What brands most want to know about Gen Z

And other youth culture nuggets from After School’s Casey Lewis.

The first person to accurately predict the “Gen Alpha aesthetic” wins. —Kate

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As The Atlantic pointed out in 2013, before Gen Z was even a twinkle in the discourse, almost every budding generation since the Baby Boomers has been described as some variation of the “me generation.” The up-and-coming humans are routinely labeled selfish, impulsive, and self-absorbed—only to grow up and point the finger back at whatever generation follows them. I’m careful not to perpetuate this loop when I hop on Zoom with Casey Lewis, an expert in youth culture and writer of the newsletter After School. 

Outside of her youth-culture Substack, Lewis consults with brands on growth and community, with a particular focus on reaching young audiences. While the focus has shifted from millennials to Gen Z, Lewis has been a youth culture aficionado since she herself was a teenager. Following dreams of running her own teen magazine, Lewis went to school for journalism at the University of Missouri, and acquired a large collection of old teen magazines. 

Roles at places like Teen Vogue and MTV paved the way for Clover Letter, a newsletter (before it was cool) for Gen Z readers founded by Lewis and Liza Darwin. Clover Letter ran for over three and a half years before Lewis landed at The Strategist in early 2020. It wasn’t until spring of this year that Lewis decided to return to her youth culture roots.

“I missed thinking about youth culture and reporting on youth culture and studying it,” she tells me. “And so I really just started the Substack on a lark because I wanted to be more in this brain space.”

At this point, youth culture is almost indistinguishable from internet culture, but as Lewis and I discuss, it’s still inaccurate to paint any member of Gen Z with the same TikTok-tinted brush. In the following interview for paid subscribers, we spoke about what brands are most interested in learning about Gen Z, why Instagram is to Gen Z what Facebook is to millennials, and how it’s already time to start thinking about what’s next: Gen Alpha.