Rich Trash Clientele
+ luxury is a simulation, long live the merch machine, new magazine launches and more
Hey, hi, hello! Welcome back to Fashion Tingz.
I’ve been taking more work meetings IRL recently, and it’s been good to get back out there into the big wide world and put names to faces in an offline capacity. Though I did venture to Soho House this week and it felt… lacking?
Anyways, such meetings have come about because of this very Substack. So thank you, dear readers, for tuning in each week to hear me wax lyrical about fashion, trends, culture, and anything else that springs to mind.
I’m figuring out how to work with brands and agencies, and how that shows up on Fashion Tingz. I want such collabs to feel like a natural extension of this space, not a targeted ad. If you have any good examples of this, let me know.
— J’Nae xoxo
IN THIS EDITION: Rich trash clientele aren’t as bad as you think. Bieberchella sets a new record for merch sale dominance. Tech bro fave Allbirds pivots to AI. W Magazine launches WYouth. Pedro Pascal is Chanel’s latest brand ambassador. Grace Ladoja is the first African woman to design a Nike shoe.
I saw this post on Notes from Viktoriia Vasileva a while back about rich trash clientele, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. So here’s a newsletter dedicated to this very topic.
The woman steps out of a blacked-out SUV in a cloud of hairspray and contradiction. Her sunglasses are the size of dessert plates. Her manicure? It could slice fruit. There’s a flash of monogram so aggressive it borders on being camouflage, a faux-fur coat drags on the pavement while she walks, and her heels are so sharp they feel weaponised. She looks expensive, from a distance. She looks chaotic. She looks like she tips in cash and argues loudly. She looks, in the language fashion pretends not to speak, like rich trash.
Luxury has long treated this archetype as a ghost at the banquet: present, powerful, but politely ignored. Rich trash conjures up some very specific mental imagery. Think: new money excess, logo worship, conspicuous consumption without the taste credentials of old-world restraint. It’s the leopard print McMansion fantasy, the diamond-encrusted cup holder, the reality-TV villainess who buys couture by the rack and wears it to brunch.
Brands have historically distanced themselves from this image, preferring to sell aspiration as quiet, curated, and coded. Wealth is supposed to whisper, after all. And then came Gucci under Demna. Demna’s Gucci doesn’t whisper, it dares you not to stare. The silhouettes? Inflated. The styling? Borderline abrasive. The glamour? Knowingly synthetic. There’s an embrace of bad taste so deliberate it circles back to being conceptual. It’s as if the brand has cracked open the idea of rich trash, spilt it across the runway, and said: let’s talk about this.
Fashion has always thrived on provocation, but the provocation only works if it hits a nerve. Leaning into a rich-trash aesthetic is designed to elicit a very specific response: discomfort wrapped in fascination. It forces the industry, and its audience, to confront its own snobbery. Who decides what tasteful wealth looks like? Why is maximalism coded as vulgar while minimalism is coded as refined? Why is loud luxury considered gauche when the entire system runs on visibility?
Demna understands that fashion’s power lies not just in beauty, but in tension. His Gucci feels like a mirror held up to consumer culture at its most unfiltered. But is it satire? This is where things get interesting. When a luxury house adopts the aesthetics of the very stereotype it once shunned, the line between critique and complicity blurs. Is Gucci mocking the idea of tasteless wealth? Or is it capitalising on it? Is it social commentary, or smart business in an era where subtlety doesn’t trend?
This is happening now because the cultural mood has shifted. Quiet luxury had its moment: beige cashmere, stealth-wealth signalling, the fantasy of inherited taste. But we live in an algorithmic age that rewards spectacle. Social media doesn’t amplify understatement; it amplifies audacity. The return of overt glamour feels almost inevitable. In uncertain economic times, fashion often swings toward excess.
Looking inward, there’s also a deeper democratisation at play. The stereotype of rich trash is classist at its core, as it polices who is allowed to display wealth and how. Old money is romanticised for discretion; new money is ridiculed for enthusiasm. By leaning into this aesthetic, brands like Gucci destabilise those hierarchies. It suggests that taste is not fixed, that refinement is a construct, and that gaudiness can be intentional if you let it.
We may not agree with these archetypes. We may even cringe at them. But the fact that luxury is now trying to appeal to, target, and make space for these figures says something about where fashion is headed. The industry is no longer interested in pretending it exists above pop culture’s messiness, thank heavens! It wants in. It wants the meme, the discourse. It wants to be screenshotted and argued over.
In that sense, being rich trash becomes symbolic. A symbol of consumption without apology, of visibility over subtlety, of wealth performed rather than inherited. The risk, of course, is that irony collapses under its own weight. When satire is sold at full retail, it becomes difficult to tell whether we’re laughing with the brand or being laughed at. If a $5,000 faux-fur coat styled like a suburban fever dream is meant as a critique, who exactly is in on the joke? The runway may wink, but the cash register rarely does.
Perhaps that ambiguity is the point. Fashion has always oscillated between sincerity and parody, aspiration and absurdity. Rich trash clientele, then, aren’t a punchline. They’re provocation. They ask whether fashion can critique excess while profiting from it, whether it can expose class performance while still selling tickets to the show. What this means depends on how we read it and who buys in.
We see this tension playing out in real time with figures like Becca Bloom. She’s the kind of hyper-visible, hyper-styled persona whose entire brand is built on the performance of excess. The luxury wedding, the designer hauls, the deliberately unrelatable morning routines: it’s a feed engineered for awe, but increasingly met with eye-rolls. There’s a growing fatigue around this kind of display, a sense that the spectacle has become too relentless to seduce in the way it once did. It now risks feeling algorithmically inflated, a feedback loop of wealth signalling for an audience that’s no longer convinced.
And here is where the idea of wealth cosplay starts to crystallise. You no longer need generational wealth to look like you have it; what you need is styling, access, and an understanding of the codes. Rental platforms, resale markets, and fast-fashion imitations have collapsed the distance between authentic and performed affluence.
If it seems like we’re living in a luxury simulation from which there’s no escape, it’s because we are. We’re stylising wealth, serving up exaggerated versions of it. It’s a mood that borrows as much from reality TV and influencer culture as it does from traditional ateliers. We’re staging scenarios, building characters, setting the scene for imagined fantasies. Because luxury is no longer about authenticity, but about clicks and likes and shares.
Which brings us back to the woman outside the SUV. She isn’t just participating in luxury; she’s performing it, aware of the gaze, fluent in the language. Whether she’s being satirised, celebrated, or simply mirrored by the industry is almost beside the point. What matters is that the performance lands. In a world where wealth itself feels increasingly abstract, unstable, and performed, maybe the spectacle is now the most legible form of truth.
Bieberchella was in full effect as the man himself pulled in $5.04 million in Skylrk merch sales in a single weekend. A $10 million paycheck may have made him the festival’s highest-paid act ever, but that was just the opening act. He drove record-breaking ticket demand, delivered the most-Googled performance in Coachella history, and moved merch at a pace usually reserved for entire tours, quietly eclipsing the previous two-weekend festival merch record of $1.7 million. It’s less about breaking records at this point and more about redefining what counts as one. When an artist turns a festival into an ecosystem — music, search trends, retail, and hype all orbiting the same name — you’re watching market dominance in real time.
Once the unofficial uniform of startup founders and tech bros, Allbirds is pivoting to AI. In a move that feels less like a pivot and more like a personality transplant, the San Francisco company announced a $50 million deal to reinvent itself as an “AI compute infrastructure” business, complete with a new name: NewBird AI. Investors, ever fond of a good buzzword, sent stock soaring over 580% upon hearing the news. That said, zoom out, and the glow dims a bit: the company is still sitting more than 90% below its 2021 debut. The only question is whether this is a second act or just a very well-dressed costume change?
In case you were wondering how legacy glossies plan to stay young forever, W Magazine just found its answer: WYouth. Enter a digital-first, biannual print offshoot designed to introduce the next generation to W, preferably before they discover TikTok has already done the job. The first issue lands in September, under the watch of editor-in-chief Sara Moonves, with Ava Nirui at the helm. Sofia Coppola and her 15-year-old daughter Cosima Mars will serve as contributing editors. There’s no standalone website; WYouth will live within W’s existing digital ecosystem. And the print edition? Half the size of a regular issue, as if to say: same taste level, just optimised for a shorter attention span.
Pedro Pascal becoming the latest face of Chanel isn’t so much a surprise as it is a formality finally catching up with reality. Over the past few seasons, Pascal has been quietly orbiting the house, from sitting front row to wearing the brand at premieres and on red carpets, dressed like he’s already on payroll. This new ambassador role just makes it official. It also signals where Chanel is headed under Matthieu Blazy, who called Pascal a “natural ally.” Translation: the brand is leaning into a broader, more fluid idea of who gets to represent it. Not bad for a house that technically doesn’t make menswear.
Grace Ladoja has just become the first African woman to design a signature shoe for Nike. It’s a milestone that feels even sharper when you realise she once walked to school for 60 straight days just to afford the very silhouette she’s now reimagining. Ladoja’s path has never been linear. Splitting her time between London and Lagos, she first made her name behind the scenes in the UK music industry. Since 2017, she’s been building Homecoming Festival into a gravitational force for African creativity, all while collecting an MBE along the way. But this Nike moment hits differently. When someone who once chased access ends up defining it, the product becomes more than just a shoe.
Denim Tears just turned SoHo into a moving installation, debuting its SS26 collection with stilt-walkers towering over the streets. The inspiration comes from the Moko Jumbie, a practice rooted in the African diaspora, where figures on towering stilts are seen as guardians, observers, and symbols of spiritual elevation. Here, that legacy is reworked into cotton-wreath denim that quite literally elevates the body above the crowd. It’s a fitting language for founder Tremaine Emory, whose work has consistently treated fashion as cultural excavation. This time, the excavation has height — physical, historical, and symbolic.
Honeyeee, I think this is your Best yet! I think we can call them #BravoBabes? #performativewealth. 💘