the brand becomes...
descriptive, not prescriptive
generic, not specific
not as a rejection of individualism in favor of collectivism, but as a way for the brand to facilitate the individualism of the singular consumer by scaling back their own voice

the brand can't be the individualistic one, because people know now that no matter how specific, niche or distinguished a brand, its mainstreamification is always inevitable. So, they'd rather consume things that are already normal, and use this default-ness as a platform off of which to impose their individuality, and distinguish themselves

“so this art of trying to simulate the original, the precision, and the relative complexity that the creation of the synthetic engenders, the technology of creating paints, colors, materials to replicate some sort of original, holy kind of sublime, is an insight into how we’ve always been with artificial and synthetic in our long history of using technology as humans, and through the history of paint, it starts to look like less of a barrier to the natural, authentic, or pre-technological to use tools, systems and technologies”
Nora Khan UCLA talk

Generic: supermarket offbrand products (efficiency + adaptability first priority, not designed by cutting edge design-school grad)
Premium Generic: american apparel, glossier, DTC startups subscription brands (self-reflexively normcore, reaping the ethical benefits (signaling brand transparency, sincerity) of prioritizing adaptability + efficiency by using defaults design, even if designed by design school grad)
Ultra-Premium Generic: LOT 2046, Off-White, "Brutalist Websites" (alluding to edgy anti-originality of default systems design, defaults as pure aesthetic signifiers comically descriptive and exaggerated to be indistinguishable from actual bare commodity-forms except by the wealthy in-the-know)