MILLENNIAL DIARY
CLOTHING retailer Zara has found itself at the centre of a furore — not regarding its questionable manufacturing practices, its unsustainable business model or its poor record on accessibility for disabled patrons... but for its new logo.
There are few things that stoke the fires of millennial discontent quite like controversial typeface decisions. The all-caps new logo kind of looks like the old logo pressed together from both ends. Letters overlap. Your throat constricts just looking at it. It makes people feel claustrophobic, anxious: what could be more perfect for Zara, proud home of the high street’s most savage queues and tachycardiac sale racks?
The previous iteration of the logo was stretched out — an embarrassment of luxurious white space between words. It felt laidback, calm, expansive: the precise opposite of Zara’s brutal returns policy.
Studies show that nicely spaced well-designed layouts lead to higher cognitive focus, more efficient mental processes, and a stronger sense of clarity in viewers. By assaulting us with its jangled design before we even enter the shop, evil genius Zara is lowering our defences, making us feel muddled and woolly and more vulnerable to the lure of ruffled knit trousers and yet another white blouse with a ‘fun’ twist.
It’s no wonder Zara enjoys just a one-star rating on Trustpilot. It’s trying to hack us.
The squashed logo is me, trying to get through the throngs of glazed women at the ‘All €7.99’ rail, to reach a leopard print blouse. The squashed logo is me, trying to get out of that erroneously ‘large’ labelled blouse in the hot unforgiving chokey of the dressing room, convinced that I am stuck there, with my arms over my head forever.
It is said that the best graphic design is a reflection of what culture is feeling already — that the current yen elsewhere for pastel, flat, sans-serif millennial brands represents the desire for an ordered world. But Zara knows the world is not neat. This is a logo for Brexit, a logo for Trump, a logo for MeToo and data breaches and Instagram’s new algorithm and the extortionate price of Freddos.
And let’s face it, Zara could rebrand entirely in Comic Sans and sell dresses crafted from pieces of the ozone layer itself, and we’d still queue up for 40 minutes to be insulted by its checkout staff. You just can’t argue with that style at those prices.
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The internet has crowned its new king: Andy King, producer of Fyre Festival, whose misguided dedication to the event has become the stuff that memes are made of.
During the Netflix documentary on the disastrous festival, King recounts how the festival’s founder, Billy McFarland, approached him when Bahamian customs had detained the festival’s water supply, saying: “You’re our wonderful gay leader and we need you to go down [to customs]. Will you suck dick to fix this water problem?”
Says Andy: “I literally drove home, took a shower, I drank some mouthwash... I got into my car, to drive across the island to take one for the team. And I got to [the customs officer’s] office, fully prepared to suck his dick.”
As it turns out, he didn’t have to. The customs officer “couldn’t have been nicer”. But Andy King told his story and became a folk hero, became a ‘friendship goal’ — “If you don’t have people like Andy King in your circle, you don’t have people in your circle,” went one popular tweet.
A mere photo of Andy’s grimly resigned face has become the internet’s favourite punchline: ‘Interviewer: Tell us about a time when you went above and beyond for a client’ or ‘Please select payment method’ and so on.
That’s right folks, just over a year after the Weinstein scandal, we’re all having a lol about an employer instructing an employee to perform a sexual favour for the benefit of a company. Ha-ha-ha!
After going viral, King was interviewed by Netflix for a short promo video cheerfully captioned, “Andy King has seen all of your FYRE Fest memes — and he loves them!” King talks about how he didn’t know what ‘trending’ even meant until he had become ‘a noun, a verb, an adjective’ before smoothly segueing into selfpromotion: “We’ve started another Gofundme which is now focusing on paying back all the labourers...
“If I can drive positive influences and a lot of positive energy towards, you know, social and environment impact — which is what I base my business on, then I think I can utilise this moment to do a lot of good.” It is a truly astounding piece of 2019 PR.
Fyre was an almost entirely millennial fable: we see the bitter millennials who flew to the Bahamas for a luxury weekend with supermodels only to be met with disaster tents, soaked mattresses and no food; we see the regretful and resentful millennials who were brought in to do the marketing; the smug millennials who knew all along it wasn’t going to work; the fatally self-assured millennials who cooked up the whole thing. None of them comes across as particularly likeable.
Andy King is striking in the documentary for being from an older generation. He is not a digital native, he doesn’t have any social media at all. He claims to not have known what a meme is until he became one. And yet Andy King — who was undoubtedly complicit in the sh**show of a festival and partly culpable for its failure — is making the documentary work for him as if to the manner born.
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This week in Things Women Can’t Do: have a face! Holly Carpenter, and her face, competed in until last Sunday when she was eliminated. Holly’s face betrayed her disappointment at the news, thus sending Twitter into a meltdown over her ungraciousness.
Holly had performed a nostalgic Beauty and the Beast themed dance. This was a move squarely aimed at the millennial vote because Belle, being the only one with a discernible personality and interests of her own, is every 27-yearold woman’s spirit-princess. Holly, in the yellow dress of our most taboo fantasies, was living the dream. No wonder she was devastated.
Perhaps we would have been able to forgive her if she broke down in tears, long eyelashes glittering prettily as she mournfully met the benevolent smile of Nicky Byrne. Like a lady.
But instead Holly looked pissed off; a halfhearted attempt to make the right noises tailed off with: “I’m really glad for the experience and all of that kind of stuff you’re supposed to say...” It was my favourite television moment of 2019 so far — and I’ve watched both Fyre Festival documentaries.
Holly, like Belle before her, disrupts our notion of how princesses should behave. We’re so used to seeing Holly’s impervious tribe on Instagram, violently cheerful and managed to within an inch of their life... so used to it that seeing her react like a human shook us to our core.
And Holly was unapologetic, speaking to Ryan Tubridy on RTE Radio One, she mused: “So if some randomer from the back arse of nowhere wants to tweet me… What was I supposed to do? Jump up and down and smile when I got eliminated?”
This beauty is a beast too. And you know what? I can’t help liking her more for it.