June has been a wild ride so far, and I’m sending this newsletter out en route to Founders Forum Global at Soho Farmhouse. Over the next few weeks, we will only share one newsletter a week and will be back to regular programming from July.

This week's news recap was Apple's developers conference, and also for all the fashion tech enthusiasts in our network. Remember to reply to this if you will be at Cannes Lions in a couple of weeks.

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. OpenAI’s biggest redesign of ChatGPT since launch.

2. Waymo acquires Apple’s former autonomous vehicle testing site for $220 million.

3. WWDC 2026: Apple rebuilds Siri with Gemini, rolls out iOS 27, and sharpens its AI strategy.

4. Fashion Tech’s largest-ever industry conference.

5. eBay backs AI textile-sorting startup Trosort.

1. AI PLATFORMS AND CAPITAL STRATEGY

OpenAI’s biggest redesign of ChatGPT since launch.

What’s happening: OpenAI is preparing the largest redesign of ChatGPT since the product launched, recasting it as a super app built around AI agents, coding tools, image generation, and third-party integrations. The overhaul begins rolling out across web and mobile in the coming weeks. A senior employee put the internal conviction plainly: "Chat is dead." Business customers already account for 40% of revenue, a figure OpenAI aims to raise to 50% by year's end. Codex, its coding product, has grown sixfold to more than 5 million weekly active users since February and forms the spine of the new experience. Launch partners include Canva and Booking.com. The redesign is timed to an IPO that could value the company at $850 billion.

TLDR:

• The redesign moves ChatGPT from question-and-answer to task execution. The frame is no longer assistant, it is an agent.

• Codex is the proof of concept: sixfold user growth in four months, now being embedded into the main product for a general audience.

• Business customers at 40% of revenue, target 50% by year end. The IPO pitch is built on this number moving.

• ChatGPT, Codex, and product teams have been consolidated under new CPO Thibault Sottiaux. Several senior executives, including former CPO Kevin Weil, have departed.

• OpenAI shut down Sora, its video-generation product, less than a year after launch. Consumer-facing initiatives are being shelved in favour of enterprise tools with better margins.

Why it matters: OpenAI is steering 900 million weekly users toward higher-margin tools, ahead of a public listing, and directly competing with Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce for the same corporate budgets. The product convergence between OpenAI and Anthropic, both now pitching enterprises ahead of IPOs, is compressing the competitive window. The tooling landscape being evaluated today will look different before the next procurement cycle opens.

2. PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND CAPITAL REALLOCATION

Waymo acquires Apple’s former autonomous vehicle testing site for $220 million.

What’s happening: Waymo acquired a 5,500-acre autonomous vehicle testing facility in Wittman, Arizona, for $220 million from a shell company associated with Apple. The sale was recorded in early June. Apple had purchased the property in 2021 for $125 million, having rented access to it for years while running Project Titan, its self-driving car programme, which was eventually cancelled in 2024 after billions in expenditure. The facility includes a 115-acre city course, a vehicle dynamics area, a four-mile oval track, and a freeway course purpose-built for autonomous testing. Waymo confirmed the acquisition and said it will use the site for rider-only testing, motion control, and operational training workflows. The company is currently expanding toward tens of thousands of robotaxis annually from a fleet of close to 4,000 vehicles.

TLDR:

• Apple spent years and billions on Project Titan before cancelling it. The physical infrastructure it has built is now directly operational inside the market leader in autonomous vehicles.

• Waymo paid a $95 million premium over Apple’s 2021 acquisition price. Purpose-built AV test infrastructure at this scale rarely comes to market.

• The facility adds a fourth major testing environment to Waymo’s existing network, in Waymo’s first and largest commercial market.

• Waymo’s fleet expansion toward tens of thousands of vehicles makes controlled test infrastructure a hard operational requirement.

• The transaction closes a loop: capital Apple allocated to a cancelled hardware bet is now compounding inside the infrastructure layer of a working one.

Why it matters: The more interesting frame here is what Apple's exit reveals. A decade of Project Titan spending has quietly resolved as physical assets absorbed by the companies that stayed. Autonomous vehicle investors and mobility infrastructure operators should note that the test and deployment layer is consolidating around Waymo's vertical model, from Arizona proving ground to Zeekr factory outfitting to commercial fleet, at a pace the public coverage hasn't fully registered.

3. AI, HARDWARE AND PLATFORM STRATEGY

WWDC 2026: Apple rebuilds Siri with Gemini, rolls out iOS 27, and sharpens its AI strategy.

What’s happening: Apple's WWDC keynote introduced a substantially rebuilt Siri, with Google Gemini now powering the underlying AI layer. The updated assistant launches as a standalone app in addition to its existing system-level presence, and Apple claims it will be more capable, more conversational, and compatible with visual intelligence. Craig Federighi opened the announcement with a privacy commitment: data is used only to execute requests, verifiable by outside experts at any time. iOS 27, compatible with devices back to the iPhone 11, brings performance improvements, including 70% faster photo loading and 80% faster AirDrop. WWDC was Tim Cook's last as CEO. He steps down in September, with hardware engineering head John Ternus succeeding him.

TLDR:

• Gemini under the hood: Apple is outsourcing the AI model layer to Google while retaining the interface, the data architecture, and the privacy narrative.

• iOS 27 runs on every iPhone from the 11 onward. The addressable base for AI-capable Apple devices has expanded significantly.

• “Privacy in AI is non-negotiable” is Apple’s declared positioning against the consumer AI field. The trust argument is the product.

• Tim Cook’s final keynote marks a transition in platform and leadership at the same time. Ternus brings hardware instincts to an era defined by software intelligence.

• The Liquid Glass design system is getting opt-in rollback options, a quiet acknowledgement of sustained user resistance.

Why it matters: The structural implication is clear: Apple has ceded the AI model layer to Google while hardening its grip on the interface and the privacy frame. That is a deliberate platform position. The 1 billion-plus active iPhone users now have Gemini's capabilities delivered under Apple's trust architecture. Luxury and retail brands building voice, visual, and ambient AI commerce experiences should note that iOS 27's expanded install base and Siri's rebuilt capability set are the consumer surface area on which those experiences land.

4. FASHION TECH AND INDUSTRY INFRASTRUCTURE

Fashion Tech's largest-ever industry conference.

What’s happening: The FASHIONOLOGY Summit, held at The Glasshouse in New York and co-produced by Manya Jain and Mary Korlin-Downs of All Things Fashion Tech, drew 1,400 attendees across nine panel tracks, an innovation expo, and a sensory gallery featuring live wearables demos, a content studio, and a scent salon. Topics spanned agentic commerce, virtual try-on, trend forecasting and data, wearables, manufacturing and design, the creator economy, brand discovery, and the future of commerce. Every subject on the agenda was actively deployed somewhere in the market. The event was the largest fashion tech gathering the industry has produced.

TLDR:

• 1,400 attendees: founders, brand leaders, investors, creators, and press in the same room. The scale signals institutional weight.

• Nine panel tracks covering agentic commerce, virtual try-on, wearables, and manufacturing. The breadth reflects how many adjacent categories now overlap with fashion tech.

• The sensory gallery ran live product demos alongside a content studio and scent activations, industry convening and experiential proof-of-concept in the same format.

• The summit was co-produced by All Things Fashion Tech, a newsletter-to-conference arc that reflects how serious industry discourse is being built outside traditional media.

• The founding question, what exactly is fashion tech?, has a working answer now. The category has operators, capital, and commercial products behind it.

Why it matters: Creative directors and retail executives with commercial technology decisions approaching should treat the FASHIONOLOGY topic list as a live map of where operational capability is maturing. Agentic commerce, AI-powered trend forecasting, and physics-based virtual try-on are entering procurement conversations. The useful question is which vendors are building genuine category depth and which are still at the pitch-deck stage.

5. CIRCULAR FASHION AND OPERATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

eBay backs AI textile-sorting startup Trosort.

What’s happening: Trosort, a Belgium-based startup founded in 2023, was named the global winner of eBay's 2026 Circular Fashion Fund at an awards event held at The Ned in New York, taking a $300,000 investment from eBay Ventures. Selected from eight international finalists, Trosort was recognised for building the infrastructure that circular fashion has consistently lacked: the ability to process secondhand garments at scale. Its hardware and AI system assign a digital identity to 1,200 garments per hour, gather full metadata, and sort clothing for reuse, repair, upcycling, or recycling. Founder Achille Mathot put the problem directly: the world discards six times more fashion items than it can sort; the rest is landfilled or incinerated. Trosort sells the system as a hardware service, automating resale listings and, as Mathot described it, becoming the brain and heart of sorting centres. He plans to use the investment to build a US team.

TLDR:

• 1,200 garments processed per hour, full metadata captured, sorted by end destination. The throughput gap between consumer intent and circular reality is an infrastructure problem; Trosort is addressing it at the processing layer.

• The system automates resale listings from the sort. The value capture extends beyond the physical sort into the digital commerce pipeline.

• Eight international finalists across the EU, UK, US, and Australia. Each received $50,000. The fund is in its fourth year and has backed more than 30 businesses globally.

• Mathot’s statistic from the stage: the world discards six times more fashion items than it can sort. That gap is where Trosort operates.

• The judging panel included the CEO of the Global Fashion Agenda, the Chief Strategy Officer of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and a senior editor at Vogue. The evaluation frame is systemic, not only commercial.

Why it matters: Luxury and fashion brands with circular commitments on the record should note where their investments are going. The gap between consumer-facing resale programmes and operational reality behind them is a logistics problem the industry has largely treated as a communications one. Capital is now moving toward the actual bottleneck. Brands that treat circular as an infrastructure investment rather than a brand position will hold a structural advantage as EU regulation raises the operational floor.

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New Space Capital’s AGM event in Luxembourg has made me dive deep into all things space. SpaceX’s upcoming IPO will make Elon Musk the first-ever trillionaire and, more importantly, a lot of investors and employees multi-millionaires, flooding the market with capital and excitement to start many more new ventures across a whopping $360 billion new space economy.

If you are a brand leader, founder, marketer, or investor who will be at Cannes Lions, reply to this email, as we have some incredibly exciting invite-only events across luxury, culture, and technology.

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. Sephora is the first one to move beauty into Google’s AI layer.

2. The business of the New York Knicks.

3. The Mall is building a universal feed for fashion.

4. Vêtir raised $5.5 million to bring AI styling into luxury.

5. Pfizer and Eli Lilly are betting on AI drug discovery.

1. BEAUTY, RETAIL AND THE AI INTERFACE

Sephora is the first one to move beauty into Google’s AI layer.

What’s happening: Sephora has become the first prestige beauty retailer to enable end-to-end shopping within Google through Agentic Checkout: product discovery, ingredient queries, basket-building, and purchase without leaving the platform. The integration connects to Sephora’s existing AI infrastructure, including AI Beauty Chat, Smart Skin Scan, and a skin diagnostic tool, completing more than 180,000 scans per month. Sephora has 80 million active Beauty Insider members globally. Future phases will bring loyalty personalisation into the AI experience.

TLDR:

• Sephora is the first prestige beauty retailer inside Google’s Agentic Checkout. The transaction layer is already in place.

• Its 80 million Beauty Insider members give Sephora a substantial first-party data asset to extend into the AI interface.

• More than 20% of consumers who use Sephora’s AI Beauty Chat make a purchase the same day. The commercial signal supports the platform push.

• AI-native discovery inside LLMs depends on multimodal optimisation: text, imagery, and video tuned for how AI surfaces products.

• Sephora’s positioning is clear. The AI platform extends the advisor relationship and carries that service model into a new channel.

Why it matters: This sets a benchmark for beauty commerce inside AI platforms. The strategic edge sits in data architecture, content quality, and platform integration. Sephora enters this shift with a loyalty base large enough to shape personalisation at scale, and with enough behavioural data to make the interface more useful over time. As discovery moves into AI environments, the brands that surface well will be the ones with depth behind the product page.

2. SPORT, CULTURE AND COMMERCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The business of the New York Knicks.

What’s happening: The Knicks swept the Cleveland Cavaliers on 25 May to reach the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, creating a cultural moment with measurable commercial force. Timothée Chalamet’s courtside appearances have generated $52.9 million in media impact value this season, according to Launchmetrics; Kylie Jenner’s attendance since late April has generated $33 million. The Knicks franchise was valued at $9.75 billion in October 2025, up 30% year on year. Playoff revenue in 2025 reached $115 million, and this Finals run could drive gross revenue to $180 million. Kith, the team’s creative director since 2022, has released a Finals capsule; Saie Beauty is an official in-arena partner; and Abu Dhabi tourism holds the jersey patch.

TLDR:

• Chalamet, Jenner, Stiller, Swift, and Kelce have turned courtside attendance into measurable media value, running far ahead of a typical sponsorship readout.

• Saie Beauty entered the arena space and is now seeing a direct lift in retail sales through visibility at MSG.

• Kith’s Knicks x Nike Air Max 95 collab dropped this week via draw entry at $220, with a six-month delivery window. Demand is already locked in.

• Pinterest searches for “courtside outfits” and “Knicks game outfit women” are rising sharply, pointing to a growing fashion and female fan economy around the team.

• Abu Dhabi’s jersey patch places a state-backed tourism brand inside one of the most globally broadcast cultural sports moments of the season.

Why it matters: The Knicks are showing how a franchise can operate as a layered commercial platform across fashion, beauty, tourism, and media. The partner stack at MSG extends far beyond sponsorship inventory. What matters is adjacency to the moment, and the brands that entered with a point of view are now benefiting from cultural momentum that feels organic on camera and scalable off it. This is what a sports asset looks like when it starts behaving like a luxury and lifestyle ecosystem.

3. COMMERCE INFRASTRUCTURE AND DISCOVERY

The Mall is building a universal feed for fashion.

What’s happening: The Mall, founded in October 2025 by Sreya Halder and Ellie Konsker, has launched on an invite-only referral basis with a database of more than 10,000 brands and 4,500 beta testers. The app scrapes retail websites to pull full catalogues and track pricing, sales, restocks, and drops in real time, then uses LLMs and custom models to label inventory and make it searchable across the full database. Users build a personal brand feed and receive push notifications about changes. Any brand can be added by sharing its Instagram or TikTok handle. A B2B data tool for brands launches this summer.

TLDR:

• The Mall aggregates catalogue data from more than 10,000 brands through scraping, bypassing the need for API access or formal partnerships.

• LLMs label and categorise products across the full database, creating search and comparison at the inventory level.

• The B2B product coming this summer gives brands aggregated data on clicks and assortment. The consumer app is building the audience layer first.

• Discovery is social as well as searchable: personal brand feeds create network effects around taste and recommendation.

• The founding thesis is a universal shopping feed, turning fragmented brand browsing into a single searchable system.

Why it matters: The Mall makes visible where digital commerce is heading. Discovery, comparison, and recommendation are moving further away from the brand’s owned environment and into third-party interfaces that aggregate supply. The commercial model sits in the data layer, while the consumer product builds habit and reach. For brands, this raises the importance of how inventory is structured, labelled, surfaced, and compared across external systems. The interface is shifting, and the next advantage will come from being legible inside it.

4. LUXURY TECH AND CLIENTELING

Vêtir raised $5.5 million to bring AI styling into luxury.

What’s happening: Vêtir, the AI-powered luxury wardrobe platform founded by Kate Davidson Hudson, closed a $5.5 million Series A at a $150 million valuation, reporting 200% month-on-month organic user growth over the past year, 9x year-on-year revenue growth, and average order values above $2,500. The platform combines a digital wardrobe for consumers, a stylist dashboard for professionals managing at least $1 million in annual client spend, and an enterprise product for brands. Its lead enterprise tool, Style This Piece, connects to a brand’s catalogue and builds complete looks around a single item, with a conversational AI stylist allowing the client to refine in real time.

TLDR:

• Style This Piece turns a single product page into a full-look selling moment, expanding the basket through styling logic.

• Vêtir trained its model on five years of data from what it describes as the top 1% luxury consumers. That behavioural layer is the company’s core asset.

• The stylist access threshold is $1 million in annual client spending. The product is built around existing VIC relationships.

• Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s are moving in the same direction with AI shopping assistants. The architecture is spreading across tiers of retail.

• Brunello Cucinelli’s AI-driven site is already adapting the journey around shopper intent. Early adoption is beginning to define the baseline.

Why it matters: Luxury clienteling is becoming a software layer as well as a human one. The relevance here lies in how product, styling, and relationship management are starting to merge into a single interface. One useful detail in the same briefing is Launchmetrics’ finding that AI-generated answers around Watches and Wonders leaned most heavily on traditional media, news sources, and niche editorial. That makes authority, consistency, and editorial presence more commercially relevant inside AI discovery. The brands that have built those inputs are likely to surface with more clarity when a high-intent customer asks what to buy.

5. FRONTIER CAPITAL AND BIOTECH

Pfizer and Eli Lilly are betting on AI drug discovery.

What’s happening: Chai Discovery, the San Francisco AI biotech founded in 2024, has signed deals with both Eli Lilly and Pfizer to design novel therapeutics using its antibody AI model, and is now in talks to raise $400 million at a $3.4 billion valuation, after reaching a $1.3 billion valuation at its Series B in December. The company’s Chai 2 model designs antibodies from scratch, targeting proteins previously considered undruggable. When Chai released the model last June, nearly 20 pharma companies reached out within days. General Catalyst, OpenAI, and Thrive Capital are among its backers.

TLDR:

• Chai has now signed with both Eli Lilly and Pfizer. Two of pharma’s largest buyers have moved early on the same platform.

• Chai 2 designs de novo antibodies, generating new molecules instead of modifying existing ones. The commercial interest sits around targets that have historically been difficult to address.

• Chai was valued at $1.3 billion in December and is now in talks at $3.4 billion. The valuation step-up follows visible commercial validation.

• Eli Lilly’s Chai deal sits alongside its $1 billion NVIDIA co-innovation lab and its $2.75 billion collaboration with Insilico Medicine. The pattern points to a coordinated AI discovery stack.

• General Catalyst’s view is explicit: biopharma partners working with Chai in 2026 could have first-in-class molecules in clinical trials by the end of 2027.

Why it matters: Chai reads as an infrastructure signal. The pattern across Lilly’s AI spend, the Isomorphic Labs deals, and now the dual Lilly and Pfizer commitment to Chai points to a market that is buying into the discovery layer early. Value is beginning to concentrate around platforms that become embedded in biologics development, accumulate proprietary data, and sit upstream of the clinical pipeline. Chai’s position with two of the largest pharma buyers suggests it is moving quickly into that role.

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I’m in Luxembourg for New Space Capital’s AGM this week and looking forward to meeting their portfolio companies and learning more about their ambitions, including a tour of SES - the world’s largest multi-orbit satellite network company.

From the offices of Google to punting with the Minister of AI, Kanishka Narayan, on the River Cam and ending with a dinner to introduce the family offices in our network to some of the top Indian tech founders, it was an action-packed trip with the SPF India delegation on their UK safari. Shared a recap here.

June is our busiest month, with so many events. Ending with what has lined up to be a fantastic week for Cannes Lions. If you are an investor, tech founder, or brand leader at Cannes Lions, reply to us to find out what we are up to!

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. Anthropic files confidentially for proposed IPO.

2. The Enhanced Games make their Vegas Debut.

3. Bad Bunny and Zara turn cultural relevance into a sell-out drop.

4. Alo’s wellness-driven luxury yacht activation.

5. Jennifer Aniston’s brand, LolaVie, drove sales by 40%.

1. AI CAPITAL AND THE PUBLIC MARKETS

Anthropic files confidentially for proposed IPO.

What’s happening: On 1 June, Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the SEC for a proposed IPO. Share count and price have not been set. The filing follows the company’s recent $65 billion Series H and signals that one of the most consequential AI companies of the private-market cycle is preparing for the next phase.

TLDR:

• Anthropic moved from major private financing to a confidential IPO filing in rapid succession. The sequencing looks deliberate.

• The filing matters beyond Anthropic itself. Public markets are about to start pricing frontier AI more directly.

• The next phase of AI financing will be shaped by how investors read revenue quality, infrastructure dependence, and margin potential.

• This is the beginning of a new comparison set for the sector, not just another tech IPO.

• The listing window for major AI companies is coming into view.

Why it matters: The AI market has so far been priced largely through private conviction, hyperscaler partnerships, and secondary-market expectations. A public filing starts to expose the harder questions: what revenue is durable, what dependence on compute providers looks like in practice, and how much governance complexity public investors are willing to absorb. For capital allocators, enterprise buyers, and operators building against the AI stack, this is the point at which the narrative begins to meet public arithmetic.

2. SPORT, CAPITAL AND CULTURAL DISRUPTION

The Enhanced Games make their Vegas Debut.

What’s happening: The inaugural Enhanced Games took place in Las Vegas on 24 May, with 42 athletes competing in swimming, track and field, and weightlifting under rules that permit the use of FDA-approved performance-enhancing substances under medical supervision. The event is backed by investors including Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., and Christian Angermayer. One world record was broken by swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, who also received a $1 million bonus.

TLDR:

• The Enhanced Games are now real, not hypothetical. The event has happened, and the format is in place.

• The capital behind it is serious and ideologically legible. This is as much a regulatory and cultural project as a sporting one.

• The commercial opportunity extends beyond tickets to include supplements, longevity products, creator distribution, and wellness adjacencies.

• WADA and the IOC condemned it, but neither has meaningful jurisdiction over an event built outside their system.

• The core question now is how enhanced performance gets framed for audiences, consumers, and brands.

Why it matters: The most important shift here is not athletic performance. It is permission. The Enhanced Games sit at the intersection of sport, consumer health, media spectacle, and deregulated aspiration. That makes it relevant well beyond athletics. For brands, platforms, and investors tracking the next phase of performance culture, the bigger issue is how quickly the language of enhancement moves from the edge into the mainstream consumer imagination.

3. FASHION COLLABORATION AND CULTURAL DISTRIBUTION

Bad Bunny and Zara turn cultural relevance into a sell-out drop.

What’s happening: Bad Bunny and Zara launched BENITO ANTONIO, a 150-piece Spring/Summer 2026 collection, on 21 May. The collaboration had been seeded for months across highly visible cultural moments, beginning with a custom all-white Zara look at the Super Bowl halftime show and continuing with a black tuxedo developed with Zara for the Met Gala. Developed with longtime creative director Janthony Oliveras and M/M Paris, the collection draws on Puerto Rican visual language and sold rapidly at launch.

TLDR:

• Two major cultural placements landed before the formal announcement. The collection arrived after the desire had already been built.

• This was not a standard celebrity capsule. The art direction and cultural coding were handled with unusual discipline.

• The collection’s scale matters: 150 pieces, not a symbolic drop.

• Zara is building a broader collaboration architecture across 2026, and this is one of its clearest expressions.

• The release shows how mass retail can still operate with authorship, timing, and point of view.

Why it matters: Zara’s move here is less about celebrity than sequencing. The brand used performance, presence, and visual memory to establish the collection before the customer was ever asked to make a purchase. That is a different model from the old campaign-led collaboration playbook. For fashion operators and brand strategists, the signal is clear: cultural distribution now begins long before the launch date, and the brands that understand how to build anticipation through live moments will hold an advantage over those still relying on announcement mechanics alone.

4. LUXURY, WELLNESS AND EXPERIENCE

Alo’s wellness-driven luxury yacht activation.

What’s happening: Alo has launched two permanent retail locations in Cannes and Saint-Tropez alongside a broader series of Cannes Film Festival activations, including a takeover of the Hotel Martinez pier and a wellness superyacht offering Pilates, recovery therapies, IV treatment, and meditation in the bay before continuing to Monaco for the Grand Prix. The move follows the appointment of Benedetta Petruzzo as international CEO and extends the brand’s Wellness Club footprint beyond cities such as Los Angeles, New York, London, and Seoul.

TLDR:

• Alo is not treating the Riviera as an event backdrop. It is building a durable physical presence there.

• The Cannes strategy combines real estate, hospitality, and wellness programming into one brand system.

• Petruzzo’s arrival gives the expansion more weight. This is being managed with luxury fluency.

• The brand is building identity through destination and ritual, not only through product.

• Wellness is now being staged in the same geographic and cultural zones that have long been dominated by heritage fashion houses.

Why it matters: Luxury increasingly lives in environments, schedules, and access rather than in the product alone. Alo understands that, and Cannes is being used as a stage on which to make the case. The more interesting development is not that wellness has become premium. It is that wellness now has the confidence to claim a permanent space within one of luxury’s most symbolically charged settings. That changes the competitive map for hospitality, fashion, and experience-led brands alike.

5. BEAUTY, DTC AND PERFORMANCE MEDIA

Jennifer Aniston’s brand, LolaVie, drove sales by 40%.

What’s happening: LolaVie, Jennifer Aniston’s haircare brand, ran its first television campaign using Roku Ads Manager for connected TV. The campaign used a creative concept in which Aniston critiques an over-produced version of her own ad and paired brand storytelling with interactive calls to action via the Roku remote. Roku reports a 40% lift in overall sales across LolaVie.com and Ulta Beauty, alongside a 53% year-on-year increase in new customers.

TLDR:

• The headline numbers are strong enough to move this out of the awareness bucket and into channel strategy.

• Interactive CTV is narrowing the gap between premium video and direct-response media.

• The creative matched the medium. The ad worked because it acknowledged the viewer’s scepticism rather than ignoring it.

• LolaVie used CTV to reach beyond its existing organic and social audience.

• Premium DTC brands are starting to treat the living room as a measurable conversion environment.

Why it matters: Connected TV has often been discussed as a top-of-funnel channel with nicer creative and weaker attribution. That framing is starting to break down. What LolaVie shows is that streaming inventory, when paired with the right format and a recognisable founder voice, can perform more like acquisition media than many brands still assume. For beauty and consumer brands trying to diversify away from increasingly expensive digital channels, CTV is becoming harder to treat as experimental.

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Finally, Friday, and it’s the end of one of the busiest weeks. Tomorrow we will be at Cambridge Judge Business School for the UK-India dialogues, ending with punting on the river with the UK Minister of AI, Kanishka Narayan, himself. Exciting.

I have been deep diving into research and reading about new-age space tech companies ahead of my trip to Luxembourg next week. More on that soon.

Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni’s startup Phia may have the smartest cap table strategy I’ve come across in a while, an important one to highlight.

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. Why the Estée Lauder and Puig deal collapsed?

2. Longevity companies backed by the world’s wealthiest.

3. Celebrities backing Phia, and why does it matter?

4. Apple x Google AI deal revealed.

5. A world model for protein biology.

1. LUXURY BEAUTY AND M&A

Why the Estée Lauder and Puig deal collapsed?

What’s happening: Two months of intensive talks between Estée Lauder and Puig ended in May with both parties terminating discussions. The proposed combination would have created the largest prestige beauty conglomerate in the market, bringing Tom Ford, La Mer, Charlotte Tilbury, Byredo, and Clinique under one structure. Charlotte Tilbury’s change-in-control clause became the public explanation, but it had been known from the beginning. The more serious breakdown appears to have been over price, control, operating structure, and the Lauder side's appetite for another major integration.

TLDR:

• Charlotte Tilbury’s clause may have triggered the public narrative, but it does not explain the collapse on its own.

• Puig appears to have pushed back harder on value and structure than the market expected.

• Inside Lauder, integration fatigue was a live constraint.

• Family control, founder equity, and voting rights were structural tensions throughout.

• The failed deal now resets the map for the next beauty consolidation cycle.

Why it matters: This is not just a failed merger. It is a case study in how prestige beauty deals break when governance complexity collides with strategic ambition. Family voting control, founder economics, and brand identity are no longer side issues in this cycle. They are central deal variables. The more consequential signal is what comes next: Lauder still needs a path to scale, Puig remains free to move elsewhere, and every major beauty group is now recalibrating what a viable transaction looks like.

2. CAPITAL AND LONGEVITY

Longevity companies backed by the world’s wealthiest.

What’s happening: The old symbols of wealth, yachts, jets, and islands, are losing their hold on the cohort, setting the next register of aspiration. What is replacing them is biological runway: energy, recovery, healthspan, lifespan. Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner backed Altos Labs with roughly $3 billion. Sam Altman put $180 million into Retro Biosciences. Larry Ellison directed nearly $430 million into ageing research through the Ellison Medical Foundation. Peter Thiel’s longevity exposure spans NewLimit, Unity Biotechnology, Methuselah Foundation, and SENS Research Foundation. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan committed $3 billion through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The world’s wealthiest are no longer only buying assets. They are funding time.

TLDR:

• Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner: Altos Labs, roughly $3 billion, focused on cellular reprogramming.

• Sam Altman: Retro Biosciences, $180 million, focused on extending healthy lifespan.

• Larry Ellison: nearly $430 million through the Ellison Medical Foundation into ageing research.

• Peter Thiel: exposure across NewLimit, Unity Biotechnology, Methuselah Foundation, and SENS Research Foundation.

• Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan: $3 billion through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative into disease research and long-term biological science.

Why it matters: Luxury has long been built around the display of access. Longevity shifts the frame from possession to performance. The next premium category is not just what people own, but how long they can sustain clarity, energy, and relevance. What begins as billionaire capital allocation rarely stays there. It travels through consumer behaviour, wellness infrastructure, hospitality, private healthcare, and the experience economy. The question is no longer whether longevity becomes aspirational. It already has. The question is which brands and operators recognise early enough that biological advantage is becoming a new status system.

3. CONSUMER AI AND COMMERCE

Celebrities backing Phia, and why does it matter?

What’s happening: Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni closed a $35.5 million Series A for Phia, their AI shopping assistant, led by Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins. The round was oversubscribed and brought in an unusually large celebrity investor base alongside established consumer-tech operators. Phia now sits across retail and resale with a large product catalogue, a growing user base, and a clear next step: moving from price comparison into personalised discovery.

TLDR:

• The round closed above the target, which is the first real signal.

• The cap table has been built for both cultural distribution and operating intelligence.

• Phia is not positioning itself as a shopping app alone, but as an interface layer across commerce.

• Lower return rates suggest the product is solving more than search.

• The next ambition is anticipatory discovery, not transactional assistance.

Why it matters: The ownership structure is part of the strategy here. Gates and Kianni have assembled investors who carry both reach and relevance with the exact consumer Phia wants to serve. That makes this more than a funding story. It is a signal about where power may sit in commerce if recommendation, preference data, and cultural distribution consolidate inside a single layer between consumer and retailer. The strategic question is not whether shopping gets more intelligent. It is who owns that intelligence.

4. AI INFRASTRUCTURE AND DISTRIBUTION

Apple x Google AI deal revealed.

What’s happening: New reporting suggests Apple’s next wave of AI features will keep on-device processing as the priority, but not as the whole system. According to The Information, as cited by 9to5Mac, Apple is using Google’s Gemini model to help train a smaller version that can run locally on Apple devices through distillation. For heavier queries, some requests to the new Siri are expected to run in Google Cloud on a licensed version of Gemini. The same report says Apple recently approved Nvidia’s confidential computing technology in that environment, allowing encrypted processing in the cloud while preserving its privacy position. Apple is also expected to keep using the Private Cloud Compute branding, even as some AI workloads move beyond Apple’s own servers.

TLDR:

• Apple is still prioritising on-device AI, but it is no longer relying on a fully self-contained stack.

• Reporting says Apple is using Gemini to train a smaller local model through distillation.

• Some Siri queries are expected to run in Google Cloud on a licensed version of Gemini.

• Nvidia’s confidential computing technology is reported to be part of the privacy architecture for that cloud setup.

• Apple may continue to present this under Private Cloud Compute, even though some workloads would no longer run exclusively on Apple infrastructure.

Why it matters: Apple has spent decades as the clearest example of vertical integration in consumer technology. This report suggests that AI is forcing a more pragmatic model: local where possible, external where necessary, privacy engineered across both. That is the more consequential signal. Even Apple appears willing to borrow frontier capability from outside its own stack when the product requirement is high enough. Once that logic enters the most tightly controlled platform in consumer tech, it becomes easier for the rest of the market to follow.

5. DEEP SCIENCE AND OPEN INFRASTRUCTURE

A world model for protein biology.

What’s happening: Biohub released a world model of protein biology built around open components spanning language modelling, structure prediction, and discovery infrastructure. The significance is not just scientific performance. It is that a capability with direct implications for therapeutics, drug discovery, and longevity research is being made available as open infrastructure rather than held inside a closed commercial system.

TLDR:

• This is a major release at the intersection of AI and biology.

• Open access changes the pace at which smaller teams can operate.

• The commercial implications extend far beyond academic research.

• Frontier biology is no longer only a proprietary game.

• The infrastructure layer for the next medicine cycle is becoming more widely available.

Why it matters: The cost and speed profile of drug discovery changes when high-quality protein modelling becomes open infrastructure. That does not eliminate the advantage of capital, but it does change where that advantage compounds. The teams that move first to adopt these tools will operate on a different timetable from those waiting for closed systems or outsourced access. In practical terms, this is what the next layer of the longevity economy looks like: open scientific infrastructure underneath, private capital and commercial execution on top.

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End of an inspiring first day hosting some of India’s most brilliant tech founders in partnership with Startup Policy Forum India. We had posted the announcement here.

On my radar this week, a post on LinkedIn peaked my interest in the cultural mood matrix, where we are in proximity to the tech overlords, which defines our general mood.

Also, Gucci confirmed its F1 sponsorship with Alpine, which we shared in the last issue and more details below. Can luxury brand sponsorships across media, sport, and entertainment bring back any of the 50 million customers lost?

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. Ferrari’s first EV arrived at near-universal rejection.

2. NASA says its Artemis moon base will cover hundreds of square miles.

3. Brain-sensing tech is moving into consumer wearables.

4. SOND is turning sleep tech into a closed-loop system.

5. Gucci is making Formula 1 a primary brand platform.

1. LUXURY AND THE IDENTITY QUESTION

Ferrari's first EV arrived at near-universal rejection.

What’s happening: Ferrari revealed the Luce, a five-seat electric vehicle priced at around $650,000 and designed by LoveFrom, the studio of Jony Ive and Marc Newson. The car delivers 1,000 horsepower and reaches 60 miles per hour in just over two seconds, but the design drew immediate backlash, and Ferrari’s stock fell on the day of the reveal. Ferrari’s own marketing leadership described the car as deliberately polarising. The more important point is who it is for: not Ferrari’s existing owner base, more than 80% of whom already own another Ferrari, but a different customer entirely, with China clearly in view.

TLDR:

• Ferrari did not design this for its current owner base. That is the story.

• LoveFrom brings cultural prestige, but the result has landed as estrangement rather than evolution.

• Ferrari needs an EV strategy for regulatory reasons, even if the first move creates visible brand friction.

• China appears to be the real target market, not Europe or the US.

• The risk is simple: the extension weakens the core before the new audience arrives.

Why it matters: The Luce raises the identity question every heritage brand is now facing: how do you enter a new technology category without dismantling the value that made the brand worth extending in the first place? Ferrari is trying to address regulation, geography, and generational change in a single product. Whether that works will matter well beyond the automotive industry.

2. SPACE INFRASTRUCTURE AND SOVEREIGNTY

NASA says its Artemis moon base will cover hundreds of square miles.

What’s happening: NASA has laid out a lunar south pole base that will span hundreds of square miles, using hopping drones, autonomous rovers, delivery systems, and distributed infrastructure rather than a single, concentrated outpost. Contracts worth more than $700 million have been awarded across lunar vehicles, deliveries, and perimeter-mapping systems, with phased development running through 2032. The scale reflects the mission: science, habitation, power generation, mobility, and permanent presence cannot all sit in one place. China is pursuing the same territory on a similar timeline.

TLDR:

• This is not just a moon mission. It is an infrastructure plan.

• The footprint is large because the south pole is operationally fragmented by design.

• Hopping drones and rovers will define the territory before humans do.

• The competition is not symbolic; it is logistical and geopolitical.

• The lunar south pole is becoming the most strategic address off-planet.

Why it matters: This is the clearest sign yet that the lunar economy is being framed like terrestrial infrastructure: multi-vendor, phased, redundant, and politically strategic. The more consequential question is not whether the moon becomes commercial. It is who writes the norms around access, control, and presence before the legal architecture catches up.

3. FRONTIER TECH AND THE BODY

Brain wearables are moving into the consumer market.

What’s happening: Neurable, a Boston-based brain-computer interface startup, is licensing its non-invasive EEG technology to consumer hardware makers across health, gaming, and productivity rather than trying to win the device market itself. The company has already shipped a prototype headset with HyperX and is now positioning its brain-sensing layer for integration into headphones, glasses, and headbands. That move comes as the broader brain health wearable category is projected to grow from $2.9 billion in 2024 to $15 billion by 2035, with smart EEG devices outpacing the wider BCI market. The shift is subtle but important: brain-computer interface is moving out of the lab and into the logic of consumer electronics.

TLDR:

• Neurable is not building the breakout product; it is building the layer inside it.

• EEG is moving into familiar form factors: headphones, glasses, and headbands.

• The category is now being framed as a consumer wearable market, not just a clinical or research one.

• Smart EEG devices are projected to outgrow the broader BCI segment.

• The commercial question is no longer whether this works, but who controls the experience around it.

Why it matters: Wearables have already normalised continuous tracking of the body. Brain wearables push that one layer further, toward constant measurement of cognitive state, attention, and mental recovery. The important shift is not only technical. It is commercial. Once neural sensing starts appearing inside everyday devices, the companies that matter most may be the ones that define the meaning, utility, and trust layer around the data.

4. WELLNESS, HARDWARE AND THE SLEEP STACK

SOND is turning sleep tech into a closed-loop system.

What’s happening: SOND, a Boston startup founded by Bose’s former head of sleep products, has emerged from stealth with $7 million in funding and a debut product called Dreambuds. The in-ear system captures 12 physiological signals, including respiration, heart rate variability, sleep staging, body position, and snoring, then uses a cloud-based AI sleep coach to adapt audio interventions in real time. The device runs without requiring a phone, with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and voice interaction built into the charging case. The proposition is not passive sleep audio, but a responsive sleep system designed to sense, interpret, and act.

TLDR:

• SOND is not selling earbuds in the usual sense. It is selling a closed-loop sleep platform.

• The signal is the stack: sensors, AI coaching, audio intervention, and hardware all working together.

• Removing the phone from the experience is part of the product logic, not a design flourish.

• Sleep tech is shifting from tracking and masking to intervention.

• The category is moving closer to healthcare architecture while still being sold through consumer hardware.

Why it matters: Sleep has become one of the clearest examples of wellness moving from content into infrastructure. The companies that matter now are not just producing better audio or nicer hardware, but also systems that can continuously measure the body and respond in real time. That pushes sleep tech into a more serious category, somewhere between a consumer device, a behavioural platform, and a preventive health layer.

5. LUXURY, SPORT AND CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Gucci is making Formula 1 a primary brand platform.

What’s happening: As we shared in Issue 105, the potential for Gucci to sponsor Alpine F1 has now been confirmed. Starting with the 2027 season, Gucci will become the title partner of Renault’s Alpine Formula One team, which will be rebranded as the Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team. Reuters reports this is the first time a high-fashion house will lend its name to an F1 team, while coverage around the launch describes Gucci Racing as a broader platform spanning content, product, and client experiences rather than a standard logo-placement deal.

TLDR:

• This is no longer speculation. Gucci has formally entered Formula 1 through Alpine.

• The move turns Formula 1 into a long-term luxury platform, not a media buy.

• Gucci Racing signals a broader commercial and cultural build, across content, product, and experience.

• Alpine offers a team identity that is still shapeable, which matters more than buying into an overbuilt property.

• The sport’s value to luxury now sits in recurring global attention, not just hospitality or sponsorship visibility.

Why it matters: Formula 1 has become one of the few global environments where a luxury brand can build its identity across media, geographies, live experiences, and products simultaneously. Gucci’s move confirms what was already becoming clear: the sport is no longer adjacent to fashion and luxury; it is becoming one of their most effective operating stages. The brands arriving now are not simply buying exposure. They are buying a position inside a platform that still has room to be defined.

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The news is finally out. Future+ will be hosting Startup Safari UK for 15 of India’s best and brightest tech founders in partnership with Startup Policy Forum India. You can read more about the announcement here. We are excited to build bridges across the UK-India tech, innovation and investment corridor.

This week, we are still unpacking all the major launch updates from Google’s I/O conference. This video with Sundar Pichai is a great interview for understanding what this shift means for creators, engineers, and everyday users, touching on everything from YouTube to agentic coding, and why today’s AI will look like a flip phone in three years.

Also, in case you missed it, it’s interesting to see CharlieXCX as the newest face (and investor) at Nothing. We are big fans, and it’s a great example of a culture-forward tech brand partnership.

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

1. Google is becoming the interface for how we search, shop, and decide.

2. Martha Stewart pivots to AI home management.

3. Are POV shopping videos a risk for luxury?

4. SpaceX is capitalism on rocket fuel.

5. Personal exoskeletons are bringing AI into physical movement.

1. SEARCH, COMMERCE AND PLATFORM POWER

Google is becoming the interface for how we search, shop, and decide.

What’s happening: At I/O 2026, Google presented an AI search and agent ecosystem built to sit across discovery, shopping, and everyday digital tasks. Its new Universal Cart will roll out in the United States from summer 2026 across Search and Gemini first, with YouTube and Gmail to follow, giving users one cross-platform cart and a more continuous shopping journey. Google is also introducing information agents, Gemini Spark, and Daily Brief: a system of always-on assistants operating in the background across its products. The underlying shift is more consequential than any individual feature. Search is moving away from a link-based map of the web toward a mediated experience in which more consumer intent is resolved before a user ever leaves Google.

TLDR:

• Universal Cart is not just a checkout tool. It is an agentic hub for shopping, bringing Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail into one commerce flow.

• Google is pairing that commerce layer with a wider consumer agent stack. Information agents will run in the background, while Gemini Spark and Daily Brief extend the model into personal organisation and ongoing task management.

• This changes the role of Search itself. Google is moving from directing people to websites toward answering, filtering, and personalising the experience inside its own interface.

• For brands, product metadata and inventory accuracy now sit much closer to the point of decision. Backend product fields and real-time stock visibility are becoming increasingly important to whether a brand is surfaced and selected.

• The pressure on the open web is structural, not cosmetic. As AI answers absorb more discovery and comparison, more of the decision gets made before a click ever happens.

Why it matters: For luxury brands, retail operators, and publishers with meaningful digital exposure, Google is not refining search or adding a shopping feature. It is building an interface layer that can observe, filter, and act on a user’s behalf across commerce and everyday digital life. That raises the value of structured data, operational accuracy, and direct brand memory. For merchants and publishers, the more fundamental question is what the business looks like when the gateway to the web is also where the decision gets made.

2. CULTURE, HOME AND AI

Martha Stewart pivots to AI home management.

What’s happening: Martha Stewart has co-founded Hint, an AI home management startup that raised $10 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures. The platform asks for a user’s address, pulls in public property and environmental data, and lets homeowners upload inspection reports, warranties, utility bills, and insurance documents. Hint is expected to launch on desktop and iOS this summer, with a proposition centred on maintenance, insurance, repairs, and the ongoing economics of running a home.

TLDR:

• Hint treats the home as an information problem, bringing documents, maintenance signals, and environmental data into one operating layer.

• Martha Stewart is a co-founder, not a campaign face, which gives the company a deeper layer of authority in a category built on trust and judgment.

• The company raised $10 million led by Slow Ventures, with Montauk Capital, Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey, and Brian Kelly also participating.

• The service enters a fragmented market where homeowners manage expensive assets with scattered paperwork and little strategic visibility.

• The broader signal is that lifestyle expertise is being rebuilt as software, with taste and utility now living inside the same interface.

Why it matters: Domestic life is as much a trust category as a product category, and the strongest consumer software in trust-dependent markets tends to arrive with pre-existing authority attached. Stewart brings editorial legitimacy accumulated over decades; AI gives that authority a scalable operating model. The more transferable insight for cultural and luxury operators is that category-defining expertise is increasingly the moat, not the product.

3. LUXURY, RETAIL AND DISTRIBUTION

Are POV shopping videos a risk for luxury?

What’s happening: Point-of-view shopping videos, often filmed discreetly inside luxury stores through Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, are going viral across TikTok and Instagram. One Patek Philippe visit, filmed by creator Sami Varelli, drew 50 million views after staff asked him to remove his glasses or leave, and the comments quickly turned into a public debate about service and elitism. Similar clips from Gucci and Loro Piana show how easily a boutique interaction shifts from a private-client moment to a mass online spectacle.

TLDR:

• Meta sold 7 million smart glasses in 2025, which has made recording more ambient, more discreet, and harder for boutiques to manage.

• These videos work because they feel unmediated. The audience experiences the store through the creator’s eyes, which gives luxury retail a new voyeuristic quality online.

• The upside is still real. A store experience people want to secretly document still carries mystique and cultural pull.

• The larger pressure sits in sentiment risk. A sales interaction that reads as cold, exclusive, or dismissive can become a reputational issue at platform scale.

• “No filming” policies are not enough. The stronger response is staff training, store awareness, and service behaviour designed for an environment where the camera may already be on.

Why it matters: The boutique is no longer only a controlled setting for conversion and clienteling. It is also a stage where brand behaviour gets captured, interpreted, and redistributed in real time. The operators who respond well will move beyond policy signage toward staff readiness and a more camera-native model of hospitality. The store remains one of the most valuable stages in luxury. The audience around it is now much larger than the one inside it.

4. CAPITAL, INFRASTRUCTURE AND SPACE

SpaceX is capitalism on rocket fuel.

What’s happening: SpaceX has filed for an IPO targeting roughly $75 billion in proceeds at a valuation of about $1.75 trillion, a scale that would make it the largest stock market flotation on record. The company now reads as an integrated infrastructure platform spanning rockets, satellites, communications, and adjacent AI-era ambitions. The filing brings one of the world’s most consequential private infrastructure businesses into the logic of public capital.

TLDR:

• SpaceX now reads as an integrated infrastructure platform spanning rockets, satellites, communications, and adjacent AI-era ambitions.

• The target raise and valuation place it in a category of its own. Public markets are being asked to price frontier infrastructure at a planetary scale.

• Much of the company’s strategic power comes from vertical integration, with control of the stack becoming part of the valuation story.

• The IPO turns space from a visionary narrative into a mainstream capital allocation question for institutions, investors, and governments.

• The broader message is that hard infrastructure is back at the centre of tech value creation.

Why it matters: SpaceX translates conviction built over more than a decade into an event that reframes physical infrastructure as a defining financial story of this cycle. Investors are pricing businesses that own the stack: launch, satellites, communications, and the downstream services that run on them. The rockets are the narrative. The infrastructure dependency is the position.

5. CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY AND WELLNESS

Personal exoskeletons are bringing AI into physical movement.

What’s happening: Hypershell’s $1,999 X Ultra S is part of a new class of hip-based personal exoskeletons designed for hiking, cycling, training, and assisted outdoor movement. Once associated with the military, heavy industry, and rehabilitation, these systems are now being sold to consumers as performance and endurance tools. In practice, the device can make climbs feel markedly easier and movement more powerful, even if the category still carries awkwardness, safety trade-offs, and visible social theatre.

TLDR:

• Personal exoskeletons are entering the consumer market at prices starting around $900, with Hypershell positioning the category around outdoor performance and endurance.

• The system uses a waistband, thigh braces, and AI software to interpret movement and deliver support across walking, climbing, and cycling.

• The product promise is not only accessibility. It also speaks to augmentation: letting users feel stronger, faster, and more capable in everyday physical settings.

• The category remains early. Rocky terrain, downhill control, battery dependence, and the risks of active robotic components still shape the experience.

• Robotics is moving from specialist use cases into lifestyle, fitness, and recreation, where aesthetics and behavioural trust will matter as much as function.

Why it matters: The next generation of embodied technology will sit across ageing, performance, and outdoor leisure, not only as a medical category. The companies that define this space will need design fluency, social acceptability, and a category language that makes augmentation feel desirable. The mechanics are solved enough. The cultural frame is still open.

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At the Code with Claude event in London today, listening to founders using Claude to build one-person companies, doing live workshops with the teams to build agents and troubleshooting 1-1 during their office hours. Fun. They have new dates announced in SF and will be coming to Tokyo next. Highly recommend signing up.

On my radar this week was an interesting story about a Stanford student named Theo Baker and his book How to Rule the World. It’s about his time at Stanford and the school’s often insidious relationship with the venture capital industry. There’s been a lot of interest around this recently; it’s set to become a bestseller. Given my recent trip to the Bay Area and my interest in Stanford’s GSB, I will definitely be adding this to my summer reading list.

An interesting round-up of news this week, including the shocking Everlane deal with China’s fast fashion behemoth Shein. It seems you can buy your way into brand credibility these days. Also, if the Gucci x Alpine F1 sponsorship deal goes through, it will confirm our prediction that the race is set to become the top sporting event for luxury, culture, and tech. You’ll know where to find us.

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. Shein is buying Everlane in a $100 million deal.

2. Gucci is in talks to sponsor Alpine Formula 1.

3. Designer Jonathan Simkhai is building an AI storefront for e-commerce.

4. Google’s intelligent eyewear is entering the mainstream.

5. Ex-OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic.

1. RETAIL AND DISTRIBUTION

Shein is buying Everlane in a $100 million deal.

What’s happening: Shein is acquiring Everlane from its majority shareholder, L Catterton, in a deal that values the San Francisco label at roughly $100 million. Reports suggest common shareholders will receive no payout, a stark marker of how far digitally native apparel valuations have reset. The deal arrives as Shein expands beyond consumer retail into manufacturing services for third-party brands, while tariff pressure and regulatory scrutiny continue to bear on its core business.

TLDR:

• $100 million is a fraction of what Everlane once represented on paper. The markdown captures how decisively the market has turned against DTC brands that treated transparency as both a message and a moat.

• Shein is not buying demand. It is buying a vocabulary: restraint, considered consumption, and a version of American brand credibility that its supply chain cannot produce.

• Everlane’s residual value sits in trust, even after the economics became harder to sustain. That makes it strategically useful at a moment when infrastructure alone is no longer enough.

• Shein has already opened its manufacturing network to outside brands. Owning a culturally legible label extends that strategy from backend service to front-end positioning.

• Retail power is shifting toward operators who can combine operational efficiency with narrative legitimacy. Scale without cultural permission has limits.

Why it matters: This is less an M&A story than a distribution story in disguise. Tariff exposure, regulatory pressure, and consumer distrust are all raising the strategic value of brand meaning, and Shein understands that its supply chain cannot generate it. Everlane offers access to a language of moderation and considered spending that cannot be manufactured from infrastructure alone. It also tells you where cultural equity is currently being priced: lower than before, but still worth buying.

2. LUXURY AND SPORT

Gucci is in talks to sponsor Alpine Formula 1.

What’s happening: Alpine Formula One is in discussions with Gucci over a potential title sponsorship. No deal has been finalised. The talks matter regardless. Kering CEO Luca de Meo previously led Renault, Alpine's majority owner, and understands Formula One as a global branding instrument. The timing is notable: Alpine's partnership with BWT is nearing its conclusion, while luxury groups continue to deepen their presence across teams, races, hospitality, and lifestyle partnerships.

TLDR:

• If the deal closes, Gucci joins a luxury migration into Formula One that now includes LVMH, Ferrari with Armani, Aston Martin with Hugo Boss, and McLaren with TUMI. This is no longer sponsorship as logo placement.

• Luca de Meo links both sides of the conversation. He knows the sport as a brand platform and now oversees the group, with Gucci as the key narrative lever.

• Alpine offers a credible platform that still feels open. That gives a luxury house room to define the partnership’s tone rather than to fit into an overbuilt property.

• Formula One offers something luxury brands increasingly need: recurring global attention, premium male audiences, and a live emotional stage that fashion media no longer delivers with the same force.

• Gucci is looking for fresher public stages, with reach, velocity, and cultural pull. Formula One offers all three.

Why it matters: Read this as structural, not opportunistic. Formula One now offers one of the few global environments where brands can build identity at scale across geography, media, and live experience simultaneously. The properties that still allow meaningful positioning will not stay open indefinitely. The brands moving now understand that the sport has become a cultural platform, and the window to shape what that looks like is closing.

3. AI, COMMERCE AND INTERFACE

Designer Jonathan Simkhai is building an AI storefront for e-commerce.

What’s happening: Jonathan Simkhai is developing an AI-powered storefront for customers who arrive without precise search terms or product vocabulary. Most fashion demand does not begin with category logic. It begins with a mood, a reference, or a half-formed sense of what feels right. The brand is building an interface that interprets intent before the customer can fully articulate it, treating commerce less as catalogue retrieval and more as guided discovery.

TLDR:

• Traditional search rewards the shopper who already knows what they want. Most fashion customers do not begin there, and the interface has lagged behind that reality.

• An AI storefront shifts the experience from retrieval to conversational merchandising. It changes not only what gets surfaced, but how taste gets organised.

• Brands that control this layer gain more than conversion. They gain insight into ambiguity, aspiration, and latent demand, which are often more revealing than explicit search behaviour.

• In premium fashion, discovery is part of the product. The route to the item shapes its value.

• The strongest storefronts will increasingly act as a stylist, editor, and sales associate all at once.

Why it matters: Interface design is becoming a strategic layer rather than a service layer. Simkhai’s move points to a broader reordering of digital commerce: value is shifting toward whoever can translate vague desire into a confident decision. That has implications far beyond search. It affects merchandising, data, brand perception, and the architecture of demand itself.

4. HARDWARE AND CULTURE

Google’s intelligent eyewear is entering the mainstream.

What’s happening: At Google I/O this week, the company confirmed that audio glasses will launch this autumn, co-designed with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker and powered by Gemini. The announcement sat within a broader framing by Sundar Pichai around "hyper progress": Gemini 3.5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash were introduced as capability upgrades, AI Mode was rolled out across Google Search, and the keynote positioned agentic AI as Google's organising logic. The glasses handle directions, calls, texts, live translation, and multi-step tasks such as placing a food order, with user confirmation as the main intervention point. They pair with both Android and iOS.

TLDR:

• Audio glasses are coming this autumn, not at some undefined future date. Gentle Monster and Warby Parker supply the form factor, Gemini supplies the intelligence, and the category has now moved beyond prototype theatre.

• The keynote made Google’s position explicit: AI is no longer just there to answer prompts. It is there to complete tasks.

• Gemini 3.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and AI Mode in Search widen the infrastructure underneath the hardware. The glasses are only the most visible expression of a larger system.

• Real-time translation, messaging, navigation, and task completion all point to the same ambition: an always-available interface that sits closer to the body than the phone.

• Meta Ray-Bans established the category. Google’s answer is to compete through intelligence, interoperability, and social acceptability rather than pure hardware spectacle.

Why it matters: This is the point where the category becomes commercially relevant. Google appears to have addressed the problem that has held smart glasses back for years: they look wearable. Gentle Monster and Warby Parker are not decorative partners. They are central to Google’s argument that ambient computing succeeds only when the object passes as desirable in public. That changes the brief for any brand operating near the face, the body, or the moment of purchase.

5. AI AND TALENT

Ex-OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic.

What’s happening: Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and one of the field’s most recognised research and engineering figures, has joined Anthropic’s pre-training team. The move comes at a moment when frontier labs are competing not just on product velocity but also on model architecture, training systems, and research environments. Karpathy’s decision draws attention back to the foundation layer, where long-term advantages in model quality are still being established.

TLDR:

• Karpathy’s move carries weight across research, product, and talent markets at once. A hire of this profile is a market signal before it becomes an operating one.

• Joining pre-training rather than an applied or product unit points clearly to where Anthropic believes the real frontier still sits.

• Competition is consolidating around a small number of labs with the capital, computing, and research conditions to attract people at this level.

• Talent concentration compounds quickly. One high-profile arrival strengthens recruiting, internal ambition, and external confidence well beyond a single role.

• In frontier AI, personnel decisions increasingly function as capital signals. They shape how the market reads momentum.

Why it matters: Pre-training remains an active strategic ground. Application-layer businesses depend on the quality and direction of the model layer beneath them, and Karpathy’s move tells the market that Anthropic intends to compete aggressively at that level. The hierarchy among labs is not settled, nor is the capability stack that downstream companies will inherit.

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What stood out to me this week was how many industries are being forced to confront the same question from different angles: what, in fact, sits b…

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This week’s issue is slightly longer with 10 stories on our radar covering recap of the recent Shoptalk event in Las Vegas where the best technology solutions present to the biggest retailers. Agentic commerce has been at the top of everyone’s agenda, and tracking announcements at events gives us a macro understanding of the trends and capital flowing into the space.

We also recap both Prada’s Frames symposium, which highlighted the existential question of our times: who owns AI image generation, and EssilorLuxottica’s wearables summit, which interestingly positioned the eye and its wearables as a health platform that tracks data and uses AI to detect systemic conditions.

Especially interesting (and worrying) this week was The New Yorker’s coverage of Sam Altman’s growing influence on the future of AI and whether one person can really be trusted with all the control. Scroll on for all the stories.

Finally, we have officially re-launched the newly updated Future+ website, which has been a labour of love since the start of the year.

If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.

📖In this issue:

1. Shoptalk 2026 reveals how AI agents are transforming the shopping experience from discovery to checkout.

2. Sam Altman’s increasing influence over the future of AI.

3. Google’s AI-powered adverts drove an 80% increase in sales for Aritzia.

4. Prada Frames explores who controls imagery in the age of AI at Milan Design Week.

5. Pixel Moda demonstrates how AI is revolutionising large-scale fashion imagery production.

6. Nothing announces its entry into the AI glasses market with a design-led approach.

7. EssilorLuxottica highlights the convergence of eyewear, AI, and healthcare innovation.

8. Indian startup Rocket launches an AI tool offering strategy consulting at a fraction of the usual cost.

9. Medvi faces scrutiny after revelations of fabricated data behind its AI success story.

10. NASA’s Artemis II mission advances human spaceflight further, pushing lunar ambitions.

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    Agentic commerce owns discovery. The storefront still owns the close.

    The defining story at Shoptalk Spring was OpenAI quietly sunsetting Instant Checkout, its attempt to complete purchases inside ChatGPT, and pivoting to a discovery-and-handoff model through its Agentic Commerce Protocol, with Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, and Wayfair already integrated. Sephora is now inside ChatGPT. Gap is purchase-enabled inside Gemini. Meta has rebuilt shopping summaries and checkout across Instagram and Facebook. The floor data was sobering: 60% of shoppers who receive an AI recommendation still go and research before buying; only 18% transact immediately. That gap is the whole story. AI is taking over the moment of intent, but it is not yet closing the sale. For retail and brand operators, the question is whether your product feeds, pricing logic, and data infrastructure are clean enough to convert attention that now arrives from an interface you do not own.

    The New Yorker is asking the governance question OpenAI keeps deferring.

    Drawing on new interviews and internal documents, The New Yorker’s profile revisits the 2023 OpenAI board crisis and lands in an uncomfortable place: the doubts about Altman were never really about personality. They were about candour, the concentration of power, and whether the people constructing this technology are sufficiently accountable for what they produce. OpenAI has spent two years managing that story. The New Yorker is reopening it. For capital allocators and enterprise buyers with material exposure to OpenAI’s ecosystem, the governance question is not an abstract one. A single founder’s control over a general-purpose technology at this pace and scale is one of the most significant structural risks in the market right now. The profile is asking it on the record. The answer is still open.

    Google’s AI ad tools drove Aritzia’s revenue up 80%. Performance marketing has a new architecture.

    Google’s AI Max campaign tool reads a brand’s creative assets and product catalogue, then interprets conversational search queries, now averaging 45 words against the old two-to-three keyword standard, to match intent to inventory in real time. Aritzia’s 80% lift in online revenue is not a creative optimisation story. It is evidence that the matching layer between customer intent and product is being rebuilt by the platforms that own the search interface, and is being rebuilt fast. For fashion and retail brands with significant paid acquisition budgets, the question is not whether to engage with these tools. It is whether your creative assets, product data, and catalogue structure are clean enough to perform inside them. The brands that are waiting are not just missing out on efficiency gains. They are being outpaced on discoverability by those that are not.

    Prada Frames is asking who controls the image.

    The fifth edition of Prada’s annual symposium, In Sight, held at the Santa Maria delle Grazie complex in Milan, was focused on image-making as a political and material force: the infrastructure it depends on, the energy and labour it consumes, and who controls the conditions of its production. Conceived by Formafantasma, the event spent five editions building toward exactly the question AI image generation has now made unavoidable. What is striking is where the conversation has arrived. This is no longer a cultural theory seminar. The struggle over who owns visual culture and who controls the systems that produce it is showing up in boardrooms, in content contracts, and in procurement decisions. Prada is staging that conversation in one of the most symbolically loaded spaces in Milan. That is not incidental.

    Pixel Moda produced 14 million fashion images with AI.

    Pixel Moda creates AI-assisted and AI-generated content for more than 900 global brands, and presented its model at BoF VOICES alongside Etro’s chief executive, who credited the partnership with 46% e-commerce growth over 12 months. The model is deliberately human-led: AI directs photographers, stylists, and models on set, then uses those assets as inputs for generative outputs, including body swaps, background changes, and per-SKU video, content that used to be cost-prohibitive for all but the largest houses. The signal here is not that AI is replacing the studio. It is that the studio now has a different architecture, and the question is whether the creative layer directing it is strong enough to maintain brand identity as volume multiplies. The brands still running workflows designed for 500 images a season are already operating in a different era than the ones that are not.

    Nothing is entering AI glasses.

    London-based Nothing is developing AI glasses targeted for the first half of 2027, featuring cameras, microphones, and speakers in a design similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. CEO Carl Pei shifted from initial resistance to a multi-device view after seeing the category’s early traction, itself a signal worth noting. For luxury brands and hardware operators tracking ambient AI devices, Nothing’s entry matters for the same reason Samsung’s partnership with Gentle Monster mattered: it confirms that the primary constraint on mass adoption is design and social acceptability, not the technology. Meta, Samsung, Google, and Nothing have now converged on the same hardware thesis within a narrow window. When operators of that scale reach the same conclusion at the same time, the question for luxury is not whether eyewear strategy belongs in the conversation. It is how quickly it moves to the centre of it.

    EssilorLuxottica is repositioning the eye as a health platform.

    EssilorLuxottica’s inaugural SWITCH summit convened more than 1,000 doctors, scientists, and technologists around oculomics: using advanced retinal imaging and AI to detect systemic conditions, including diabetes and neurological disease, through the eye. The company already controls the dominant global eyewear distribution infrastructure through Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley, LensCrafters, and Sunglass Hut. That combination, diagnostic capability sitting inside a distribution system that already reaches hundreds of millions of people, is the thing worth paying attention to. For luxury wellness, longevity, and premium healthcare investors, the category is repositioning from optical correction to continuous health monitoring. The interface closest to the face is becoming the one that reads it most intimately. What sits above that layer, in experience design, data governance, and brand relationship, is still wide open.

    A startup in Surat is pricing McKinsey-style strategy reports at $250 a month.

    Rocket, based in Surat with operations in Palo Alto, generates consulting-style strategy documents covering pricing, unit economics, go-to-market, and competitive intelligence, drawing on more than 1,000 data sources. Its thesis is direct: as coding is commoditised by AI, the strategic layer above it is where the next value gap opens. The outputs still require human verification. But the more consequential point is the price signal itself. The market is beginning to set a floor for AI-assisted strategy work, and that floor is lower than most incumbents have modelled or are comfortable acknowledging. The firms most exposed are those whose value proposition rested on access to proprietary frameworks and aggregated data rather than judgment built from genuine operating experience. That distinction between analytical access and earned perspective is where the value will concentrate and where the pressure will fall hardest.

    Medvi was celebrated as the first one-person unicorn, but it was built on 800 fake doctors.

    The New York Times profiled Matthew Gallagher as proof that one person with AI could build a billion-dollar company. The revenue figures cited, $401 million in 2025 from two employees, came from an unaudited private LLC with no independent verification. What has been independently documented is rather different: more than 800 fake Facebook doctor profiles with AI-generated images, deepfaked before-and-after patient visuals, and an FDA warning letter for misbranding violations that arrived six weeks before the profile ran. A class action and a data breach affecting 1.6 million patient records followed. The Times piece has since been heavily scrutinised. For investors and enterprise buyers tracking AI in healthcare and wellness, Medvi is the clearest illustration yet of what happens when AI is used to fabricate the trust layer rather than earn it. The regulatory window that made this possible is closing. The harder question is how many companies in adjacent categories are operating closer to this model than their positioning suggests.

    Artemis II has taken humans farther from Earth than any crew in history. The infrastructure for a lunar economy is being tested now.

    NASA’s Artemis II crew has completed a circumlunar flyby, surpassing the distance record set by Apollo 13. This is not a landing, but that is precisely the point. The strategic significance lies in what the mission is building toward: Artemis III targets the lunar south pole, with the longer ambition of sustained human presence beyond Earth. For deep-tech investors and capital allocators tracking the space economy, the Artemis programme is public infrastructure in the most literal sense: the enabling layer on which commercial lunar operations, resource extraction, and eventually off-Earth compute will depend. The test is live. The commercial layer above it is being built in parallel. The organisations that understand the infrastructure timeline are the ones positioned to shape what eventually runs on top of it.

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