The Digest 28

Vibe-matching marketing, Mom Water, and the comeback curd

Jordan Bogigian

Jun 12, 2025

Welcome back!

I think I’ve finally nailed the structure of the Digest after much experimenting. This week you’ll encounter:

Aperitif: A little taste of what’s to come

Main Course: A selection curated to keep you fed

Digestif: A download on this week’s hard pill to swallow

Dessert: A weekly book rec as the cherry on top

Let me know in the comments what’s speaking to you in this week’s edition. xoxo

At The Composite, we serve up a curated collection of culture, beauty, and critique. Think of The Digest as your quick, thoughtful read to replace the doom scroll, offering a bite of everything you need to stay in the loop. Come hungry. Leave questioning everything.

Aperitif

A little taste of what’s to come

Trending Tidbits:

These trends are tracked not for following, but for what they reveal. Not necessarily an endorsement, but a thought starter

🍡 Sorbet Nails

🩳 Foldover Micro Shorts

✂️ The Purdey Bob

🪩 Mirrors on Clothes

🩰 Embellished Ballet Flats

The Main Course:

A selection curated to keep you fed

Torrid is closing up to 30% (180) of their stores. The amount of in-person options for plus size shopping is already abysmal, and while Torrid may not have the best styles they have been a dependable source for many

“The Most Anticipated Books Of Summer 2025”, according to Bustle

In other literary happenings, Dirt Media collaborated with Urban Stems to create a Mrs. Dalloway bouquet, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name

A few weeks ago I mentioned the yassification of the gas station1 This week, Mecca + Dr Jart both created convenience store brand activations2. I think we’ll see more working class brand cosplay, like the recent boom of dry cleaner content. Diners, drive-ins, mechanics - anything retro classic and nostalgia-inducing that also evokes a “simpler” time

Several outlets are proclaiming guava as the flavor / scent of the summer, and I feel strongly that this is the gateway drug to my self-proclaimed next big beauty fruit: rhubarb (summer ‘26?)

Staying true to one of my favorite beats to cover - Hellmann’s Mayo’s marketing. The brand is looking for a “tender-loving couple to say ‘I Dip’” in a Vegas wedding officiated by their mascot, Manny Mayo

Of course, we already know that mascots are the moment, from NY Liberty’s Big Ellie to CeraVe’s goat, Sarah V

Hellmann’s also hopped on a trend we discussed in last week’s Digest (and so did Beis)

A coworker of mine (Hi Elyse) put me on to Corner.Inc, “the first personalized map that shows you places based on your taste, not the internet’s”

“Low maintenance” (but not low maintenance enough that they can’t profit from it) beauty is still hot. Crown Affair’s recent campaign focuses on less time styling, more time for _______.

This post on Threads piqued my interest in Mise En Scent, a company that creates candles based on films. Very much aligned with the move towards more multi-sensory, world-building marketing (remember this?)

Somatic scents that embody an experience are only becoming more popular. See Dirt Media’s (again) “Sensuous Skateboarding”, a series that appealed to all the senses and culminated in a perfume “bringing the experience of skateboarding directly to your nose”

Beauty will continue to become hyper-personal. Muhza is a skincare brand whose products are designed to sync with your menstrual cycle

I mentioned cottage cheese in last week’s Trending Tidbits section, and this article describes it as “the comeback curd” (lol). Meanwhile, Vogue is touting ricotta as the underrated, protein-packed cheese of choice

The latter article felt very reminiscent of the Vogue 1970s diet (a bottle of wine + 3 eggs per day), a sentiment that was echoed on their recent IG post about “the glute diet”. Icky!!

Beverage brands like Mom Water, Girl Beer, and Gay Water are leaning into consumer archetypes to “catch a vibe”

Similarly, this article delves into how beauty brands are marketing fragrance to Gen Alpha, who are new to shopping scents, with a “vibe-matching approach”. Evereden leads “with use case scenarios, mood and personalities instead of the technical notes”

Anddd we have another celeb beauty brand - enter Isima from Shakira. Very Gen Z / Alpha friendly packaging, interestingly

I’ve now seen two of this format of social post this week (cannot find the other to save my life) and I expect to see it more in the coming weeks

Willy Chavarria is partnering with Tinder in a Pride campaign. AWAY hooked up with Grindr for theirs, which is very funny tbqh

Luggage brand Beis launched a book club - “Booked with Beis” - and their first pick is The Wedding People by Alison Espach (a good choice as it appeals to a lot of reader types)

J.Crew continues to lean into all things literary with a feature on Josh Hickey, founder of the Hydra Book Club

Weirdly niche trend - teeeeeny tiny catalogs/magazines, seen on both J.Crew and Elle

The biggest trends to come out of Miami Swim Week, according to Fashionista, include extravagant beading, high-octane glam, and matching headwear. More importantly, of the 16 swimwear brands mentioned in that article, none carry extending sizing. Detailed breakdown here3

Anyway… boy short swimsuits are in, babe. The article also cites an increase in popularity of modest swimwear

Just yesterday I received a report from WGSN about “modest glimmers” in fashion through playful, individualistic modest dressing

TikTok has banned the hashtag #SkinnyTok amidst concerns that the platform was glorifying disordered eating and anorexia in the pursuit of extreme thinness. Will it help?

Every week there’s a new version of this article about wellness tech. Related: Cosmo dropped a series about wearable tech

Two profiles on women who star in pieces of entertainment I loved recently - Helen J Shen as Claire in Broadway’s Maybe Happy Ending (MUST see) and Holmes as Hailee in Overcompensating

Digestif:

A download on this week’s hard pill to swallow

Something that has never sat well with me: Good American and other Kardashian-Jenner brands identifying as inclusive. Yes, some of the family’s many brands do, indeed, carry extended sizing. However, to me, claiming inclusivity as a brand is SO MUCH MORE than size range - it’s about the culture that your company creates. It’s no secret that I’ve historically taken issue with the ethos of these brands and their seemingly gleeful perpetuation of diet culture, from Lemme’s GLP-1 capsules4 to Khloud’s protein popcorn, hawked by the woman who also created an entire television series about curating a “revenge body”. Most recently, I took major issue with Skims’ “Ultimate Hips” body padding product.

The Kardashian-Jenner sisters have created an entire career built on making you feel like shit about yourself. Once you’re feeling sufficiently insecure, they magically provide a solution in the shape of a pill or padding or popcorn. And while of course this is the entire structure of marketing as a whole, it somehow feels exceptionally insidious coming from them as they leverage their privilege and wealth to achieve generally unattainable goals - and then lie about their methods5 and profit off our attempt to close the gap they’ve manufactured.

Let’s chat about what led me to this rant at this point in time: Good American launched on ASOS. The launch was publicized via a collab post from both brands and GA cofounder Emma Grede, who says in the video that “We want Good American to be as accessible as it is empowering”. And while that sounds good in theory, it’s not reality.

Plus size shoppers immediately clocked that the majority of pieces on ASOS did not come in the full size range, with one commenter noting that when you filter the collection by the larger sizes, only 11-30 of the 90 pieces populate.

Even worse, once Samyra, a plus size advocate with a large following, commented on the post and called out the hypocrisy, the brands began to delete comments and hide the complaints from view.

And while the onus of this falls on ASOS too, it’s very much a byproduct of the exclusive culture that brands like Good Americans and Skims have created. If there’s one thing that the Kardashian-Jenners are good at, it’s making money. We’ve been screaming for years that selling clothes to plus size consumers is lucrative - and while most have chosen to ignore us, it’s clear that this crew heard us loud and clear. They know it’s business-savvy. So, yes, they sell plus sizes, but to what end?

In my eyes, it’s a clear money grab without the ethos and intention needed to make it matter. Two things can be true at once: we can acknowledge the positive of having more options while also feeling indignant that these are the circumstances in which they’re presented to us. While ASOS is doing damage control in the comments and saying that more plus sizes are being added every day, plus size shoppers deserve to have the same access, at the same time, in the same places. ALWAYS.

Dessert:

A weekly book rec as the cherry on top

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

“Mining the darker side of nostalgia”, this book dives into how the cultural influences of the 1990s into the 21st century have shaped the way we view women as a collective, and, perhaps most importantly, ourselves as women. From The Spice Girls to the porn industry to reality television, it’s immaculately researched and scarily illuminating. I’m currently reading and am incredibly engrossed in this.

bustle

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