Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
These days, I get my favourite internet microdoses from Cosmos’ newsletter and often find myself curiously scrolling through less mainstream media publications to feed my inspiration and gather strategic insights for the advisory work we do at Future+.
So much in the news this week that it was hard to distil into only 5 things to cover. Oura is preparing to go public and has been instrumental in helping turn biometric tracking into a mainstream consumer habit. At the same time, Stoke Space has just raised another $1 billion to push reusable rockets further into commercial reality, a company we are tracking closely as it’s positioned as a direct competitor to SpaceX. Julie Kegels won the LVMH Prize and underscored how a singular perspective still resonates, while Eva Chen’s analysis of the evolving social media landscape highlighted a sector-wide pivot from curated polish to genuine identity, intimacy, and something that feels more real. Hiroshi Fujiwara bringing back Fragment University lands in the same place for me: culture is increasingly about participation and community, not just consumption. Also interesting, as I shared in last week’s newsletter, Bangkok is becoming the new culture and creator capital of Asia.
In this week’s issue, we cover brain-tracking wearables and women’s intimate health to adaptive fashion, Formula 1’s fashion expansion and AI-powered avatars in beauty; the strongest ideas are not always the most advanced. They are the ones that make technology, design and culture feel more personal, more useful and more human—all the themes we are building on for our annual summit coming to London in November.
Scroll on for more news on our radar.
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