Codes of Culture | Issue 97
Commerce, Culture, and the Trust Problem
Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
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 between the product and the person now? In beauty, that increasingly looks like messaging; in retail, it looks like experience as infrastructure; in wellness, it looks like a correction to the science itself; and in fashion tech, it looks like the quiet but necessary shift from front-end excitement to back-end utility.
Sharing insights and highlights from Vogue Business’ Future of Wellness event, one of our favourite fashion tech newsletters right here on Substack, ATFT’s Q1 highlights, and more news on our radar for the end of the week.
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📖In this issue:
Fenty Beauty moved its beauty advisor to WhatsApp.
Meta signed a 10-year lease on Fifth Avenue.
Wellness in 2026 is correcting the science it was built on, and the market is bifurcating as a result.
Coty withdrew its guidance, lost its CEO, and now faces a securities class action.
All Things Fashion Tech’s Q1 review.
1. BEAUTY AND COMMERCE INFRASTRUCTURE
Fenty Beauty moved its beauty advisor to WhatsApp.
What’s happening: Fenty Beauty has launched Rose Amber, an AI-powered beauty advisor built directly into WhatsApp, in its first formal partnership with Meta in the US. Named after one of Rihanna’s favourite Gloss Bomb shades, the advisor offers shade matching, product recommendations, tutorials, and customer reviews across Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin, and Fenty Hair. Charles powers the commerce layer behind the integration. Fenty has already said that international expansion and in-app purchasing are the next steps. That matters because L’Oréal is already further ahead: in Brazil, more than 20% of its direct-to-consumer sales now come through conversational commerce on WhatsApp.
TLDR:
Rose Amber is live in the US across all three Fenty lines. The next move is in-app purchasing, not more experimentation.
L’Oréal’s Brazil business has already shown what scaled WhatsApp commerce can look like. The benchmark exists.
Meta now reports more than one billion active daily business conversations across its messaging platforms. Consumer behaviour has outpaced most brand strategies.
The opportunity is not customer service alone. It is discovery, recommendation, and conversion inside a channel people already use constantly.
Messaging is becoming infrastructure. The brands that move early will have more control over how that layer feels.
Why it matters: Conversational commerce is starting to look less like a brand experiment and more like a channel strategy. In markets where messaging already sits close to transaction, the advantage will go to brands that can make that experience feel guided, premium, and native to the wider brand world. Beauty is especially well-suited to that shift because the category depends so heavily on recommendation, reassurance, and routine. What Fenty is really testing here is not a chatbot. It is whether messaging can become a high-intent commerce layer for prestige beauty.
2. FASHION, TECH AND CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Meta signed a 10-year lease on Fifth Avenue.
What’s happening: Meta has extended its Fifth Avenue presence in New York with a 10-year lease, taking over a five-level, 15,000-square-foot townhouse on Millionaires’ Row, between Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Dior. What began as a short-term pop-up in late 2025 is now a permanent experiential space, with a café, content studio, community area, and in-store customisation for its AI glasses. A second flagship, Meta Lab LA, opened last October. Nothing is pursuing a similar logic, using physical retail and fashion-coded activations to build hardware appeal. The shift here is clear: tech companies are no longer borrowing fashion’s symbolism for a campaign or a collaboration. They are building the same kind of brand infrastructure that luxury has relied on for years.
TLDR:
Fifth Avenue is not just a retail address. It is a positioning statement.
The operating model mirrors luxury more than electronics retail: experiential, staffed, clienteling-led, and built to hold attention.
Tech brands are moving beyond collabs and runway adjacency. They are building stores, environments, and narratives of their own.
The problem they are solving is familiar: how to create desire around products with functional alternatives.
Fashion’s toolkit now belongs to a much wider competitive set.
Why it matters: Meta’s Fifth Avenue move matters because it turns a familiar cultural borrowing exercise into something much more durable: commercial infrastructure. Luxury brands have long had an advantage in world-building, physical experience, and symbolic positioning. That advantage starts to narrow when tech companies stop referencing fashion and start replicating the experience architecture that once set luxury apart. A collaboration is fleeting. A long lease on Fifth Avenue is a claim on territory, attention, and cultural legitimacy.
3. WELLNESS, LONGEVITY AND CAPITAL
What’s happening: The wellness market is being reshaped by two structural shifts at once. The first is a long-overdue correction inside longevity: women age differently from men, and a growing body of research now points to ovarian decline as a central driver of systemic ageing. That is pushing the market beyond generic longevity language and into a more specific category built around women’s healthspan. The second shift runs in the opposite direction. As optimisation culture becomes more exhausting than aspirational, some of the fastest-growing parts of wellness are moving away from constant tracking and toward social saunas, nervous system regulation, communal rituals, and lower-stimulation experiences. The global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024 and is projected to approach $10 trillion by 2029.
TLDR:
Longevity science is correcting for male biological defaults, and that correction is now shaping product design, clinical focus, and capital.
Women’s healthspan is becoming a category in its own right, not a side conversation within menopause or general wellness.
In beauty, skin longevity is replacing anti-ageing as the preferred language, with skin framed as a health marker rather than a surface problem.
At the same time, there is a growing backlash against over-optimisation and constant self-measurement.
The market is not consolidating around one future. It is splitting into hardcare and softcare, and both are growing.
Why it matters: The important thing here is that wellness is no longer moving in a single direction. One part of the market is becoming more clinical, more data-led, and more biologically precise. Another is becoming more emotional, more communal, and less interested in performance as a lifestyle. Brands that try to speak to both without understanding the difference will sound vague at best and inauthentic at worst. The opportunity is significant in both lanes, but the language, product architecture, and trust signals required for each are completely different.
4. BEAUTY CAPITAL AND GOVERNANCE
Coty withdrew its guidance, lost its CEO, and now faces a securities class action.
What’s happening: A federal securities class action filed in March 2026 names Coty, former CEO Sue Nabi, and other senior executives. The complaint covers the period from November 2025 to February 2026, during which management continued to say that sales trends were improving and reaffirmed a $1 billion adjusted EBITDA target for fiscal 2026. In early February, Coty reported a 17% decline in adjusted EBITDA, weakness across both Prestige and Consumer Beauty, and withdrew full-year guidance. Nabi departed the same day. Coty shares fell by roughly 22% across the period. The complaint argues that softness in Consumer Beauty, slowing Prestige fragrance growth, and margin pressure linked to marketing spend were not adequately reflected in the company’s earlier guidance.
TLDR:
The class period covers exactly the months in which Coty maintained an improving outlook that later results did not support.
Prestige fragrance, one of the sector’s strongest recent categories, was already showing signs of slowing.
Consumer Beauty was under pressure at the same time, making the group picture weaker than the headline narrative suggested.
The timing of the guidance withdrawal and CEO exit deepened the damage.
The broader issue is visibility: how clearly public markets can really see what is happening inside large beauty portfolios.
Why it matters: The significance lies less in the litigation itself than in the structural question underneath it. Large beauty groups present investors with a consolidated narrative, but the underlying categories often move at very different speeds and for very different reasons. That becomes more important as prestige fragrance loses some of the momentum that helped carry the sector over the past two years. When one category can no longer hide softness in another, disclosure, sequencing, and management credibility come under much harder scrutiny.
5. FASHION TECH AND AGENTIC COMMERCE
All Things Fashion Tech’s Q1 review.
What’s happening: Q1 2026 made one thing much clearer: the most commercially credible AI story in fashion right now is not consumer-facing styling, but operational infrastructure. All Things Fashion Tech’s quarterly review captured the gap between agentic commerce as a concept and the systems required to make it work in practice. OpenAI scaled back its more ambitious in-app checkout plans and shifted toward brand plug-in integrations, a quieter approach that better matches the still-limited number of merchants actually set up for agentic transactions. Swap raised $100 million to build the transaction layer for AI agents. Microsoft and PayPal launched seamless checkout inside Copilot. The broader pattern is increasingly obvious. The glamorous front-end vision is still compelling, but the near-term value is being created in logistics, forecasting, returns, and merchandising.
TLDR:
OpenAI’s checkout reset looks more like sequencing than retreat. Merchant readiness remains the bottleneck.
Swap’s raise points to where the real work is happening: the infrastructure layer beneath agentic commerce.
Microsoft and PayPal’s Copilot integration is one of the clearest signs that checkout is beginning to move into AI environments.
Q1’s strongest shift was away from styling narratives and toward operational AI with measurable commercial impact.
Fully agent-owned checkout still faces unresolved trust, liability, and permission questions.
Why it matters: Fashion tech has spent the last year talking loudly about AI at the point of inspiration. The more interesting shift now is happening deeper in the stack. Back-office infrastructure is proving easier to deploy, easier to justify, and far more likely to produce real commercial returns in the short term. The longer-term question remains the biggest one: who controls the agent that ultimately acts on the consumer’s behalf? But before that comes into view, brands need machine-readable product data, cleaner inventory architecture, and checkout systems that can actually support that future when it arrives.