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A couple of years back I ended up at an asado in Buenos Aires with a group of Venezuelan rappers, and every one of them was decked out in Carhartt. Until that afternoon I had the brand filed under workwear, somewhere near the boots and the hi-vis, so it took me a while to work out what it was doing. One of them was moving overseas not long after and left me his oversized jacket, which I took down to Patagonia and wore through winds I had no business standing around in. It kept me warm and I stopped asking questions.

That jacket is still the one I reach for, and I was in France last month noticing the same logo on every other corner, on people who have never lifted anything heavier than a laptop. Thirty years of rappers, skaters and students wearing it, and as far as I can tell the company never once went looking for any of it.

In today's issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Back in 2012, on a farm in northern California, a plumber left a heavy canvas jacket behind because he didn't want to carry it home. It got worn every day through a freezing autumn out in the fields, and then left on the same hook, because there wasn't room in the bag. Nobody involved knew what brand it was. It was a Carhartt Active Jacket.

Thirteen years later that jacket was being celebrated in the Tanks at Tate Modern for its fiftieth birthday, except it wasn't quite the same jacket. The Carhartt the plumber knew is still owned by Hamilton Carhartt's descendants in Dearborn, Michigan. The one at the Tate is Carhartt WIP, a separate family company run out of Weil am Rhein on the German side of the Swiss border, which licenses the name and has spent thirty years doing all the cool things Dearborn never had to.

Dickies had the same opening, the same blue-collar origin and the same skaters and rappers turning up in the nineties, and tried to do both jobs with one brand. VF bought it for $820 million in 2017 and sold it for $600 million eight years later, having lost the electricians along the way and not kept the skaters either.

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Sydney Sweeney is lying naked across a pool table telling me Novig is just sports. It's Thursday morning, my coffee is going cold, and I'm already tired, because I can see the whole week coming. Fourteen months ago American Eagle turned a homophone into a national argument and sales went up anyway. Nobody has that accident twice, and the people who commissioned this one had the numbers from the first in front of them.

The response from women in sport came fast and was unusually organised. Ariarne Titmus, four Olympic golds, said she couldn't describe how infuriated it made her. Tilly Kearns posted water polo footage, hair flattened to her skull, somebody's elbow going where it shouldn't, and within days swimmers, surfers and the Australian Institute of Sport had done the same thing, answering an image with footage of the actual work.

What stayed with me was the sentence she's saying while she lies there. Novig is a prediction market in the middle of an expensive fight to be understood as trading rather than betting, and for a full week, inside the loudest advertising conversation of the month, almost nobody argued with the copy.

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Tansanmagnesium's new flagship in Seoul has a climbing hold built into the front of the building, placed so that getting through the door means grabbing it and taking your weight on it. No sign explaining who the shop is for, no window display doing that job. The entrance sorts the customers out before any of them are inside.

Elsewhere this month: a studio drawing typefaces out of gummy sweets, cheese slices and pasta dough with the squish and the light rendered properly. Bandai shrinking the Tamagotchi down to ring size. LEGO's brick-built PlayStation, memory card included. And Amber Skye Alcock, painting ordinary domestic scenes with the technique of a Géricault and something quietly wrong going on in all of them.

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A woman walks a humanoid robot in on a leash and tries to teach it to pronounce Desigual. It can't manage it, keeps failing, and short-circuits in the attempt. DESI84 looks a great deal like the machines Tesla has been building, which is not an accident.

The woman holding the leash is Vivian Wilson, a model who argues publicly for tech regulation and is Elon Musk's estranged daughter. Desigual cast her for Born to Disobey at a point when much of the fashion industry is quietly using generative AI to take the cost out of campaign production.

The robot is a person. They hired an actor to play the machine, which is one answer to a decade of being told the machines are coming for the work.

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