Culture Share: Curating Your Own Life

The trend report industrial complex needs to collapse

I don’t think there was ever a moment in my childhood when there weren’t posters, flyers and trinkets plastered over my bedroom walls. Even up until I started living by myself in my early thirties and graduated from house shares, my bedroom walls displayed memorabilia and paraphernalia that depicted my interests and personality. My living room still does, but in a more refined way, befitting someone in his mid-thirties.

In 1995, Adrienne Salinger released a book of photographs taken in American teenagers’ bedrooms across the 1980s and 1990s. In My Room paints a vivid and visceral image of teenage expression and memory but it tells a deeper story about self-curation and personal identity.

Everything I know about Labubus, Dubai chocolate, and Sydney Sweeney (sorry, but she’s gonna have to hold this one) has been against my will. There are elements of popular culture which, admittedly, I should at least have an awareness of, given what I’ve spent the past fifteen years doing for a living. I’ve never listened to a Taylor Swift or Lana Del Rey album. I couldn’t tell you what the most popular male-centred podcast is, the only one I even give a fraction of my time to is All The Smoke – a basketball-focused one featuring Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. Even then, I only watch them when the guests speak to me in some way.

I don’t avoid these things to be a cultural contrarian. I like what I like. I’ve spent years curating that, and at 35, there’s little sense in stepping beyond that. Of course, there’s value in trying new things; I do that all the time, and I have to as someone who documents and archives culture. Perhaps that’s the wider criticism of cultural trend reports: some people just don’t neatly fit into those boxes and stereotypes. The latest fad can seem appealing at first, but do many of us stop to ask if this is something that we even like or want for ourselves?

Doing a 75 hard seems less appealing if you already go to the gym 3-4 times a week and play a sport. Intermittent fasting may seem less attractive when you enjoy eating and trying new foods. The new Taylor Swift or Ethel Cain album doesn’t feel like something you’d like if you’ve grown up on a heavy diet of powerful voices that can quite literally bring the roof down.

If this is cool, consider me washed

This is why Anthony Bourdain speaks to so many young people these days; his level of curation is rare. I’m sure he would’ve had no desire to check out Smoking Goat or Brat in East London because those types of restaurants were never his penchant. You’d be more likely to see him in Tas Firin on Bethnal Green Road – arguably the best Turkish restaurant south of Dalston – or Blankita on West Green Road. Bourdain lived the life so many of us aspire to because he danced to the beat of his drum, and there are few traits more appealing than that.

The speed at which the internet moves – and the trends that shape it – in 2025 certainly feels much faster than it did in 2010, let alone 2000. It’s not just a trait of Gen Z to latch onto trends and fads as quickly as they appear; people have been doing that for generations. I’ve been very wary of the rise in vaping because of the health risks and implications we still have very little knowledge of. It hasn’t even been a century since we were told smoking was good for us by Madison Ave, only for regulators and government bodies to turn around and tell us it was indeed bad for us.

In My Room by Adrienne Salinger

Furthermore, what does the latching onto popular trends and fads say about our ability to curate our interests, desires and tastes? And how deep is our relationship with self and those things that define our personality? Maybe these things don’t have to be deeper than they are, but these trends and fads shape popular culture, ultimately shaping the tastes and interests of society at large.

It could also be an age thing because when I was a kid, I got caught up in the Pokémon and Harry Potter hype, but they were the zeitgeist when the internet wasn’t a vehicle for cultural explosion. The kids told us these things were cool, and then the adults jumped on the train and discovered why they were cool for themselves. Parodies were made of these cultural institutions, and back then, that was a sign of coolness if it were to be mocked by French & Saunders and The Simpsons.

Now, the internet dictates what becomes the zeitgeist with no real interrogation as to why. The American Eagle Sydney Sweeney ad is a great example of that. American Eagle isn’t a cool brand and hasn’t been for some time, especially when you examine the symbolism the brand stands for in 2025. Sydney Sweeney isn’t yet an icon that possesses the appeal of a Taylor Swift or Katy Perry, yet the recent American Eagle ad has tried to manufacture her into a symbol of Americana that doesn’t even hit the scales of Marilyn Quayle, let alone Marilyn Monroe. Monroe made herself cool through film, beauty and rumours of her sneaking into the Whitehouse for a romp with JFK, to the dismay of American housewives who secretly wanted to be her.

All this to say, many are beginning to reject what the internet deems the zeitgeist and perhaps the only way to truly do that is to avoid the trend reports and figure out who the outliers are, because when it’s all said and done, it’s the Anthony Bourdains who we remember fondly. Of course, young people are on the internet, but so much online traffic is driven by bots and paid media; how can we really trust that what’s considered cool isn’t part of some CMO’s online marketing strategy?