š§ Taste Notes 3.20.26, "Dinergoth" edition
Creative agency death, tech bros love taste, new Japanese calendars.
Can restaurants survive without selling alcohol? Can you be famous in architecture without knowing how to build stuff?? Can a soccer coach wear plaid??? Can visitors survive the new New Museum buildingās stairs???? Plus the most controversy-generating essay of the week, on the Tumblrification of American suburbia, and the most aesthetic new video game.
Things of the week
TikTok amateur architecture: DIY cabin-builders are amassing followers posting daily construction updates for their ramshackle structures. Social media might dictate the future of architecture, as with every other industry: āWhoeverās the most visible gets to get the most work.ā
Matthieu Blazyās debut Chanel collection saw buyers richer and poorer lining up for hours for $1,500 shoes. It might be the highlight of the recent carousel of designers switching brands.
New New Museum: After a two-year closure, the New Museum reopened with a new OMA-designed building expansion. In this fun conversation Hyperallergic editors complain that the stairs are too slippery. Jason Farago covered it in NYT: Itās a ānot-quite-finished new building.ā (Unsurprising since it was supposed to open last December.)
NA apocalypse: Only 54% of Americans drink now, which is bad for restaurantsā bottom lines.
Kyleās latest New Yorker column is on the wanton abuse of the word ātasteā by tech bros, who want to claim human creativity and decision-making in an era of AI.
Since 2019, ex-Apple designer Jony Iveās new firm LoveFrom has designed a Christieās rostrum, Moncler outerwear, a Balmuda lantern, and Ferrariās first EV interior. All of it is pretty cool tbh.
Glossy international magazine: Now Voyager is a new print magazine that promises six issues a year, big-name contributors, and the kind of global, culture-forward coverage that has been the province of Monocle. Are we due for a renaissance in foreign bureaux?? Browse the debut stories on its site.
The 2026 World Happiness Report ranks Finland happiest for the ninth year running. No English-speaking country made the top ten.
Creative agency death spiral: Madison Utendahl shut down her award-winning Brooklyn branding studio. Here she reflects on the vicious cycle of low-margin work, over-hiring, and hustling for new clients. Rare honest writing on the business of commercial culture.
Japanese calendar drop
by Nate Gallant
For those who missed the rush to buy Japanese-branded calendars/planners from the few shops that ship to the US these days, the āApril-startā line recently dropped on Jetpens, the most reliable and well-stocked online shop for Japanese pens and stationary. They have an amazingly detailed guide for which version might best fit wherever you fall on the planning spectrum: from hour-by-hour grids or an entirely blank day/week format. I recommend the Hobonichi Techo Weeks, personally, for the weekly-panorama view with plenty of room for notes on the side, and a high-enough grade paper to withstand most fountain pen ink.
Diner goth mania
by Kyle Chayka
Ohhh boy!! Online controversy. The most discourse-generating piece of the week by far was āAmerican Diner Gothic,ā an essay in the conservative journal The New Atlantis, by Robert Mariani, a conservative-ish writer who also happens to be the founder of an AI dating coach startup. As an amateur anthropologist Mariani observes the way previously niche digital cultures ā anime, Discord, Tumblr, extremely online identities āĀ have taken root in the American hinterland of non-coastal suburbs. Mariani ties it to economic exhaustion and the flattening force of corporate aesthetics. If you over look certain problematic elements (never put a breakup in your Americana travelogue essay), the writing is fun, lively, and stakes claims in a way that feels rare these days:
The story goes like this. The great stagnation desacralizes local America through the homogeneous efficiency-machine of national private equity, and everything flattens. Gen Z is disinherited by Boomer policy that culminates but never crests, rationing the good life in generational warfare. Regional accents and identities and cultures are vanishing. Liquid Internet flows into this void as a mass-vision event, the mythic power of fandom and content overflowing from and washing over millions of minds in placeless America, the new soul of a soulless world. Subcultures and nerd cultures disappear into simply culture, self-oblivious and technicolor and sincere in a way that postmodernism could never permit. Instead: a riot of myth and meaning in the fandom-noosphere that bootstraps itself from and then forgets the North American provinces.
Itās a provocation rather than an authoritative statement. The furor with which the essay has been met on social media is proof of its incendiary quality. The critic must also be a troll these days. I read it like I read Rem Koolhaasās architectural criticism ā The Generic City, say. Itās cartoonish polemic, and thatās the point. To address Marianiās argument: There have been nerds in suburbia forever, and young people hide in whatever subculture they can find and meaningfully participate in (I should know!). That might be ā80s goth or it might be Tumblr vaporwave Serial Experiments Lain-core. Whatās new here, as always, are the scale and speed at which niche subculture becomes universal reference point. And, I think, the sensory weirdness of the overall lifestyle, which I might compare to my description of āIRL brain rot.ā
Streaming anime - vape shop - Vtuber - Discord - hair dye - American suburbia is, if nothing else, an extremely powerful aesthetic, and one that will probably become even more dominant, in a quiet, pervasive way. After all, when economic mobility seems impossible and the hyper-wealthy ascend into a realm of Ozempic and Aman Resorts, delving deep into your own abject aesthetic is one of the few escape routes available to your psyche. Become as alienating to the ānormalā as possible.
ARC Raiders: Hyper-aesthetic gaming
by Emily Chang
As the world outside feels increasingly volatile, everyone seems to be opting in to a different one: ARC Raiders. Everything I have learned about this PS5 game is against my will āĀ and tempting me to join. Several friends āĀ VPs of Creative at large fashion houses, creative directors, and fashion photographers āĀ have all been getting happily lost in this charismatic and cinematic extraction shooter game set in a future lethal Earth. The game is as much a social experiment as it is a survival trial. Itās gorgeous. Itās social. Itās inventive. And apparently, itās notorious for taking over your life. Because itās heavily mic/sound-based, online interactions feel startingly IRL. You can even blast music through your āspeakerā in the game. The aesthetic pull is so strong that thereās even a Reddit dedicated to in-game photography, while a videographer has already made three short films within the game by recruiting and live-directing players as his cast. Even the downtime is curated: If you find instruments and play them with other people, the game syncs you all up together to create a musical ensemble.
(European) football menswear update
by Nate Gallant
Footballās most famous current coach, Manchester Cityās Pep Guardiola, has been long admired/teased by the British mediaās quasi-lad-o-sphere (and well beyond) for āavant-gardeā knitwear and designer cargo pants. Tuesday night, he showed up to a UEFA championās league second leg, in which Manchester City were staring down a 3-0 deficit from the first leg, in this green-gray, plaid-ish overshirt. His look was read on social media from irreverent to āgeography teacher,ā which I found interesting given that the apparently confusing novelty of his outerwearāslightly updated, slightly gorpier/knitty 90ās nostalgia-fitsāare fairly old now in runway terms. They do generate a lot of conversation, and not just from GB News, but heās inarguably late to the game in terms of wearing an over-shirt to tell people you could care less about what they think of you.
The winners of critical theory
by Nate Gallant
For the hardcore dialectical materialists out there, who have potentially heard quite a bit now about the new biography of Walter Benjamin, The Pearl Diver, hereās another recommendation: Gabriel Rockillās Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, out as of December 2025 from Monthly Review Press. The book has been received controversially by intellectual historians of the 20th-century, as it challenges fundamental beats in the narrative of the ānew leftā in Europe. Rockhill, a philosopher, academic, and contributor to several notable critical outlets in French and English, examines who stood to and did benefit, institutionally and financially, from the enthronement of a certain reading of Frankfurt School as ātheoryā and the subsequent, interrelated emergence of āFrench theoryā in the 1960s (this latter point is more explicitly elaborated elsewhere, too). If anything, I can very well imagine the polemic category he marshals in this book, āthe compatible left,ā getting swallowed and repurposed by social media moralizing voices sooner rather than later.