Issue 02: Guess & Billie
Alpine fantasies and hairy armpits
Hi :) I’m excited to share the issue: 02 of the BxS Report with you. I’ve been thinking a lot about how much we’re expected to process every day and what actually cuts through in a New York-minute attention economy. Again and again, it’s the brands that understand their story and their audience that win, even when they’re not the biggest players. When brands lose that thread and focus solely on growth and revenue, the work starts to feel gluttonous, disconnected, and ultimately forgettable.
Billie and the Pleasure of Paying Attention
There are very few things that can interrupt a New Yorker in motion. The city trains you to move with purpose. Eyes forward, headphones in, body dodging obstacles with muscle memory precision. And on Instagram/TikTok, the conditioning is even more severe. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Attention is not just fragmented; it’s aggressively hijacked.
Which is why Billie’s scratch-and-sniff campaign from last spring (2025) felt so refreshing, and frankly, so smart.
Billie installed oversized billboards across NYC featuring armpits (some with hair, some without) and invited passersbys to scratch and sniff. The scent they smelled: Coco-Villa. Coconut and sweet vanilla, warm and familiar. When I first saw footage of it online, it stopped me mid-scroll. Not because it was shocking, but because it was playful! It had the right amount of unhinged for my city and its people.
What Billie understood (and executed beautifully) is that attention today isn’t earned by yelling louder. It’s earned by changing the mode of engagement.
In the streets of New York, people are locked into solo travel. Everyone is the main character in their own itinerary. This campaign gently broke that spell. It pulled people out of their internal monologues and into a shared moment of curiosity. You didn’t just see the ad, you participated in it. You scratched. You sniffed. You laughed. You looked around to see who else was watching.
That shift from observer to participant is brilliant.
There’s also a quiet nostalgia baked into the execution. Scratch-and-sniff immediately calls back to perfume inserts in glossy teen magazines, a time when advertising wasn’t just visual but tactile. You had to slow down. Rub the page. Smell your wrist. Decide how you felt about it. Billie took that memory and translated it into the public realm, scaling intimacy into spectacle without losing its charm.
This is sensory marketing at its best. It’s not gimmicky, not overproduced, but human. Smell is one of the most emotionally direct senses we have. It bypasses logic and goes straight to memory, pleasure, and association. Coco-Villa isn’t just a scent; it’s a mood. Warm. Clean. Approachable. Exactly how Billie positions its relationship to body hair and personal care: normal, non-judgmental, quietly confident.
And of course, the campaign was engineered for the modern attention economy. It gave people a reason to post. Not because they were told to, but because the experience itself was worth sharing. Watching strangers scratch a billboard armpit and react in real time is inherently entertaining. The ad didn’t beg for virality, it earned documentation.
That’s the difference between brands that feel current and brands that feel desperate.
What makes this campaign truly “on key” is how aligned it is with Billie’s broader worldview. The brand has always challenged conventional beauty norms without scolding. It uses humor instead of righteousness. It understands that delight is persuasive. And it respects its audience enough to invite them into the joke.
In a landscape where so much advertising fades into visual noise, Billie chose to activate the body. To slow people down. To make them smell something sweet in the middle of a chaotic city day.
Guess (How a Brand Forgot Its Own Story)
Every time I walk past a Guess storefront, it’s empty. Not quiet—empty. No browsing energy, no curiosity, no gravity pulling you inside. Just racks of overworked product and the strange feeling of a brand waiting for someone to tell it who it is again.
For years, the word that keeps surfacing for me (no matter how much I try to intellectualize it) is tacky. And not in a fun, camp, knowingly excessive way. Tacky in the sense of trying too hard to inhabit a fantasy that no longer belongs to you.
That feeling came rushing back when I saw Guess’s recent “Glacier 3000 – Switzerland” campaign. A luxury alpine fantasy, staged against snow and elevation, meant to signal aspiration. Instead, it felt hollow, like costume design without character, and glamour without gravity. Especially when held up against the first ski collection by Jacquemus and Nike, which understood something Guess has forgotten: that even fantasy needs self-awareness.
Jacquemus and Nike gave us performance silhouettes built for speed and softness. Real materials and real function, wrapped in humor and honesty. Their campaign hinged on a woman imagining herself as the greatest skier alive, only for the fantasy to collapse when reality intervenes. The joke lands because it’s true. It understands that aspiration isn’t about pretending you’re already elite, it’s about wanting to feel capable, powerful, alive. When I wear Nike to the gym, I don’t think I am the best athlete in the room. But I feel like I could be. That distinction matters.
Guess, by contrast, feels stuck trying to convince us it already is something it hasn’t been in decades. Case in point, their instagram bio reads: “Young. Sexy. Timeless.”
To understand how we got here, you have to return to Guess's original language, not the mall version, but the myth. In the late '80s and early '90s, Guess advertising was genuinely seductive. Shot largely in black and white, the imagery leaned heavily on mid-century European femininity: cigarette smoke glamour, undone hair, unapologetic sensuality. It looked cinematic and it looked expensive.
What's often forgotten: Guess wasn't born American. The brand was founded by brothers from Marseille, a port city that is warmer, louder, rougher, and more sensual than Paris ever pretends to be. Marseille has grit, salt in the air, bodies and noise and contradiction. The Marciano brothers have spoken fondly of their first store there, a converted fish shop where they'd work from 4 a.m. to midnight, exhausted and exhilarated. That energy—scrappy, immigrant, hungry—quietly lived inside the imagery, even after the brand relocated to Los Angeles.
Looking at these early Guess images now, what’s striking is how easily they could be mistaken for early Dolce & Gabbana campaigns. The same black-and-white palette. The same erotic restraint. The same European archetypes drawn from 1950s and ‘60s cinema. But Dolce & Gabbana was founded after Guess. Yet somehow D&G managed to carry this aesthetic forward as mythology: ritualized, elevated, fiercely controlled. While Guess flattened it into repetition, D&G preserved tension.
This is where brands can live or die: not in their archival references, but in how carefully they protect them.
The unraveling accelerated in the 1990s, when Guess made a decision that was financially smart and culturally catastrophic: aggressive licensing. Fragrance, eyewear, accessories, footwear… its name was stamped onto everything.
This is the moment Guess stopped being a brand and became a logo.
Licensing doesn’t just expand reach, it dilutes authorship. Guess was never a lifestyle brand; it was a denim brand with an erotic point of view. Lifestyle brands require a worldview, not just product categories. Guess had an image, not a philosophy. When everything can be Guess, nothing really is.
Which brings us to the present-day confusion: Guess as a $100–$250 brand that lives comfortably at Marshalls and TJ Maxx. There is nothing inherently wrong with these stores (I shop them myself), but there is something destabilizing about a brand asking to be perceived as premium while training its audience to expect it at a discount.
Then there’s the question of who Guess is actually speaking to now. Scroll their current imagery and the answer becomes obvious. The fantasy hasn’t evolved; it’s simply narrowed. All the women look the same. And in 2026, monoculture doesn’t read as intentional, it reads as dated.
At this point, Guess isn’t failing to include broader audiences, it’s refusing to.
And it’s not just aesthetics that reveal how far the brand has drifted from its origins. Those brothers who once loved working eighteen-hour days in a former fish shop have presided over a company repeatedly accused of labor exploitation and wage theft. The same brand that built its mythos on European craftsmanship now finds itself in court for stealing IP from graffiti artists, a lawsuit that exposed not just legal overreach but creative bankruptcy. When you’re ripping off artists for inspiration, you’ve run out of original ideas.
The distance between the Marseille fish shop and the current reality isn’t just geographic. It’s moral.
I don’t believe Guess needs to be fixed. Sometimes the most honest ending for a brand is irrelevance.
But if we were to imagine a parallel universe where Guess wanted its soul back, the path is obvious.
It would mean killing most licensing outright. Returning to denim with humility. Collaborating with true craftspeople, brands like Studio d’Artisan, whose work is rooted in French workwear, Japanese technique, and American utility, rather than trend cycles. It would mean excavating the Marseille story, not as a marketing gimmick, but as lived texture. Who were the women who shaped that original gaze? What did sensuality look like before it became mall-ready?
And finally, it would mean embracing a multicultural reality, not as virtue signaling, but because it’s the only way culture actually moves forward.
Guess didn’t lose relevance because fashion changed. It lost relevance because it stopped editing itself. Because it confused scale for meaning. Because it remembered its own mythology incorrectly.
And no amount of snow, logos, or aspiration can fix that.
What do you think about Guess? And who did I miss on the cultural inventory list? Tell me!