Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick, The Trend Report™
💭 Thoughts on ML Buch’s Suntub, Manic Panic hair dye, and framing digital culture independent of place.
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick is a writer currently based in Barcelona, Spain. He runs the trends and culture newsletter The Trend Report™ and works as a copywriter, journalist, and social media marketer/strategist. His background is in television and digital production and development. He loves small dogs, short shorts, and sparkling wine.
🎯 Current focus
This is going to sound both weird-and-not as I’m a writer but haven’t had anything of this level published yet: I’m working on a new novel! My third, to be exact. It’s a cute lil story about a couple who move to an island in another country only to find that…life is hard. And there’s a sea monster who kills people! It’s been fun, as I’m mining a lot from life and also participated in a Granta workshop to turn up the volume on it. It’s the sort of project that is a testament to just doing what you love, as my other two books found no home — Yet! — with publishers despite my agent and my doing our best. Now I’m trying to divorce myself from the mythologies of what “success” means in creative writing, while writing about the mythologies and history of place. Also? Starting to develop a Trend Report™ event series, with url and irl components in the name of community building. Stay tuned!
🌇 The necessity of IRL experience in framing digital landscapes
I’ve been thinking a lot about what place means, largely as a springboard for culture and connections. This is obvious as we all “know” you have to be in the right place for things but, having left a city like Los Angeles and all that comes with it, I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to fill the void of living in a “center of the universe” with only online inputs, particularly as someone who writes about trends, taste, culture, and the arts. Is it possible to “do that” independent of place? What are the limits? Can you really recreate or rely upon the internet for (accurate) culture sourcing in 2024? I think so, but I also know that one needs the spark of a rich lived experience in the real world to counterbalance and frame trends big and small. Big, digital, international trends are invalid without little, real-world, local trends. I’m also thinking about TikTok as I’m always thinking about TikTok and how I have intense stage fright around going on digital camera despite knowing I’d love it. Maybe I need to see a hypnotist.
This has been like an eight month long high but I still can’t get enough of ML Buch’s Suntub. I often wonder how writing can “feel” like music, to evoke the oddity and emotion and full body feeling of life — and I think this album sort of “does that,” as this piece of experimental music with lyrics that are so strange, often unreal, with images of flames shard goo, fleshless hands, and flapping faces. It’s beautiful and, while Brat held Buch off for a moment, Buch still won. Otherwise, Nourished By Time and the new Miranda July book have been doing it for me as far as the absurdity of life.
🕉️ Mantra of the moment
I don’t have to settle for things being okay! Things can and should always be great. I think that for myself, as far as where I am, who I surround myself with, and how I spend my time. I’d also like to get off my computer more.
🧑🎓 Being a student of the present
Someone in my industry that I look up to? For trends and culture reporting, Robin Givhan. I cannot think of a writer more thoughtful and more intelligent than her, someone who is a student of the present but also an elite scholar of taste. Do we need more critics in the world? Not if we still have Robin Givhan. I do miss her style reporting though, now that she’s shifted to larger cultural criticism. For fiction, Patricia Lockwood. I don’t think anyone else has successfully bridged the online and offline worlds better than she has — and with so much heart and soul too! A uniquely eloquent (and Millennial) writer who really just is doing her own brand of “thing.” I’ll have what she’s having!
🌊 Large bodies of water
I am looking forward to swimming in a large body of water that is not a pool. I also bought my first swim briefs to wear, which was more of a challenge to myself to accept that I am an aging body whose appearance doesn’t matter. Hopefully it enables me to be a bit more loosey goosey — and get out of my head!
🗣️ Face-to-face discourse
The best/worst answer of my favorite way to consume content is TikTok. It’s like a television I imagined where all the channels are designed for me, where flipping the channels itself is the gesture of consumption. Perfect for the indecisive and easily distracted! Is it rotting my brain? Most definitely. But something about it hits. The exact opposite — The real answers! — is when someone texts or calls or tells me in person something they love that I should read, or that we discuss after having read something together. Very underrated to do discourse face-to-face!
📲 Loewe’s thoughtful approach to social
I’ve been keeping an eye on luxury fashion brand Loewe. Loewe on TikTok who are using social listening (a la, what creators and gestures are in?) to contextualize fashion and art while playing by the rules of trends. Unlike Marc Jacobs, who is doing a really interesting copy+paste trend campaign that all brands dream of pulling off with such seamlessness and speed, Loewe is taking a quieter and more thoughtful approach. It’s accessible yet cerebral: a perfect balance. No one is doing social like the fashion brands these days! Also The B-52’s’ TikTok. I don’t think we give shitposting enough respect.
One thing I can't live without, and why? Spiritually, my partner Bobby but, physically, the Manic Panic Electric Lizard and Electric Banana dyes. Bobby helps me think through and get through my ideas and the Manic Panic is sort of a baseline “drag” for being myself. Technically though? The bookmarking function on Twitter.
😵 Death by community management
Most brands — Even the brands I work with! — are too reactive and or scared of not meeting an executive or corporation’s idea of success that “social” posting is hollow shit without a point of view. It’s a real problem! Trust one or two people to post — and let them run with support. I also think this is the perfect manifestation of how, a decade and a half after internet marketing really hit, business and technology have corroded the funnel, taking down all of social media and the internet with it. Brands don’t know how to communicate anymore! And they ruined all the digital “third spaces” that we had. No wonder people are getting offline and the cores have ended: people are tired of being haunted by brands. I feel like a great social downsizing is going to happen via tech’s precariousness and general layoffs, which may enable the internet to be a freer space again. Just a thought! It feels like you’re talking to a narc whenever a brand shows up online, no matter how good they are. Death by community management.
Follow Kyle on Linkedin and check out their Substack here.
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