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‘The thong is centimetres closer to areas of arousal,’ writes Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York, 2011–2019, ‘which means it is that much closer to the truth’ As any millennial who has ever tried to get ‘closer to the truth’ will know, it is not to be found in the places we were brought up to expect ‘With the naming of call-out culture,’ writes Stagg in a section on internet idiom, ‘we’ve had no choice but to become confused about who tells the truth’ ‘Without the moral compass of the newspaper,’ she recalls, elsewhere, of an early professional foray into new media, ‘we were all in some horrifying reality show about who is the most credulous at any given moment’ In the city and the decade that Sleeveless represents, what matters to bloggers, influencers, trolls, aggregators, ‘journalists’ and callers-out is not the truth of facts or of insights, but of traction: likes, forwards, follows, views Stagg, whose essays, op-eds and fiction of the 2010s the book collects, is personally intimate with this distortion In the decade that straddled her twenties and thirties, Stagg followed the growth of the internet’s traction-dependent ‘attention economy’ in a day job writing as a branding consultant There, she wrote for fashion brands, having known and grown tired of the financial struggle of writing, as a journalist and magazine editor, about them   The atmosphere of disorientation running through Sleeveless’s pages is sustained by two premises, each of which, Stagg contends, have tangled the lines of thought her generation (also my own) once followed as guides to life: the withering of print media, for one, and the marketing-driven impulse underlying everything that replaced it As Stagg briefly puts it, ‘[o]ur awareness of native advertising, artificial intelligence and data mining has impacted levels of trust in all forms of communication’ Fighting against this awareness, as she less briefly elaborates in essays applying her insights to the dynamics of contemporary fashion media, is a canny and uncompromising ‘comms’ machine In an analysis of the ‘Micro-Trend’, for instance, Stagg points