Dolly was unique in that hardly anyone has anything bad to say about her. The communists and DSA celebrated, and Ted Cruz did in his own way. The British monarchy did a stirring rendition of 9 to 5 and Irish nationalists saluted as well. Then again, what kind of a person would talk shit about someone who just died?

Dolly was a master at owning her narrative. It was an American story, even if she knew it wasn’t the only one. Famously born dirt poor in a one-room cabin, blessed with big talent, big hair and a bigger work ethic, she’s lionized for her kindness as much as her entertainment. She protected her big story from being co-opted by others, particularly politicians. When people made jokes about her déclassé accent and big boobs, she laughed along, outworked everyone and put up points. She was a Bucket. She didn’t apologize for who she was, and people respected that even if they disagreed. She built a theme park and named it after herself. She earned over $500 million and gave away much of it.

She had a lot of Dollyisms over the years. Americans love home-spun wisdom, especially from someone who made it. The American story is about striving, yes, but only as a retrospective from the position of success. One Dollyism is that Americans romanticize having been poor while treating being poor as shameful. Nobody begrudged Dolly for being rich because she earned it and somehow remained relatable. She wasn’t another American archetype: The rich guy born on third base who acts like he hit a triple.

The tiny rollneck story is an equally shared experience. It got a lot less love than Dolly, sadly. I am refraining from publicly sharing my opinion, but those interested can join my private Sociology of Business WhatsApp group (paid subscribers only, so you may need to visit this page first).

And now, to the main event, literally.

The first round of speakers for Tasteful is here. See the names are below, and I look forward to seeing you on October 15th at the A24’s Cherry Lane Theater in New York’s West Village. Get your ticket here.

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Jon Neidich, the CEO of Golden Age Hospitality (the Nines, Le Dive, Elvis, etc)

Nicolas Mouchel, the founder of the Michelin start restaurant Bridges

Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson, the founders of Dante Aperitivo

Marguerite Mariscal, the CEO of Momofuku

Joey Scalabrino, the founder of Apollo Bagels

Amy Odell, NYT Bestselling Author of “Gwyneth” and “Anna”

Willa Bennett, Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen

Gabe Whaley, the founder of MSCHF

Hillary Taymour, the founder and creative director of Collina Strada

Mike Eckhaus, co-founder and co-designer of Eckhaus Latta

Rachel Antonoff, the founder of Rachel Antonoff

Robert Rizzolo, the global President of Alexander Want

Elaine Chang, the President of Tibi

Halsey Anderson, the CMO of Veronica Beard

John Hutchinson, the CEO of Paul Stuart

Jay Tibbitts, Fashion Creator

Nolan Giles, Editor-in-Chief of The Curator and ex-Executive Editor of Monocle

Max Tcheyan, co-founder and CEO of Caper

Robert Rizzolo, the global President of Alexander Wang

Elaine Chang, the President of Tibi

Halsey Anderson, the CMO of Veronica Beard

John Hutchinson, the CEO of Paul Stuart

Patti Simpson, the Chief Administrative Officer of Union Square Hospitality Group

Laura Lendrum, ex-CEO Printemps

Sue Chan, the founder of Care of Chan

Max Meighen, the founder of Serviette Magazine

Ana Andjelic, Forbes Top 50 CMO, Doctor of Sociology and Author

More is to come next week, including the event website, with the program for the day. Make sure to secure your ticket. Cherry Lane Theater, which is the home of Off-Broadway, is an intimate setting, and tickets are selling fast.

x Ana

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Last May, Stone Island launched the latest edition of its Frieze uniform t-shirt series with Public Gallery. It featured an artwork by Reika Takebayashi, and the drop is the latest in its ongoing partnership with Frieze and the brand’s support of emerging artists and galleries.

Join us for one-day summit on cultural capital on October 15th at the A24’s Cherry Lane Theater. The summit is titled Tasteful because we focused on the food and fashion industries, and also because taste is one of the main forms of cultural capital.

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For Chinese New Year, the brand sent their Chinese VIPs digital cameras, beautifully packaged in traditional color red, to signify celebrations and good luck.

These are just some of the recent ways that Stone Island accumulates its cultural capital. At the past couple of recent Salone del Mobiles in Milan, the brand had been hosting lo-fi listening sessions. “Community as a form of research” is a well-received, ongoing project that showcases identity of Stone Island’s fans, from Liam Gallagher to Philipe Starck, all curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

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Founded in 1982 by Massimo Osti, the brand is built around a single fabric. Called Tela Stella, it was first adopted by a 1980’s Milan subculture called paninari, designer clothes obsessives, and then by English soccer fans.

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From these subcultural origins, Stone Island moved into mainstream, powered by Moncler’s 2020 acquisition for 1.15BN euros. From the POV of cultural capital and IP portfolios, Stone Island mastered three distinct loops:

Below the paywall is analysis of the recognition loop, community loop, and resale loop, along with specific examples

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Earlier this summer, and for the first time in two years, Burberry reported operating profit of 115 million pounds. Revenues were flat, but this is good news despite the share price drop (which was tied to the vague annual forecast). The operating profit growth marks Burberry’s recovery from the 3 million pounds losses from the previous year.

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Burberry strategically activated cultural market actors. More specifically, it orchestrated market makers, speculators, arbitrageurs, hedgers and regulators in such

Behind the paywall is the full analysis on how cultural market makers, speculators, arbitrageurs, hedgers and regulators connect brand actions with business.

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What does it look like when a brand successfully converts cultural capital into commercial value through an operating system?

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Join us for one-day summit on cultural capital on October 15th at the A24’s Cherry Lane Theater. The summit is titled Tasteful because we focused on the food and fashion industries, and also because taste is one of the main forms of cultural capital.

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Culture industries, like food and fashion, convert taste, knowledge, belonging, or status into numbers on the balance sheet. Cultural capital is one of the most valuable and sought-after assets in modern business … but very few understand how this capital is created or translated into long-term relevance or commercial results.

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You get a brand world.

But do not confuse a brand world with aesthetic brand universe. A brand world is not a mood board or a brand book. Not it is brand extensions with better copy.

I partnered with Pique Life because I became genuinely obsessed with their products, especially their Hydration Protocol. I got overexcited after trying it and in less than a month went through the whole thing. As someone who travels constantly, it was exactly the thing missing in my life — that and Isabel Marant Edrik suede booties. It’s also a sure guarantee of waking up fresh the next morning after a martini or two, and fresh is not the word I would have used often to describe myself after a night out.

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A brand world is a coherent fictional-but-real space (as Marrakech luxury knock-off merchants would say “original imitation”), with its own internal logic, rules, recurring characters and narratives, and a community of people who don’t just consume a brand’s core products but also everything else that a brand makes—merch, collabs, experiences, events, content.

Every brand world has a center of gravity that holds it together, and where the world begins determines the physics of the world a brand can build.

The four world types are:

Product worlds are built on iconic object IP, like the 501s, the Air Force 1, the Birkin, whose mythology expands with time and use. The object itself is the IP, and the world is what accumulates around it through history, community, and the secondary market activity. Iconic products are archetypes: Levi’s 501 has a globally known shape, texture, ritual of putting a pair on, heritage. Every extension (the selvedge editions, the vintage market, the cultural references from James Dean to Beyoncé) is

Behind the paywall are the types of brand worlds, along with the in-depth analysis of the four elements of world-building (narrative architecture, always-on creative production, and two more).

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Inc. magazine recently published an article on corporate merch, framed as fandom and community play. While some of the examples …

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Get your early bird ticket

This Thursday, July 23 at 12pm ET, I will hold the first of Classroom series, monthly talks free for annual paid subscribers of the Sociology of Business. The topic is “Culture is the New Balance Sheet” and I will talk about how to make and measure cultural capital.

Paid annual subscribers can register here. Not a paid annual subscriber? Become one and join us on July 23rd!

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The in-depth analysis is behind the paywall, including the key shifts in the new new brand marketing’s operating system, and ways to measure cultural impact and commercial gains of brand actions.

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Hi everybody,

I partnered with Sue Chan of Care of Chan and Max Meighen of Serviette Magazine on a new event this Fall. It’s called Tasteful, because we focused on the food and fashion industries, and…

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I am kicking off Classroom series, monthly talks free for annual paid subscribers of the Sociology of Business. This upcoming Thursday, July 23rd at 11am ET, the topic is “Culture is the New Balance Sheet” and I will talk about how to make and measure cultural capital.

Paid annual subscribers can register here. Not a paid annual subscriber? Become one and join us on July 23rd!

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Behind the paywall is the rest of this analysis, along with what to replace gimmicks with, plus examples <3

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I am kicking off Classroom series, monthly talks free for annual paid subscribers of the Sociology of Business. This upcoming Thursday, July 23rd at 11am ET, the topic is “Culture is the New Balance Sheet” and I will talk about how to make and measure cultural capital.

Paid annual subscribers can register here. Not a paid annual subscriber? Become one and join us on July 23rd!

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The Reign of the Creator

Behind the paywall are the visuals capturing the new creator ecosystem.

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Mention a cultural program to a CFO and they will immediately think of it as a cost center. To change their mind (and get their attention), reframe it as a portfolio of accumulating assets.

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Within these portfolios, there are three layers, each with the different time horizon and risk profile.

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The core position is long-range, low-turnover holding. Ralph Lauren’s preppy style or Hermès equestrian aesthetics belong here, as well as Burberry’s trench or check pattern. These are positions held for 60 years and 200 years, respectively. The association with

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Everyone has their favorite food. It’s just one of those things that can’t be explained to someone who doesn’t already get it.

This fact alone makes food a cultural industry. Add to it the rest: aest…

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“To ensure that transformative AI has a positive impact on humanity.”

This is Anthropic’s mission statement.

Anthropic’s imminent IPO is a brand story. Along with OpenAI and SpaceX, Anthropic IPO is one of the largest IPOs in history, with a public valuation of $1 trillion. It’s a brand story of cultural capital accumulated through Anthropic’s promise of protecting humanity from AI by building AI first. Businesses, governments and society trusted that promise.

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What happens next is when a brand promise fails and when a brand devalues its cultural capital (Hint: it’s already happened to luxury).

After 53 years, Knicks won. New York City on Saturday night was the place to be in. (It always is, but especially this weekend). I lived 25 years in the city and this was one of the moments, like the blackout in the early 2000s, or the rare special nights where everything is just as it is supposed to be, where you remember the magic of New York, the hold it has on the global imagination, and all the wonderful characters that live in it, like this bus driver with exceptional dancing skills. Give this man a stage.

Founded by former members of OpenAI in early 2021, Anthropic is privately held, public benefit corporation created to serve “humanity’s long-term well-being.” Traditional role of brands is to act as markers of trust (we buy, say, Colgate over Crest because we trust it more). Anthropic brand promised social benefits, not perils, from artificial intelligence, and asked us to trust it with it.

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As with every brand, this trust carries a premium. The best AI researchers join Anthropic because it isn’t a commercial enterprise. Governments and corporate clients license its models because Anthropic is antithesis of OpenAI. Anthropic asks for high regulatory scrutiny because it wants to protect us from AI. The rest of us, faced with something genuinely frightening like artificial intelligence, give Anthropic our trust that this intelligence wouldn’t destroy us.

Brand Anthropic never competed on product or on features, but on trust. Trust is one of the ways that cultural capital converts into commercial value. Trust is not only good PR—it also lowers the cost of distribution, recruitment, and regulation. It builds brand equity and creates a competitive advantage that has nothing to do with the product.

Anthropic benefits handsomely from its cultural capital, but AI is expensive business. In 2026, its estimated spend is approximately $19 billion on compute, model training, and operations. For the first time this year, the company is going to reach operating profit.

Anthropic is going public because it needs money.

Capital needs liquidity. Liquidity will unlock trillions in funding for Anthropic’s growth in computing power, infrastructure and deployment.

This is very similar to a luxury brands public listings. A luxury brand lists because it needs money. It tells itself that it lists because it wants to accelerate its mission. The shareholder pressure instead forces category extensions, licensing, discounts and partnerships that erode equity. (Burberry’s overexposure in mid-2000s and its slow rebuild following it is a case study of what happens when brand equity melts.)

When a public benefit corporation like Anthropic goes public, the same thing happens. Its promise doesn’t get wind in its sails. It breaks under the weight of quarterly expectations.

Pay to read the rest, it’s good!

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The most fascinating thing about “Backrooms” is not how big its opening weekend was, but that it hasn’t been bigger.

Popularity was baked into “Backrooms” long before the movie hit the screens.

Unlike most movies, “Backrooms” has vast, well-established and keen subcultural fandom. Fandom here is not people only, but also stories, aesthetics, vibes, mythology, language, memes, places, and characters. Fandom, given the opportunity to experience object of its fascination in a new format and in a novel interpretation, rarely passes it.

In my second book, Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture, I describe a lot of what ultimately underlined the success of “Backrooms” — the existing fandom, the clear and recognizable aesthetics, the urban mythology, the portfolio of decentralized cultural products.

“Backrooms” fandom goes back to 2019, when someone posted a grainy photo of a yellow office space with caption “approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in” in the murky waters of 4Chan.

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From there, the photo multiplied, as memes tend to do, across message boards, forums, subReddits, podcasts, Substacks, TikTok and YouTube, where the grainy photo became known as The Backrooms: creepy, drab, “liminal” empty spaces. Kane Parsons, then a high school student, serialized The Backrooms as the “found footage” homemade videos. His YouTube channel became ultra-popular, leading to producers calling, and to him making “Backrooms,” the movie.

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The movie is doing exceptionally well: during the opening weekend, it amassed $81.5M at the domestic box office, and over $118M worldwide. The numbers are exceptional compared to other box office openings. Compared to the sum of The Backrooms internet fandom, they are fine.

This is an important distinction. By the time “Backrooms” reached movie theaters, the context for its success was already set.

When it comes to success of cultural products, context is the only thing that matters.

When the context is right, almost anyone can create a hit. When it isn’t, almost no one can (see: Mandalorian). In sociology, there’s analogy of forest fires to describe this. A fire happens when there are dry woods, strong winds, dense shrubbery between the trees. Any spark can light a fire then. In society, hits are a matter of susceptible, interested and receptive subcultures:

Fan as a Creator. “Backrooms” is the work of fan fiction. Parsons is a fan obsessed with The Backrooms, turned video creator, turned movie director. At 20, he is one of the

As always, the best stuff is behind the paywall.

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Back in 2022, there were rumors that LVMH was going to buy AC Milan. Antoine Arnault quickly denied them and went on to found 22 Montaigne, an entertainment arm for the conglomerate — bec…

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“Art is either plagiarism or revolution,” said Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp had never met Lauren Sanchez.

Artmaxxing, adopted by Sanchez as well as Bertrand Arnault, is a lucrative corporate strategy. It refers to strategic transformation of fashion into objects of art, in order to de-emphasize their commercial nature.

Louis Vuitton Cruise at the Frick Collection and Dior Cruise at LACMA, both part of Arnault’s conglomerate LVMH, were held in traditionally non-commercial setting. The hope was that rarified symbolic authority of these museums might rub off. (By setting Gucci Cruise in the grimy Times Square, Demna clearly hoped for the opposite effect, calling spade a spade).

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Nicholas Ghesquierre partnered with Kith Haring foundation for the LV Cruise and Jonathan Anderson with Ed Ruscha for Dior Cruise; Ruscha’s famous slogans could be seen on a number of shirts on the runway. They will sell for many thousands of dollars, a mere bargain compared to the original works.

This year’s Met Museum’s The Costume Institute Gala exhibition is titled “Costume Art” because art x fashion are the zeitgeist. The exhibition’s main sponsors, the Sanchez-Bezos duo, are after the self-fulfilling prophecy: if someone is celebrated as a patron of arts, they must have taste. Just as artmaxxing gives a product the status of the work of art and enriches it with meaning, it also gives a person status and cultural authority.

At least, that’s the hope.

Artmaxxing ensures that fashion remains a contemporary and active element of

Behind the paywall is the analysis of why artmaxxing is a genius corporate strategy and a dangerous cultural strategy.

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“Original imitation” is a preferred way of Marrakech luxury knock-off merchants to describe their wares. There, one can find anything from Tiffany x Wilson basketball to a Millionaire Speedy to the Chanel 25. Most of it looks original; it is also unmistakably an imitation. The souks’ luxury knockoffs are derivatives.

A derivative is a financial instrument whose value is derived from an underlying asset.

Cultural derivatives have the same structure: cultural products, signals, rituals, and community behaviors whose value is derived from underlying cultural asset — a brand world, a subculture, a founding mythology, recognizable brand codes, an aesthetic sensibility.

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Before derivatives, there needs to be underlying assets with stable value. In cultural economy, these are:

Behind the paywall, you will find the types of underlying assets, types of derivatives (collaborations as options, merch as futures, etc), and why the cultural derivatives framework is more useful than traditional brand strategy templates.

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At Watches & Wonders in Geneva a couple of weeks ago, there was a pervasive feeling that people knew what they were paying for. The same cannot be said of luxury fashion. When brands raised prices across every product tier, making even entry-level items inaccessible, they lost more than aspirational consumers. Faced with a $5K sweater or a $1000 bucket hat, the wealthy consumers started doing the math, too. Once that happened, the irrational, aspirational, prestige dimension of luxury — its soft power that powers its pricing— got lost.

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Price hikes are a great example of the simultaneous destruction of both economic and cultural value. Not only luxury fashion got more expensive, generating billions of unsold goods, it also lost meaning and clout, forcing the industry to revise its price pyramid from both ends: more accessible staples at the base, genuine exclusivity at the top.

Bigger lesson here is that pricing strategy is not only a financial decision, but a cultural one.

Price tells consumers what category a brand belongs to, what kind of people buy it, and what kind of knowledge they signal by doing so. A $19 bread loaf is not irrational

Behind the paywall, the analysis expands into the information that pricing strategy communicates, how it builds brand equity and commercial scale, and why and how it matters for brand positioning and strategy.

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Rick Rubin gets inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this November. People quote him constantly — on creativity, on process, on instinct. But Rubin’s most quoted line is the one he gave Anderson Cooper: that he trusts his taste completely.

Taste is also all over Substack. Everyone has a theory about it.

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Also all over Substack: The Devil Wears Prada 2. The celebrity cameos. Vanessa Friedman. The original cast. Kara Swisher. The method red carpet dressing. The world tour. Dior. The popcorn purse. The massive marketing push. The brand activations across the globe.

Most importantly, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a clash between attention and taste played out in real time. A movie about the foremost taste-making industry in the world almost certainly measured its promotional campaign in impressions, reach, and views.

Impressions, reach, and views are not cultural relevance. They are evidence that people scrolled past you. This did not stop brands from reorganizing themselves

As always, the best stuff is behind the paywall <3

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