When people who have just heard about High Noon for the first time ask me what it’s about, I often struggle to find the perfect succinct description. But after writing this week’s Long Read, I realized that a kind of perfect summation of the project is an investigation of influence.
The subject has been a recurring theme throughout the course of writing HN, in all its various manifestations — the lasting impression of defunct blogs, the taste-making role of social clubs, when influencers move from selling other brands’ products to launching their own, the influence of algorithms on behavior, and the evolution of the It-Girl — to name a few.
This week, I wanted to take this investigation a step further, and write about something I’ve come to realize in the past several months about the nature of influence — that influence is a multi-stage affair. We’ll get more into what that means in the Long Read. For now, I’ll say ciao and happy sailing into the final days of the year, High Noon style!
xx SCREMES (Shawn)
The Roundup
Links to the stories you should be reading this week
A deep-dive oral history to commemorate 15 years of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. ✺ The death of desire in American cinema. ✺ Philippe Plein’s bizarre gaudy world just keeps on keeping on. ✺ What is up with book covers these days? ✺ A louche true-crime drama of the early aughts. ✺ Eli Keszler’s score for The Scary of Sixty-First serves the goal to “make something as a whole.” ✺ And, why is America’s generation of new ideas stagnating?
The Long Read
The week’s keynote story
Only going to read one thing? Read me.
Into the Land of the Taste-Makers | Shawn Cremer | HN Original
The most influential people right now are not the stars but the publicists, the stylists, the producers. Influence is not about mass appreciation or recognition. It’s about being appreciated and recognized by the right people. Case in point: Harry Lambert is far more influential than Harry Styles. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know his name. Styles is the vessel. Lambert is the artist.
Those oft perceived as being the most influential are so-deemed because of the size of their audience. But who influences the influencers? Those with the most genuine influence on taste and style often are early leaders of niche taste communities.
Taste communities are a sort of subcultural grouping of individuals around a certain specific or nebulous taste profile. There might be a taste community for something as particular as women watch collectors or as abstracted as edgy, post-woke leftism.
The brand consultant Ana Andjelic describes the function of taste communities as a way to better understand consumer behavior from a sociological lens.
“When we shift our focus from an individual to their network of relationships, we start asking different questions: how the communities an individual belongs are structured; what is their dynamics; how the influence spreads within them; who are the most active and/or valuable members. This shift reveals not our inferred, but our actual taste.”
The key idea here is that the stars with multi-million individual followings are not actually the most influential. Rather, specific tastemakers in various niche taste communities generate opinions, content, style, aesthetics, points of view, and even ways of speaking that first penetrate their own small sphere, and then, eventually, when the conditions are right, influence another key figure — one without norm-breaking tastes of their own — but with a large audience, to break the taste community threshold and become widely popular.
This is the Harry Lambert/Harry Styles relationship or the Mellany Sanchez/Drake relationship. Certain luxury brands often capitalize on the taste generation of a niche leader by deploying them in a creative director role. Balenciaga looked at Vetements’ success and hired Demna and Louis Vuitton did the same with Virgil and Off White.
In other cases, the secondary figure (the Harry Style, Drake, Louis Vuitton role) is more nebulous, and certain Taste Generators’ styles leak out through more democratized routes, reaching mass by dint of their followers’ followers’ followers. This is the route of the Kaitlin Phillipses, Natasha Staggs, Giancarlo DiTrapanos.
From this point follows the idea that we are living in a post-fame age. While there are still megastars, their direct influence on lifestyles and tastes has waned. Now, taste leaders are wildly famous to a certain subsection of the population and completely unknown to others. But in this way, taste is still disseminated, leaking into the mainstream via the changing behavior of the various niche community’s members. And in that way, the adage that everyone is an influencer really does ring true.
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Cheers
As the season is getting chillier and darker, there’s nothing like a hot cup of glühwein to warm you up.
1 Bottle Red Wine
3/4 Cup Water + 1/4 Cup Sugar
Juice + Zest from One Orange
20 Whole Cloves
2 Cinnamon Sticks
2 Whole Star Anise
Combine water and sugar in a saucepan to make a simple syrup. Add the orange juice and zest as well as the spices and simmer for about one minute. Reduce the heat, add the wine, and simmer on low for 30+ minutes. Serve with a cinnamon stick as garnish.