Codes of Culture | Issue 105
Google’s AI glasses are your new personal assistant.
Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
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.
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📖In this issue:
Shein is buying Everlane in a $100 million deal.
Gucci is in talks to sponsor Alpine Formula 1.
Designer Jonathan Simkhai is building an AI storefront for e-commerce.
Google’s intelligent eyewear is entering the mainstream.
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.