This week feels like a microcosm of the the moment we’re living in: legacy houses rearranging their power structures, lawsuits flying across the retail like holiday confettis, and a record breaking BCFM that suggests shoppers are buying both feelings and fitness trackers with equal enthusiasm. In culture, the year-end lists have begun; crowning new tastemakers, freshly minted billionaires, and even a broadway-bound Mormon Wife. Meanwhile, governments and platforms alike are trying to civilize us: dress better on planes, return to office five days a week, and please don’t be alarmed if your shopping cart knows a little too much about you.
Legacy institutions show their teeth, digital ones rewrite the rules, and taste, quite literally, becomes a shade of white. Below, everything you need to know in fashion, tech, culture and the chaotic forces shaping how we live now.
This Week’s Pins
Fashion & Retail
Pietro Beccari, the current chair and CEO of Louis Vuitton has been promoted. Effective January 1st of the New Year, he will take on the role of chair and CEO of the LVMH Fashion Group and its eight brands: Celine, Loewe, Fendi, Givenchy, Kenzo, Pucci, Patou and Marc Jacobs.
Williams-Sonoma Inc has sued Quince, the DTC clothing and home goods company, alleging false advertising and unfair business prices over the dupe strategy Quince has used comparing their products to retailers like Pottery Barn for less.
Black Friday Cyber Monday generated record sales on Shopify, with $14.6 billion in global sales, up 27% from last year. The hottest product categories included cosmetics, clothing tops & pants, activewear, fitness & nutrition.
Matthieu Blazy’s second collection and debut Métiers d’Art proposal for Chanel took place at the inactive Bowery station platform.
Saks has filed a high profile lawsuit against the former Chief Merchandising Officer of Bergdorf Goodman for breaching a non-compete agreement by accepting a similar role at Nordstrom.
Finance
Former Loewe CMO, Charlie Smith has exited to join London-based smartphone company Nothing to oversee brand, mage, marketing, communications and store design.
Kalshi Co-Founder is Now the Youngest Self-Made Billionaire. At just 29 years old, Luana Lopes Lara has become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. A former professional ballerina turned MIT-trained computer scientist, she reached billionaire status after Kalshi’s valuation surged, making her stake worth over a billion dollars.
Microsoft Teams is rolling out an Auto-Detect Location feature that will use your office building’s Wi-Fi to update your location status and let your coworkers know where you are working from.
News
Ahead of the holiday season the US Department of Travel has launched a new civility campaign titled “The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” with the goal "restore courtesy and class to air travel" with the first request being to dress better.
Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri has announced that all employees will be expected to be back to the office 5 days a week to build a ‘winning culture.’
New York has enacted a new “AI shopping” law that will require retailers to tell customers when surveillance pricing has been used to adjust prices.
Art Basel Miami Beach featuring hundreds of galleries, Modern & contemporary art, and a focus on Latin American artists this year.
The Algorithm
After a Dancing with the Stars run, Whitney Leavitt, the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star, has announced that she will be making Broadway debut as Roxy in Chicago.
Forbes has announced the Class of 2026 30 under 30 honorees from 20 different industries, including Jesse Zhang, cofounder of AI unicorn Decagon; Coco Gauff, tennis star; and Doechii, rapper and singer.
New York Magazine’s inaugural The Culturati 50 list honored fifty influential actors, artists, and creators defining culture in the current year, including Lorde, Sadie Sink and Adam Scott.
Pantone has release the 2026 Color of the Year and for the first time in the traditions 26 year history, it is … a shade of white. “Cloud Dancer” white to be specific.
Pantone’s color of the year is rarely just a color. It’s a barometer, a mood ring, a collective Rorschach test disquised as a design decision. And this year, the world apparently needs… Clod Dancer. An off-white the company says represents “a new start.”
The internet did what it does best.
Designers, artists, and the aesthetically fatigued greeted the announcement with something between confusion and eye-rolling exhaustion. At a time when AI-generated imagery is siphoning attention (and commissions) away from human creators, many expected Pantone to plant its flag in something bold, defiant, maybe even a little unruly. Instead, they got a shade most paint decks would classify as primer adjacent.
That disappointment quickly expanded into cultural critique. Pantone, insisting there were no racial implications to its choice, found itself on the defensive as commentators questioneed the optics of elevating whiteness, literally, during a chapter of heightening racial tension. Even if unintentional, the symbolism landed awkwardly.
But politics aside (if such a thing is even possible anymore), there is something compelling about the idea of a blank slate. Not as an escape, but as a reckoning. Cloud Dancer reads less like neutrality and more like a forced quiet: the pause after a collective overstimulation cycle, the inhale before the next era takes shape. It reflects a mood that isn’t quite optimism and isn’t quite resignation. A cultural palate cleanser.
Perhaps that’s why this color feels so charged. Off-white is never really empty; it’s a space waiting to be marked up, lived in, argued with, reimagined. And maybe that’s the point. After several years defined by saturation, of information, crisis, discourse, and algorithmic everything, Cloud Dancer offers a reset. Not a retreat but a surface on which the next wave of human creativity might insist on writing itself.
In other words, if 2025 was the year of reacting, perhaps 2026 is the year of rewriting. Cloud Dancer may just give us the margin.
As always, thank you for sending part of you Sunday with us. If this new format feels like a gentler on-ramp into the week, that’s exactly the point. And if you want more of The Sixteenth, find us on Instagram for a steady stream of taste, culture and thoughtfulness @thesixteenth__.
