Culture Talk(s):Your Weekly Hit of What’s Shaping Brands, Creators, and Culture
Fake Mink’s in Gucci, Elton has a Tesco Meal Deal and The Green Party won a by-election.My Grandma would turn in her grave if she heard me say all that in one sentence. This week we are bombarded with FASHUN as Fashion month begins again, but aside from Demi Moore’s dog stealing the show at Gucci our focus is elsewhere, think BRAT X Cash APP, Ezra Collective and Dove raiding Reddit for their most recent OOH work. BRAT IS NEVER GOING AWAY.
Charli x Cash App
The fictional bank card from Charli XCX’s new film The Moment has officially broken the fourth wall. The once-make-believe brat card is now real, thanks to a collaboration between Cash App, A24, and Charli herself o giving everyone a chance to literally tap into the era. The brat universe has never just been about the music; it’s been about world-building, lore, and aesthetic down to the tiniest detail. The brat Cash App card, available now for $5 directly in the Cash App, is the logical conclusion of a pop moment that refused to stay contained to streaming. This is IP extension done right: organic, cheeky, and deeply in character. The card doesn’t just reference the film - it IS the film, walking around in your wallet.
Dove has done something quietly radical: it handed its entire campaign over to Reddit. The new ‘Dove r/eal Reviews’ campaign saw the brand put its Intensive Repair 10-in-1 Serum Mask in front of the internet’s most notoriously unfiltered community, then commit to sharing the first 50 reviews - positive, negative, and everything in between - completely unedited. No cherry-picking, no polished testimonials, no brand gloss. An immersive pop-up in New York’s Flatiron Plaza brought the reviews to life in physical space, with the campaign rolling out across OOH, digital, social, and live review streaming. In a beauty landscape drowning in paid partnerships and algorithmically curated opinions, Dove doing the opposite is a genuine brand statement. The name is delicious too - r/eal Reviews, the Reddit thread format baked right into the campaign identity. Cheeky, clever, and completely on brand for a company that has spent two decades betting on real over aspirational. It’s the anti-campaign campaign, and it hits harder for it.
Nothing
Nothing have taken their anti-tech tech brand to the streets - literally. Wild posting campaigns plastered across cities with Nothing’s signature transparent aesthetic and deadpan copy. In a digital-first world, there is something viscerally exciting about a brand that chooses brick and mortar over pixels. Nothing’s brand positioning has always been about being the antidote to the bloated, feature-stuffed smartphone market, and this campaign extends that logic perfectly into physical space. It’s tactile, it’s irreverent, and it will absolutely end up on someone’s mood board before the week is out. Plus it’s pink and there is an Elton John Lookalike. So understandably we love it.
This is the collaboration that nobody asked for and everybody needed. Ezra Collective 0 the Mercury Prize-winning jazz collective - performed for COLORS, soundtracked by the olfactory world of Diptyque. The result is a triptych of sensation: music you can feel, a visual world you want to live in, and a fragrance you can almost smell through the screen. Diptyque have always sold a lifestyle more than a product, and this partnership makes that proposition literal. You don’t just buy the candle; you buy entry into a world where jazz plays and everything smells of fig and amber. Making fragrance audible is a stroke of creative genius, and the execution is flawless.