🟧 Taste Notes 9.25.25, NPC era edition

& the philosophy of Uniqlo

I wish this autumnal weather were cooler than 80 degrees and 98% humidity in DC! We’re firmly in the back-to-school moment and that means the curator crowd and the Think Bros are all busy trying to define what the discourse will be this fall. Feels like the vibes are AI / global chaos / realpolitik / everyone wants to make tv / seeking a safe back-to-the-land exit route. Scroll to the bottom for Emily Chang’s inside look at Uniqlo corporate sloganeering. I am ill, send content recommendations. — Kyle Chayka

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Aspirational shopkeeper life: I really enjoyed this interview in the great London newsletter Wooden City with two blokes who opened a cool, curated boutique called Perfect Lives selling basically whatever they can get their hands on: vinyl, rare books, art prints, seal furs. The writer Isaac Rangaswami also runs a perfect Instagram called Caffs not Cafes, on low-key London restaurants. Must-follow, IMO, especially if you already know what Vittles is.

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Good taste can be bad, too: The Washington Post’s fashion critic Rachel Tashjian nailed a certain kind of aspirationally tasteful millennial adult lifestyle hypebeast when she started off her tirade against New York Fashion Week with this paragraph:

Too many designers are making nice trousers and sort-of-interesting tops for upper-middle-class women on the go, who find meaning through owning a few vases special enough to be called “ceramics.” Too many designers are making Fortuny-inspired skirts and dresses, blazers just oversize enough to convey “mystery” rather than “Berghain regular,” and extravagant peasant dresses for women who pine after Elsa Peretti and think of American expat and progenitor of Cotswold cool Amanda Brooks as the cognoscenti’s Gwyneth Paltrow.

Ceramics!!! I feel owned. The markers of the aesthetically “interesting” have lately become so standardized as to be boring, too — if you like Peter Hujar, I don’t care. When niche signifiers become too mainstream, the race is on to find new ones.

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“🌻 are you high-agency or an NPC?” — “Omg, I’m scared,” as one friend responded to this Substack link. One of my fav forms of tech writing are dispatches straight from the source, the hive mind of the Bay Area. Once in a while, a participant in the whole tech scene just nails what’s going on right now, because they can observe it on the ground. That’s what former Substack employee Jasmine Sun does in this newsletter. Silicon Valley is in full-on gold rush mode again (see Kerry Howley’s deep report in NYmag), but the ideology is all structured on the dynamics of artificial intelligence, which are even less fun than those of, say, cryptocurrency. It’s a population of agentic hyper-optimizers, working at an inhuman pace in order to beat (and profit from) the tide of AI.

For Sun, being a “non-player character” means being irredeemably basic, even if you seem like you’re doing pretty well. The AI differentiator is attitude, not status (but, one might ask, all this achievement and disruption to what end?):

NPCs start every morning with Starbucks and the Spotify algorithm. They’ve worked the same Big Tech job for the last 7 years, collecting a 5% annual raise and spending it on a surf trip to Hawaii. The NPC always votes Democrat but doesn’t know why. Hobbies include Netflix and “trying new restaurants.” Sometimes, they scroll the app Threads.

The NPCs don’t know that AGI is coming. The NPCs will probably end up stuck in the permanent underclass. The NPCs go about their quiet lives, playing LinkedIn Games and watching Marvel movies, blissfully blind to the technological tsunami mounting behind them.

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Fun artsy stuff

• “a new 13 metre long table made from a 5000-year-old oak log discovered perfectly preserved in a peat bog in 2016.”

• “This novel is a work of criticism in which life is the subject.” — Legendary NYT book critic Dwight Garner takes on Patricia Lockwood’s new novel.

• Do men even write fiction? This messy critical essay in NYmag tries to define the millennial male novelist, finds the current crop lacking, and I would say fails to point to a coherent cause, style, or complaint. Reading this, you might think that men don’t write about anything other than manhood. (See also: Nate on “brodernism.”)

• “Arrest Warrant Says Buyer of ‘Nude Emperor’ Bronze Knew It Was Looted.” I hate when I get made an example of for buying ambiguously sourced, singular antiquities and hoarding them in my house.

• The largest private collection of Rembrandts is going to do a kind of IPO, so you can invest in Rembrandt Futures long-term. Sounds like there’s also a vague crypto scheme. But who gets to look at the paintings??

• “My edge was always gonna be little tweaks here and there, and then adding this luxury element to everything I do.” Read this interview with the menswear designer and founder Todd Snyder, who for my money makes menswear at the ideal intersection of cool and accessible.

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The enigma of Uniqlo

by Emily Chang

Lauren Collins recently published a sweeping profile for The New Yorker on Uniqlo’s steady rise to the top. I spent a little over four years at Uniqlo Global Creative Lab, where I was Associate Creative Director and recently left to start my own practice. It’s been gratifying to see someone finally cover the complexity of the brand in a way that goes beyond its deceptive simplicity and into the depths of what it is exactly that creates its elusive magic. Here’s a bit of the story:

I asked Conway about Uniqlo’s philosophy, and why a clothing company should aspire to improve human existence. Couldn’t it just make nice clothes? “I think, even internally, we’ve asked ourselves, What is it that’s different about us?” Conway replied. “LifeWear is the main difference.”

LifeWear is notoriously difficult to explain, but in the highest offices of the company, it’s a utility that every person has the right to access, akin to clean water or heat. Uniqlo makes clothes, and Westerners have often misread the brand as a “Japanese H&M”, but the Japanese DNA reframes everything with an ethic of respect for all people that underpins even the smallest decisions. Despite its scale and continuous growth in the midst of a turbulent economy and even more turbulent fashion retail industry, Uniqlo has an extreme and almost debilitating sense of humility. While known for its rigorous obsession with improving tiny details of the product and making high-quality, technical clothing accessible, its eight-figure donations to academic and arts institutions, scientific research, and nonprofit organizations are rarely publicized in a way that other brands of its size and stature would happily tout. This constant internal tension between understatement and conviction reminded me of a short piece of language we once developed to help express what “simple” really means at Uniqlo:

Simple is a coat that fits inside your purse.
Simple is everyone in the world having access to high-quality clothing.
It’s simple. If you’re cold, be warm. If you’re hot, be cool.
If you’re looking for the perfect T-shirt, you shouldn’t have to pay $100 for a brand’s singular vision of it.

Simple keeps its feet on the ground.
Simple breathes in the air. And wants to keep it clean.
Simple respects everybody.
Simple is never exclusive.

This ethos resurfaced in a campaign we created last fall that took the form of a question: “What Makes Life Better?” It gave a humble brand permission to actually talk about who they are through the question at the core of its philosophy. As Collins notes, answers ranged from the poetic (Waight Keller: “Inspiration.” Federer: “Kindness.”) to the technical (“electrolyte membranes” and “carbon-fibre solutions”).

This campaign was the question I imagined employees asking themselves every day as they went into work, whether they realized it or not, making a sweater 10 grams lighter, refusing to raise a price, or simply making something more beautiful. As the influential designer and Uniqlo collaborator Christophe Lemaire often says, “A beautiful color is no more expensive than a cheap color.”

So when Collins ends the article with an anecdote about how she asks the founder, Tadashi Yanai, for a concrete example of how Uniqlo makes life better, I found his response perfectly poetic. He pulls a laminated card from his jacket pocket that says, among other gnomic lines, “Uniqlo is how the future dresses. / Uniqlo is beauty in hyperpracticality.”

There was the question, and there was his answer, with no specifics, no numbers, and no corporate jargon. Just the purest expression of values. Simplicity isn’t so much the absence of complexity as it is the mastery of it — a lesson that continues to shape how I approach my work, and even how I think about what matters in life. Meanwhile, the rest of the fashion industry marches on its own way: Gwyneth Paltrow doubled down on making $725 sweaters with her brand, Gwyn, which debuted last week.

Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

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