Run clubs, supper clubs, book clubs, cookbook clubs. Everywhere I look, there’s another fucking club.
No one is going to the club, mind you – the most active participants I spot in that space are millennials and elder Gen Zs chasing some kind of 2010s revival. These new clubs are different.
They’re wholesome and algorithm-friendly. No drugs, barely any drinking. They’ve been cleaned up, commodified, made safe enough to scale.
A club is a group of people united by a common interest or goal, whether that goal is to get fucked up or read quietly together. But there’s also an unspoken expectation that they’re a bit exclusive, a bit intimate.
The pop-ups that eventually gave way to this new club culture used to feel niche. Now it seems like everyone runs some kind of event, from small independents to big brands. And like anything that suddenly becomes hyper-visible, a lot of them have become stripped of meaning.
