On this episode we speak with Emily Segal, the founder of the brand strategy agency Nemesis, publishing house Deluge, and the author of the novel Mercury Retrograde. Emily came to fame in the 2010s as the co-founder of the collective K-Hole, which coined the term “normcore.” She went on to work with everyone from Prada to Supreme, and learned a few things along the way, some of which we discuss in this episode. We mostly concentrate on two pieces of her writing, the Umami Theory of Value and B for Balenciaga, a brand case study. We discuss why the current culture feels like a postmodernist, meaningless, made-for-Instagram slop, or as Emily writes, “Umami is what you got when you did not get anything,” why Balenciaga is a cultural apex predator, a vortex that sucks in cultural artifacts and spits them out as memes, why Demna’s irony is hollow, whether he will succeed at Gucci, and much more besides.
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