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How much would you pay for a gray fleece? Yes, the type thats ubiquitous in corporate cubicles and business-casual work conferences across America. What if it had the Miu Miu logo stitched on the left chest? If you said $2,500, youd be on the money. Miu Mius $2,500 fleece sweatshirt, specifically in gray, has been trending online in recent months, spotted on celebs and featured in dozens of videos across social media platforms. You might think it looks like any other gray fleece. And youd be right. Yet the Miu Miu version has inspired dupes and influenced people to unearth 4imprint jackets from their dads closet or old thrift finds to participate in the trend. For more than a decade, banks, investment firms, and tech companies have co-branded corporate logos on gray fleece vests for their workforces. Worn by everyone from interns to executives, this look, dubbed the Midtown uniform in major cities like New York, has become as ubiquitous in workplaces as the sad desk salad. As my boyfriend was leaving for work this morning he put on the fleece that his company gave him, New York City-based influencer Danielle Carolan said in a recent TikTok while wearing the Miu Miu version. I was like, oh my god, this is literally like a fleece your tech company would give you. Still, in influencer circles the Miu Miu fleeceto be uttered with the same reverence as Andy Sachss coveted Chanel boots in The Devil Wears Pradahas become a cultural shorthand. The Miu Miu fleece is a wearable argument about how taste, comfort, and status work now, according to a recent Substack post from Dot Dot Dot. In simple terms: the ability to look relaxed without looking irrelevant. And for the $2,500 price tag surely theres something fashion normies must be missing to justify the cost? Something about the garment construction or fabric composition, perhaps. No. Its really just a gray fleece made of 80% polyester and 20% recycled polyester. Some have suggested its a social experiment. Or is it a sign of the times? Coinciding with the RTO push, fashion houses have been tapping into the workplace discourse, taking inspiration from the office in runway collections and ad campaigns. Throughout 2025, designer brands like Prada and Miu Miu and more affordable high-street retailers like Uniqlo and Aritzia put their own spin on workwear fashion as companies ushered employees back in the office. That interest in corporate style has continued in 2026, with views on #OfficeOutfits up 811% over the past week, according to Vogue Business. From power dressing to business casual, corp-core is in vogueeven if the Miu Miu fleece is worn predominantly by influencers on their way to Pilates and brunch.
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E-Commerce
At least three-quarters of the speaking invitations I get these days are about AI. But lately, theyre for different reasons. Companies used to bring me in under the assumption that artificial intelligence was going to change everything. So theyd ask me to talk about the jobless future, prompt engineering, or automating marketing online. Today, theyre asking a different kind of question: What went wrong? Where are the promised productivity gains? In other words, why isnt AI helping our company do stuff? And if I were to answer honestly, Id tell them the simple truth: Its because you and your people dont know what you want to do with it! This is not a technology problem or even a people problem, but an organizational one. Most companies are trying to run 21st-century AI-enabled companies on 20th-century industrial age architectures. The goals and the values are simply not aligned. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/adus-labs-16x9-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/anduslabs.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Douglas Rushkoff and Andus Labs.","dek":"Keep up to date on the latest trends on how AI is reshaping culture and business, through the critical lens of human agency.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.anduslabs.com\/perspectives","theme":{"bg":"#1a064b","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420531,"imageMobileId":91420530,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Weak returns The failure of AI to increase productivity isnt just cherry-picked anecdote or idle speculation. According to Microsofts own study, only 25% of AI initiatives achieved expected returns over the past three years. Computer scientist Gary Marcus has been writing about the hype and misplaced hope around large language models (LLMs) for just as long. But the problem here is not that AI cant do great stuff; its that organizations are not yet thinking in a human-first way about technology. Its what Chris Perry, my partner at Andus, calls the Human OS. Companies are trying to integrate AI into their existing workflows without considering the human systems that can not only utilize it, but also grow and improve with it. This means more than training workers on AI interfaces or running trials of AI-derived ads. It means remaking the very structure of your organization around these new opportunities. Its a transition less technologically focused than the term OS may imply. You dont reprogram your workforce around the needs of AI. Rather, you develop a different kind of workplace. Who thought up how a bank works, with a safe in the back and tellers behind special windows? It was a way of creating an interface between lenders and borrowers in a new economic system. Now it seems obvious. Or take the grocery store, with aisles, shopping carts, and cashiers. It is an operating system designed to allow humans to browse, gather, purchase, or even socialize (in the fruit section). These are architectures for human interaction under capitalism and then industrial production. And they worked, largely because the people designing them were taking the human consumers into mind. Lessons from the Industrial Age We dont generally devise our operating systems for labor with the same considerations for the people trying to function within them. Industrial age values of efficiency and productivity led to the assembly line, the sweatshop, and the typing pool. These are environments in which humans are cogs in a machine, and the more repeatable and uniform their tasks, the better. If anything, the values of the industrial age were to remove human beings from the value equation altogether. Assembly lines allowed for unskilled, replaceable workers to replace higher-paid craftspeople. New machines were always valued for their ability to replace labor, or at least allow labor to be outsourced to less expensive labor in Asia. This approach to new technology wont work in the age of AI. And even talking this way will make workers less likely to consider the possibility that you are trying to do anything other than replace them with this stuff. You are trying to augment instead of replace them, right? I sure hope so, because the alternativea world where you are using AIs instead of peoplemeans your only competitive advantage is the size of your contract with the AI company. Moving from “more to better” Assuming you are on Team Human here, then the object of the game is to help your people come to terms with how their own capabilities can be enhanced with this stuff. Sure, they can churn out more PowerPoints or spreadsheets in an hour, but thats not the enhancement on offer here. The possibility is for them to do categorically better, more considered, and more developed work. Instead of using AI to create more volume of what already is (industrial age efficiency), what about using it to help imagine what does not yet exist? Again, this is the opposite of industrial age repeatability and workforce reduction. We have that one down. Its time to move on from more to better. But to do that, your company needs to retrieve its core competencies, rediscover its values, and reclaim its culture. Oddly enough, this is the real AI opportunity: to double down on the human creativity driving your enterprise. Its the very opposite of what weve been doing with technology until recently. But this means building a different kind of human readiness into the very architecture of your organization. You can buy a bunch of AI capabilities, but you need to match them with human processes that can benefit from them in real and sustainable ways over time. It will take more than one article to explain how that works, because it covers everything from talent development and workflows to rituals and incentives. For now, think of it this way: Machines process data fast and accurately. Humans dont process so much as respirate and metabolize. In a successful organization, these two functionsprocessing and metabolizingcan support each other. The way to get there is not simply to buy more AI capability and work on training, but to engage with your people in a way in which they know what they want to do better. They must understand that their nervous systems and sensibilities are going to be valued and trusted as they explore uncharted territory, and that their explorations are being integrated into the companys institutional memorywhatever their apparent contribution to growth or efficiency. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/adus-labs-16x9-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/anduslabs.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more isights from Douglas Rushkoff and Andus Labs.","dek":"Keep up to date on the latest trends on how AI is reshaping culture and business, through the critical lens of human agency.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.anduslabs.com\/perspectives","theme":{"bg":"#1a064b","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420531,"imageMobileId":91420530,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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E-Commerce
A major winter storm is expected to bring heavy snow to parts of the East Coast this weekend. Amid freezing temperatures, many will be hunkering down and sipping hot cocoa by the fire or trying out new warming winter recipes. Others will be getting creative with an ingredient that wont be in short supply: snow. First snow of the year means SNOW CREAM, one TikToker posted earlier this month. This is literally my childhood, another wrote in the caption of her video, combining fresh snow with milk, sugar, and vanilla to make a bowl of dessert. Other snow-based recipes that have gone viral in light of the recent weather include using snow as a way to freeze ice cream, adding whipped cream, vanilla, and icing sugar to a mixing bowl pressed into the snow. Another is sugar on snow, also known as maple taffy, made by pouring hot maple syrup directly onto snow and rolling it onto a stick for a simple cold-weather treat. While many of these concoctions arent new, comments online are mixed. Ohhhh girlfriend you’re not supposed to make snow cream with the first snow of the season, one warned. Another wrote, Hey so I saw an under the microscope of snow and Id just put that back on the ground. These fears arent entirely unfounded. The National Snow and Ice Data Center suggests avoiding ingesting the first layer of snow covering the ground. “As snow falls through the sky, it can lock in pollutants into its intricate latticework. The most common is black carbon from coal-fired plants and wood-burning stoves, the organization explains. Snow acts like a scrubbing brush as it falls through the atmosphere. So, the longer the snow falls, the cleaner the air, and also the snow.” If you do want to try your hand at making snow cream this weekend, avoid any discolored or yellow-tinged snow (for obvious reasons) and anything that could have been in contact with chemicals, such as salt or ice melt. City snow is also more likely to be contaminated than rural snow. If you live in Manhattan, perhaps you should sit this one out.
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E-Commerce
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