Chip Wilson has said openly that he chose the name Lululemon partly because he believed Japanese consumers would find the letter L difficult to pronounce and that this difficulty would give the brand an exotic appeal in the Japanese market. He started the company in Vancouver in 1998 after attending an Ashtanga yoga class and noticing that the women there were wearing cotton leggings that went saggy and wet with sweat, and that nobody was making technical athletic fabric for them the way the surf and snowboard industry was making it for men. His target customer had a name, Ocean, a hypothetical profile the brand constructed of a 32-year-old educated professional woman who drove a Land Rover and was searching for meaning as much as she was shopping for spandex. Wilson's personal philosophy was shaped by Ayn Rand, and Lululemon once printed "Who is John Galt?" on its shopping bags alongside the wellness manifesto about sunscreen and the importance of listening to your body. Employees were encouraged, and in some accounts pressured, to attend Landmark Forum seminars at the company's expense, and Wilson said of those who resisted that they were "not going to be happy in the company, so they might as well find another place to work." Last year he took out a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to declare that Lululemon, the company he founded and from which he was removed as chairman in 2013 after a series of public controversies, was in a nosedive.

The controversies are worth noting because they illuminate something about the distance between what the brand sold and what it was. When Lululemon's Luon yoga pants were found to become sheer when stretched, Wilson's response was that some women's bodies "just actually don't work" for the pants, specifically because of thigh rubbing. Ocean, the 32-year-old with the Land Rover and the search for meaning, apparently had a body that worked for them. Wilson apologised later, and Lululemon issued a recall, but the incident was clarifying in the way that moments of crisis often are, revealing the gap between the aspiration the brand was selling, wellness, community, the elevation of everyday life through considered choices, and the product itself, a nylon-Lycra blend constructed to perform barely adequately across a range of athletic activities.

Howard Schultz went to Milan in 1983 and stood in an espresso bar and felt something he wanted to bring back to America. What he felt was the specificity of an Italian coffee bar, the quality of the shot, the relationship between the barista and the regular customer was the particular texture of a space that existed for no purpose other than the pleasure of being in it with other people. He came back and eventually bought Starbucks, and the concept he built the expanded company around - the third place - he took from the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who had written in his 1989 book The Great Good Place that informal public gathering spots, pubs, cafés, barbershops, were essential to community and democracy, and that their disappearance from American life was causing measurable social damage. Oldenburg had also written that these places must be non-commoditised, that when the means for relaxation and leisure become objects of private ownership and consumption, living becomes more expensive and community becomes less possible. Schultz's genius was to take the vocabulary of "the third place" and build a commodified version of it at sufficient scale that the vocabulary wove itself through the paradox of economic exclusivity by its sheer force of distribution.

By 2025, Starbucks's brand value had fallen 36% in a single year, McDonald's had overtaken it as the world's most valuable restaurant brand, and the incoming CEO announced a plan called "Back to Starbucks" involving cutting 30% of the menu. Schultz himself appeared at a company leadership event and said the third place was not something that needed to be reinvented, it was who they were. He had apparently forgotten that the original Oldenburg formulation specifically excluded brands like his.

The Stanley Quencher was at risk of being discontinued in 2019 due to poor sales when a women-led shopping blog and Instagram account called The Buy Guide posted about it with genuine enthusiasm and generated immediate, overwhelming demand from its audience of women aged 24 to 45. The Buy Guide's editors reached out to Stanley, bought 5,000 units wholesale and sold them in four days. Stanley's leadership, recognising that they had accidentally discovered a new consumer base that had nothing to do with the construction workers and campers they had been selling to for a century, restocked the Quencher in pastel colours and began paying careful attention to what The Buy Guide's audience wanted next. What they wanted, it emerged, were new colours, regularly released in limited quantities, at price points that made individual cups affordable but collections expensive. The waitlist for new colourway releases reached 150,000 people. Limited Starbucks collaborations sold out within minutes. A Valentine's Day collection at Target in early 2024 prompted scenes of women swarming displays that were filmed and posted and viewed tens of millions of times. A woman posted a video of her car after a fire, the interior completely destroyed, with a Stanley tumbler sitting in the cupholder intact, ice still in it. The president of Stanley offered to replace her car. The clip was viewed 95 million times and generated more marketing value than any campaign Stanley had ever run. Destinee, a 30-year-old collector interviewed by Dazed magazine, had five Quenchers, all in different shades of pink. She had picked up every pink colourway Target had released because she felt like she needed to have them. She estimated she had spent over $300. Dazed noted that Holly Snyder, another collector, had 539 bottles.

The mechanism behind this is documented extensively by the marketing industry, which treats it as a playbook worth studying rather than a phenomenon worth interrogating. Scarcity, when applied to a product in adequate supply, triggers a specific psychological response: the fear of missing the window, of being the person who wanted the thing after the thing stopped meaning what it meant when the right people had it. The word for this is FOMO, fear of missing out, and its commercial application was borrowed directly from sneaker culture, where brands like Nike and Supreme had spent decades understanding that the desire to own a rare object is structurally different from the desire to own a good one, and that desire of the first kind can be manufactured at scale by controlling the number of colourways released in any given month and the number of minutes they are available before selling out. Stanley applied sneaker culture to a steel tumbler. The result was a content flywheel, limited drop generated creator content, creator content generated algorithmic amplification, amplification generated mainstream demand, sell-out generated anticipation for the next drop, and the tumbler itself, the actual insulated vessel and its capacity to keep liquids cold, receded from the conversation entirely.

Glossier understood the same mechanic in beauty. Its founder Emily Weiss built the brand from a blog called Into the Gloss, which documented the real skincare routines of real women, including celebrities, in a format that felt like access rather than advertising. The products Glossier subsequently released were sold as the distillation of what women actually used and loved rather than what the beauty industry thought they should want, and the aesthetic, minimal packaging, dewy skin, the idea that you were already beautiful and needed only help revealing it, was sufficiently distinctive that it generated the kind of user photography that no paid campaign reliably produces. Rituals, the mass produced Dutch brand sold the same aspiration through different materials and a retail design borrowed from Sanskrit and Mandarin, an Orientalist outlook packaged in minimally designed tubes with gold to adorn its mirage of exoticness. As an aside, the writer finds the unavailability of their hand mask, an actually good product, slightly upsetting. Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocery chain, sold it across an entire market, where a $25 smoothie in the right postcode communicated a whole set of decisions about how you spent your afternoons.

What these brands share, beyond the marketing architecture of community and scarcity and the influencer as aspirational peer rather than aspirational stranger, is that they were built for a consumer who arrived at disposable income before arriving at the reference points that tell you what disposable income is actually worth spending on. Someone who grew up handling long-staple linen understands immediately when they touch short-staple. Someone who has worn 12-micron vicuña feels the gauge when it goes to fast-fashion "cashmere". Someone who has drunk a well-pulled shot from a small roaster that sources its beans with attention cannot unknow what the coffee in the green-mermaid cup is costing them beyond the $8 on the receipt - (likely their soul, but also) their sleep now ruined by thoughts of money absolutely wasted on an idea executed imperfectly. These reference points are not innate and they are not markers of class in any simple sense but are the accumulated residue of exposure, of having been around things made with genuine attention for long enough that inattention becomes palpable. The consumer that Lululemon, Starbucks, Stanley, Glossier and Rituals were built for had the money before the exposure, and what these brands offered was the feeling of having arrived at taste, the feeling of choosing well, in objects that could be acquired immediately and that would be recognised by others in the same position as evidence of the right kind of person.

The brands that have flourished most completely in this register are primarily American, and their global spread follows the spread of American cultural influence with a precision that is not coincidental. In South Korea, where the middle class has been contracting under a labour market dominated by a small number of chaebols and where proximity to American consumer culture has carried aspirational weight since the American military arrived and stayed, the Starbucks cup and the Lululemon legging function as social signals in a language whose grammar was written in California and whose vocabulary updates each season. In India, where the middle class is growing faster than the quality literacy that usually accompanies generational wealth, new money reaches for American brand names because those are the names that decades of global media have associated with having arrived. European middle-class consumers have a noticeably cooler relationship with these brands, and it is because the comparison point is available there in a way it is not available in markets where American cultural output arrived first and without competition. A Breton shirt worn to the point of softness, Belgian shoes that will outlast the decade, linen that improves with washing and a consumer who grew up with access to these things, or who grew up in a culture where knowing about them was ordinary, is not the consumer Lululemon built Ocean to describe.

In May 2026, Starbucks Korea launched a tumbler promotion called "Tank Day" on May 18, the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in which hundreds of pro-democracy activists were killed by military forces under General Chun Doo-hwan. The slogan was "thwack it on the table," a reference to a 1987 police claim used to conceal the torture death of student activist Park Jong-chol, a phrase embedded so deeply in Korean public memory as a symbol of state violence that its appearance as a product tagline required simply the complete absence of anyone in the approval chain who had thought to ask what May 18 meant in the country the brand had been operating in since 1999. The CEO was dismissed. The chairman bowed three times on television. Cups were smashed on the pavement outside a store in Gwangju. The brand built on the constructive, almost noble idea of "the third place", the community, the feeling of being somewhere that knew you, had accumulated no actual knowledge of the place it had been extracting money from for twenty-six years, because knowing the place was never required for the machine to run. Ocean's Land Rover was always pointed somewhere else.

Culture is the living argument a people has with itself across time. return. enters that argument as a reader, not a referee.