Vol 1, No. 14: The Trend Trap

Welcome to Soft Labor, the namesake publication of Soft Labor, a strategic consultancy for organizations, designers, and the culture industry led by Sarah Hromack-Chan. Soft Labor is a publication about creative labor—what it is, what it looks like, and how it has and will continue to change. Did someone forward you this publication? Subscribe, read our archives, or email us at info@softlabor.biz. 

Performance Improvement Plan

Performance Improvement Plan seeks to solve problems by answering questions about working in the creative industries. What’s vexing you? Talk to us: pip@softlabor.biz. All communications and sources will remain confidential and anonymous.

Dear Soft Labor,

I work as a strategist in a major interdisciplinary design agency that engages mostly with luxury brands. Identifying and analyzing consumer trends comprises a large part of my job. I find my work to be equally fascinating and exhausting.

I enjoy the research and the novelty, but I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information I encounter and the pressure to discern and track individual nodes in what feels like an endless sea of slop is overwhelming to me. I can barely keep up as culture moves at the speed of light and moreover, I can hardly surmise my own sensibilities anymore.

My question: From this vantage point, how do I define my own personal sense of taste?

From the trend mill,
Trapped

Dear Trapped,

Firstly, we encourage you to think critically about the outsized role trends play in the way you relate to your own self through your professional identity. In our opinion, those tasked with tracking trends as a job seem to feel pressured into devising what reads, to us, like watered down cultural theory as a means of establishing their work's value. This breathless analysis, splayed across LinkedIn, Substack, TikTok—you name it—almost always sounds like the commentator is a giddy undergraduate student encountering, say, the work of the Frankfurt School or Pierre Bourdieu for the first time. (Or rather, the student who skipped the reading but piped up loudly in the seminar anyway!) Real talk.

Trapped, you may produce this particular variety of word salad at work, but you can engage with a whole other form of language in how you discern culture in your private life and mind—because you do have both, after all. 

You must not only locate but recognize your own taste when you find it, Trapped, and in doing so we suggest that you intentionally reduce the amount of information you take in, even if temporarily. Rather than drinking from the firehose you’re forced to consume at work in order to "keep up" with "the culture," choose a really tight set of newsletters, magazines, websites, designers, galleries—whatever you’re most drawn to—and intently focus on them. Focus! Try on some ideas for size. What feels right in your mind or on your body? Finding your own pulse, rather than being on the pulse, is more important right now. Take your time.

Another thing, Trapped: You must be brave. As you find yourself in various ways, be prepared to hold different sets of priorities, ideas, and looks. Walk into the world with your head held high.

Be your own North Star. 

Yours,
Soft Labor

Search Results 

“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests.

🔗 Follow Soft Labor’s research channel on are.na. 

🔗 Thanks to those who wrote us positive affirmations following last week's launch of Dress Code as an independent feature! So fun. We were reminded of a truly intriguing project by the artist Tyler Rowland called "Artist's Uniform," a thirteen year-long live project (2002-2015) wherein Rowland embraced iterations of uniform dressing in different cities and settings. The project was shown variously including in the 2011 Mass MoCA show The Workers and featured in Dan Fox's essential 2016 book Pretentiousness: Why it Matters.

🔗 We've been listening to podcast Articles of Interest, a show about the social history of clothing that has been recently running a series on the subject of "gear," including uniforms. Truly good.

🔗 We're reading veteran illustrator Raymond Biesinger's 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off (An Informal Self-Defense Guide for Independent Creatives), published recently by Drawn and Quarterly. More on this one later.

🔗 Ever-shapeshifting Metalabel recently released a mini manifesto called "What the World Needs Now is Groupcore" that we're keeping an eye on both as a neologism and a concept. "Groupcore," according to Metalabel, is a noun defined as "software, tools, economics, spaces, and ideas that help creative people cooperate."

Progress Report

“Progress Report” updates readers on Soft Labor’s own work, as well as that of our collaborators and comrades.

▶️ In an absolute fugue state of travel-induced shopping mania, we recently purchased the iPhone Pocket while traveling in Hong Kong, an experience—and an IRL use case—that provided fodder for the design critique we published a few weeks later in Fast Company. We were glad to have the opportunity to write design criticism in the first person for a new audience—and to take on a very quirky accessory rendered by the studio of a late designer whose work we collect and hold very close to our hearts. Be on the lookout for more writing like this.

(Trapped, Miyake is some of what we're talking about when we talk about cultivating personal taste!)

▶️ Our comrades at Outland have published several new articles recently and moreover, held events at both Amant and the School of Visual Arts earlier in the month. Our next column is in the works. Subscribe to follow along!