News broke earlier this week that Tesla had laid off its entire 40-person marketing and growth content team, barely a year after starting it. Perhaps the biggest surprise for many was that Tesla even had a marketing and growth content team.  Ford spent $2.5 billion on global advertising in 2023, according to Statista. General Motors spent $3.6 billion. Meanwhile, Tesla has mostly limited its own marketing investment to price promotions and brand content across social. The brand dropped a new Model 3 ad this week that looks like a generative AI experiment with the prompt, “Make a generic c ..read more

Our homes, schools, and offices are made up of concrete, timber, metals, and textiles. But as we spend our days in these spaces, we rarely think about where the materials came from or the people who helped create them. With Every Fiber, a new exhibition that launches May 4, encourages people to consider the materials that make up the built world around us. And there’s plenty we should be caring about. The tragic reality is that there is a lot of forced and child labor that goes into making building materials. But the exhibition at Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut, makes the case that whe ..read more

Nearly a year after their last sold-out collaboration, Tyler “the Creator” Okonma and Converse are back with a new take on a classic sneaker. Okonma’s apparel brand, Golf le Fleur, is bringing his eclectic, vibrant style to four dialed-up versions of Chuck 70 low-tops.  The sneakers are available in new colorways of le Fleur’s signature digi camo print, a leopard-esque pattern rendered in chunky pixels. Fans can choose from neon pink and red, multicolored rainbow, white and blue, or subtle monochromatic green. The Fleur Camo Chucks dropped online this week for $120 a pair, and based on th ..read more

Featuring dramatic cuts in the facade or portions of floor plates sliced away—a new kind of architectural detail is reshaping the exterior of high-rise towers on a global scale. Distinctive gashes are splitting the surface of new buildings with a kind of surgical intent. [Photo: © Laurian Ghinitoiu/courtesy Bjarke Ingels Group] There’s The Axiom, a recently completed 49-story office tower in Shanghai designed by Buro OS. It appears from one side to be a conventional rectangular tower until about halfway up, where the facade cuts back sharply to create a brief two-story indentation. The space c ..read more

For more than a decade, the skinny jean reigned supreme. The skin-tight, legging-like style first emerged in the 1970s in glam rock bands, and by the 2010s, the jeans had hit the mainstream, with everyone from high schoolers to suburban moms wearing them. But since the pandemic, skinny jean’s popularity has been waning. Today, the only people wearing skinny jeans are toddlers and elder millennials. Every decade or so, our preference for jeans changes. This latest evolution of denim isn’t about the straight, or boot-cut, or bell-bottom jeans of the past. Instead, we’re getting a new and kookier ..read more

Ever since college, Brad Jobling struggled with his weight, fluctuating between a low of 155 pounds when he was in his 30s to as high as 220. He spent a decade tracking calories on WeightWatchers, but the pounds he dropped always crept back onto his 5-foot-5-inch frame. A little over a year ago, the 58-year-old Manhattan resident went on a new weight loss drug called Wegovy. He’s lost 30 pounds, and has started eating healthier food and exercising — the habits behind many commercial diet plans and decades of conventional wisdom on sustainable weight loss. Yet Jobling’s experience also has alte ..read more

In the K-pop capital of Seoul, a high-stakes battle is unfolding. Min Hee-jin, a household name in the world of Korean music, is a celebrated creative director behind some of the biggest groups from the past two decades. Her latest and arguably greatest creation is a girl group called NewJeans, which she launched in 2022 under the company Hybe—the same company behind BTS.  At Hybe, Min ran both the creative and business side of her own label called ADOR, or All Doors One Room, which generated $83 million in 2023 through NewJeans’ record sales and its brand ambassadorships with both mainst ..read more

Employees of the company tasked each year with rapidly personalizing jerseys for each first-round NFL draft pick as they are announced don’t need to travel very far for this year’s player selections in Detroit. Stahls’ headquarters in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, sits 17 miles from the stage where NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will inform players—and the world—that they have been selected by an NFL franchise. “The draft coming back to Detroit is extra special for us,” said Brent Kisha, the company’s vice president of strategic sales. The Stahls’ team has less than two minutes, from the moment ..read more

Two years ago, Jenny Nguyen launched a Kickstarter with modest hopes of raising just enough money to open a women’s sports bar in Portland, OR. But the first-of-its-kind establishment, the Sports Bra, has become so wildly popular that, this week, Reddit co-founder (and Angel City Football Club co-owner) Alexis Ohanian announced he’s backing a plan to expand the concept around the country—and possibly around the world. Sports Bra founder Jenny Nguyen [Photo: StarChefs] “I had this idea,” says Nguyen, a former college basketball player and professional chef. “I felt like it could work, but you n ..read more

Few aspects of architecture are as dramatic as the cantilever, a rigid structural element that extends horizontally, unsupported at one end, from a building. It’s the closest an edifice can come to flying. Arguably the world’s most famous cantilever belongs to Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater, whose room-size concrete balconies float mesmerizingly over a waterfall in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. “I want you to live with the waterfall, not just to look at it, but for it to become an integral part of your lives,” Wright told his clients, the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh. As technology ..read more