Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

Gaby Goldberg on Trickle-Up Coolhunting: Seed to Harvest Short Clip

24 May 2022 · 1 min

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1:03

In this short commentary, the speaker argues that fashion curation has shifted from a traditional top‑down model dominated by couture houses to a "trickle‑up" dynamic where street‑level creators and internet‑native brands drive trends. The argument is framed using Malcolm Gladwell’s essay "The Cool Hunt," which investigates how trends emerge from the streets. The speaker cites Kanye West’s discovery of Virgil Abloh as a pivotal example: Kanye elevated Virgil, who then spotlighted grassroots designers and streetwear creators, further accelerating the trickle‑up flow. The discussion concludes with examples of contemporary internet‑native fashion brands—Hidden New York, Furniture Archive, and New Bottega—that embody this bottom‑up curation model.

Chapters

And the answer is like, it's curators all the way down. The example that I give is fashion used to be curated top-down from these big couture houses. And over time, you've started to see how fashion has become kind of trickle-up. And I used a lot of this from a piece that Malcolm Gladwell wrote called The Cool Hunt, which is sort of like investigating the process of looking for new trends at street level. And you can see it happening today of like, For example, Kanye West kind of scouted Virgil and brought him up. And in turn, Virgil would find all of these people who were on the ground floor curating and creating and doing things either online or offline in streetwear. And he would bring those up. And you see fashion instead of becoming top-down, it really was becoming trickle-up. And you see people curating from the bottom. You also start to see the emergence of like real internet-native brands. Yeah. So like some of my favorites are like Hidden New York, Furniture Archive, New Bottega,