xbox. The decision was reportedly spurred by PlayStation’s cancellation of Kojima’s long-awaited action-espionage game, Physint. Xbox will release Physint, as well as Kojima’s other highly anticipated horror game, O.D., starring Hunter Schafer. The partnership will also expand beyond video games, with Kojima and Xbox collaborating on film and television projects.-

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Roc Nation — Distribution A&R Intern (New York, NY)

Paid music industry internship supporting artist research, scouting, and release planning from Roc Nation’s New York office. Responsibilities include researching artists and songs, monitoring charts, preparing A&R reports, tracking emerging artists, and supporting day-to-day artist relations. Ideal candidate is a current student or recent graduate with strong organizational skills, a passion for independent music, and an interest in A&R.

Apply

Dark Matter — Fall 2026 Intern (New York, NY / Los Angeles, CA)

Music PR internship supporting artist research, media relations, and communications for Dark Matter. Responsibilities include A&R and artist research, media research, copywriting, press reporting, EPK updates, and client setup. Ideal candidate is studying or recently graduated from a PR, communications, journalism, marketing, or English program and has strong media literacy and knowledge of emerging music.

Apply

SoundCloud — Artist & Label Relations Manager (Berlin, Germany)

Music industry role representing SoundCloud across the European music ecosystem and helping shape its electronic music strategy. Responsibilities include building relationships with artists, managers, labels, and distributors, supporting release strategies, hosting artist performances, and collaborating across marketing, product, and analytics teams. Ideal candidate has one to two years of experience in artist relations, A&R, or partnerships and a strong understanding of European electronic music.

Apply

Unlock the full list of job opportunities—from New York and Los Angeles to Paris and London—plus complete access to the Welcome Magazine archive by becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to paid

Read more

Written by lattice9.net

9/11 occupies a one-of-one place in the American consciousness. It was the single deadliest attack on US soil ever, and the catalyst for a forever war whose consequences the world continues to deal with. It is an enduring source of trauma, and a lasting aggravator of race relations. It changed flying forever.

But it has also become the punchline of endless internet memes, and a way to signal personal irreverence and political affiliation. In art and fashion, it is a cultural symbol and a provocative aesthetic. In fact, to a younger generation with no real memory of the day, 9/11 is mostly these things, and only on some secondary level an actual event that happened in the world.

There are few cultural symbols or social concepts as complex or dynamic as 9/11. On its 25th anniversary, we’re examining the evolving cultural significance of the tragedy, and tracing the changing social attitude towards its contested legacy.

CW: this article contains description and imagery of the 9/11 attacks. Reader discretion is advised.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, major media declared irony dead. Comedians asked permission to tell jokes, and radio stations were told exactly what they could and could not play.

Twenty five years later, the Twin Towers are an evergreen meme format, appearing on tattoo flash sheets and edgy garments.

So, how did we go from this:

To this?:

The answer is in three distinct stages.

• 9/11 as Tragedy (2001 - 2004)

  • Proximity to (and vivid memory of) the attacks created a cultural attitude toward 9/11 that was sincere, reverent, and largely uncritical

• 9/11 as Conspiracy / Critique of Government (2005 - 2014)

  • Growing distance from the attacks, and continued geopolitical and social fallout from the government’s response to them, shifted cultural attitude toward critical humor and conspiracy

• 9/11 as Meme (2015 - present)

  • A rising generation without direct memory of 9/11 reappropriate the tragedy in discourse as a provocative symbol

9/11 as Tragedy (2001-2004)

In the aftermath of the attacks, flags lined every stoop in Brooklyn. Walmart sold 300,000 that week. Bush stood at O’hare airport and told the country to “get down to Disney World” in an attempt to restore confidence in flying, and prop up the economy.

Vanity Fair and TIME said it was the “the end of the age of irony.” Saturday Night Live came back with Rudy Giuliani doing the opening monologue, and Lorne Michaels asked “can we be funny?” The Onion suspended publication for two weeks, before returning with some earnest soft humor (punctuated with a graphic description of the attackers burning in hell).

Clear Channel, which regulates radio programming, sent stations a list of 160 songs it would “rather they not play.” Songs like “Free Fallin,’” “Walk Like an Egyptian,” and Rage Against the Machine’s entire discography. The twin towers were cut out of movies that hadn’t even came out yet. Airports changed forever with the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Eric Fischl’s Tumbling Woman (2001), a bronze statue of a falling figure, sparked immediate controversy and was ultimately removed from the Rockefeller Center where it had been installed to commemorate the attacks in 2002.

Sharon Paz’ Falling (2002) was pulled from the Jamaica Arts Exhibition following controversy and audience outcries.

It’s important to understand that, psychologically, America was primed for an end-of-days catastrophe. Y2K spent two years preparing the country and world for a technological apocalypse that never came. In many ways, 9/11 even looked like the disaster movies that Y2K inspired. (see Independence Day and Armageddon.)

In sum, the first chapter of 9/11 as a cultural symbol and social concept was defined by earnestness, a collective agreement about its tragic nature, and a sense that the world might be on the precipice of a darker age. Crucially, everyone participating in its discourse actually remembered it.

9/11 as Conspiracy / Critique of Government (2004-2014)

As the immediacy of 9/11 faded, it became easier to engage with it in a way that wasn’t strictly sincere. It also became easier to question the official narrative of the events. Beginning in 2004, and continuing into the mid 2010s, conspiracy theories and critical humor became increasingly visible in 9/11 discourse.

An important distinction: most of the 9/11 jokes in this era were critical of the governmental response to 9/11, not the tragedy itself. They also still directly referenced the actual event of 9/11.

Conspiracy movies began going viral in 2005, hosting taglines like:

“Bush did 9/11”

“Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” (a dog whistle for another inside-job theory)

“Dick Cheney made money off the Iraq war”

This attitude had a lot to do with the fact that the public was seeing the consequences of the rash military action prompted by the attacks. There was also an increasing acknowledgment that the rampant islamophobia 9/11 set off was textbook xenophobic panic, rather than a justified interest of national security.

(To be sure, general islamophobia continued to be rampant in this era, perhaps best exemplified in the public discourse by the 2010 controversy around an Islamic Community center two blocks from Ground Zero.)

Symbols like the Mission Accomplished banner George Bush displayed six weeks after the invasion of Iraq became a shorthand punchline for the whole war, which would go on for almost another decade.

This 2004 - 2014 era was also marked by the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. While this death temporarily restored public fervor around 9/11 (crowds went to ground zero chanting “USA”), it ultimately furthered the public’s psychological distance from the event.

Toward the end of this period, we begin to see 9/11-related discourse decouple from the event. The towers became a reaction image to unrelated content. “Never forget” became a caption you could use for anything on 4chan or Tumblr, from a discontinued TV show, to a viral pet’s passing.

‘Never forget’ is an ironically apt tagline for an era that can be understood on the whole as a gradual collective forgetting of the horror of 9/11, and a persistent distancing from the reality of its occurrence.

9/11 as Meme (2015-present)

In the mid 2010s, this new humorous and aesthetic leveraging of 9/11 came to dominate discourse. 9/11 jokes were no longer motivated by a critique of government policy. Usually, the had next to nothing to do with the actual event at all.

Pedaled online by young people who had no vivid memories of the attacks, this new era of 9/11 as symbol and concept was formed on social media. In spring 2015, “Bush did 9/11” took over Vine. (Results of this virality included students yelling the phrase in class, and 9/11 themed prom-posal posters.)

These terms were fully detached from the argument they seemed to make, and became catchphrases for edgy teenagers, just one meme among many, with no connection to conspiracy theories and truthers.

Where in the 2004-2014 era 9/11 humor was used to critique the governmental and social response to the attack, now the zone of humor has shifted. In its edgiest formulations, the purpose of a 9/11 joke is to make fun of the tragedy itself. More commonly, they have literally nothing to do it.

This has allowed 9/11 to be incorporated into art and fashion as a symbol in a way that was impossible before.

Fashion brand Enchanted Armour’s 9/11 denim puts a print of the explosion across both legs, one tower each. $150 retail, and they’ve resold at over $1,000. The backlash came and went, but the pants were laughed with, not at:

These are only a few examples. Anyone who has been on the internet in the last decade will no doubt be familiar with many more.

Of course, these eras bleed into one another. They also do not accurately represent the attitudes of individual people. The way that most individuals think of 9/11 is more static. (Today, for instance, millions will observe the anniversary with the solemn reverence that dominated the 9/11 as Tragedy era.)

What we are really witnessing in the evolving character of 9/11 as a cultural symbol is the successive dominance of different groups of people in the discourse.

In the first era, the discourse was dominated by those who witnessed the tragedy firsthand, or saw it live on television, and knew 9/11 as a terrible catastrophe.

The discourse of the second era was define by those fixated on what happened in response to 9/11, and knew the event as the catalyst for a misguided war and an intensification of racism.

In today’s era, the discourse belongs to those who were first exposed to 9/11 as a piece of internet humor. They know 9/11, first and foremost, as a meme.

The imagery of 9/11 unites these three eras and groups of people. But what that imagery references is entirely different.

The archival efforts of certain internet historians, such as the incredible X account 2001 Live, might do something to reintroduce younger generations to the pure horror and tragedy of the attacks. But it seems that we are continuing to trend away from the visceral memory, becoming every more distanced.

With another chapter of deluded military action in the Middle East upon us, however, the next 25 years of 9/11’s evolution as a cultural symbol could surprise us. Like so many cultural symbols, what it means will be determined on the internet.

So when one of my friends mentioned he was doing a true commercial for adidas, I asked if I could check it out. I wanted to see what it felt like to be on set of a major commercial production.

The commercial was for an exclusive Adistar Control 5 collaboration with Larry June. The Control 5 was originally a technical running shoe from the 2000s, and has been revived as a sort of Y2K-ish lifestyle sneaker. Larry calls his collaborative colorway the ‘watermelon smoothie.’

The commercial was being shot at a massive house in Beverly Hills. Maybe the nicest house I’ve ever been in.

There were a ton of people on set, probably more than 40. Different rooms were staged for different purposes: some were for shooting, some for photo, there was a director’s room with a bunch of chairs and monitors, a wardrobe room (there were more outfits than I could count even though I only ever saw Larry in like two), and a dining room with professional catering.

We mostly saw them working on three shots: Larry opening the fridge; Larry smashing a watermelon with a hammer; and Larry drilling into the top of a milk carton.

There was a huge team behind the camera coordinating each shot. There were people in the director’s room watching each shot and giving feedback. They took a bunch of takes for each one.

The shoot was still going when we left like five hours later.

It was impressive to see the scale and care of the production. I’ve been on commercial shoots for brands that feel like a content factor. This felt more like a movie set.

It’s a dying art, making commercials like this. But it still creates a very professional product. Here’s how the commercial came out:

• Bassvictim — “jagódki (blueberries)”

• Fine — “Everything in the shade”

• Ms* Gloom + Quiet Light — “Hi Society”

• Nettspend + Che — “KissAss (Pull Up Pls)”

• skaiwater — femme fatale

• Fakemink — “Love Of The Game 3 .”

• bleood + ApolloRed1 — “overwatch”

• Perubaby — i still float

• Frieze Seoul ran from September 2-5th

• Matt McCormick’s Long Distance Call at Ruttkowski 68 in New York from September 10 to October 17

• Do Ho Suh’s retrospective at MMCA Seoul in Korea through February 9th

• Raffi and Al’s Basket Bar at Night Gallery (in collaboration with Sexy Beast) in LA from September 1st to September 19th

• Not All Flowers Follow The Sun at R.A.R.O. Barcelona in Spain (no end date states)

• Gorillaz’s House of Kong at Agger Fish Building in Brooklyn, New York through September 28th

• John Galliano voluntarily stepped down from the Met Gala exhibition amid controversy and shared a letter addressing his decision on Instagram.

• Interesting FW campaigns: David Sims for Stone Island, Simone Rocha for adidas Originals, Moni Haworth for Jil Sander, Nan Goldin for Acne Studios, Juergen Teller for Givenchy

• Ib Kamara has stepped down as Off-White’s Creative Director after four years at the helm.

• The LVMH Prize winners for 2026 have been announced, spotlighting the next generation of fashion talent. Julie Kegels took home the top prize.

• Cummerbunds are emerging as a new street-style menswear trend, with recent runway collections from Celine and Valentino bringing the formal accessory back into the spotlight.

• Taryn Segal’s new photo book Snow in July, published in collaboration with Pomegranate Press

• Preorders for Tomagotchi Rings are open

• Kiko previews FW26 footwear, which appear to be inspired by Prada Cups

• Wrought iron white gold grills by @bitter.000000

• Ken Carson will be getting a Funko Pop as well as a Fortnite skin

This Week’s Headlines

John Galliano’s Met exhibit has been cancelled

Amid controversy over the Met’s decision to center John Galliano as this year’s Met Gala theme, Galliano announced on Instagram that he would voluntarily step down, acknowledging his antisemitic and racist comments in 2010. While many praised the decision, others questioned how long someone should remain unforgiven after years of apologies and efforts toward accountability, reigniting debates around cancel culture and redemption. With the 2027 Gala only months away, it remains unclear how the Met will secure a replacement theme on such short notice.

Aya Takano, a pioneer of the Superflat art movement, is working on an original anime

Aya Takano, the Japanese painter and former assistant to Takashi Murakami, may be getting her own anime project. The project was teased through an Instagram post showcasing new apparel featuring what appears to be artwork from the upcoming series. While concrete details remain scarce, Takano has indicated that environmental experts will be involved in the project, potentially hinting at a science-fiction-driven narrative with environmental themes.

Lucy Bedroque, kuru, and dollmaker soundtracked an independent RPG horror game

Paradise Chateau is a puzzle RPG horror game created by Chloe Music, which has a soundtrack with contributions from Lucy Bedroque, kuru, and dollmaker. The game which was reportedly made in just 5 weeeks, contains many references to the 1977 horror movie House. By completing the game, players can uncover the tracklist for Lucy’s upcoming project. You can play it for free on your browser.

We are literally talking less each year

A study from Perspectives on Psychological Science, which analyzed speaking patterns from more than 2,000 people, found that young people are speaking less and less with each passing year, showing an alarming 28% decline from 2005 to 2019. The study raises questions about the growing effects of phones, AI, and online communication on how we, as humans, fundamentally socialize.

George W. Bush just dropped a new series of 9/11 paintings

Former U.S. President George W. Bush has been painting for the past 14 years, reportedly taking up the hobby after reading Winston Churchill’s essay Painting as a Pastime. Now, he has created a series of 16 paintings titled “Remembering 9/11” to mark the 25th anniversary of the tragedy. The works are on view at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas through September 30.

Singapore is testing a 510kg pepperspraying robot to handle prison disturbances

The robot, named PROTECT (Prisons Robot To Eradicate Conflicts and Threats), is being tested at three Singapore prisons, primarily in exercise yards. It is equipped with AI-powered navigation, a 360-degree security camera, and verbal warnings to disperse. If a conflict escalates, the robot can deploy pepper spray before guards step in to intervene.

-

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Leave a comment

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Artse — Art Consultant (Remote)

Full-time remote art consultancy role working across hospitality, residential, and commercial projects. Responsibilities include art research, developing concepts, creating presentations, and carrying projects from initial brief through final design delivery. Ideal candidate has experience in art consultancy, curation, interior design, or a related creative field, with a strong eye and excellent research and presentation skills.
Apply

Dazed — Freelance Designer (London, UK)

Freelance editorial design role working with Dazed’s Art Director and editorial teams to develop layouts, visual formats, and the magazine’s evolving design approach. Responsibilities include graphic design, research, concept development, art direction support, production, and translating the magazine’s visual language across digital and social platforms. Ideal candidate has three or more years of editorial design experience, strong typography and Adobe Creative Cloud skills, and familiarity with editorial production workflows and basic animation.
Apply

Snoop Dog’s Ice Cream Brand Dr. Bombay — Official Ice Cream Taste Tester (Remote)

Remote taste-testing role for Snoop Dogg’s ice cream company, Dr. Bombay, offering $10,000 per month. The successful candidate will sample and provide feedback on ice cream products while working from anywhere in the world. No location restrictions are listed, making this a rare opportunity for ice cream lovers looking for a highly unusual remote role.

Apply

Unlock the full list of job opportunities—from New York and Los Angeles to Paris and London—plus complete access to the Welcome Magazine archive by becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to paid

Read more

The movement is defined primarily by one fact: the art looks like it was made by a child.

This is not derogatory. The art is childlike in the sense that it is colorful, raw, and anti-technique, but it still displays a compositional awareness and attention to detail and color balance that has produced some of our favorite pieces over the last year.

Many of its practitioners are excellent artists on a technical level, who are intentionally turning in this more whimsical direction. (The reasons for this are numerous, and we’ll get into them.)

Artists working in this style are multiplying rapidly, and the aesthetic has broken into several adjacent cultural spaces, such as underground rap, and major commercial campaigns.

Internally, we’ve been calling it the Elementary School Figurative style. In this piece, we’ll be defining the style, identifying our favorite practitioners, and examining the motivating forces behind its emergence.

[def] Elementary School Figurative: a widespread contemporary artistic movement that incorporates materials, colors, subject matter, and stylistic motifs reminiscent of an elementary school arts and crafts session.

Defined by:

• colorful palette

• colored pencil or pens/markers as the primary material (or the digital mimicking of these)

• paper as the primary surface

• hand-drawn figurative daydreamy subject matter that ranges from idyllic innocence to the twisted and sinister

• raw anti-technique style

There are countless contemporary artists working in this realm, but a non-exhaustive list of practitioners to give you a sense of what we’re talking about:

Lucy Levine

Loose Sleep

Fox111nko

Virus of Minora

Niptong

Lugas Elias

With important forebearers like Aya Takano, Teng Yung Han, and Aurel Schmidt.

Aya Takano

Teng Yung Han

Aurel Schmidt

Obviously, the work of the above artists is incredibly diverse. These artists have different backgrounds and practices, and many will not like being grouped together.

But it is undeniable that there is a throughline in materials, color, rawness, and straightforward affective perspective. Elementary School Figurative is not a coherent movement with a single philosophy, but a general aesthetic shift that emerges differently in different artists’ practices.

One of the reasons we’ve gravitated toward the term Elementary School Figurative is because this simultaneous breadth and unity is exactly what you might mind in an elementary school classroom.

Just as every class has a few artistic talents who can draw things that look kind of real, there are the Elementary School Figurative Realists.

Fox111nko

Sayo

Not realists in the conventional sense, these artists do at least devote some attention to figurative and objective accuracy, and often complete their compositions with backgrounds.

Then there are the kids who gravitate towards sketching cartoon characters, or figures of their own imagination; in ESF, these are the Illustrators.

Matthew Bonneau

Motka Ambu

Uou Cute

Their work is more simplistic and raw, sometimes feeling almost incomplete. Their forms are often caricaturistic, or abstracted from the real thing. Closer to a doodle, but of course with much greater sense of line and compositional awareness.

Then you’ve got the edgy misbehaviors and abstract thinkers, who draw chaotic scenes and scribbled compositions. This less figurative bunch are the ESF Expressionists.

Kinki Texas

Juanita Nieto

The artists in this approach abstraction, but don’t quite get there. Their compositions are more like hieroglyphs, arranged with a collage sensibility. Their forms vary widely, but they are united by the shared techniques of juxtaposition and layering.

These categories are a bit simplistic, but do stake out three distinct camps within Elementary School Figurative. They all, however, share an undeniable linkage in terms of materials, colors, subject matter, and stylistic sensibility.

The reference set of Elementary School Figurative includes other contemporary hand-drawn artistic modes (several of which ESF bleeds into), and historical predecessors in the world of fine art.

On the contemporary side, ESR is closely associated with illustration, graffiti, and tattoo artistic modes, both aesthetically and structurally.

Many ESF artists began as (or still are) commercial illustrators. Lucy Levine and Dagou are examples. Even those who are not are deeply informed by the artistic tradition in the world of illustration, including that of manga and other comics, oftentimes more than any fine art practice.

The tattoo connection is also very intense, as many of the artists on the forefront of this style are tattoo artists, and tattoos have been a key medium for its distribution.

A subset of ESF artists have emerged from, are actively involved in, or are inspired by graf scenes as well, including (a favorite of ours) Leif Jones.

But there are also echoes of fine art traditions among ESF practitioners. In particular: classical masters of engraving like Dürer and Rembrandt, certain neo-expressionists like Basquiat and Condo, superflat / superflat adjacent artists like Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, and contemporary painters like Robert Nava.

There are some miscellaneous references that bear commenting on. Toys like Blythe Dolls are undeniably a reference for some of the figures of ESF, as are certain comic book characters.

And any understanding of ESF would also be incomplete without acknowledging the extent to which DeviantArt has served as both incubator and reference bank for this growing form

Temporalizing this style is difficult, because it is hard to distinguish from the notebook-posting ongoing since Instagram’s debut, the forever-cutesy artists who have been drawing like this for a long time, and the fine art world covid-era increase in color pencil art (which was enough to make it one of the trends to watch in 2021). Not to mention the commercial lane, where there are illustrators who have made their careers on colored pencil work. (Nike employed it recently.)

All of the forgoing is acknowledged, and none of it is exactly what we’re talking about here. We’re focused on a class of mostly small-following digital-native artists and aspirants who have adopted this style (or innovated on it) more recently, and the new aesthetic gravity that their creations have in the algorithm.

In this specific area, there has been a marked increase in ESF, first visible in hindsight in early 2023, but really picking up steam last year. Many of the artists most closely associated with it now made the stylistic transition between ‘23 and ‘25.

This distinction’s validity is supported by the fact that ESF has recently permeated other pop culture spaces (see Jaeychino’s June album cover, or hunnigarden’s recent prominence in the underground rap space), and the resurgence of a similar sensibility of colorful innocence in other mediums, such as twee in music, and a generally cutesy turn in street style.

The final question to ask about something like this is why it emerges. We posted the question to Aurel Schmidt. Here was her answer:

It’s certainly the case that social media is central to the prominence of ESF. The stuff just photographs well; it has a pleasing first impression, its color pops on the feed, and its subject matter doesn’t lose as much as other styles to 2-D interactions.

But social media has been around for too long for it to be the only variable behind the present growth of ESF. The concurrent trends in other mediums (music, fashion, etc) also suggest a deeper drive.

In general, it is clear that the pendulum is swinging away from the cold monochrome of first the opium and then the indie sleaze cultural movements. Not just on an aesthetic level, but that of attitude as well. Culture has started to feel lighter. Many of our leading artists seem to be comfortable with a more childlike approach to their craft. Could it be that a self-serious age of irony driven by pessimism (beginning in or around 2016) is wilting? And that we’re going back to the meadow?

Of course, there is also the AI aspect. ESF is a style that foregrounds the human touch, something there is a particular drive for in today’s climate.

And then you would also be remiss not to mention the generational trend of prolonged adolescence, and a falling birth rate that means people are less likely to be re-exposed to the childish in their own immediate lives.

And an economy that might be making the purchase of expensive oils and canvas less accessible than a 12-set of Crayola and a notebook.

Etc.

What do you think?

Leave a comment

This is our seventh iteration of Monthly Discoveries, our recurring series where the Welcome team rounds up and shares what we discovered on the internet this past month.

Paid subscribers can revisit previous six editions here, here, here, here, here, and here.

August’s eclectic assortment includes a rare photograph, a highly customized firearm, a Minecraft experiment, incredible tattoos and short films, standout artworks, and more.

Happy discovering.

3-D Printed Miku animation by Sorao Sakimura

Sorao Sakimura is a Japanese artist whose devotion to anime informs his practice that synthesizes animation, live action, and 3DCGI. For the music video for Hatsune Miku and Saku’s track “Pure,” Sakumuru 3D printed Miku as a physical object, fabricating 332 distinct poses from 1,027 printed components, and then capturing the figure across urban settings in 4,352 stop-motion frames.

ear’s unconventional tour venues

ear are embarking on their U.S. tour this September, notably routing the tour through some of the country’s most unconventional venues. The itinerary includes a New York heliport where a man famously hijacked a helicopter in 1974, a converted armory, and a handful of churches and community art centers.

Sonic Note One by @dieslo999 and @xiaji2tsunagi2

This custom unconventional firearm is a collaboration between @dieslo999 and @xiaji2tsunagi2. Both are underground designers, with dieslo formerly focusing mostly on garments, and xiaji2 mostly focusing on physical objects. The product shoot for the gun was also great, with models styled as figurines on round bases holding the weapon.

Dolly Parton photo by Bryan Fuller

Bryan Fuller, creator of the television series Hannibal, shared this exceptional photograph of Dolly Parton performing at the Hollywood Bowl in 2016. A strange camera artifact caused Dolly’s silhouette to clip into pure white light, almost as though she were illuminated from within. Fuller described the accident as something that “perfectly captured her essence”.

Tattoos by Kim Daeo

Seoul based tattoo artist Kim Daeo conjures tattoos that blur the lines between common bruises and watercolor freeform art. His practice is defined by an avoidance of pre-planned palettes, instead favoring an intuitive process of mixing and layering colorful inks and water directly into the cartridge. This naturalistic approach produces spontaneous, blended creations.

T-shirts by Shunichi Iwata

Drawing from Utagawa Hiroshige’s famous ukiyo-e landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, Japanese artist Shunichi Iwata recreated all 55 woodblock prints using monotype printmaking on a collection of t-shirts. Ukiyo-e, which translates to “pictures of the floating world,” was a popular Japanese art form during the Edo period. Traditional ukiyo-e woodblock printing was an early method of mass-producing fine art and later had a major influence on European modern artists such as Monet and Van Gogh in the 19th century.

Stopmotion Train video by Aarica North

Artist Aarica North shared a frame-by-frame stop-motion video this month of a figurine pirouetting and dancing through the course of a long train journey. Filmed over 15 hours, the piece beautifully captures the passage of time. Its opening sequence was directly inspired by St. Petersburg dancer Vlada Chepkasowa, while the remainder was improvised intuitively. Pay close attention to the minute details, particularly the expressiveness conveyed through the figurine’s shifting hand positions.

Excoriation by Tseng Chien-Ying

Chien-Ying’s Excoriation uses ink, color, and mineral pigments on paper to render a visceral, highly figurative depiction of a pair of very anxious hands. Many commenters felt deeply seen by the work, which depicts excoriation disorder, a psychiatric condition characterized by repetitive skin picking that results in tissue damage and emotional distress.

Furry Guntube Content by @dawgshot_official

@dawgshot_official, or Cooper Harley, is a self proclaimed Furry GunTuber whose most common form of content is a lateral shot of him in a fur suit firing some exotic or souped-up firearm. The breadth of his arsenal is impressive, and he’s quite knowledgeable. One is also naturally interested in the seeming ideological incongruity of his two hobbies.

Flex Decks by Hurt Abdu

Hurt Abdu is a conceptual product designer, and a Monthly Discoveries favorite. Here, he continues his practice of transforming the disposable materials into objects of cultural fetish, this time with a series of Tech Deck-inspired BIC lighter cases equipped with functional wheels. They come in five iterations: Cat, Towlie, Bitch, Raf, and Gaara. On Instagram, he previewed versions referencing cultural cornerstones such as Supreme, YVL, Asspizza, Che, Fakemink, Mowola, and many others. Conveniently, wired earbuds will wrap around the wheels. Also check out his glock stress toys, which he dropped in June.

You’re halfway through our monthly discoveries. To access the rest of the list, as well as all of our past and future discoveries (and much more), become a paid subscriber to Welcome Magazine

Upgrade to paid

Read more

• Ken Carson — xperiment - caretunez

• Turnstile — NEVER ENOUGH:VERSIONS

• xaviersobased — “Struggle Gang”

• Chanel Beads — “teenage dream chanel beads remix”

• Tommy Fleece — Plus

• untitled (halo) — “aimee lou wood freestyle”

• Tezzus + diamond* — “Hood of Atlanta”

• underscores — “Unlimited Love + The Peace (Frost Children Remix)”

• Soldier’s Reveal Yourself, Softly at Market Gallery in New York, opening September 1

• Tickets dropped for Printed Matters’s 2026 NY Art Book Fair (featuring 300+ exhibitors from 41 countries) at MoMA PS1 in New York from September 24–27

• Deana Lawson’s Edge Control at Gagosian, featuring photographs and holograms, opening September 10 at 541 West 24th Street in New York

• Christian Marclay’s exhibition at White Cube Paris in Paris from September 9–October 10

• Gagosian at Frieze Seoul at COEX in Seoul from September 2–5, featuring paintings and sculptures by Damien Hirst

• Shigeo Otake’s Inside the White Cube: Agoraphilia at White Cube Hong Kong through August 29

• Interesting campaigns this week: Prada AW25, Gucci Primavera by Michael Chelbin, Celine by Michael Rider, Balenciaga AW26 by Pierpaolo Piccoli

• JW Anderson dropped a “Twisted Denim” collection featuring a twisted silhouette made in Japan from Japanese cotton

• Willy Chavarria collabs with UGG on a biker inspired footwear collection

• Brands are gearing up to prepare for NYFW early next month

Products

• Everything Is Important, Vol. 2, a field guide to NYC’s downtown art scene curated by Mike Brewer and produced by Travis Spinks and Noah Letcavage

• HELIOT EMIL + Alpinestar’s Ignite boots containing spark rods engineered to create sparks when they make contact with the road

• Home Invasion’s Jeffery lamp inspired by Young Thug’s album cover and Alessandro Trincone’s 2016 Japanese-style dress

• BERLIN POSTERS FIRKIN bag by @gorantosic_, made from found posters

• Custom Rick Owens Geobasket mules by @dietsodas

This Week’s Headlines

Iranian state TV aired a tutorial for assassinating Barron Trump

Iranian state television aired a Hitman-style video segment titled “Where and How Should We K*ll Barron Trump?” alleging that they have Trump’s 20-year-old son under tight surveillance, detailing his movements and personal life, and advertising a $10 million bounty for his assassination. The U.S. Secret Service confirmed that the claims are being investigated.

There’s a new underground rap super-collective

Lucy Bedroque, Slayr, Prettifun, and many more have come together to form La Familia. The collective unites a group of artists who have long socialized in a Discord group, and have a history of musical collaboration. La Familia was first teased during a PlaqueBoyMax stream earlier this year, and the official Instagram page debuted this week. Look through their following for a glimpse at the collective’s wider network, with 38+ affiliated artists, producers, and visual creators.

Highlights from the first look at GTA VI’s gameplay

The GTA VI extended look dropped yesterday, offering the first look at gameplay and the most concrete details yet about the game. Highlights include:

• Characters Lucia and Jason will physically change based on players’ habits

• NPCs are set to be more advanced and reactive than ever

• Players can travel together or separately as the two protagonists and build a relationship between them that will affect the story

• The map is reportedly twice the size of GTA V’s and three times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2’s

• There’s a more complex six-star wanted system and advanced police recognition

• Stealing cars will be a far more involved process, with techniques varying from vehicle to vehicle.

The robot Olympics were held in Beijing

The five-day World Humanoid Robot Games have just wrapped up, bringing together more than 2,000 humanoid robots to compete in Olympic-style events including running, soccer, tug of war, table tennis, combat, sparring, and long jump. Notably, three robots surpassed Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record of 9.58 seconds, with the top three finishing in 8.64, 8.86, and 9.39 seconds, respectively. The events took a massive toll on the robots, with several falling apart mid-event, and nearly all of them requiring extensive repairs afterward.

Catastrophic flash floods strike Nepal and Tibet

Triggered by a glacial collapse in the Himalayas, devastating flash flooding swept across the Nepal-Tibet border, leaving 579 people dead, and nearly 2,000 others unaccounted for. The initial collapse was large enough to read as a magnitude 5.3 earthquake, and caused water levels to rise up to 9 meters in 30 minutes. Rescue officials are now warning that secondary floods could be an issue, as temporary dams upstream, formed by the debris, could fail in the coming days.

New DJ-rating app is like Letterboxd for nightlife

A new app called “Seen Live” allows users to rate DJ sets and live shows in a Letterboxd or RateYourMusic-esque fashion. Reception is polarized, with many questioning the need to constantly algorithmize everything, particularly live music, while others have shrugged off the app as a useful tool for documenting their personal history. The release speaks to a broader cultural obsession with tracking, cataloguing, and rating everything we consume.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Leave a comment

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Loro Piana — Digital & E-Commerce Intern (New York, NY)

E-commerce internship supporting Loro Piana North America with a focus on digital marketing, paid media, and website analytics. Responsibilities include managing the e-commerce activation calendar, tracking product launches and marketing campaigns, briefing campaigns across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Pinterest, analyzing site performance, and developing competitive e-commerce reports. Ideal candidate has strong analytical and project management skills, knowledge of digital media and e-commerce, and an interest in luxury fashion and leather goods.
Apply

Canvas Magazine — Editorial Intern

Full-time editorial internship supporting Canvas Magazine’s editorial team for a three to six-month hybrid contract. Responsibilities include creating social content, pitching and writing articles, conducting interviews, assisting with daily editorial tasks, and attending events as a brand ambassador. Ideal candidate is a recent graduate or has a relevant degree in arts, media, or publishing, with strong writing and social media skills.
Apply

CELINE — Image Assistant Intern (Paris, France)

Six-month image internship supporting CELINE’s design and creation team beginning September 2026. Responsibilities include assisting with image-related projects and supporting the creative team across day-to-day activities. Ideal candidate is interested in fashion imagery, visual culture, and working within a luxury fashion house.
Apply

Unlock the full list of job opportunities—from New York and Los Angeles to Paris and London—plus complete access to the Welcome Magazine archive by becoming a paid subscriber.

Upgrade to paid

Read more