Dispatch #9

Towards the end of Daisy Alioto's visit to our class, she described a TikTok video of a young woman who hired a stylist for Coachella, thought the outfits seemed bananas, and then went to the mall to find her own outfit, but decided she didn’t find anything she liked. “What do you mean you didn’t find anything?” Daisy asked. Her point was that there is so much talk of taste and pressure online that young people feel they have to “have it,” that they’re skipping the joy of experimentation and developing their own benchmark for whether they genuinely like something or not.

This was a funny aside, but a telling one that connects to many of the things Dirt, Daisy’s media company, is doing well. Dirt, which currently has 100,000 subscribers, a publishing arm, multiple newsletters, and several offshoots (like one for tennis, for design, and a fictional anthology we worked on together last year with Parsons students!), stands out because of their specificity and preservation of personal voice in their content. “People run out of attention before money,” Daisy told us.

Her initial pitch for Dirt was that they were going to operate like a streetwear brand, occasionally launching “accessories” that generated excitement rather than following a traditional schedule. While some potential collaborations felt that the work was “too weird” (Dirt is very online), others loved the framing and collaborated with her to create memorable branded content and a space for amazing creative writing.

For example, in 2025, when David Lynch died, Dirt and independent movie streamer, MUBI, commissioned writers to describe their favorite objects from Twin Peaks (like Laura’s locket, for example). Rather than echoing existing sentiments about David Lynch, “Peak Objects” felt like a more expressive way of highlighting his impact. It highlighted the writers’ personal preferences, while contributing to a shared memory.

Since launching in 2021, the media landscape has changed slightly and Daisy has also been thinking about how to continue developing work that feels resonant. Tasteland, the interview podcast she co-hosts with Francis Zierer, shifted to a slower schedule with multiple guests on one longer episode, more like a documentary.

Her publishing arm, Dirt Books, will launch in June with Lauren Napier's Tattooed, Pierced, and Fucked Up: A Scene Memoir 2004–2008, as the first title. This is an oral history about Warped Tour told through a series of diary entries and interviews by the author who was there. It documents a folk history that surprisingly hasn’t been adequately recorded. Lauren was directly in the scene, so her specific voice and the artifacts from there carries more weight than a traditional journalist could, and help show what that scene really looked like.

Daisy’s visit reminded us that finding something you like is powerful. Dirt lingers because she figured out what that was.