My Night at the Shopping Pep Rally

Image credit: Jeremy Cohen

Cosmetics industry titan Leonard Lauder popularized the phrase “lipstick index” in 2001, when the American economy was retracting around a Twin Towers-shaped hole. Nobody was buying much of anything — except, he noticed, lipstick. It has become a common rule of luxury goods: in every recession, when nobody can splurge for bags or shoes or dresses, there will always be lipstick. 

I wondered what Lauder would have made of the selection at the newly opened New York location of Printemps.  The French luxury department store sells, in addition to many other products, tubes of lipstick in its dazzling beauty corridor from brands like Les Filles en Rouje, Celine, and Guerlain for $44, $78, and $85 apiece. Lipflation, we might call it, and not of the filler variety.

I saw the tubes up close on September 8 at the Shop Rat Summit, an event put on by Substack and hosted by the fabulous Emilia Petrarca, author of my favorite fashion newsletter, Shop Rat. The event brought together a slate of Substack’s most popular writers and gift guide curators in three segmented panels to take on “the state of shopping in 2025.” But I was there for a meta-purpose: to cover the state of writing about shopping in 2025 — including how platforms like Substack sustain and manipulate it.

It was Fashion Week Eve, and the literate and chic were in attendance. Coming up the escalator and onto the gleaming wood parquet floor of the store’s “salon,” I found a room full of 200 extremely well-dressed guests munching on hors d’oeuvres. There were Chanel flats, layers of gold Mejuri jewelry, oversized blazers, and agnès b. snap cardigans as far as the eye could see. A man in a Printemps uniform offered me a glass of cold champagne, which I politely declined (you know what they say about drinking on the job). Across the bar, I saw my friend Iris Haastrup, who runs the Substack newsletter Ex Machina, which focuses on design and culture.