What's it like to write a newsletter for ten years?
Ask Delia Cai.
Hello everyone.
Today’s letter includes: Prenups now have “Social Image Clauses” outlining how your spouse must treat you on social media, the return of Marc Jacobs Beauty, and the Reformation team explains their partnership with Hollywood divorce attorney Laura Wasser.
Guest Lecture is a Feed Me series where I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want. Past guests have included Lina Khan, Alison Roman, and Rachel Karten.
For our next Guest Lecture, we’re interviewing Delia Cai, who has been writing the observant, wry newsletter Deez Links for TEN YEARS. She also edits laura reilly’s newsletter Magasin, as well as Highsnobiety. She also wrote a novel called Central Places.
This week on the Feed Me Job Board: Interview Magazine, Phaidon Books*, and more.
*A reader recently suggested “Vote for adding comment sections under each listing on the Feed Me job board... Phaidon offering sub-$70k for an NYC-based Social Media Manager position requiring 4 to 6 years is nasty work, and we should be able to tell them.” While I won’t be adding a comment section to the job board, I welcome feedback on the jobs listed on there.
It’s hard to stand out in a sea of Fashion Week content. Between the selfies and photos of the same runway from different angles, the whole thing can become monotonous. But there were three people who really delighted me and captured my attention this week:
Biz Sherbert, writer of American Style, turned the video camera on and spoke to industry players about their getting-ready routines. She worked with artist Lola Dement Myers on shooting the series. The spontaneity of them reminds me of these early Cass Bird videos for Chrissie Miller’s brand Sophomore that I used to watch on Tumblr in my teenage bedroom. Bird also directed Sky Ferreira’s “17” music video, which is the national anthem of Biz’s American Style to me.
Brenda Hashtag’s black and white color scheme, combined with her naughty humor, have grabbed my attention over the last few months. She’s been posting carousels that mix digital camera video clips and photos overlaid with text. I like the little diagram in this one.
And Jalil Johnson has been doing one of the most fun series – a mini interview show in the backseat of Blacklane chauffeur cars with guests like laura reilly and Laurel Pantin. Even though it’s part of an ad series with Blacklane, it feels very organic. While fashion industry newsletters and podcasts are often full of dissection, this series feels particularly joyful and personal. “I’m trying to think of ways to share Fashion Week with people that doesn’t always involve a writeup,” Johnson told me on the phone this morning. “I find that sometimes if you do a big writeup, it still feels inaccessible.” He told me that the response to the series has been overwhelmingly positive, and that another brand recently reached out to him to interview someone as part of a partnership. “I was like, ‘Can we do do it in this car series? Because I really feel like this has legs.’” WSJ’s Sarah Ball has been doing a similar car talk series that published a few days after Jalil’s.
George W. Bush’s first newsletter on Substack is an essay about George Washington. It was aggregated across The Free Press and In Pursuit, an America 250 project.
We have learned who the new editor of GQ is: Adam Baidawi, who previously served as the magazine’s deputy global editorial director and head of editorial content for British GQ. Baidawi told The New York Times that he wants to restore GQ “to its rightful place as the North Star of masculinity.” I was rooting for Chris Black, who was also in the running for the job, but I am overwhelmingly bullish on Black’s brand advisory firm Lobby Partners & Associates (which he runs with partners David Cho, Spencer Lemon, and Shivam Pandya). In a deck I recently saw from LPA, I learned that the advisory organizes bespoke teams from their (massive) network to “solve any challenge.” Perhaps I’ll give them a call for an upcoming project….