Month: November 2020

Grass is green, the sky is blue, and former Oasis members Noel and Liam Gallagher really don’t care for each other. These are some of life’s constants, and as the brothers tend to do, one has spoken ill of the other. This time, it was Noel, who thinks that Liam is all bark with no bite.

In an interview with the Daily Star newspaper (via MSN), Noel said of his brother, “He’s a tough guy when he’s got his security guard with him.” He went on to tell a story of how friend of squirrels Johnny Rotten blatantly disrespected Liam, saying, “I’ve had a few nights out with John Lydon, he’s also one of my heroes, but I’ve also seen him be a f*cking ****, he just doesn’t take sh*t off anyone. I was out with him one night in LA and he wouldn’t talk directly to Liam, he would say to me, ‘Ask your singer what kind of make-up he’s wearing.’ Liam was literally six inches from him.’”

Noel also insisted that Liam doesn’t take any blame for their strained relationship, saying, “I think we’re both the problem and the problem is that he thinks he’s not the problem. He thinks I’m both the problems. Whereas I’m just a problem. I’m half the problem, whereas I can’t be having him thinking I’m the full problem. He needs to take on some of the problem. The minute he does that we’ll move on… He needs to own his problem.”

Meanwhile, things have been good with Oasis lately, as “Wonderwall” recently became the first ’90s song to surpass a billion streams on Spotify.

When people describe what it takes to succeed in business, the words they use often sound combative. We assume a certain ruthlessness is necessary to make it, that you must destroy the competition and step on and over others to climb to the top. It’s almost a given that exploitation of employees and deceptively clever marketing to customers are they keys to big profits.

Then along comes someone like Tony Hsieh, who spent two decades obliterating those assumptions as the visionary CEO of Zappos.

Hsieh, who tragically passed away last week at age 46 following a house fire, took a unique approach to running a business on practically every level. From a decentralized management model to a completely relationship-centered customer service philosophy, he created an innovative alternative to traditional business practices. But it was his generosity of spirit in helping others succeed that clearly defined his legacy.

Hsieh’s customer service philosophy was all about creating and maintaining relationships with people. Rather than make it hard for customers to find contact information on their website like many companies do, Zappos posted their 1-800 number prominently on the top of every page. And rather than try to get customers off the phone as quickly as possible, they made sure that every customer truly felt taken care of—even to the extent of helping them find shoes from competitors if Zappos didn’t have what they were looking for.

Hsieh’s family says that his mantra was “delivering happiness.” It seems he instinctively understood that truly happy customers are loyal customers, and that business could involve both making money and making people happy.

But it wasn’t just customers that Hsieh focused his energies on. After his passing, story after story of his thoughtfulness and helpfulness toward other businesses and individuals have circulated, proving that not only was Hsieh a good businessman, but also a truly good human being.

For example, Josh Reich, former CEO of the online bank Simple, told a story about trying to poach Zappos’ head of customer service when Simple was starting up. He said Hsieh found out and made a counter-offer for Reich’s team to come meet the Zappos team and learn how they operated.

“We got to spend time with agents in the call center, watch them take calls,” Reich wrote on Twitter. “Learn about how they were hired. Speak with the engineers about how they built the CRM stack to be both efficient and foster moments of delight.

We spent time with his exec team and went back to his apartment and chatted over pancakes. He went above and beyond. He liked our mission and wanted to help. He helped us deliver happiness. He left an outsized mark on this world. He will be missed.”

Praise for Hsieh has come from people of all backgrounds, especially those who have worked in the startup business world or who lived or spent time in Las Vegas, where Hsieh lived.

He embraced and encouraged his employees uniqueness as human beings.

He was successful and thoughtful, but also refreshingly humble.

And his generosity extended to all he came in contact with.

The outpouring of gushing eulogies are how we should all strive to be remembered.

If you are not familiar with Hsieh’s life story, investor Sahil Bloom offered a synopsis on Twitter that illustrates what makes Hsieh such a unique figure.

“Tony Hsieh was a builder, investor, philanthropist, and self-proclaimed weirdo.

He inspired millions to think differently about happiness and embrace their own inner weirdness.

Here is the story of a beautiful man gone way too soon.

Tony Hsieh was born on December 12, 1973.

His parents, both Taiwanese immigrants, placed a strong emphasis on education, always pushing Tony and his younger brothers to excel in school.

Upon graduating high school in California, he left home to enroll at Harvard University.

Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the very early days of the internet, he wanted to be a part of that world.

He graduated in 1995 with a degree in computer science, determined to build.

As a first step, he accepted a job at Oracle as a low level programmer.

But his ambition and creativity was not suited for the large corporate life.

Within a few months, he left Oracle with a colleague to build something new.

Their idea: to build an ad network for the new world of internet advertising.

So it was that LinkExchange was born.

Riding the internet boom, it took off immediately.

Within 90 days, they had 20,000 participating web pages.

Within 2 years, they had over 400,000.

In 1998, just 2 years after starting the business, Hsieh and his co-founders sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million. Working at Microsoft while waiting for all of his shares to vest, Hsieh yet again grew tired of the big corporate culture.

Deciding that time was his most precious resource, he left early, leaving millions of unvested shares on the table, and launched a startup incubator.

Venture Frogs (the name originated from a dare) invested in and supported startups.

It was in this role that Hsieh first met Nick Swinmurn, the founder of @Zappos, a company that wanted to sell shoes online.

In 1999, this seemed crazy, but Hsieh was intrigued.

Believing in the massive market opportunity, Venture Frogs decided to invest in Zappos.

This was just the beginning for Hsieh.

Anxious to get back to building, he joined Zappos as its CEO and got to work.

Sales were growing, but there was nothing smooth about road ahead.

The business was unprofitable, and with a backdrop of the dot-com crash, the idea of raising money for an internet shoe sales business was laughable.

So Hsieh buckled down, selling off his own real estate holdings to fund the business.

He became a true servant leader. 9/ As Zappos grew, Hsieh focused on building a company he could be proud of.

He prioritized people and built a unique culture that embraced individualism.

Zappos famously asked the question, “How weird are you?” of new applicants.

By 2009, the company hit $1 billion in sales.

Zappos was acquired by Amazon in 2009 for $1.2 billion.

Having rejected previous offers, Hsieh finally relented when Amazon promised to allow Zappos to run independently.

For Hsieh, the success of Zappos was intertwined with its culture.

This was simply non-negotiable.

Tony Hsieh remained at the helm of Zappos until August 2020, when he stepped down after 21 years as its CEO.

A natural introvert, he likened his role as CEO to that of a greenhouse architect, designing an environment that would allow employees to learn, grow, and thrive.

Outside of his day job, Tony Hsieh always sought out ways to give back.

His book, Delivering Happiness, was a #1 @nytimesbooks best seller, remaining on the list for 27 consecutive weeks.

He also invested heavily in rebuilding underdeveloped parts of downtown Las Vegas.

Tony Hsieh showed the world that being different was not only ok, but actually a competitive advantage.

He inspired millions to embrace their inner weirdness.

Above all else, Tony Hsieh loved life.

He will be sorely missed, but his legacy will live on.”

Indeed it will. Thank you, Tony Hsieh, for being an inspiring example for us all.

The ladies of The View kicked off their Monday with some justifiable concerns over Donald Trump’s latest appearance on Fox News. In a bizarre interview with Maria Bartiromo, who seemed uninterested in fact-checking the president’s claims, Trump ranted wildly about “big, massive dumps” of votes that he falsely claims were part of an elaborate scheme to steal the presidential election. While co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar shared their disbelief at the “psychosis” from Republicans who are refusing to accept that Joe Biden won the election, Sunny Hostin issued a scathing assessment of what needs to happen to rein in Trump and his conspiracy-tinged rhetoric. Via Mediaite:

He just needs to go to Losers Anonymous. Like, he’s really in a psychosis right now, and I’m surprised that the people around him like his daughter, like Jared Kushner, who somehow is on his way to the Middle East. I don’t understand why he has to go to the Middle East this week, but I think that they need to stage some sort of intervention at this point, because he is now damaging the Republican Party even further with all of this rhetoric.

With the occasional exception of Meghan McCain, The View has been a vocal critic of Trump, but this time, they’re not the only ones with concerns about his interview with Bartiromo. Her Fox News co-worker Eric Shawn pushed back on the president’s false claims that same day.

“He doubled down on his claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, even though local and national election officials, as well as federal and state courts in multiple states, and in some cases the Trump campaign’s own lawyers, have said there is no evidence to prove that.” Shawn said on the air. “Experts say such claims are unsupported falsehoods that are not backed up by any facts.”

Before September of 2020, BTS did not have one Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 song to their name. Now, three months later, they have three of them.

On the chart dated September 5, “Dynamite” debuted at No. 1, giving them their first chart-topping single. Then, on the chart dated October 17, the group landed their second No. 1 thanks to their feature on Jawsh 685’s “Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat).” Today, it was revealed that the South Korean superstars have officially bagged their third No. 1 song, as “Life Goes On” has debuted in the top spot on the chart dated December 5.

BTS have been making history lately, and this song brings them yet another accolade, as it’s the first song sung predominantly in Korean to top the Hot 100. It’s also the first song sung mostly in a non-English language to top the chart since Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” did in 2017.

Additionally, BTS now joins Taylor Swift as being one of the two acts to ever debut an album and song at No. 1 on the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 charts in the same week (Be just debuted at No. 1). On top of that, this is the fastest accumulation of three No. 1 singles (exactly three months) since the Bee Gees had three chart-toppers (“How Deep Is Your Love,” “Stayin’ Alive,” and “Night Fever”) over the course of two months and three weeks in 1978.

It’s been a successful past week or so for BTS, as they performed “Life Goes On” on The Late Late Show after bringing “Dynamite” to the AMAs.

It took three months, but the COVID-19 pandemic has now significantly altered the NFL season in a way many feared when the league decided it would not only play, but also play amid the general population and not sequester its players and staff from the public. The Denver Broncos played what can barely be called a modern football game without a true quarterback because they were all potentially exposed to coronavirus. The San Francisco 49ers don’t have a home facility after the county in which they play banned contact sports for three weeks. And for the second time this season, the NFL will attempt to play a game on a Tuesday night as the Pittsburgh Steelers-Baltimore Ravens matchup originally scheduled for Thanksgiving night has been moved twice as both teams continue to see positive test results impact their starting lineups.

The word on Monday afternoon was that another positive test result from the Ravens before Tuesday night would push the game back again, potentially throwing the NFL’s schedule into chaos or force the cancelations the league has so desperately worked to avoid this season. But some players have a better, and certainly safer, idea: play Madden to decide the outcome.

As news of more positive tests hit on Monday, Ravens cornerback Marlon Humphrey joked that, like many things this year that have been impacted by COVID-19, Tuesday night’s AFC North showdown should be done virtually.

But he wasn’t the only player interested. Steelers wideout JuJu Smith-Schuster hopped on board and had a more specific plan: each team’s best Madden player go head-to-head for the division bragging rights.

Smith-Schuster would obviously put himself in the role as best Madden player on the Steelers, and he’s also very much kidding. But in a world where football isn’t quite as life-and-death, it would be wonderful to see the NFL embrace this idea and play it safe when the coronavirus crisis is spiraling out of control in many areas of the country and safety should be the main priority. Maybe if Tuesday’s game doesn’t happen Smith-Schuster will play someone from the Ravens anyway, a non-sanctioned game that won’t actually count on the scoreboard. It’s a much more fun idea than the actual reality of the NFL trying to keep its season on track despite the number of complications we’ve seen in recent weeks.

If you ask anti-mask skeptics why they refuse to cover their noses and mouths to help prevent the spread of coronavirus, the answers will be varied and occasionally, completely off the wall. But one thing is consistent among them: They are helping, whether intentionally or not, to spread a virus that has already killed over a quarter of a million Americans and permanently affected potentially millions more. Rap star Ice-T offered the perfect illustration of that effect on Twitter, where he revealed his father-in-law had been hospitalized with COVID-19 after refusing to wear a mask.

“My father-in-law ‘Coco’s dad’ was a serious ‘No Masker’ [until] COVID hit him,” he shared. “Pneumonia in both lungs.. 40 days in ICU close to death.. Now he’s on Oxygen indefinitely. Ohhh he’s a Believer now.. #COVIDisNotAGame.” He also shared a picture of his father-in-law wearing a different kind of mask — an oxygen mask from a hospital ventilator. Ice later followed up with a tweet referencing another member of the hip-hop community with extensive coronavirus experience: Scarface, who’d been hospitalized with a ferocious case of the disease that left him in need of even more serious medical aid.

“Some people think a Mask is a sign of weakness,” T quoted. “My homie @BrotherMob who had it told me.. ‘Ice, your Gangster can’t fight this shit…..’ I heard him loud and clear.” He made sure to clarify that while he doesn’t wish illness on anyone, he wanted to warn people and encourage them to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously. He also shared a little pimp game for those looking to dress up their masked looks: “Of course Players are gonna Coordinate…. That’s mandatory.”

Since 2017, it has become an annual tradition for Billie Eilish to sit down with Vanity Fair, the video of which comes around this time every year. Now, the 2020 installment, Eilish’s fourth overall has arrived, and in it, she reflects on how her life has been lately.

While most people have been focused on the music she has made during the pandemic, she did something else of great personal significance: Eilish said, “I did get a tattoo, but you won’t ever see it.”

Elsewhere during the clip, she spoke about her new interest in using her voice to speak out about issues in the world, saying, “I have learned so much more about the way people are living that I wasn’t aware of before. The climate crisis and social injustice and all the bad things made me think differently. I will never stop fighting for all the black and brown people who have lost their lives to police brutality.”

She also said of fame, “Getting bigger and bigger makes me more comfortable about not having to prove myself. People look up to you so that you will tell them what you, yourself, would actually tell them.” Of course, Eilish also talked about her music and performing again, saying, “I have made and created things that I don’t think I would have ever created. When shows are allowed again, every show is going to be the best show.”

Watch the video above.

You deserve to have some fun. We all do at this point, for a bunch of reasons that don’t especially require rehashing but also because it’s the time of the year when it starts getting dark at like 4:45 p.m. and you probably wouldn’t be all that jazzed about going outside even if you could. It’s a great time for a little diversion, something fizzy and bouncy to watch, a show whose guiding principle is to be entertaining above all else. Not one of those bleak bummer shows, the ones where everyone is miserable and it’s always gray outside and they try to trick you into thinking “relentlessly serious and/or sad” is interchangeable with “quality programming.” Again, something fun. That’s why you should check out The Flight Attendant. The Flight Attendant is so much freaking fun.

A quick summary: The Flight Attendant is a new HBO Max series that stars Kaley Cuoco as a kind of boozy party girl and, uh, flight attendant — no false advertising here, people — who hooks up with a mysterious passenger and then wakes up very hungover next to his blood-covered corpse and, whoops, now she’s eyeballs-deep in a twisty murder mystery. Everyone has secrets and may or may not be up to something. She has hallucinations where the dead guy talks her through the various sticky situations she finds herself in through circumstance and self-destructive behavior. Rosie Perez is on the show. Find me one thing not to like in any of that.

It’s not just the mystery that makes it fun, although I will come back to that shortly, because I really want to talk about it. The show is also very stylish, both in how the characters dress and behave and in how it’s shot. The camera angles are sometimes tilted to push someone off to one side of the screen as a means of throwing the viewer off balance. The colors are bright and saturated within an inch of their lives in some parts, and muted in a cold, blue-ish tint in others. Everyone is always going out to nightclubs or on secret fact-finding escapades to mysterious corporate headquarters or funerals and they are always wearing fancy outfits that are the opposite of the sweatpants and thermals you’ve probably been wearing since October. The combination gives it a kind of Mr. Robot meets Killing Eve visual vibe that is a real blast for the eyeballs.

It’s also a blast for the ears, too, thanks to a soundtrack filled with bouncy horns and dinky bonk piano music that can make walking down a sidewalk or sneaking a glance at a stranger feel frenetic or ominous or extremely cool, depending on the circumstances of the particular scene. I love it. I want to have the soundtrack playing while I’m, like, making coffee in the morning, or reheating leftovers in the microwave, possibly in slow motion, just to add a little intrigue to my day. My favorite part about the music might not even be the music itself. It might be the way the show describes the music in its subtitles.

I love dark investigative music.

But all of that means nothing without a solid plot and set of performances. Let’s quickly run through a few things we had going on in the first three episodes that HBO Max released this weekend:

• Kaley Cuoco’s character, Cassie, has a lawyer best friend who is played by Zosia Mamet and has a secret hacker boyfriend and has a bunch of burner phones and might be up to something
• Rosie Perez — whose character has a name, Megan, but my brain can’t be expected to handle that when Rosie Perez is on the screen looking and talking like Rosie Perez — is a fellow flight attendant who is stealing files off her husband’s laptop and selling them to mysterious Asian businessmen and paying off weird dudes with random bottles of pills
• The dead dude worked for a huge shady corporation and his family appears to be into some wild stuff
• There’s a lady named Miranda who is scary as heck and real slick with a butterfly knife and who everyone talks about in hushed tones like she’s Keyser Soze or something
• The FBI is involved and they sure do think Cassie knows more than she’s letting on, which she does
• Sometimes Cassie lies to people and says her name is “Alessandra Ricci,” which is a good reminder that everyone should have a fake name ready just in case you need to investigate a murder you’re suspected of committing or want to have some goofs while making a dinner reservation
• Mine is Mitch Casino and you can’t steal it

I’ll tell you what really makes this show hum so far, though: Kaley Cuoco’s performance. Man, is she ever good as Cassie, a character who flips between bubbly flirt and anxious wreck and bottoming-out drunk and someone who Has Demons In Her Past, as all protagonists do these days, with hers involving flashbacks and dead rabbits and substance abuse issues starting at a very young age. It’s a lot. It might be too much in the hands of a lesser performer. It might still end up being too much if things skid from fun-messy into gratuitous-messy as the show progresses, which is always a risk with this kind of multidirectional mystery layered with ever-growing conspiracies. But she really is so good. Between this show and her voice work on the animated Harley Quinn series (also extremely freaking fun), Kaley Cuoco is carving out a nice little post-Big Bang career arc all over HBO Max. This is a situation I will continue to monitor.

One note in closing, about the great unknown in all of this. As I mentioned above, HBO Max only released the first three episodes of this show so far. The remaining episodes will go up weekly, every Thursday. This is something that streaming services have been tinkering with recently. The Mandalorian drops one episode per week, Ted Lasso also dropped a chunk upfront and then released the remainder of its season one at a time every Friday. People who are now conditioned to binge entire seasons in a weekend might get frustrated by this, the delayed gratification and forced waiting and not getting the answers to things nownowgimmenow. Personally, I like it, especially for a show like this. I like thinking about a mystery between episodes, and I like when a show has a chance to build and remain a part of the cultural conversation for entire weeks instead of fading out after a long weekend, and I do not have the self-control to not rip through the entire season in one sleepless night and ruin my productivity for the next four days. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the two other shows I mentioned that tried this — The Mandalorian and Ted Lasso — are two of the buzziest shows of the last year or so. I suspect it is not.

But that’s a conversation for another day, probably between a bunch of television critics who think about that stuff a lot because our brains are ruined. You don’t have to worry about it right now. You can just focus on finding cool stuff to watch until we all can and/or want to go outside again. The Flight Attendant is a pretty good place to start.

The San Francisco 49ers picked up a big win on Sunday when they upset the Rams in Los Angeles to move to 5-6 and keep their slim hopes of a playoff berth alive. However, after the win the Niners had to return to a reality in which their immediate future was in limbo as Santa Clara County had announced a three-week lockdown amid spiking COVID-19 cases that would not allow any sporting events or practices, including Niners games and practices.

That meant the Niners, who have home games scheduled for this coming Sunday and the next against the Bills and the Football Team, needed to find a new place to play. On Monday, they announced they’d reached an agreement with the NFL and the Arizona Cardinals to play their games at State Farm Stadium in Glendale for the next two weeks.

The Cardinals are at home next week on Sunday, but the Niners-Bills game is the Monday Night game, so it’ll be a quick turnaround for stadium staff to re-paint the field. The week after, Arizona is headed to the Meadowlands to face the Giants, leaving their stadium open for the Niners to host the Football Team on Sunday.

It’s yet another example of teams having to be flexible amid the ever-changing landscape of the pandemic, as the league tries desperately to get every game played despite climbing case counts on teams and communities having to go back into lockdowns in an effort to mitigate the spread once again as we push into a 10th month of record high cases. The Ravens and Steelers remain unsure of whether their game, initially scheduled for Thanksgiving night, will be played on Tuesday as Baltimore has seen a number of positive tests on the roster, including to Lamar Jackson.

The Niners expressed frustration with the lack of communication from Santa Clara County on the lockdown decision, but if health officials have deemed it necessary to limit gatherings once again and by virtue of the number of people on the field a football game would be included, then there wasn’t significant discussion to be had. They will now go to Arizona where they will hopefully be able to get through the next two weeks.

It’s no secret that Black culture dictates what’s poppin’. While ideas are not always attributed to the creators who bore them, archivists and supporters across media and entertainment have made sure to cite Black influence and provide proper credit to the community. Black public figures have displayed their dominance across fields, particularly when it comes to style, and Black culture’s alignment with fashion brands adds a new mark to their innovation checklist.

To keep up with the mainstream, luxury fashion brands have worked with Black artists in order to appeal to consumer enthusiasm, tapping big names to bring in big bucks across several decades. In 2020, fast fashion brands — affordable apparel based on trends bought in stores and online — have not only utilized the same business model as major brands, but shifted the fashion industry’s power dynamics in the process. Influence no longer lies solely with lavish fashion houses, placing control in the hands of consumers more than ever before. However, fast fashion’s dominance comes with both positive and negative characteristics, especially when it comes to its relationship with Black community.

While fast fashion’s high-speed origins kicked off in the 1960s, the ’90s and early 2000s gave way to the takeover of retailers like Zara and H&M, providing consumers with near-replicas of high-end looks at a reasonable cost. In the internet age, social media makes it easier for fashion to be duplicated and sold in the blink of an eye, with online boutiques like Fashion Nova, PrettyLittleThing, and Boohoo providing affordable, trendy, and quickly-processed styles for men, women, and plus-sized consumers. Their prominence only seems to grow with time — currently, Zara has 41 million Instagram followers, H&M has 36 million, and Fashion Nova has more than 19 million.

How do fast fashion brands determine which public figures to work with? Especially in the social media era, online impact often translates to IRL-influence, and popularity is a quick and easy way to reach more consumers. In this day and age, that means garnering promotion by way of musicians, models, and influencers, and scavenging for intel into what is trending by way of social apps like Instagram and Twitter. Fast fashion brands tap in with Black superstars with universal appeal to cater to all potential buyers, but especially to pull in Black dollars. Per the Selig Center for Economic Growth, Black buying power could result in bringing in an estimated $1.46 trillion by 2021, and may see an increase of 5.4 percent by 2022.

H&M worked with Beyoncé for a beachwear collaboration in 2013, while online boutique Asos is one of the homes for her latest Adidas line, Ivy Park. R&B/hip-hop performer Teyana Taylor teamed up with PrettyLittleThing for brand campaigns and ambassador gigs in 2018 and 2019, while rapper Saweetie worked with the brand for two clothing collections. Cardi B famously released two Fashion Nova clothing collections in 2018 and 2019 — both of which sold out in minutes — and Megan Thee Stallion is reportedly working with the clothing company on a collection of jeans catered to tall women. These artists’ followings, personas, and style have contributed to their rises outside of their work, making them obvious collaborators.

“When something is hot and makes money, people want to… figure out how to do business and get down with it,” designer and stylist Misa Hylton told XXL in 2019. Her influential “hip hop glamorous” style was made famous during her time working with Lil Kim and Mary J. Blige in the 1990s, and the aesthetic appears to have made a comeback in the late 2010s.

Not only are fast fashion collections typically budget-friendly, but many of these stores also take all size ranges into consideration, something that luxury brands don’t always do. For instance, Forever 21, PrettyLittleThing, and Shein often have online sales ranging anywhere between 10 to 90 percent off for their products. Additionally, F21 and PLT carry styles for sizes up to 3X, while Shein accommodates 5XL individuals. Given these credentials, these companies are, far and by, more relatable to the average consumer.

This factor is certainly ironic considering hip-hop in particular runs on braggadocio, often featuring lyrics doting on the fabulous accoutrements of a wealthy lifestyle. From a music standpoint, that respect is shifting as well.

Per Genius, Fashion Nova has been shouted out on songs from spokesperson Cardi B, as well as Meek Mill, French Montana, and Young M.A., while Zara has been mentioned by 21 Savage, Roddy Ricch, and Lil Durk. However, many of the references to fast fashion brands in songs are tongue-in-cheek, often punctuated by bars about the clothing being more cost-efficient than designer duds like Gucci and Chanel, thus making it low class (and even embarrassing) to wear by rapper standards. (“This that Hermes money, this ain’t no Fashion Nova,” Meek raps in “Dangerous” from 2018.)

Cost-effective clothing certainly gives way to cheaper material. Even if rappers believe that fast-fashion is a low-status symbol, it also serves an environmental disservice. Per a 2019 report from the House of Common Environmental Audit Committee, a goal of fast fashion brands is to lower production costs by any means necessary. Although popular, fast fashion’s trendy styles are frequently produced quickly without taking sustainability into consideration.

Per Good On You, which provides expert insight on fashion brands’ sustainability rating, Fashion Nova, Boohoo, and Forever 21 have received “very poor” ratings when it comes to their environmental impact, labor conditions, and animal welfare. However, the site notes that some fast fashion companies are working to become more environmentally conscious; H&M in particular is praised for their clothing recycling program, which allows customers to return clothing in-store in order to reduce the amount of textiles in landfills. However, the brand is chastised by Good On You for adhering to the unsustainable fast fashion business production model, which results in thousands of pieces of fabric being discarded.

On a deeper level, fast fashion brands have come under fire for utilizing and profiting off of aspects of Black culture, but not showing up to support causes important to the Black community.

Collin Karter, known as a stylist to Cardi B, spoke out on his client’s collaborator Fashion Nova for their radio silence regarding the heightened Black Lives Matter movement and calls for change after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery in spring 2020.

“For you to be in my email begging for placements but have nothing to say when it comes to this matter is disgusting,” he wrote on Instagram. “You take from the culture and us brown men and [women] for your traffic and profit.” Similarly, beauty YouTuber Jackie Aina called out Fashion Nova and Revolve with her concerns, urging them to “do more” for the amplification of Black issues, especially with the amount of influence fast fashion brands have with consumers and the culture.

With this glaring discrepancy in mind, some brands have attempted to right their wrongs with the community that they owe a great chunk of their popularity and overall aesthetic to. Profits from Saweetie’s 2020 collaboration with PrettyLittleThing went directly to Black Lives Matter. H&M pledged to donate an allotment of $500,000 towards the NAACP, ACLU, and Color of Change. Nevertheless, their allyship can be seen as performative. Despite their vows to support Black and brown bodies, brands continue to be criticized for less-than-savory working conditions and business practices.

While it appears that fast fashion brands are doling out one-sided support of Black lives, there are a few solutions to make fast fashion more acceptable from a moral standpoint. This means pushing for more authentic representation on their websites. A gripe with fast fashion websites that many people carry is that the models appear to be racially-ambiguous or ethnically “exotic,” and that their features, deemed as desirable on light and fair-skinned women, are seen as “ugly” on women of color.

Morally-sound fast fashion business practices should also entail hiring more people of color behind-the-scenes, in order to facilitate stronger and more well-informed design, marketing, and labor decisions. These decisions would not only create sustainable change when it comes to how these companies are perceived socially, but environmentally and ethically. (Offshore manufacturing often relies on female workers in foreign countries, who are forced to accept terrible wages and labor laws in order to survive and provide for their families.)

While it’s easy to disavow luxury brands for tone-deaf fashion mistakes, let’s face it: some people just want to look cute for “the ‘gram,” and fast fashion provides quick and easy opportunities to do just that. However, It’s important for both consumers and artists — regardless of their race — to think about their priorities when buying from and working with not only fast fashion brands, but any business. It’s up to them to weigh all the negatives and positives, and decide whether they are compromising their principals with what they wear and support.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.