How To Borrow A Personality

Founder cosplay and performative intellectual social infrastructure.

Goodafternoon Gatekeepers. Today’s syllabus is all about credibility: who has it and who knows how to manufacture it. We’re looking at celebrity-backed fashion tech companies, Hailey Bieber’s latest exercise in cultural influence, the Southern women who keep retail alive, and five things I think are worth the money.

---

Gatekept is a fashion and style publication that comes with a syllabus. Today’s curated syllabus is free, but paid subscribers receive every weekly edition including expanded fashion-industry analysis, style guides, and aesthetic culture deep dives that keep them creatively engaged in their visual world.

---

---

Fashion Intelligence Brief

---

• The fashion-tech startup Phia was caught “cookie stuffing,” a form of affiliate marketing fraud. The practice itself is hardly new (the Chrome extension Honey is facing a class-action lawsuit over the same issue) but what interests me is how Phia’s celebrity investors were presented as a meaningful vote of confidence, despite the fact that most celebrities are unlikely to possess the technical expertise required to scrutinize what they are buying into. This coincides with the rise of what TikTok has dubbed “Emma Grede disease”: the impulse to trade the identity of “just an influencer” for that of an entrepreneurial badass™. The goal is not necessarily to identify a real gap in the market or create something of genuine value, but to wrap a creator in the aesthetics of entrepreneurship. Building and scaling a company becomes an aspirational identity in itself; what the company actually provides matters less than whether it can support a founder profile and eventually, an affiliated podcast.

• Cousin Greg just directed a short film for Shinola. The Runwell campaign is anchored by a cinematic short called The Restaurant, starring and directed by Nicholas Braun — who I know as Cousin Greg, the patron saint of overgrown boys who can't read a room — in his directorial debut. Built around the tagline "Set The Pace," it centers the Runwell watch. This is the inverse of the usual celebrity-campaign logic, where you borrow polish. Here, they're borrowing a persona to make "slowing down" feel like something you can rightfully demand. It's also new creative director Jonathan Bailey's first swing, so it's a legible marker of where the brand goes next. Back in June, we talked about the rise in fashion micro-dramas being used to give further lore to branding narratives. It looks like we can add Shinola to the list.

• Hailey Bieber tries her hand at denim. Gap just announced “The Hailey Jean,” a two-silhouette denim capsule with Hailey Bieber. Extra Baggy and Low Rise Loose, $89, with "1996" stamped into the hardware because that's the year she was born. Mario Sorrenti shot it in the stripped-down studio style of Gap's '90s ads; the campaign film runs on a loop of "Linger" and plays into nostalgia. Hailey has a solid POV that Gap is borrowing here; it’s a sanded down version of what she’s created at Rhode and from a decade of being incredibly tapped into cultural moments. Gap is clearly making a big comeback (a new CEO from Mattel and Zac Posen doing "culturally relevant storytelling") and campaigns like this depend on borrowing someone else's authenticity or a unique nostalgic moment. Also…I guess there’s no way to truly tell but the campaign video voiceover feels like that “it’s not this, it’s that” cadence that I’ve started associating with AI-generated campaign copy, which is interesting considering the goal of evoking nostalgia. Either way, I’m really into the low-rise loose pair.

  

---

Niche Rabbit Holes To Fall Down

---

• In 2000, Sarah Jessica Parker hosted the MTV movie awards and had 15 outfit changes. My favorites were the Versace dresses and the Union Jack dress by Richard Tyler. I’m brainstorming ways to incorporate this vibe into my own wardrobe. I’ll either have to get creative OR win some sort of award that justifies the context.

  

  

  In order: Richard Tyler Union Jack dress, Versace FW 2000, Versace FW 2000

• The concept of the social Southern woman holding the fashion industry on her shoulders. Last week, I was watching a video from Alex Greifeld, who was describing an archetype named Mary Catherine. I grew up in the South and know several Mary Catherines quite well. Greifeld argues that the overlooked engine of American fashion is the affluent Southern suburban customer who pays full price for brands like Tuckernuck and dresses formally for real-life social occasions. While Northern coastal fashion insiders mock this archetype, brands have been targeting her, especially in growing Sun Belt markets like Charlotte and Tampa. This style isn’t to be confused with New England prep and I’m happy to do a deeper dive on the two aesthetics. Either way, these are fascinating and valuable commercial infrastructure insights: the customers fashion considers culturally unsophisticated may be among the people giving the industry its most dependable economic support.

• I’ve been captivated by the idea that life is about renegotiating over and over again. You work hard, become a ballet dancer, your wife gets cancer so you quit traveling and take a job painting ballet shoes, you decide to make art. It’s so obvious once you get some perspective, that everyone’s life is built from these forced revisions. Feeling emo today, I guess.

• The Rise of Intellectual Clout by J'Nae Phillips, author of Fashion Tingz, for SSENSE. J’Nae explains how taste and knowledge have become forms of social currency and how genuine curiosity morphs into intellectual performance.

---

Five Things I Think Are Worth The Money

---

1. Boobs are going to be back in a huge way, no pun intended. I intend for mine to enter the room before I do, which is why the Skims Ultimate Balconette Push-Up Bra is worth every penny.

2. The Kérastase Magic Overnight Hair Serum.

3. An epidural.

4. A Crown Affair hair towel. I’m aware this is on everyone’s list also. I would make every article about this towel if it made any sense. Changed my life. I bought a second one for travel.

5. A pornstar martini at Death & Co. $22 but it works better than any anxiety medication on planet earth. You will have to be airlifted out after 3 drinks though, so proceed with caution.

Five Things NOT Worth The Money

1. “Investing” in Kerrygold Butter. You can’t invest in butter, plus it’s just regular butter in a pretty wrapper. If you actually want to develop a fancy butter habit, you want Salted Beurre D’Isigny AOP.

2. Manicures. Some of y’all will sit down and learn to use Claude Code before you’ll queue up ONE Youtube tutorial of a basic manicure. If an apocalyptic situation hits anytime soon, come see me and I can do pretty much all basic beauty treatments adequately. It’s not crazy expensive to get them done, but I can’t spare the cost of how stressful it feels for someone to hold my hand for an hour.

3. A Brick. I’m not giving someone $70 just for me to NOT use my phone. I was someone who got grounded a lot as a teenager so there is no way in hell I would pay someone to ground me as an adult woman.

4. Lola Blankets. If this is on your list…wrap it up babe. It has to be a social experiment.

5. Expensive face cleansers. You literally wash it down the drain!!! This goes for expensive hand soap too.

---