If you're reading this, it's too late… Drake released three albums last week and you've already opened this newsletter.

As The Margin's creative designer, here's what's currently living rent-free in my head this week: the "quiet luxury" aesthetic is finally on its way out after years of everyone dressing like an off-duty hedge fund manager. Spotify swapping their logo for a disco ball and turning everyone and their mom into an art direction critic (and they’re reverting to the old logo anyway). AI slop imagery is becoming so normal that nobody clocks it anymore. All of which is to say: aesthetics and economics are basically the same thing. Trends are just markets with better moodboards, aesthetics are consumer behaviour with a colour palette, and your FYP is a portfolio of your subconscious spending habits. (Coincidentally, so is your credit card.)

Or maybe I've just been staring at visual culture for so long that everything's starting to look like an overpriced design decision. The real finance stuff is below (written by people who are good at words).

– Jenna Zaitchik, Senior Creative Designer

The takeaway: A shorter trading week in Canada due to the Victoria Day weekend saw the “old economy” take the reins, with the Dow and TSX both climbing more than 1.5%. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq barely moved and the S&P 500 crawled forward with 0.41%. Tech took a breather, which is a flip from the past few weeks, when tech was propping up the indices – now, you get Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) dropping -1.75% even though it beat earnings expectations. Wall Street’s bar for success is on Neptune, apparently. Traditional value sectors got their turn, which is why the TSX outperformed: it's heavy in energy and financials.

At its annual I/O developer conference this week, Google announced it's replacing search as you know it with AI – basically, they said a lot of stuff that meant "we want to keep you inside Google instead of sending you to other websites." AI Mode, where Gemini answers your questions instead of linking to sources, now has over a billion monthly users, and Google says queries are doubling every quarter.

Understandably, a lot of people are freaked out, especially publishers who rely on search results for traffic and attention (omg hi). This is what many have been calling “Google Zero” – the point where Google just stops referring traffic to websites entirely. The company did clarify that people have to opt in to AI Mode in search, but honestly, a lot of damage was already done before the I/O announcement. When an AI summary appears at the top of search results, users click through to other websites only 8% of the time, compared to 15% without one, and from November 2024 to November 2025, traffic from Google Search to publishers dropped by 33%. Publishers are expecting traffic to decline another 43% over the next three years.

This is more than just a problem for publishers. For 30 years, search engines were the solution to the internet’s most pressing issue: how to find stuff. Now Google is replacing that with a chatbot that scrapes other people’s work, summarizes it, and keeps readers inside its own infrastructure. Social media already filters what you see based on engagement; AI Mode adds another layer, giving Google the power to choose what information surfaces in its summaries and what gets buried. The company's always influenced what people find online, but at least with blue links you could click through and check the source yourself. Now everyone's internet will get filtered through the same AI model.

by Sara Harowitz

The Business Of is a series that breaks down the financial realities of specific jobs and industries in Canada – what comes in, what goes out, and what most people get wrong. This is an excerpt of the first instalment, originally run in full on The Margin.

Free Label, a Vancouver-based ethical fashion brand, charges nearly $100 for a T-shirt, and nearly $170 for a pair of shorts. At those prices, you’d likely assume the company turns quite a healthy profit, but that isn’t the case – on a single shirt, for example, the label actually nets nothing.

Ethical fashion brands, also called slow fashion brands, adhere to an array of values, including ethical production (paying craftspeople a fair wage at every stage of the supply chain), sustainable production (using eco-friendly fabrics and making pieces in small batches to minimize waste), and inclusive sizing (offering more than just extra-small to extra-large in order to better serve a range of bodies). These values come at a cost, as Free Label founder Jess Sternberg knows well.

Sternberg, who now produces her clothing in Vancouver, started Free Label in 2015 in Toronto. “Nobody was making things in Canada,” she says of the time period. “And I found especially, there weren’t a lot of people making anything that was geared towards my body shape, which is a little bit more curvy, and in a way that really celebrates and honours the female body. I thought I could fill that gap.”

She had no entrepreneurship or design experience, instead learning as she went, working with Canadian textile manufacturers, pattern-makers, and sewing factories to produce an array of clothing, available in sizes XS to 5X, that fits all kinds of shapes, including bras that go up to cup size K.

By comparison, fast fashion is typically made overseas, where production costs are much cheaper and workers are paid incredibly low wages to sew poorly-made items in unsafe conditions. Because the fast fashion business model is about volume rather than quality, it’s also bad for the environment: the fashion industry is the second-biggest consumer of water, and fast fashion in particular leads to increased carbon emissions, the production of non-biodegradable microplastics, and toxic chemical run-off in waterways, particularly in countries like Bangladesh, where these clothes are often made.

Read more

Jenna Zaitchik, Senior Creative Designer: Everyone says Gen Z has no brand loyalty, but that's backwards. Gen Z is incredibly loyal – they just want a brand that looks like something. An Owala and a gas station tumbler hold the same amount of water, but Owala has fun colour combos and is stealing market share from Stanley.

The minimalist brands millennials built their personalities around are struggling. Glossier's valuation has dropped from $1.8 billion to under $1 billion and just closed 9 of its 12 stores, while Everlane sold to Shein this week after years of losses. Minimalism was a good business decision for a time – cheap, easy to scale, and broad appeal. But once every brand went clean and minimal, nobody stood out anymore.

Gen Z decided they prefer a little bit of character. So now we get products like Liquid Death, water in a can that looks like an energy drink. Starface makes pimple patches shaped like colourful stars. David produces protein bars that actually stand out from the competition.

A good visual identity shouldn’t be an afterthought. It's why you picked that one off the shelf, why you followed that account, why you bought the thing before even checking the price. Gen Z would rather look interesting than rich, and right now, the brands that look like nothing aren't getting picked.

From The Margin group chat:

If you liked this newsletter, hated this newsletter, or are totally indifferent to it, hit the reply button and tell us why! We’re so lonely.

This week’s contributors: Sara Harowitz (writer), Mark Yuen Visuals (photography), Tyler Haw (audience engagement), Jenna Zaitchik (senior creative designer), Shazia Khan (social media strategy manager), Kat Angus (deputy editor), and Eric Wainwright (editor in chief).

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