Thin Body Types Are all the Rage, Trumping Diversity in a More Conservative Ad-Sphere

Plus: AI, old flicks and more pop-culture trends

Spooky snz is already upon us—holiday creep is real—with The Conjuring: Last Rites levitating to the top of the box office and PSL’s record-breaking sales exorcising a few of Starbucks’ demons. Elsewhere in the bedeviled pop cultureverse:

Twiggy vibes

Inclusive images: out. “Aspirationally” fit and thin: in. Here’s the backdrop—the swole bro Pete and Bobby Challenge, Mar-a-Lago face and POTUS publicly drooling over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans-genes campaign. It’s little wonder then, yet still disheartening, that media and advertising are reverting to stereotypical beauty and size standards. Gap’s latest dance-centric campaign stars the willowy women of Katseye (400 million views and counting). A controversial Guess ad in Vogue features an AI-generated model who’s conventionally gorgeous, blonde and lithe, adding in a machine-made twist that could never be replicated IRL. And one of the world’s most famously ripped athletes, Serena Williams, is promoting weight-loss drugs for telehealth brand Ro. The commitment to body positivity, once lauded but now gone the way of some short-lived DEI pledges, appears to be off the mainstream marketing diet.

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Creatures, classics, Croisette

And speaking of AI (isn’t everyone?) OpenAI plans to turn its animated short called Critterz into a full-length feature to debut at … wait for it … the Cannes Film Festival, the industry’s most prestigious showcase. Execs at the tech company think “Critterz” will hawk its tools more effectively than your average product demo. No word yet on its actual chances at a Croisette screening. And in another incursion on Hollywood’s vaunted turf, the Amazon-backed Fable Studios (“the Netflix of AI”) aims to reconstruct 43 lost minutes of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, strictly for “academic” purposes. The project touts the Showrunner app that lets users make their own animated TV series. Even as Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Universal sue Midjourney for copyright infringement, the creative community’s anxiety justifiably ratchets up and the bot battle continues.

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Newstalgia

Gen Alpha might just save the cineplex–apparently movie theaters are a novelty to them. And they turned out, among a cross-generational audience, to watch Steven Spielberg’s classic thriller “Jaws” in IMAX and 3D, bringing in $10.5 million over the Labor Day holiday. Not bad for a 50-year-old flick with unending TV mileage. Theaters were packed all weekend at one of the highest-grossing AMC locations in the country (in Burbank, Calif.), which was the first eye opener. The second? The crowd cheered loudest for the trailer to the upcoming 40th anniversary showing of Back to the Future, not the next Avatar or Wicked. (Nicole Kidman still gets her flowers too, btw). It’s a clear signal. Open the vaults, create an event. Maybe the old Bijoux can stick around after all.

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