SSENSE SUPERLATIVES:
CLASS OF 2018

Stairwell goths—we all know at least one, but more plausibly, we know several. For eons, packs of them (herds? no, murders) have haunted floor after floor of high schools in different cities, countries, and dimensions. But as five, ten years pass after graduation, most relegate their clammy hand-holding, mall macabre, and ham sandwich halves passed back and forth to their brain’s black-lit nostalgia cupboard. Others do not, and wallow forever in cringeworthy Hot-Topic-adult purgatory. And then there are those who make it work: Emily the Strange gets her braces off and becomes a UX designer and now rounds of vermouth are on her. Take that, Quarterback Chad!

It’s not an uncommon scenario in 2018: person, after auditing the $25 spent daily on cold-pressed green juice and salad, arrives at the thought that that they might turn that juice into a fully fledged lifestyle, maybe even a career. Why not transform that photogenic green juice into green dollar bills? Today, Modern Farmer is a thing (the magazine known as @modfarm for short), and, if packaged properly, nothing is out of the question. The aspiration of eating and living “clean” in a toxic world is the catalyst to fund this burgeoning career path. Not to say it’s not a noble cause as it stands—striving for the greater health of human beings is a quality pursuit—but it probably won’t hurt to be foraging and fermenting in CDG. High Sobriety is right.

There's something a little terrifying about waking up to discover that your things are not where you remember leaving them. Rather, they’re perfectly in order when certainly you would not have remembered to do any organizing yourself before falling asleep. It’s evidence that someone took it upon themselves to right the error of your ways. They observed your sleeping body and tucked a blanket around its perimeter, noticed the battery on your phone turn from green to red and made sure to plug it in for you. All while you were asleep, oblivious to the fact that you were being thought about or considered. Or watched... and who does all of this pragmatic keeping of order? A watch, of course—the one most likely to keep you in check.

Skipping college to move to Palo Alto and work out of Mark Zuckerberg’s basement is so 00s. In 2018, the real entrepreneur is dropping out of the ninth grade, enrolling in coding boot camp, building a cryptocurrency pegged to the resale value of luxury streetwear, taking all the cash from the ICO and dumping it into KAWS statuettes and Boring Company flamethrowers, going on the lam and hoping the singularity hits and we can upload our collective consciousness to the cloud before investors or the feds catches up to them.

Not super interesting or exciting personality-wise, although genuinely really, really nice. Almost too well-rounded and well-meaning. Responsible and reliable. A life’s work for Secret-rich is only to hook it up, bequeathed with an upper-middle-class brand of moral compass and a simplicity of upbringing that breeds a do-gooder. A golden retriever of a human—bit boring, but friendly! The only person with a car, always with the newest iPhone. Talks to parents with sincerity on that iPhone. The principle indications are the frequency of new looks, the willingness to foot the bill and forget, to share drugs. The overall ease of everything—decision-making, weekend getaways, shopping trips. Secret-rich dresses with a safety net. “This is a fun pattern,” thinks Secret-rich, “and if I only wear it once, I can always give it away.”

The guitar-strumming high school crush who wears a choker and lots of plaid, and a shearling corduroy jacket, and who leans—who “leans great,” they’ll say—against lockers, mostly, and his red car, too, as if to say, I’m too life-worn and irreversibly dazed to stand up straight, who also, it’s worth noting, pulls his sweatshirt over his hands like a true blue 90s grunge-heartbreaker and who goes by his whole name (never merely his first), who then goes bottle-blonde, beautifully so—eyebrows, too—and joins some kind of violent fight club, only to get murdered in an act of pure jealousy by his colleague, Patrick Bateman—or did he just move to London? It’s unclear—after all he shows up years later, with cornrows no less (whyyyy?), breaking into an uptown apartment, trapping Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart in a steel-enclosed, concrete panic room, only to later lose 40 pounds and star opposite Matthew McConaughey, and subsequently, win an Oscar. What?!

The modern curator is never caught anywhere without their gingham trousers. Sporting their blue and white checkered pattern makes the perfect backdrop for their content-revolved, on-the-go lifestyle. A necessity for the self-certified visual expert. Notorious for cutting class to find the next best thing at the farmer's market or vintage shop, they'd rather be learning about what herbs are in season and where to score the cutest bucket bag or poplin blouse. But alongside their best friends—ceramics and fresh flowers—they know it's worth it: that Instagram feed isn't going to like and follow itself.

In the parlance of our times, the petite straw panama hat is that bitch. How else could she maintain what she thinks is a cognitive distance from a family fortune with questionable colonial origins by insisting on paying her own rent (every other month, that is)? As a freshman, she was known for using Eames chairs as patio furniture and refusing to eat anything but chard flown in from Corsica for a week straight. But now, she’s kind of over the whole Ivory Tower thing, so where in the world is this slightly-less-cumulonimbus Carmen Sandiego? Somewhere along on the coast of Spain, delicately swinging an impossibly tiny purse in one hand and clasping a fresh baguette and rose water to her chest with another. She is about to (knowingly) mispronounce her lover’s name yet again during coital act in such a terrifyingly elegant manner it will have to be pornographed on film, then burned, the ashes ground up and manufactured into an extremely expensive anti-aging eye cream.