By GUY TREBAY
SOME pop culture phenomena have the life span of a mayfly. Others have the staying power of a plutonium rod. The phenomenally popular “Miami Vice” flickered across screens for barely five seasons — 1984 to 1989 — on NBC, yet the effects of its influence on television, movies, music and most lastingly, of course, fashion, were so potent and unforeseeable that one can pick up their radioactive signals 17 years after the series shut down.
The cop show lives on in reruns, on DVD and now in a new movie directed by the show’s executive producer, Michael Mann, which opens nationwide at the end of this month. While violent and stylized and packed with the gritty and hyper-real effects now obtainable through the miracle of computerization, “Miami Vice,” the movie, is set in the unfashionable present and thus unlikely to jump-start any trends.
True, each of its stars does his bit to add spin to the visual images originally conjured by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in the roles of James (Sonny) Crockett and Ricardo (Rico) Tubbs. But aside from a porn-star mustache that Colin Farrell, the new Crockett, wears, and the Malcolm X meets R. Kelly goatee Jamie Foxx affects in the movie, there is nothing stylistically to compare with the crazy subtropical brio of images from the 80’s TV show. Its Necco Wafer palette and ironic macho were ideal for an unsubtle era of big hair, big government and big bad gangsters hauling kilos for the Medellín cartel in cigarette boats backlighted by a Harvey Wallbanger sky.
“The way Michael Mann did the costumes has nothing to do with real cops,” said Jim Moore, the creative director of GQ magazine. “But it influenced everything we did at the time.”
The extent to which the show played a part in the sartorial recasting of the American man is difficult to overestimate. Before “Miami Vice,” which was conceived as a cop show for the MTV generation, adult males were not often in the habit of wearing T-shirts under sports coats or shoes minus socks. Most guys without ties in the 1980’s would have been considered slobs or candidates for the unemployment line. Pastel-colored trousers were reserved for caddies, pastel-colored vehicles for pimps. Suits in the late Reagan era were still substantially lined and padded and as rigidly shaped as Barcaloungers, although with sleeves. Loose, crumpled garments were considered work wear for convicts or gigolos. Hardly anybody without a begging cup wore a straw hat.
Although it’s hard now to remember the radical statement these gestures once constituted, before “Miami Vice” few men except bank tellers rolled up their jacket sleeves, and about the only folks who flipped up their blazer collars were the singer George Michael or patrons in some Fort Lauderdale gentlemen-only bar. “It’s the first point in fashion history where you can really show a TV having that influence on fashion,” said Mr. Moore, adding that a two-day growth of beard before “Miami Vice” was a sure sign of a impending bumhood. “ ‘Miami Vice’ made stubble cool,” he said. It has stayed cool far too long, and this is something Mr. Mann should be required to answer for.
When he orchestrated the look of the original show, Mr. Mann was venturing into stylistic territory already staked out by Italian designers, people like Gianni Versace, Gianfranco Ferré or Giorgio Armani, the man generally credited with introducing the world to the unconstructed suit — that is, without padding, a lining or internal stiffening. This might be as good a time as any to amend the old canard about Mr. Armani being the inventor of the floppy suit. It was long a staple of Neapolitan haberdashery, developed by tailors sent to London by wealthy patrons to apprentice on Savile Row. Being superior craftsmen, the tailors absorbed everything there was to know about British cuts and suit construction. Being Neapolitans, they blithely tossed out the window most of the knowledge they had acquired. It is generally too hot in Naples to dress like Bertie Wooster. But it is not too hot in Milan, where Mr. Armani adapted the look before wholesaling it to the world.
“Miami Vice” may also have marked the earliest mainstream appearance of that indestructible cultural chimera, the metrosexual. “As tough as Sonny Crockett was meant to be,” the dude on a boat with a pet alligator named Elvis, “he still had the meticulously groomed scruff on his face and the pastel, linen-y sports jackets,” said Dan Peres, the editor of Details. “That all was certainly a part of the cultural moment that allowed men to embrace their vanity a little more openly.”
It was their big weapons, of course, that gave the “Miami Vice” guys confidence enough to wear girly clothes and to moisturize. From the start the show unabashedly showcased the latest and scariest in armory, something it has in common with the new film, which rarely shows anyone unholstering a pistol when there’s a submachine gun around.
From the pilot episode, in which Crockett carried a sleek automatic, it was clear that the show sought to telegraph macho credibility and insider cool by swiping a tactic rappers were using successfully in their lyrical boasting, outgunning both everyday criminals and cops on the beat. So what if weapons experts considered the Bren Ten stainless steel pistol that was used for several early seasons to have been a dud, prone to malfunction and with a magazine that cost $100?
“The gun was a nice design, but you couldn’t find or afford the damn magazine,” said Garry James, a senior editor at Guns & Ammo. The Bren Ten was abandoned and replaced by a variety of other pistols, including one uncannily like a gold-plated model later found and looted from Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad, and then seized by the British Customs and Excise Service early in 2003.
If the graphic and preening look of “Miami Vice” style made excellent joke fodder, visually easy to parody (as the cast of “Friends” did, in hilarious flashback), it also provided an enduring stylistic touchstone for consumers, who apparently never lost affection for Crockett and Tubbs.
Gamers still play “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” with its undercover officers looking like wonky virtual versions of Johnson and Thomas. Donatella Versace still designs men’s wear, as she did for the spring 2007 season shown recently in Milan, that modifies deftly, but only slightly, the defining elements of Pan-American style, circa Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega.
“Miami and ‘Miami Vice’ represented a magical time,” in the 1980’s, Ms. Versace said in an e-mail message, understatedly characterizing the era as colorful and “even excessive.” With her latest collection, Ms. Versace explained, “I returned to my roots and to a Miami that was very important to me in the late 80’s and early 90’s.”
Mr. Armani, too, plays games with the clichés of Latin macho; at his Emporio Armani presentation in June the designer sent models out wearing glue-on lip hair that looked a lot like the mustache Mr. Farrell has in the film.
With few exceptions, most purveyors of high-end design left “Miami Vice” behind a long time ago. Yet the effects of the show never really disappeared from the marketplace. “Our customer is a working guy who always wanted to look fashionable and set himself apart from the crowd,” said Neil Mulhall, the president of International Male, the mass market catalog clothier known for mesh pouch thongs and ruffled Byronic poets’ shirts. In its spring 2006 catalog, International Male offers a selection of suits in pink pastel linen and shirts of semi-sheer embroidered voile that could easily have been swiped from the set of “Miami Vice,” the television show or the film. “It’s a little bit forward and a little bit retro,” said Mr. Mulhall, neatly summing up the whole enterprise.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
It's in. It's out. At last, your guide to necktie etiquette.
By Daniel B. Wood Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
LOS ANGELES -- Subtle forces are shifting deep in the psyche of the American male. These forces plumb the very depths of identity, class, power, status, and the human mating dance.
They are plumbing in several directions at once.
Someone please call the plumber.
If you believe marketers, imagemakers, bosses like Dilbert's - and other blokes paid to think up ways to tell you, "You're not good enough, but I've got just the thing to fix that" - it has all come down to the common necktie.
In some places (church, restaurants, college) the tie seems to be vanishing alongside the polar ice caps (if you believe Al Gore). Sightings can be especially rare during the hot summer months. But in other places (law offices, stock brokerages, hospitals) ties are reappearing faster than Whac-A-Mole on steroids. "Ties are both coming back and going out at the same time," says Gerald Andersen, executive director of the Men's Dress Furnishings Association in New York. The changes are both real (not imagined) and modified by regional differences (up generally in the Midwest and East; down, for the most part, in the West), he and others say. The personal whims of revolving CEOs can also figure in - no matter what profession.
"Both perceptions are correct," Mr. Andersen says. But with a kind of defiance to those of the now-defunct dotcom era who had all but deep-sixed the necktie in favor of T-shirts, beards, shorts, and sandals, he paraphrases Mark Twain: "The reports of the death of the necktie have been greatly exaggerated."
Of course a guy from the Men's Dress Furnishings Association would say that, some might think. But he's got stats showing where the prediction came from and where it went. The glory days of the tie were in the early '90s, when men, and the women who shop for them, racked up a record $1.3 billion in US necktie sales. But they dipped to half that ($750 million) just a half decade later. That was when "casual Friday" became the mantra, when the nerd-geniuses of Silicon Valley made it a status symbol to thumb their noses at US workplace convention.
Yes, that's how it was? Time to send an e-mail to Wall Street, stomping grounds of this writer's very own brother. "[The '90s was] when everybody figured the way to look businesslike and professional was to look like a dotcom executive wearing a casual shirt and walking shoes like [Apple exec] Steve Jobs, and it was pretty cool since those people were worth $50 million to $5 billion each," writes back Stephen Wood, an investment banker. "All the Wall Street firms and the law firms needed to appeal to the young guns coming out of school, so they adopted the 'business casual code' ('see, we're just as professional and serious about business as you are, Mr. $5 billion Dotcom executive').".
But after the dotcom bust, "the whole trend didn't seem so professional and serious anymore," says Wood. "It seemed like a crock reserved for the rock stars and Hollywood types."
By 2000, though, neckwear started coming back - thanks to Regis Philbin, with dark tie on dark shirt, hosting oodles of episodes of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" on ABC. And after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a shocked nation went back to basics - yes, even with its wardrobe.
Since then, say experts, the tie look - overall - has rebounded. Maybe not to its earlier height, but sales are at least well over the $1 billion mark as of this year.
Although it's possible that some of these tie purchases usually stay in the closet, reserved only for special occasions, others are convinced the change is for real. "It seems pretty clear there is a movement to start dressing up again, and ties are part of that," says Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant with the Association of Image Consultants International (AICI). Think individualized choices - bold colors from pinks to oranges - with radical designs, he says. Thin is back in, as are ties that cost more than $100.
Employers are trying to bring back the tie, says Colleen Abrie of AICI, because "no doubt you perform better when you feel more professional looking."
That's how Matt Alexander, who works at Wellington Management in Boston, sees it. "Financial is a place for ties," says the client administrator, who is required to wear a necktie in the office.
More and more employers, it seems, were walking into work on casual Fridays and not liking what they saw. Many lost clients who entered dressed-down offices. The globalization of trade has also prodded Americans to spruce up their image, since Europeans and Asians tend to place a high value on a professional interchange.
Daryl Johnson, who works at GMO LLC, an investment management firm in Boston, has seen these forces firsthand. Although his office has adopted business casual year round, and he thinks it "contributes to a better working environment," the exception is when he and his colleagues conduct interviews or meet with clients. Then, "business formal is worn ... to show our respect," he says.
Sociologists, image consultants, and style mavens say the ups and downs are all a part of a bigger pattern: On roughly 20-year cycles, the open-collar look comes into vogue.
Recall ascot-coiffed Cuban bandleader Ricky Ricardo on "I Love Lucy" in the '50s, followed by the button-down Ward Cleaver ("Leave It to Beaver") and Robert Young ("Father Knows Best"). In the '70s, John Travolta brought the opencollar back ("Saturday Night Fever") before it died alongside discomania. In the late '80s, casual returned (with a lag to catch up with Crockett and Tubbs of "Miami Vice").
Today, there are still huge pockets that have defiantly stayed with the casual style. "[Ties are] uncomfortable, restricting, and serve no practical purpose," says Michael Saffran, a media-relations specialist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Faculty there don't wear ties, and many students have probably never seen one, he says. Things have gotten even more casual over the past five years, to the point where he has worn one only once in the past 12 months. "I had been hoping to make it a full year without wearing one, but I broke down and put on the 'noose' for a formal awards dinner this past spring," he says.
Recently a friend told him that wearing a tie gave him a sense of empowerment.
"My response to him (and to anyone who feels similarly) is this," says Mr. Saffran. "The only one being empowered are the people you're trying to impress by wearing a necktie."
LOS ANGELES -- Subtle forces are shifting deep in the psyche of the American male. These forces plumb the very depths of identity, class, power, status, and the human mating dance.
They are plumbing in several directions at once.
Someone please call the plumber.
If you believe marketers, imagemakers, bosses like Dilbert's - and other blokes paid to think up ways to tell you, "You're not good enough, but I've got just the thing to fix that" - it has all come down to the common necktie.
In some places (church, restaurants, college) the tie seems to be vanishing alongside the polar ice caps (if you believe Al Gore). Sightings can be especially rare during the hot summer months. But in other places (law offices, stock brokerages, hospitals) ties are reappearing faster than Whac-A-Mole on steroids. "Ties are both coming back and going out at the same time," says Gerald Andersen, executive director of the Men's Dress Furnishings Association in New York. The changes are both real (not imagined) and modified by regional differences (up generally in the Midwest and East; down, for the most part, in the West), he and others say. The personal whims of revolving CEOs can also figure in - no matter what profession.
"Both perceptions are correct," Mr. Andersen says. But with a kind of defiance to those of the now-defunct dotcom era who had all but deep-sixed the necktie in favor of T-shirts, beards, shorts, and sandals, he paraphrases Mark Twain: "The reports of the death of the necktie have been greatly exaggerated."
Of course a guy from the Men's Dress Furnishings Association would say that, some might think. But he's got stats showing where the prediction came from and where it went. The glory days of the tie were in the early '90s, when men, and the women who shop for them, racked up a record $1.3 billion in US necktie sales. But they dipped to half that ($750 million) just a half decade later. That was when "casual Friday" became the mantra, when the nerd-geniuses of Silicon Valley made it a status symbol to thumb their noses at US workplace convention.
Yes, that's how it was? Time to send an e-mail to Wall Street, stomping grounds of this writer's very own brother. "[The '90s was] when everybody figured the way to look businesslike and professional was to look like a dotcom executive wearing a casual shirt and walking shoes like [Apple exec] Steve Jobs, and it was pretty cool since those people were worth $50 million to $5 billion each," writes back Stephen Wood, an investment banker. "All the Wall Street firms and the law firms needed to appeal to the young guns coming out of school, so they adopted the 'business casual code' ('see, we're just as professional and serious about business as you are, Mr. $5 billion Dotcom executive').".
But after the dotcom bust, "the whole trend didn't seem so professional and serious anymore," says Wood. "It seemed like a crock reserved for the rock stars and Hollywood types."
By 2000, though, neckwear started coming back - thanks to Regis Philbin, with dark tie on dark shirt, hosting oodles of episodes of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" on ABC. And after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a shocked nation went back to basics - yes, even with its wardrobe.
Since then, say experts, the tie look - overall - has rebounded. Maybe not to its earlier height, but sales are at least well over the $1 billion mark as of this year.
Although it's possible that some of these tie purchases usually stay in the closet, reserved only for special occasions, others are convinced the change is for real. "It seems pretty clear there is a movement to start dressing up again, and ties are part of that," says Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant with the Association of Image Consultants International (AICI). Think individualized choices - bold colors from pinks to oranges - with radical designs, he says. Thin is back in, as are ties that cost more than $100.
Employers are trying to bring back the tie, says Colleen Abrie of AICI, because "no doubt you perform better when you feel more professional looking."
That's how Matt Alexander, who works at Wellington Management in Boston, sees it. "Financial is a place for ties," says the client administrator, who is required to wear a necktie in the office.
More and more employers, it seems, were walking into work on casual Fridays and not liking what they saw. Many lost clients who entered dressed-down offices. The globalization of trade has also prodded Americans to spruce up their image, since Europeans and Asians tend to place a high value on a professional interchange.
Daryl Johnson, who works at GMO LLC, an investment management firm in Boston, has seen these forces firsthand. Although his office has adopted business casual year round, and he thinks it "contributes to a better working environment," the exception is when he and his colleagues conduct interviews or meet with clients. Then, "business formal is worn ... to show our respect," he says.
Sociologists, image consultants, and style mavens say the ups and downs are all a part of a bigger pattern: On roughly 20-year cycles, the open-collar look comes into vogue.
Recall ascot-coiffed Cuban bandleader Ricky Ricardo on "I Love Lucy" in the '50s, followed by the button-down Ward Cleaver ("Leave It to Beaver") and Robert Young ("Father Knows Best"). In the '70s, John Travolta brought the opencollar back ("Saturday Night Fever") before it died alongside discomania. In the late '80s, casual returned (with a lag to catch up with Crockett and Tubbs of "Miami Vice").
Today, there are still huge pockets that have defiantly stayed with the casual style. "[Ties are] uncomfortable, restricting, and serve no practical purpose," says Michael Saffran, a media-relations specialist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Faculty there don't wear ties, and many students have probably never seen one, he says. Things have gotten even more casual over the past five years, to the point where he has worn one only once in the past 12 months. "I had been hoping to make it a full year without wearing one, but I broke down and put on the 'noose' for a formal awards dinner this past spring," he says.
Recently a friend told him that wearing a tie gave him a sense of empowerment.
"My response to him (and to anyone who feels similarly) is this," says Mr. Saffran. "The only one being empowered are the people you're trying to impress by wearing a necktie."
A crusader for classic men's fashion
Andy Gilchrist is on a mission to make guys dress well again
By Bruno J. Navarro
MSNBC
Are suspenders in style? Should dress socks match shoes or slacks? What’s the difference between chinos and khakis?
For the past five years, Andy Gilchrist — founder of Web site Ask Andy About Clothes — has fielded such questions from thousands of fashion-conscious readers.
“I’ve always been interested in clothing,” he says via telephone from Manhattan Beach, Calif. “Out of my wife and I, I’m the one who likes to shop.”
Gilchrist, 62, built his corporate career in occupational safety. But it was a part-time job at a Polo store near Redondo Beach, Calif., that caught his fancy.
“Probably that’s the most fun I’ve every had,” he says.
For most of the 5½ years he worked there, Gilchrist was the store’s top salesman — probably not surprising given his enthusiasm for the details of clothing. “I think it’s always been an interest of mine, even in high school,” he says.
Growing up in Kingman, Kan., Gilchrist says he would look forward to his family’s regularly scheduled back-to-school shopping trip to Wichita.
Early inspiration came from his dad, who would consistently strive to look his best, a trait Gilchrist laments as having largely faded from modern life.
“We’ve missed maybe a couple of generations there,” he says. “I’m not sure what happened.”
However, in the past few years Gilchrist says he has noticed men becoming more interested in dressing well.
“Now these guys have realized that clothing makes a difference on how people perceive you,” he says.
These days, Gilchrist spends about four hours a day on the site — “but it’s for fun,” he says — and enjoys help from volunteer moderators to handle queries and make sure things are running smoothly. The online forums, where visitors trade advice, ask questions and discuss the merits of men and women’s fashion elements, boasted 40 live members one recent afternoon.
The site has garnered enough of a following that users voted on an official Ask Andy tie pattern. An official pocket square and cufflinks are also in the works, Gilchrist says.
“Maybe I should go into licensing,” he says with a laugh, adding, “It actually pays the bills and provides a little extra for the official Andy wardrobe.”
Gilchrist says the most asked question is likely: Should dress socks match the shoes or the trousers?
“The answer is they should match the trousers so they can keep that continuous look,” he says.
(Naturally, other schools of fashion thought espouse “freelancing” socks of different hues for a more colorful approach — lending weight to the idea that all style is personal and rules are meant to be broken.)
Gilchrist usually takes a traditional tack with his advice, eschewing the fads for a more sophisticated look.
“The philosophy is a very conservative look so that it lasts for a long time, not just something that’s going to be in this season,” he says. “If you buy a suit, buy something that doesn’t have ruffles on the edge — or charteuse velvet — so it lasts a couple of years.”
One challenge for men is the casual look, to which Gilchrist devotes an entire page on his Web site defining.
“To pull off the casual look and to maintain an air of authority and professionalism is really, really tough,” he says.
All the advice he offered to customers eventually prompted him to produce a photocopied pamphlet, which three years later grew to become “The Encyclopedia of Men’s Clothes” ($19.95). The self-published CD-ROM volume — aptly named at approximately 800 printed pages and for sale on the site — includes a comprehensive approach to achieving the look.
Yet a main feature of Gilchrist’s advice is his emphasis on style and fit over price tags and designer labels.
“You can buy at Marshall’s or Ross or J.C. Penney or department stores,” he says. “You don’t really have to have money to look good. A lot of it is knowing what to look for — knowledge is power.”
By Bruno J. Navarro
MSNBC
Are suspenders in style? Should dress socks match shoes or slacks? What’s the difference between chinos and khakis?
For the past five years, Andy Gilchrist — founder of Web site Ask Andy About Clothes — has fielded such questions from thousands of fashion-conscious readers.
“I’ve always been interested in clothing,” he says via telephone from Manhattan Beach, Calif. “Out of my wife and I, I’m the one who likes to shop.”
Gilchrist, 62, built his corporate career in occupational safety. But it was a part-time job at a Polo store near Redondo Beach, Calif., that caught his fancy.
“Probably that’s the most fun I’ve every had,” he says.
For most of the 5½ years he worked there, Gilchrist was the store’s top salesman — probably not surprising given his enthusiasm for the details of clothing. “I think it’s always been an interest of mine, even in high school,” he says.
Growing up in Kingman, Kan., Gilchrist says he would look forward to his family’s regularly scheduled back-to-school shopping trip to Wichita.
Early inspiration came from his dad, who would consistently strive to look his best, a trait Gilchrist laments as having largely faded from modern life.
“We’ve missed maybe a couple of generations there,” he says. “I’m not sure what happened.”
However, in the past few years Gilchrist says he has noticed men becoming more interested in dressing well.
“Now these guys have realized that clothing makes a difference on how people perceive you,” he says.
These days, Gilchrist spends about four hours a day on the site — “but it’s for fun,” he says — and enjoys help from volunteer moderators to handle queries and make sure things are running smoothly. The online forums, where visitors trade advice, ask questions and discuss the merits of men and women’s fashion elements, boasted 40 live members one recent afternoon.
The site has garnered enough of a following that users voted on an official Ask Andy tie pattern. An official pocket square and cufflinks are also in the works, Gilchrist says.
“Maybe I should go into licensing,” he says with a laugh, adding, “It actually pays the bills and provides a little extra for the official Andy wardrobe.”
Gilchrist says the most asked question is likely: Should dress socks match the shoes or the trousers?
“The answer is they should match the trousers so they can keep that continuous look,” he says.
(Naturally, other schools of fashion thought espouse “freelancing” socks of different hues for a more colorful approach — lending weight to the idea that all style is personal and rules are meant to be broken.)
Gilchrist usually takes a traditional tack with his advice, eschewing the fads for a more sophisticated look.
“The philosophy is a very conservative look so that it lasts for a long time, not just something that’s going to be in this season,” he says. “If you buy a suit, buy something that doesn’t have ruffles on the edge — or charteuse velvet — so it lasts a couple of years.”
One challenge for men is the casual look, to which Gilchrist devotes an entire page on his Web site defining.
“To pull off the casual look and to maintain an air of authority and professionalism is really, really tough,” he says.
All the advice he offered to customers eventually prompted him to produce a photocopied pamphlet, which three years later grew to become “The Encyclopedia of Men’s Clothes” ($19.95). The self-published CD-ROM volume — aptly named at approximately 800 printed pages and for sale on the site — includes a comprehensive approach to achieving the look.
Yet a main feature of Gilchrist’s advice is his emphasis on style and fit over price tags and designer labels.
“You can buy at Marshall’s or Ross or J.C. Penney or department stores,” he says. “You don’t really have to have money to look good. A lot of it is knowing what to look for — knowledge is power.”
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
ring me up, nordy's
You caught me at a good time. I’m stuck downloading a 4 meg attachment of unknown origin over dial-up. Needless to say, I’m going to be waiting a while.
Since I’m waiting and you’re all waiting with baited breath fro the latest dispatch from Steve-land (har-de-har), it’d be a good time to tell you about my shopping trip to Nordstrom this past Sunday.
As those in the know may have noticed, Nordstrom holds an annual sale when the fall merchandise comes in. All the new fall collections are discounted, and all the older merchandise goes on clearance. The Anniversary Sale has become a tradition for me ever since we started getting Nordstrom stores in clos(er) driving range a few years ago.
On Sunday, I went to the Nordstrom in The Streets at Southpoint in Durham on a commando mission. I have at least once gone into this sale without a plan and spent an ungodly amount of money. Not that any of the stuff I bought was bad or unneeded; it was just a little much. So I studied up what was on sale and planned accordingly.
Armed with my trusty circular, I set out to buy a couple of Smartcare (wrinkle and stain resistant) dress shirts for work and at least one pair of shoes, a beautiful chocolate brown nubuck pair of Rockports. Among my (somewhat nearby) Nordstrom choices, Southpoint tends to be the most Spartan, but it was still Nordstrom, so I went along with it.
I’m a sucker for shoes (shocking), so I decided to go to the Men’s Furnishings department to knock out my work shirt Jones first. Being the Spartan experience it is, Nordstrom at Southpoint had only one Smartcare shirt left in my size on sale. I decided that I could use it. It’s a very pale green point-collar and has a lustrous sheen to it. I almost bought a tie to match, but that tie was $95.00, so I figured I could live without it. Another shirt I saw from the catalog (a badass blue checked model) was not available, so my salesperson Leah offered to order it for me on Monday. As of this writing, she hasn’t gotten back to me, but I can always find it online later at the Nordstrom website.
My next and final stop was the shoe department. Nordstrom loves shoes, so I love Nordstrom. It’s the only department store I can go into and find shoes that fit as a rule. Most everywhere else, the shoes are either ill-fitting or out of my price range.
My Rockports were there and they fit perfectly, but I also found a pair of New Balance sneakers, two pairs of Allen-Edmonds dress shoes, and the most tricked out pair of Sperry Topsider boat shoes I’ve ever seen. Everything together would have cost $700.00, so I pared it down considerably. The New Balances were too similar to what I had already, so I nixed those. The AEs were beautiful, but a little much for my normal dressing, so I didn’t get those either. I couldn’t pass up the Sperry’s though. They had Vibram outsoles, a memory foam-lined footbed and a deerskin lining. They were quite possibly the most comfortable, best-made boat shoes I’ve ever seen.
With that purchase, I reached the extent of my pre-determined spending limit and left a happy camper. I’m supposed to pick up some side money from photography later this week, so I may have to make another trip before the sale ends.
Since I’m waiting and you’re all waiting with baited breath fro the latest dispatch from Steve-land (har-de-har), it’d be a good time to tell you about my shopping trip to Nordstrom this past Sunday.
As those in the know may have noticed, Nordstrom holds an annual sale when the fall merchandise comes in. All the new fall collections are discounted, and all the older merchandise goes on clearance. The Anniversary Sale has become a tradition for me ever since we started getting Nordstrom stores in clos(er) driving range a few years ago.
On Sunday, I went to the Nordstrom in The Streets at Southpoint in Durham on a commando mission. I have at least once gone into this sale without a plan and spent an ungodly amount of money. Not that any of the stuff I bought was bad or unneeded; it was just a little much. So I studied up what was on sale and planned accordingly.Armed with my trusty circular, I set out to buy a couple of Smartcare (wrinkle and stain resistant) dress shirts for work and at least one pair of shoes, a beautiful chocolate brown nubuck pair of Rockports. Among my (somewhat nearby) Nordstrom choices, Southpoint tends to be the most Spartan, but it was still Nordstrom, so I went along with it.
I’m a sucker for shoes (shocking), so I decided to go to the Men’s Furnishings department to knock out my work shirt Jones first. Being the Spartan experience it is, Nordstrom at Southpoint had only one Smartcare shirt left in my size on sale. I decided that I could use it. It’s a very pale green point-collar and has a lustrous sheen to it. I almost bought a tie to match, but that tie was $95.00, so I figured I could live without it. Another shirt I saw from the catalog (a badass blue checked model) was not available, so my salesperson Leah offered to order it for me on Monday. As of this writing, she hasn’t gotten back to me, but I can always find it online later at the Nordstrom website.
My next and final stop was the shoe department. Nordstrom loves shoes, so I love Nordstrom. It’s the only department store I can go into and find shoes that fit as a rule. Most everywhere else, the shoes are either ill-fitting or out of my price range.
My Rockports were there and they fit perfectly, but I also found a pair of New Balance sneakers, two pairs of Allen-Edmonds dress shoes, and the most tricked out pair of Sperry Topsider boat shoes I’ve ever seen. Everything together would have cost $700.00, so I pared it down considerably. The New Balances were too similar to what I had already, so I nixed those. The AEs were beautiful, but a little much for my normal dressing, so I didn’t get those either. I couldn’t pass up the Sperry’s though. They had Vibram outsoles, a memory foam-lined footbed and a deerskin lining. They were quite possibly the most comfortable, best-made boat shoes I’ve ever seen.
With that purchase, I reached the extent of my pre-determined spending limit and left a happy camper. I’m supposed to pick up some side money from photography later this week, so I may have to make another trip before the sale ends.
IGIGI Sponsors Miss Plus America 2006 Beauty Pageant
Plus-size Clothing Company Reaffirms Commitment to the Celebration of the Voluptuous Beauty
SAN FRANCISCO -- IGIGI (www.igigi.com), a leading retailer of designer clothing in sizes 14-32, is proud to announce that it is one of the corporate sponsors of Miss Plus America 2006, www.missplusmaerica.com, which will take place in Monroe, LA July 26-29, 2006.
Miss Plus America Pageant is an annual event that celebrates the essence of the full-figured, curvaceous, voluptuous American woman. Miss Plus America candidates will wear formal pieces from IGIGI collections in the pageant’s opening number as well as casual items on other rounds of the competition.
“We are very excited to be a part of this event” said Yuliya Zeltser, IGIGI Founder. “Our greatest mission at IGIGI is to break down the misconceptions surrounding beauty and consistently come out with collections which prove that beauty is not about size, but it is about style. Every woman, regardless of shape and size is beautiful and sensual when she is wearing the right clothes for her body.”
SAN FRANCISCO -- IGIGI (www.igigi.com), a leading retailer of designer clothing in sizes 14-32, is proud to announce that it is one of the corporate sponsors of Miss Plus America 2006, www.missplusmaerica.com, which will take place in Monroe, LA July 26-29, 2006.
Miss Plus America Pageant is an annual event that celebrates the essence of the full-figured, curvaceous, voluptuous American woman. Miss Plus America candidates will wear formal pieces from IGIGI collections in the pageant’s opening number as well as casual items on other rounds of the competition.
“We are very excited to be a part of this event” said Yuliya Zeltser, IGIGI Founder. “Our greatest mission at IGIGI is to break down the misconceptions surrounding beauty and consistently come out with collections which prove that beauty is not about size, but it is about style. Every woman, regardless of shape and size is beautiful and sensual when she is wearing the right clothes for her body.”
OK, maybe a little later than I thought
Despite my desire to be back up and going online tonight, I fell asleep after work and didn't wake until now. I guess I was really tired.
Updates to follow...soon enough.
Updates to follow...soon enough.
Monday, July 17, 2006
...sooner than later
Sorry for the lack of content. Saturday was my maternal grandmother's-side's family reunion. Sunday was the Nordstrom Aniversary Sale. After some fever-pitch ironing, it's time for bed.
I'll be be back online later today after work.
I'll be be back online later today after work.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Show and Tell
By BILL CUNNINGHAMNEW YORK - The Fifth Avenue windows of Bergdorf Goodman and Saks are a new kind of art gallery, with constantly changing installations. A form of theater from the early 1900's, store windows have had their ups and downs. They slumped in the Depression, revived in the late 30's, and fell again in the late 70's, when department stores closed and street crime curtailed nighttime strolls. And then many promising display artists were lost to AIDS.
Linda Fargo came to Bergdorf's in 1995 and started a revolution with her extravagant fantasies, including upside-down windows (1), and 1996's mannequins sprawled on holiday tables including broken china. Her amazing detail (7) influenced costume shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (8). David Hoey (3) now designs Bergdorf's windows. His counterpart at Saks, Tim Wisgerhof (17), has his own art signature, with Warhol-like multiple cupcakes framing mannequins (11); huge surrealist eyes (12); a snow-shovel Christmas tree (18); the repetition of manila envelopes (19); and a series of smashed panels, doors and broken light bulbs scattered on the floor (20, 21 and 22). Many times what seems to be a finished Wisgerhof window is a work in progress. The first week the backgrounds are flattened shipping boxes held together with tape (13 and 14). A week later trash can lids are added (15). Week three, the boxes are painted magenta and packing paper forms clouds (16). Visiting the windows is like watching an artist create a work.
At Bergdorf's, Mr. Hoey isn't waiting until the holidays to stop passers-by in their tracks. His present installation salutes the Dada show at the Museum of Modern Art, including a topsy-turvy room (4). Mr. Hoey's spring windows celebrated transportation (6) with seated mannequins protruding from the wall; the Dorothy Draper show at the Museum of the City of New York (9); and surrealism (5). Up now are mannequins and their silhouettes, cut from wrapping-paper backgrounds (2).
The Council of Fashion Designers of America has missed a great opportunity in not recognizing these exceptional talents at its annual awards.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
To Chav and Chav Not
Can Burberry save itself from the tacky British yobs who love it?
By Daniel Gross
Slate
American fashion brands have long looked across the pond for inspiration. Ralph Lauren made his fortune by providing an English country look to American burghers, and Brooks Brothers aspires to Bond Street. And there's an old garment industry motto: "Dress British, think Yiddish."
But the admiration goes the other direction, too. Burberry, the venerable British outfitter, has just hired its second American CEO in a row, Indiana native Angela Ahrendts. Last week the new boss said she plans to introduce the plaid-based luxury brand to flyover territory. As the Financial Times reported (subscription required), "Burberry is planning to take the brand into the heartland of Middle America, opening stores in Kansas, Indiana and Ohio as part of a big push into the US." The Americanization of Burberry is one response to the company's curious crisis back home. It's looking to the New World to save it from the down-market yobs who've hijacked the brand in England.
Burberry has a long and distinguished history. Started in 1856 by Thomas Burberry, the company developed gabardine in the 1880s and introduced the modern trench coat. (The famous checkered pattern was introduced as a lining to the trench coat in the 1920s.) Rose Marie Bravo, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Fordham University, and the retail universities of Macy's and Saks, brought New York retailing savvy to the old brand when she was hired as CEO in 1997. Bravo hired designer Christopher Bailey from Gucci, planted the famous check on bikinis, and generally endowed the staid brand with sex appeal. The turnaround won plaudits from Business Week and led Time to dub her the most powerful woman in fashion in 2004. A portion of the company was sold to the public in the summer of 2002, and the stock has done reasonably well, as this chart shows.
As part of an orderly transition, it was announced last October that Ahrendts, a senior executive at Liz Claiborne responsible for brands like Ellen Tracy and Juicy Couture, would join the company in January and succeed Bravo in July. Ahrendts' task is to consolidate the gains, improve operations, and push the brand further into new markets. These are good times for luxury brands, as rising wealth in Asia, Russia, and the Persian Gulf boosts demand for Western luxury marks like Burberry. The company reported today that quarterly sales were up 19 percent from last year.
Amid the growth, however, Burberry has faced a crisis on its home turf. For some reason, a few years ago, a group of undesirable customers—known in the United Kingdom as "chavs"—latched onto Burberry as their favored brand. Who, or perhaps what, are chavs? The FT describes them as "members of a sub-culture prone to drinking and anti-social behaviour." (Here are definitions from Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia.) They're tough guys, skanks, soccer hooligans, lower-class unsophisticates, and cheesy celebrities. The king and queen of the chavs are soccer star David Beckham and his wife, not-so-Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham. Chavs, who are defined by class, not race, listen to hip-hop music, wear lots of jewelry, hang out in fast-food joints, and drink in public. (Here's a funny animated bit: "The Chavs—In Me Burberry.")
In the United States, some brands have experienced spectacular growth after being adopted by people on the fringes of polite society (see Timberland and hip-hop). But it doesn't quite work that way in Britain. The Financial Times noted that "wearing the brand became cause for exclusion from pubs, clubs and football grounds because it had become the uniform of troublemakers." Things got really bad when Danniella Westbrook, an ultra-chavvy former soap star, appeared in photos with her child, clad entirely in Burberry. More trouble came last fall, when Kate Moss, who featured prominently in Burberry's marketing campaigns, went into rehab.
Burberry has certainly been damaged by its walk on the "chav" side. But the British market represents only a small part of total sales. And so it makes perfect sense for the new CEO to be targeting the wealthy, deep, and comparatively underpenetrated U.S. market, which accounts for about a quarter of Burberry's revenues. Still, I can't help but wonder if Ahrendts's geographical strategy within the United States is sound.
Burberry has 32 outlets in the United States. (Here's the U.S. store locator.) The stores are mostly in the Arugula Belt—really upscale suburban and urban locales where you're likely to find Asian fusion restaurants, not all-you-can eat buffets; Tiffany's, not Annie Sez—places like Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, South Coast Plaza in the O.C., Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver, Newbury Street in Boston, and even Vegas.
In building up a retail presence, Burberry has clearly followed a strategy mapped out by luxury retailers like Neiman Marcus and Tiffany. But Ahrendts has different plans. She told the Financial Times that the company's expensive belted coats would find a welcome audience in the Corn Belt. "The brand resonates as being very democratic," she said. "It is aspirational to the typical American who has never been to London. But is not as intimidating."
This Midwesterner isn't so sure. This morning, I visited Burberry's flagship store near the corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. The six-story emporium stands just off the greatest shopping axis in the Western World—Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman, and Bulgari are all within a stone's throw. There's plenty of nice-looking, high-end merchandise here: coats of course, but also handbags, shoes, and casual wear. The salespeople are nice. Not a chav in sight to intimidate buyers. But the prices are rather intimidating. The 1921 men's trench coat, made of Egyptian cotton with a heavy lining, goes for $1,495. Are the practical, sober-headed burghers of Kansas, Indiana, and Ohio really prepared to pay $1,500 for a raincoat that looks a lot like the one you can buy at Brooks Brothers for a lot less, or at Target for a whole lot less?
More broadly, the brand as it exists today is clearly not pitched to the heartland. Burberry is sponsoring the Anglomania exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And the company's U.S. home page sure doesn't look like Indianapolis.
It makes sense for Burberry to chase growth in the United States. And it makes sense for the raincoat purveyor to chase the sun. Recent store openings have been in San Diego, San Antonio, and Naples, Fla. They might not need raincoats in Vegas or San Diego, but Burberry makes excellent margins on accessories and handbags, like this $1,680 Manor bag. Still, the company shouldn't ignore the places that feature a crappy climate and lots of highly liquid consumers. Forget about Kansas and Indiana. How about Connecticut, the Hamptons, the Boston suburbs, Portland, Ore., or Seattle—all of which have yet to be graced with a Burberry store?
The British company and its American leader certainly are right that they should get away from the British chavs by heading to the American 'burbs. I'm just not convinced they're heading to the right ones.
Daniel Gross (http://www.danielgross.net/) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.
By Daniel Gross
Slate
American fashion brands have long looked across the pond for inspiration. Ralph Lauren made his fortune by providing an English country look to American burghers, and Brooks Brothers aspires to Bond Street. And there's an old garment industry motto: "Dress British, think Yiddish."
But the admiration goes the other direction, too. Burberry, the venerable British outfitter, has just hired its second American CEO in a row, Indiana native Angela Ahrendts. Last week the new boss said she plans to introduce the plaid-based luxury brand to flyover territory. As the Financial Times reported (subscription required), "Burberry is planning to take the brand into the heartland of Middle America, opening stores in Kansas, Indiana and Ohio as part of a big push into the US." The Americanization of Burberry is one response to the company's curious crisis back home. It's looking to the New World to save it from the down-market yobs who've hijacked the brand in England.
Burberry has a long and distinguished history. Started in 1856 by Thomas Burberry, the company developed gabardine in the 1880s and introduced the modern trench coat. (The famous checkered pattern was introduced as a lining to the trench coat in the 1920s.) Rose Marie Bravo, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Fordham University, and the retail universities of Macy's and Saks, brought New York retailing savvy to the old brand when she was hired as CEO in 1997. Bravo hired designer Christopher Bailey from Gucci, planted the famous check on bikinis, and generally endowed the staid brand with sex appeal. The turnaround won plaudits from Business Week and led Time to dub her the most powerful woman in fashion in 2004. A portion of the company was sold to the public in the summer of 2002, and the stock has done reasonably well, as this chart shows.
As part of an orderly transition, it was announced last October that Ahrendts, a senior executive at Liz Claiborne responsible for brands like Ellen Tracy and Juicy Couture, would join the company in January and succeed Bravo in July. Ahrendts' task is to consolidate the gains, improve operations, and push the brand further into new markets. These are good times for luxury brands, as rising wealth in Asia, Russia, and the Persian Gulf boosts demand for Western luxury marks like Burberry. The company reported today that quarterly sales were up 19 percent from last year.
Amid the growth, however, Burberry has faced a crisis on its home turf. For some reason, a few years ago, a group of undesirable customers—known in the United Kingdom as "chavs"—latched onto Burberry as their favored brand. Who, or perhaps what, are chavs? The FT describes them as "members of a sub-culture prone to drinking and anti-social behaviour." (Here are definitions from Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia.) They're tough guys, skanks, soccer hooligans, lower-class unsophisticates, and cheesy celebrities. The king and queen of the chavs are soccer star David Beckham and his wife, not-so-Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham. Chavs, who are defined by class, not race, listen to hip-hop music, wear lots of jewelry, hang out in fast-food joints, and drink in public. (Here's a funny animated bit: "The Chavs—In Me Burberry.")
In the United States, some brands have experienced spectacular growth after being adopted by people on the fringes of polite society (see Timberland and hip-hop). But it doesn't quite work that way in Britain. The Financial Times noted that "wearing the brand became cause for exclusion from pubs, clubs and football grounds because it had become the uniform of troublemakers." Things got really bad when Danniella Westbrook, an ultra-chavvy former soap star, appeared in photos with her child, clad entirely in Burberry. More trouble came last fall, when Kate Moss, who featured prominently in Burberry's marketing campaigns, went into rehab.
Burberry has certainly been damaged by its walk on the "chav" side. But the British market represents only a small part of total sales. And so it makes perfect sense for the new CEO to be targeting the wealthy, deep, and comparatively underpenetrated U.S. market, which accounts for about a quarter of Burberry's revenues. Still, I can't help but wonder if Ahrendts's geographical strategy within the United States is sound.
Burberry has 32 outlets in the United States. (Here's the U.S. store locator.) The stores are mostly in the Arugula Belt—really upscale suburban and urban locales where you're likely to find Asian fusion restaurants, not all-you-can eat buffets; Tiffany's, not Annie Sez—places like Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, South Coast Plaza in the O.C., Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver, Newbury Street in Boston, and even Vegas.
In building up a retail presence, Burberry has clearly followed a strategy mapped out by luxury retailers like Neiman Marcus and Tiffany. But Ahrendts has different plans. She told the Financial Times that the company's expensive belted coats would find a welcome audience in the Corn Belt. "The brand resonates as being very democratic," she said. "It is aspirational to the typical American who has never been to London. But is not as intimidating."
This Midwesterner isn't so sure. This morning, I visited Burberry's flagship store near the corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. The six-story emporium stands just off the greatest shopping axis in the Western World—Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman, and Bulgari are all within a stone's throw. There's plenty of nice-looking, high-end merchandise here: coats of course, but also handbags, shoes, and casual wear. The salespeople are nice. Not a chav in sight to intimidate buyers. But the prices are rather intimidating. The 1921 men's trench coat, made of Egyptian cotton with a heavy lining, goes for $1,495. Are the practical, sober-headed burghers of Kansas, Indiana, and Ohio really prepared to pay $1,500 for a raincoat that looks a lot like the one you can buy at Brooks Brothers for a lot less, or at Target for a whole lot less?
More broadly, the brand as it exists today is clearly not pitched to the heartland. Burberry is sponsoring the Anglomania exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And the company's U.S. home page sure doesn't look like Indianapolis.
It makes sense for Burberry to chase growth in the United States. And it makes sense for the raincoat purveyor to chase the sun. Recent store openings have been in San Diego, San Antonio, and Naples, Fla. They might not need raincoats in Vegas or San Diego, but Burberry makes excellent margins on accessories and handbags, like this $1,680 Manor bag. Still, the company shouldn't ignore the places that feature a crappy climate and lots of highly liquid consumers. Forget about Kansas and Indiana. How about Connecticut, the Hamptons, the Boston suburbs, Portland, Ore., or Seattle—all of which have yet to be graced with a Burberry store?
The British company and its American leader certainly are right that they should get away from the British chavs by heading to the American 'burbs. I'm just not convinced they're heading to the right ones.
Daniel Gross (http://www.danielgross.net/) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
as the world turns
Hello. I hope all is well (or at least not horrible) in your respective worlds.
Work has been a pain in my ass ever since they hired L and I'm just not motivated to do much at all around here after dealing with drama all day. And so it goes.
Long story short, L is from a sales (telemarketing) background, and she's done it for so long that she approaches every situation as an opportunity to "upsell."
Problem is, we don't sell anything at the City. We provide an essential citizen/developer service. It's not even close to the same approach.
This understandably has led to a certain amount of tension, as my co-workers are trained in a civil service style of service providing, and I approach things from a nuanced personal-shopper-cum-tax-preparer angle.
I think my angle works better, and I have written a marketing plan to support my position, waiting to be unveiled at the appropriate time.
But the last few days have bordered on unbeleivably bad. At some point when I can talk about all this without getting angry, I have to write some of this insanity down. It's like a soap opera in the weirdest sense of the concept.
If anybody out there has anything they'd like to share, please do. I need something else to think about.
Work has been a pain in my ass ever since they hired L and I'm just not motivated to do much at all around here after dealing with drama all day. And so it goes.
Long story short, L is from a sales (telemarketing) background, and she's done it for so long that she approaches every situation as an opportunity to "upsell."
Problem is, we don't sell anything at the City. We provide an essential citizen/developer service. It's not even close to the same approach.
This understandably has led to a certain amount of tension, as my co-workers are trained in a civil service style of service providing, and I approach things from a nuanced personal-shopper-cum-tax-preparer angle.
I think my angle works better, and I have written a marketing plan to support my position, waiting to be unveiled at the appropriate time.
But the last few days have bordered on unbeleivably bad. At some point when I can talk about all this without getting angry, I have to write some of this insanity down. It's like a soap opera in the weirdest sense of the concept.
If anybody out there has anything they'd like to share, please do. I need something else to think about.
Target Most-Shopped in U.S. Behind Wal-Mart
Chain Store Age
Columbus, Ohio - Target is the second most-shopped retailer in the United States, trailing only Wal-Mart, according to a report by Retail Forward.
In its latest Shopper Update report, Bull's-eye on the Target Shopper, Retail Forward assesses recent consumer research from its monthly ShopperScape on-line survey to develop a profile of the Target shopper.
The survey reveals that one quarter of all U.S. primary household shoppers visit a Target, Target Greatland or SuperTarget store monthly. Additionally, about 66% of Target's past six-month customer base returns to its stores regularly.
However, because Target's geographic coverage is not as pervasive as Wal-Mart’s, it draws much less shopper traffic on a regular basis than does Wal-Mart.
Columbus, Ohio - Target is the second most-shopped retailer in the United States, trailing only Wal-Mart, according to a report by Retail Forward.
In its latest Shopper Update report, Bull's-eye on the Target Shopper, Retail Forward assesses recent consumer research from its monthly ShopperScape on-line survey to develop a profile of the Target shopper.
The survey reveals that one quarter of all U.S. primary household shoppers visit a Target, Target Greatland or SuperTarget store monthly. Additionally, about 66% of Target's past six-month customer base returns to its stores regularly.
However, because Target's geographic coverage is not as pervasive as Wal-Mart’s, it draws much less shopper traffic on a regular basis than does Wal-Mart.
McDonald's chickens out
Peppery sandwich gets shelved; demand for bolder tastes put in doubt
John Schmeltzer
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO -- In a sign that the country's tastes may not be as adventurous as McDonald's believed, the fast-food giant said Tuesday it is pulling the Hot 'n' Spicy McChicken sandwich from the menu board.
Oak Brook-based McDonald's Corp. introduced the sandwich with great fanfare in January as part of the largest menu expansion in decades. At the time, the hamburger giant's move to add the peppery sandwich was seen as an indication that American palates were growing to regularly include more intense flavors found in Mexican, Thai and other ethnic foods.
But, apparently, we're not there yet.
After six months of soft sales, McDonald's appears to have misread the market for the sandwich. A spokeswoman for the company confirmed Tuesday that the spicy chicken sandwich "has been discontinued."
The spicy chicken sandwich was seen to be part of the restaurant industry push to offer items that excited its customers.
Across the country, restaurant menus are getting more bold flavors--such as a spicy pulled pork sandwich from Tyson; drinks from the Coca-Cola Co. like Pomegranate Punch, a blend of Bacardi rum with pomegranate juice, Sprite and lemonade; and fusions of flavors such as a peach blackberry streusel pie from Sara Lee Corp.
In part, it is due to the wave of Hispanic immigration that hit the nation in the 1990s. But it is also due to a growing number of Baby Boomers demanding stronger flavors to compensate for the loss of some taste buds during the aging process. One measure of the trend is the increase in the production of chili peppers, which has risen from 2.8 million pounds in 2001 to 5.2 million pounds in 2005.
"Spicy chicken resonated well with consumers looking for the spicy bold taste," said Bill Whitman, a spokesman for the company.
In fact, the company in April credited sales of the spicy chicken sandwich with helping to drive U.S. sales higher by 4.1 percent that month.
"It's not that it didn't do well. It just didn't do well enough" to keep it onto the core menu, he said.
McDonald's spent 18 months developing the spicy chicken sandwich and declined to disclose how much was spent in development.
None of McDonald's premium sandwiches, whether burger or chicken, are among the chain's top-selling sandwiches.
Whitman said the top-selling sandwich is the double cheeseburger by a wide margin. The cheeseburger and McChicken sandwich are second- and third-best sellers. All three sandwiches are from the company's dollar menu, where all the products cost $1.
The McChicken is one of nearly two dozen chicken items the company now offers. While McDonald's is known as a hamburger chain, more than 30 percent of the items on its core menu are chicken products.
The spicy sandwich is not the first time that the company has stumbled with an offering. But it is one of the quickest removals for an item that wasn't a hit.
McDonald's stuck with its expensive Arch Deluxe sandwich for two years.
In 1981, McDonald's introduced a boneless pork sandwich called a McRib. Sales were mediocre and it was eventually canceled several years later.
In 1962, the company briefly offered a sandwich with grilled pineapple and cheese for consumers going meatless during Lent. It failed to catch on and the next year was replaced by the Filet-O-Fish, which is now one of the company's standards.
While the spicy chicken sandwich is still available in the Chicago area and a few other markets, Whitman said it would be discontinued as supplies are exhausted.
It will be replaced on the menu boards of the more than 13,000 U.S. McDonald's this month by the snack-size chicken wrap, which the company hopes will be the newest thing that can drive sales higher.
But the spicy chicken sandwich may not be gone for good. Whitman said it may return occasionally in a fashion similar to the McRib, which is brought back in select markets about once a year.
Bob Goldin, vice president of Technomics Inc., a Chicago-based market research firm, said canceling the spicy sandwich was the right decision.
"They have to be careful about over-cluttering the menu board," he said. "If they want to add some spice to something they can add a spicy sauce."
John Schmeltzer
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO -- In a sign that the country's tastes may not be as adventurous as McDonald's believed, the fast-food giant said Tuesday it is pulling the Hot 'n' Spicy McChicken sandwich from the menu board.
Oak Brook-based McDonald's Corp. introduced the sandwich with great fanfare in January as part of the largest menu expansion in decades. At the time, the hamburger giant's move to add the peppery sandwich was seen as an indication that American palates were growing to regularly include more intense flavors found in Mexican, Thai and other ethnic foods.
But, apparently, we're not there yet.
After six months of soft sales, McDonald's appears to have misread the market for the sandwich. A spokeswoman for the company confirmed Tuesday that the spicy chicken sandwich "has been discontinued."
The spicy chicken sandwich was seen to be part of the restaurant industry push to offer items that excited its customers.
Across the country, restaurant menus are getting more bold flavors--such as a spicy pulled pork sandwich from Tyson; drinks from the Coca-Cola Co. like Pomegranate Punch, a blend of Bacardi rum with pomegranate juice, Sprite and lemonade; and fusions of flavors such as a peach blackberry streusel pie from Sara Lee Corp.
In part, it is due to the wave of Hispanic immigration that hit the nation in the 1990s. But it is also due to a growing number of Baby Boomers demanding stronger flavors to compensate for the loss of some taste buds during the aging process. One measure of the trend is the increase in the production of chili peppers, which has risen from 2.8 million pounds in 2001 to 5.2 million pounds in 2005.
"Spicy chicken resonated well with consumers looking for the spicy bold taste," said Bill Whitman, a spokesman for the company.
In fact, the company in April credited sales of the spicy chicken sandwich with helping to drive U.S. sales higher by 4.1 percent that month.
"It's not that it didn't do well. It just didn't do well enough" to keep it onto the core menu, he said.
McDonald's spent 18 months developing the spicy chicken sandwich and declined to disclose how much was spent in development.
None of McDonald's premium sandwiches, whether burger or chicken, are among the chain's top-selling sandwiches.
Whitman said the top-selling sandwich is the double cheeseburger by a wide margin. The cheeseburger and McChicken sandwich are second- and third-best sellers. All three sandwiches are from the company's dollar menu, where all the products cost $1.
The McChicken is one of nearly two dozen chicken items the company now offers. While McDonald's is known as a hamburger chain, more than 30 percent of the items on its core menu are chicken products.
The spicy sandwich is not the first time that the company has stumbled with an offering. But it is one of the quickest removals for an item that wasn't a hit.
McDonald's stuck with its expensive Arch Deluxe sandwich for two years.
In 1981, McDonald's introduced a boneless pork sandwich called a McRib. Sales were mediocre and it was eventually canceled several years later.
In 1962, the company briefly offered a sandwich with grilled pineapple and cheese for consumers going meatless during Lent. It failed to catch on and the next year was replaced by the Filet-O-Fish, which is now one of the company's standards.
While the spicy chicken sandwich is still available in the Chicago area and a few other markets, Whitman said it would be discontinued as supplies are exhausted.
It will be replaced on the menu boards of the more than 13,000 U.S. McDonald's this month by the snack-size chicken wrap, which the company hopes will be the newest thing that can drive sales higher.
But the spicy chicken sandwich may not be gone for good. Whitman said it may return occasionally in a fashion similar to the McRib, which is brought back in select markets about once a year.
Bob Goldin, vice president of Technomics Inc., a Chicago-based market research firm, said canceling the spicy sandwich was the right decision.
"They have to be careful about over-cluttering the menu board," he said. "If they want to add some spice to something they can add a spicy sauce."
Federated Sells Filene’s Historic Boston Store
Downtown location, built in 1890, latest victim of retailer’s divestiture plan
visualstore.com
Federated Department Stores Inc. (Cincinnati) has finalized an agreement to sell its downtown Boston Filene's store to Vornado Realty Trust (New York) for approximately $100 million.
The 656,000-square-foot Filene's store opened in downtown Boston in 1890. It’s one of the duplicate locations Federated previously announced for divestiture as a result of its acquisition of The May Department Stores Co. (St. Louis) last year. There is a Macy’s store in Downtown Crossing, a newer shopping and commercial area in the heart of the city.
With this agreement, Federated now has announced buyers for 57 of its 80 duplicate locations.
visualstore.com
Federated Department Stores Inc. (Cincinnati) has finalized an agreement to sell its downtown Boston Filene's store to Vornado Realty Trust (New York) for approximately $100 million.
The 656,000-square-foot Filene's store opened in downtown Boston in 1890. It’s one of the duplicate locations Federated previously announced for divestiture as a result of its acquisition of The May Department Stores Co. (St. Louis) last year. There is a Macy’s store in Downtown Crossing, a newer shopping and commercial area in the heart of the city.
With this agreement, Federated now has announced buyers for 57 of its 80 duplicate locations.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Pink Void
The psychedelic legacy of Syd Barrett.
By Jody Rosen
Syd Barrett, who died several days ago (no one is sure exactly when) at age 60, was, to say the least, a mess. The wire services are remembering the co-founder and first lead singer of Pink Floyd as a "troubled genius"—obit-speak for lunatic—and indeed his life was a lurid tragedy that seemed scripted for a VH-1 Behind the Music special: Gifted psychedelic-rock pioneer streaks like a comet across the Swinging London music scene, sears his mind on drugs, descends into madness, and disappears. He became something more horrifying than a rock martyr like Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix; he became a kind of living dead man. The most famous episode in the Barrett legend was his 1975 reunion with Pink Floyd, when he turned up unannounced at Abbey Road Studios just as the band was recording their Barrett elegy, "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond." He was a gruesome apparition—bloated, with a shaved head and shaved eyebrows—and none of his ex-bandmates recognized him.
And yet this epic mess of a man made art that was anything but. Listening to Barrett's songs—to the first Pink Floyd singles, to the band's 1967 debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and to Barrett's early '70s solo records—one is struck by the formal rigor, the wit, the satisfying symmetries of his music and words. Barrett was a terrific craftsman, and neither the dissonance and clatter of his soundscapes nor the cheery freakiness of his lyrics could hide the songs' essential classicism. Had Barrett been born 30 years earlier, and done several thousand fewer hits of LSD, he could have made a fine living on Tin Pan Alley. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is probably the great '60s psychedelic rock album, and it reminds us that psychedelic rock wasn't an atonal maelstrom, but pop gone a little fuzzy and acid-fried around the edges: catchy songs tricked out with weird noises. Barrett's lyrics similarly mixed old-fashioned rigor with drug-fueled surreality, nonsense with wry, funny, haunting sense. "Arnold Layne," Pink Floyd's first single, sounds like doggerel, but listen closer and you hear the tale of a transvestite who steals his wardrobe from clotheslines: "Arnold Layne/ Had a strange hobby/ Collecting clothes/ Moonshine, washing line/ They suit him fine."
Barrett delivers those lines in a nasal southern English whine, which was something of an innovation for the time. Most British bands, including the Stones and early Beatles, sang in ersatz-American accents, but Barrett proclaimed his Englishness and not just by refusing to Yankee-up his singing voice. His songs are steeped in a pastoral fairy-tale Englishness—enchanted forests and gnomes in tunics and mice romping through barley fields—which is what you get, I guess, when you mix hard drugs with Victorian children's literature. (Barrett took the phrase "piper at the gates of dawn" from Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.) It's a deeply quaint and provincial worldview, perfect for Barrett's twisty little pop songs but miles from the space-rock grandeur that Pink Floyd would achieve on post-Barrett classics like Dark Side of the Moon. Rock snobs like to say that Pink Floyd lost it when Barrett freaked out and left the band, but the truth is Floyd would probably have gone down in history as a curio had Barrett stuck around—and what's more, there wouldn't be any such thing as Radiohead.
For decades, Barrett was rock's great romantic-tragic recluse, and now that there will definitely be no second act to his sad story, the Byronic myth surrounding him is bound to inflate. (I'm sure we'll be hearing lots of his 1970 ballad "Dark Globe," a terrifying farewell from a man slipping into madness: "Please, please, please lift a hand/ With Eskimo chain/ I tattered my brain/ Won't you miss me?/ Wouldn't you miss me at all?") But it would be nice if Barrett was recalled not just as an acid casualty or as a legendary "rock madman" but as an English eccentric in the surreal-comic tradition that extends from Lewis Carroll to Monty Python and, via Barrett, onto the weirdo-pop specialist Robyn Hitchcock. Barrett spent his final years in his mother's house in Cambridge, England, living comfortably off the royalties that his former bandmates made sure he collected. Reportedly, his pastimes were painting and gardening, and he was often seen by neighbors on his bicycle. It sounds like a pretty nice life, actually, and it's pleasant to think of Barrett ending his days as a vaguely Victorian figure—an odd old Englishman who'd made quite a splash in his youth, tottering through town on two wheels.
Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.
By Jody Rosen
Syd Barrett, who died several days ago (no one is sure exactly when) at age 60, was, to say the least, a mess. The wire services are remembering the co-founder and first lead singer of Pink Floyd as a "troubled genius"—obit-speak for lunatic—and indeed his life was a lurid tragedy that seemed scripted for a VH-1 Behind the Music special: Gifted psychedelic-rock pioneer streaks like a comet across the Swinging London music scene, sears his mind on drugs, descends into madness, and disappears. He became something more horrifying than a rock martyr like Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix; he became a kind of living dead man. The most famous episode in the Barrett legend was his 1975 reunion with Pink Floyd, when he turned up unannounced at Abbey Road Studios just as the band was recording their Barrett elegy, "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond." He was a gruesome apparition—bloated, with a shaved head and shaved eyebrows—and none of his ex-bandmates recognized him.
And yet this epic mess of a man made art that was anything but. Listening to Barrett's songs—to the first Pink Floyd singles, to the band's 1967 debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and to Barrett's early '70s solo records—one is struck by the formal rigor, the wit, the satisfying symmetries of his music and words. Barrett was a terrific craftsman, and neither the dissonance and clatter of his soundscapes nor the cheery freakiness of his lyrics could hide the songs' essential classicism. Had Barrett been born 30 years earlier, and done several thousand fewer hits of LSD, he could have made a fine living on Tin Pan Alley. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is probably the great '60s psychedelic rock album, and it reminds us that psychedelic rock wasn't an atonal maelstrom, but pop gone a little fuzzy and acid-fried around the edges: catchy songs tricked out with weird noises. Barrett's lyrics similarly mixed old-fashioned rigor with drug-fueled surreality, nonsense with wry, funny, haunting sense. "Arnold Layne," Pink Floyd's first single, sounds like doggerel, but listen closer and you hear the tale of a transvestite who steals his wardrobe from clotheslines: "Arnold Layne/ Had a strange hobby/ Collecting clothes/ Moonshine, washing line/ They suit him fine."
Barrett delivers those lines in a nasal southern English whine, which was something of an innovation for the time. Most British bands, including the Stones and early Beatles, sang in ersatz-American accents, but Barrett proclaimed his Englishness and not just by refusing to Yankee-up his singing voice. His songs are steeped in a pastoral fairy-tale Englishness—enchanted forests and gnomes in tunics and mice romping through barley fields—which is what you get, I guess, when you mix hard drugs with Victorian children's literature. (Barrett took the phrase "piper at the gates of dawn" from Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.) It's a deeply quaint and provincial worldview, perfect for Barrett's twisty little pop songs but miles from the space-rock grandeur that Pink Floyd would achieve on post-Barrett classics like Dark Side of the Moon. Rock snobs like to say that Pink Floyd lost it when Barrett freaked out and left the band, but the truth is Floyd would probably have gone down in history as a curio had Barrett stuck around—and what's more, there wouldn't be any such thing as Radiohead.
For decades, Barrett was rock's great romantic-tragic recluse, and now that there will definitely be no second act to his sad story, the Byronic myth surrounding him is bound to inflate. (I'm sure we'll be hearing lots of his 1970 ballad "Dark Globe," a terrifying farewell from a man slipping into madness: "Please, please, please lift a hand/ With Eskimo chain/ I tattered my brain/ Won't you miss me?/ Wouldn't you miss me at all?") But it would be nice if Barrett was recalled not just as an acid casualty or as a legendary "rock madman" but as an English eccentric in the surreal-comic tradition that extends from Lewis Carroll to Monty Python and, via Barrett, onto the weirdo-pop specialist Robyn Hitchcock. Barrett spent his final years in his mother's house in Cambridge, England, living comfortably off the royalties that his former bandmates made sure he collected. Reportedly, his pastimes were painting and gardening, and he was often seen by neighbors on his bicycle. It sounds like a pretty nice life, actually, and it's pleasant to think of Barrett ending his days as a vaguely Victorian figure—an odd old Englishman who'd made quite a splash in his youth, tottering through town on two wheels.
Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.
Monday, July 10, 2006
The Guys Have It
Under American Menswear's Newly Acquired Stubble, a Flash of Ankle and Hints of Chic
By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
NEW YORK -- Hartmarx is a nondescript Goliath of a clothing corporation that traffics in charcoal suits, pleated trousers, tweed blazers and Sansabelt slacks. Last year, it reported net sales of more than $598 million from its many brands and licenses.
But now this corporate giant, known for speaking the sartorial language of average Joes, is whispering brazen come-ons to fashion aesthetes: Wanna hickey ?
The American menswear industry is in the midst of a fragile renaissance. The transformation at Hartmarx isn't loud or shrill. The shrunken silhouettes championed by new designers Thom Browne and Alexandre Plokhov have not overtaken men's affection for Dockers. But slowly and quietly, menswear is evolving.
For nearly 120 years, Hart Schaffner Marx -- a mid-priced member of the big, boring Hartmarx family -- contentedly and profitably dressed the sort of no-nonsense man who'd wait for its $695 suits to be marked down . . . twice.
Now Hart Schaffner Marx is gussying itself up, expanding its creative sensibility, sniffing around for a new kind of customer.
For the first time in 40 years, the company hired a new executive vice president. Eric Jones arrived from Polo Ralph Lauren, where he worked on Purple Label, known for its lean Savile Row silhouettes. A man could buy four Hart Schaffner Marx suits for the cost of one Purple Label ensemble. Jones's mission: update this conservative American brand.
"We didn't have a lot of personality. We'd been a utilitarian business product for guys that are conservative," Jones says. "But we could also be a fashion house."
Jones's attire underscores the new template. He wears a pair of roughly distressed jeans, a lime green track jacket and a navy pinstriped suit coat. This, he says, is the way a young man might wear a suit.
In the course of expounding on the new, hip HSM, Jones talks excitedly about a recent party he attended in Santa Monica at the Viceroy Hotel. There were hundreds of young men at the party, Jones recalls, and the majority of them were wearing jackets. They "didn't want to look like they'd crawled out of bed, or like a grunge rocker or a Wall Street guy."
This new customer, Jones says, "lives now and sleeps later." He's a guy who has "saucy" dates. He could be "in a band."
Maybe, Jones says, he was the kid "selling joints at recess."
This storyboard hipster is the holy grail of Hart Schaffner Marx, inspiring the company to create the Travelor suit, with its simple orange-and-brown label, three-inch-wide-lapels, lean cut and side vents.
Down the hall at Hickey-Freeman -- one of Hartmarx's luxury brands -- executives have introduced the "hickey" line, in which a cashmere jacket sells for $1,395. Created by a team of designers moonlighting from sister labels, hickey is a retro-preppy collection filled with slim-fitting blazers, lean chinos with a shortened rise, quilted corduroy jackets, ties printed with tiny marijuana leaves and an intarsia sweater that reads, "Wanna hickey?"
"What we're trying to do is bridge between adolescence and adulthood," says Paulette Garafalo, CEO and group president of Hartmarx's luxury group.
The design team dresses nothing like the traditional Hickey-Freeman customer who prefers business casual chinos and country club blazers. Instead, its members wear narrow flat-front dress pants and no socks with their tassel loafers. They are awash in pastels from lilac to cornflower blue. There are no laces in their sneakers.
The hickey suit, says designer Billy Draddy, "probably fits more like your grandfather's Hickey-Freeman suit from the 1960s. It's reminiscent of something JFK might wear."
The jacket is about 29 1/2 inches long instead of 31. It has a narrow lapel; it has a center vent. The suit has a seven-inch drop -- the difference between the jacket and the trouser sizes -- instead of the more traditional six inches. And the collection also is filled with color, such as strawberry pink corduroy trousers.
"It was such a long time since anyone wore color," Draddy says. "My whole childhood was about wearing pink and green and yellow Lacoste shirts."
Under the giant umbrella of Hartmarx, menswear has been colorized and doused with Rat Pack attitude. "Pleasantville" has collided with "Ocean's Eleven."
Preppy Love
After a decade of dormancy, young designers have emerged with strong points of view. They are enamored of style rather than trends. They are keen on tailoring, preppy formality and Ivy League tradition. Designer John Bartlett, one of the most creative and intellectually agile of menswear designers, is back in business after financial woes forced him to close shop for two years.
Bartlett has a lean, no-carbs-have-passed-these-lips physique. He has short sandy hair, wears wire-rimmed glasses and when he smiles could easily pass for a kindly English doctoral student. He launched his collection in 1992 and quickly gained prominence for his Forrest Gump geek chic that incorporated Hush Puppies in shades of purple and green.
Since his return in 2004, Bartlett has muted some of his more provocative tendencies. He's not presenting his collections as a meditation on the writings of Jean Genet, for instance. He signed a suit license with prices ranging from $995 to $1,500. And he has refocused on the preppy heart of American menswear, as underscored by a recent presentation at the Harvard Club, a social outpost of his alma mater.
The media are feeding interest in menswear. The fashion Web site Style.com expanded last year, giving birth to a separate men's site: http://www.men.style.com/ .
"We've been surprised at the number of guys hanging out in the forums talking about very highbrow designers," says Jamie Pallot, editorial director of CondeNet.
While "metrosexual" shopping magazines such as Cargo and Vitals folded, Men's Vogue, which launched this spring, will begin a regular schedule of 10 issues per year in fall 2007.
"There's a generation of young males that are using clothing as their image yet again. Generation X couldn't care less about clothes. For them, it was all about technology. Now the next crop of upstarts -- teenagers, early career people -- everybody is on equal footing with technology," says Marshal Cohen, chief analyst for NPD Group, which tracks retail sales. "Now it's really about, 'What separates me from everybody else?' It's image."
"Eighteen-to-25-year-olds are not buying suits to go to work," he says. "They're buying them to go out and socialize, to elevate their image beyond the next guy's."
In 1975, only 25 percent of men bought their own clothes; women did their shopping. In 2005, 75 percent of men bought their own clothes. "We live in a very androgynous society with a younger generation of guys shopping with girls," Cohen says. "It's shared entertainment."
Bartlett has noticed a similar shift. "Fashion for men used to be very segmented between suits and sportswear, clothes with a gay following or a straight following," he says. "All those lines are blurring now."
Last year, U.S. sales of men's apparel increased by 5 percent to nearly $53 billion. (Women's apparel sales grew by only 3 percent to $101 billion.) Tailored clothing sales grew by 7 percent to more than $5 billion. Within that category, sales of tailored clothes to men 18 to 24 increased by 53 percent.
The American menswear market slipped into the doldrums in the 1990s. For three or four days, twice a year, menswear designers used to present their collections in New York. It was a cohesive group of installations and runway shows. And the participation of big brands such as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein made it all seem important and significant.
"The plug was pulled out when all the major players went to Europe and all that was left were the commercial brands and the minor players," says Stan Herman, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
Klein, Lauren and Donna Karan began to unveil their collections in Europe in a search for international press and respect.
Over the years, the community of menswear designers in New York disintegrated. Karan dropped her signature men's collection. Some designers became embroiled in trademark disputes or had other legal and financial travails. No new designers were in the pipeline.
The tide began to turn a few years ago with the decline of gigolo style and the rise of preppy chic.
The timing was perfect for the emergence of designers Thom Browne and Alexandre Plokhov.
Browne is a former actor who once worked for Lauren. He won the 2006 CFDA award for menswear designer of the year and accepted his trophy dressed in one of his signature suits. His jacket barely reached to his hips. The sleeves were eccentrically short, revealing more than a few inches of his white French-cuffed shirt. And his trousers, with their flat front and slim cut, ended high above his black dress shoes, revealing the full expanse of his naked ankle.
His sensibility represents the most significant shift in the proportions of American men's tailored apparel in more than a decade. In an industry where change is an evolution -- rather than a revolution -- and where those transformations are measured in millimeters, Browne struck at the very core of menswear.
"A suit is a suit is a suit, whether it has a notched lapel, a peak lapel, two buttons or double-breasted," Herman says. "The only thing that distinguishes them is fit."
Browne -- medium height, slim, with a buzz cut and a television face that is all sharp angles and high planes -- is tucked into a corner at the restaurant Pastis in the city's Meatpacking District. It's easier for him to settle into a conversation here, despite the din of a lunch crowd that never thins. His studio, just around the corner, is small and already crowded with the three members of his staff.
The two men who work with him dress in the designer's signature flat front gray trousers with white shirts. They just as easily evoke the image of a 1950s door-to-door salesman as a debate team captain or a Sinatra enthusiast. (The lone woman wears an extremely skinny white pantsuit.)
"I don't kid myself thinking everyone loves it. But I'd rather have people either love it or hate it," Browne says. "I'd rather not please everyone."
None of it, of course, comes cheap. His ready-to-wear suits start at $3,200. For bespoke, which is a significant part of his business, a man should expect to pay at least $3,800. Never mind the price, many men will have a hard time getting past those Pee-wee Herman pants.
"They do get hung up on them," he says. "But I love the proportion. It shows a guy something he's so familiar with. His father wore a suit. His grandfather wore a suit. It provokes something. And he thinks about it."
Instead of a runway presentation, Browne creates vignettes that evoke a mood and a moment in time. For his fall collection, he had models, in his shrunken jackets and short pants, ice-skating around a makeshift rink in an exhibition space. Many designers will present garments in an extreme manner only to offer more restrained versions for sale. Not Browne. If a man likes the idea of a Thom Browne suit -- the fabric, the construction, and the narrow silhouette -- but is uncomfortable showing off his ankles, the designer would not be inclined to placate him.
"He shouldn't be coming to me," Browne says, "if he doesn't want these proportions."
Plokhov's work is more reassuring. He has a shop in SoHo filled with substantial wooden tables, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a custom-made leather sofa reminiscent of something that might be found in an old-fashioned gentleman's club. There is nothing flashy or off-putting about the surroundings or the clothes that fill the racks. Plokhov creates fashion that sneaks up on a man.
The Russian-born designer is tall with ivory skin and rosy cheeks. He speaks slowly compared with the rat-a-tat pace of the typical New Yorker and considers each word, not because he is cautious or because his English is uncertain but because he is precise.
His background is as a patternmaker for designer Marc Jacobs and he once had a bespoke business in Chicago. Plokhov is a man trained to obsess about the details.
His Cloak label is inspired by the military, by rock-and-roll and by the idea that a man's clothes should be serviceable for more than a season -- which is why he chose a career in menswear in the first place.
"The lasting quality is what was attractive for me," he says. "Guys don't change their entire wardrobe in a season. It's not about length and silhouette but about minute changes."
Plokhov compares the process of designing menswear to the typically male pastime of working on a car: "You're constantly in there poking, constantly tinkering."
"The changes are so minute you can tell the collection by the shoulder," he says. The signature Cloak shoulder has a subtle curve, like a barely perceptible wing. The sleeves are narrow and the armhole is set high. He chooses shades of gray and black for the majority of his work. He uses signature wolf-head buttons and favors skinny jeans and longish coats that skim the body. During his five years in business, he has avoided creating clothes that fit only the most emaciated young men. His work is fashionable and pleasantly macho.
"I want to keep that 'guyness,' " he says.
The Lauren Factor
Earlier this year, Ralph Lauren put his menswear collection on a New York runway for the first time in 30 years. (When he wasn't debuting the collection in Europe, he was presenting it informally in his offices.) The show was billed as a last-minute decision, and it was one that made other menswear designers practically giddy. The bulk of Polo Ralph Lauren's $3.3 billion in revenue comes from the sale of men's clothing. So when the designer speaks, mumbles or even whispers, the industry listens.
"Ralph is one of the biggest figures in menswear, not in America, but in the world," Plokhov says. "If he felt like he should put his clothes on the runway, God bless him. "
Lauren's show had the panache and glamour that one would expect. The models were so attractive and meticulously groomed, they looked like they'd been flown in from Gattaca.
The clothes painted a nuanced picture of Lauren's painstakingly crafted lifestyle of 20-room cottages and gentleman ranchers. And the audience had a fine sprinkling of glitter: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, talk show host Charlie Rose, comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Lauren's return, it seemed, was a celebration of New York men and their panache.
Afterward though, Lauren wouldn't discuss the new generation of designers, the state of American menswear or his leadership role. If the industry thought it had found a public voice in Lauren, it was wrong. Lauren, his spokeswoman Maria Prorok explained, doesn't participate in stories that are not solely about him.
Menswear is "coming onto the radar screen," says the CFDA's Herman. But the industry continues to search for a Ralph Lauren-size designer who will not only give its motley schedule of shows razzle-dazzle and stature, but also serve as an ambassador and anchor.
The industry buzzes with creativity, but rising talents struggle daily with the less glamorous elements of fashion: manufacturing, distribution and financing. Bergdorf Goodman remains Browne's sole significant retail outlet. Plokhov's clothes are not widely available either -- limited to a few specialty stores, three branches of Barneys New York and a handful of Japanese retailers.
"It's still really hard at the department store level to get any kind of business," says Bartlett, who sells to Saks Fifth Avenue. "They're very focused on large brands."
The sky-high prices need to come down, too, says Herman.
After all, if the ideal customer was selling pot at recess, fancies himself a slacker musician or invests all his money in limited edition sneakers, he won't be in a position to buy a $3,000 suit.
By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
NEW YORK -- Hartmarx is a nondescript Goliath of a clothing corporation that traffics in charcoal suits, pleated trousers, tweed blazers and Sansabelt slacks. Last year, it reported net sales of more than $598 million from its many brands and licenses.
But now this corporate giant, known for speaking the sartorial language of average Joes, is whispering brazen come-ons to fashion aesthetes: Wanna hickey ?
The American menswear industry is in the midst of a fragile renaissance. The transformation at Hartmarx isn't loud or shrill. The shrunken silhouettes championed by new designers Thom Browne and Alexandre Plokhov have not overtaken men's affection for Dockers. But slowly and quietly, menswear is evolving.
For nearly 120 years, Hart Schaffner Marx -- a mid-priced member of the big, boring Hartmarx family -- contentedly and profitably dressed the sort of no-nonsense man who'd wait for its $695 suits to be marked down . . . twice.
Now Hart Schaffner Marx is gussying itself up, expanding its creative sensibility, sniffing around for a new kind of customer.
For the first time in 40 years, the company hired a new executive vice president. Eric Jones arrived from Polo Ralph Lauren, where he worked on Purple Label, known for its lean Savile Row silhouettes. A man could buy four Hart Schaffner Marx suits for the cost of one Purple Label ensemble. Jones's mission: update this conservative American brand.
"We didn't have a lot of personality. We'd been a utilitarian business product for guys that are conservative," Jones says. "But we could also be a fashion house."
Jones's attire underscores the new template. He wears a pair of roughly distressed jeans, a lime green track jacket and a navy pinstriped suit coat. This, he says, is the way a young man might wear a suit.
In the course of expounding on the new, hip HSM, Jones talks excitedly about a recent party he attended in Santa Monica at the Viceroy Hotel. There were hundreds of young men at the party, Jones recalls, and the majority of them were wearing jackets. They "didn't want to look like they'd crawled out of bed, or like a grunge rocker or a Wall Street guy."
This new customer, Jones says, "lives now and sleeps later." He's a guy who has "saucy" dates. He could be "in a band."
Maybe, Jones says, he was the kid "selling joints at recess."
This storyboard hipster is the holy grail of Hart Schaffner Marx, inspiring the company to create the Travelor suit, with its simple orange-and-brown label, three-inch-wide-lapels, lean cut and side vents.
Down the hall at Hickey-Freeman -- one of Hartmarx's luxury brands -- executives have introduced the "hickey" line, in which a cashmere jacket sells for $1,395. Created by a team of designers moonlighting from sister labels, hickey is a retro-preppy collection filled with slim-fitting blazers, lean chinos with a shortened rise, quilted corduroy jackets, ties printed with tiny marijuana leaves and an intarsia sweater that reads, "Wanna hickey?"
"What we're trying to do is bridge between adolescence and adulthood," says Paulette Garafalo, CEO and group president of Hartmarx's luxury group.
The design team dresses nothing like the traditional Hickey-Freeman customer who prefers business casual chinos and country club blazers. Instead, its members wear narrow flat-front dress pants and no socks with their tassel loafers. They are awash in pastels from lilac to cornflower blue. There are no laces in their sneakers.
The hickey suit, says designer Billy Draddy, "probably fits more like your grandfather's Hickey-Freeman suit from the 1960s. It's reminiscent of something JFK might wear."
The jacket is about 29 1/2 inches long instead of 31. It has a narrow lapel; it has a center vent. The suit has a seven-inch drop -- the difference between the jacket and the trouser sizes -- instead of the more traditional six inches. And the collection also is filled with color, such as strawberry pink corduroy trousers.
"It was such a long time since anyone wore color," Draddy says. "My whole childhood was about wearing pink and green and yellow Lacoste shirts."
Under the giant umbrella of Hartmarx, menswear has been colorized and doused with Rat Pack attitude. "Pleasantville" has collided with "Ocean's Eleven."
Preppy Love
After a decade of dormancy, young designers have emerged with strong points of view. They are enamored of style rather than trends. They are keen on tailoring, preppy formality and Ivy League tradition. Designer John Bartlett, one of the most creative and intellectually agile of menswear designers, is back in business after financial woes forced him to close shop for two years.
Bartlett has a lean, no-carbs-have-passed-these-lips physique. He has short sandy hair, wears wire-rimmed glasses and when he smiles could easily pass for a kindly English doctoral student. He launched his collection in 1992 and quickly gained prominence for his Forrest Gump geek chic that incorporated Hush Puppies in shades of purple and green.
Since his return in 2004, Bartlett has muted some of his more provocative tendencies. He's not presenting his collections as a meditation on the writings of Jean Genet, for instance. He signed a suit license with prices ranging from $995 to $1,500. And he has refocused on the preppy heart of American menswear, as underscored by a recent presentation at the Harvard Club, a social outpost of his alma mater.
The media are feeding interest in menswear. The fashion Web site Style.com expanded last year, giving birth to a separate men's site: http://www.men.style.com/ .
"We've been surprised at the number of guys hanging out in the forums talking about very highbrow designers," says Jamie Pallot, editorial director of CondeNet.
While "metrosexual" shopping magazines such as Cargo and Vitals folded, Men's Vogue, which launched this spring, will begin a regular schedule of 10 issues per year in fall 2007.
"There's a generation of young males that are using clothing as their image yet again. Generation X couldn't care less about clothes. For them, it was all about technology. Now the next crop of upstarts -- teenagers, early career people -- everybody is on equal footing with technology," says Marshal Cohen, chief analyst for NPD Group, which tracks retail sales. "Now it's really about, 'What separates me from everybody else?' It's image."
"Eighteen-to-25-year-olds are not buying suits to go to work," he says. "They're buying them to go out and socialize, to elevate their image beyond the next guy's."
In 1975, only 25 percent of men bought their own clothes; women did their shopping. In 2005, 75 percent of men bought their own clothes. "We live in a very androgynous society with a younger generation of guys shopping with girls," Cohen says. "It's shared entertainment."
Bartlett has noticed a similar shift. "Fashion for men used to be very segmented between suits and sportswear, clothes with a gay following or a straight following," he says. "All those lines are blurring now."
Last year, U.S. sales of men's apparel increased by 5 percent to nearly $53 billion. (Women's apparel sales grew by only 3 percent to $101 billion.) Tailored clothing sales grew by 7 percent to more than $5 billion. Within that category, sales of tailored clothes to men 18 to 24 increased by 53 percent.
The American menswear market slipped into the doldrums in the 1990s. For three or four days, twice a year, menswear designers used to present their collections in New York. It was a cohesive group of installations and runway shows. And the participation of big brands such as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein made it all seem important and significant.
"The plug was pulled out when all the major players went to Europe and all that was left were the commercial brands and the minor players," says Stan Herman, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
Klein, Lauren and Donna Karan began to unveil their collections in Europe in a search for international press and respect.
Over the years, the community of menswear designers in New York disintegrated. Karan dropped her signature men's collection. Some designers became embroiled in trademark disputes or had other legal and financial travails. No new designers were in the pipeline.
The tide began to turn a few years ago with the decline of gigolo style and the rise of preppy chic.
The timing was perfect for the emergence of designers Thom Browne and Alexandre Plokhov.
Browne is a former actor who once worked for Lauren. He won the 2006 CFDA award for menswear designer of the year and accepted his trophy dressed in one of his signature suits. His jacket barely reached to his hips. The sleeves were eccentrically short, revealing more than a few inches of his white French-cuffed shirt. And his trousers, with their flat front and slim cut, ended high above his black dress shoes, revealing the full expanse of his naked ankle.
His sensibility represents the most significant shift in the proportions of American men's tailored apparel in more than a decade. In an industry where change is an evolution -- rather than a revolution -- and where those transformations are measured in millimeters, Browne struck at the very core of menswear.
"A suit is a suit is a suit, whether it has a notched lapel, a peak lapel, two buttons or double-breasted," Herman says. "The only thing that distinguishes them is fit."
Browne -- medium height, slim, with a buzz cut and a television face that is all sharp angles and high planes -- is tucked into a corner at the restaurant Pastis in the city's Meatpacking District. It's easier for him to settle into a conversation here, despite the din of a lunch crowd that never thins. His studio, just around the corner, is small and already crowded with the three members of his staff.
The two men who work with him dress in the designer's signature flat front gray trousers with white shirts. They just as easily evoke the image of a 1950s door-to-door salesman as a debate team captain or a Sinatra enthusiast. (The lone woman wears an extremely skinny white pantsuit.)
"I don't kid myself thinking everyone loves it. But I'd rather have people either love it or hate it," Browne says. "I'd rather not please everyone."
None of it, of course, comes cheap. His ready-to-wear suits start at $3,200. For bespoke, which is a significant part of his business, a man should expect to pay at least $3,800. Never mind the price, many men will have a hard time getting past those Pee-wee Herman pants.
"They do get hung up on them," he says. "But I love the proportion. It shows a guy something he's so familiar with. His father wore a suit. His grandfather wore a suit. It provokes something. And he thinks about it."
Instead of a runway presentation, Browne creates vignettes that evoke a mood and a moment in time. For his fall collection, he had models, in his shrunken jackets and short pants, ice-skating around a makeshift rink in an exhibition space. Many designers will present garments in an extreme manner only to offer more restrained versions for sale. Not Browne. If a man likes the idea of a Thom Browne suit -- the fabric, the construction, and the narrow silhouette -- but is uncomfortable showing off his ankles, the designer would not be inclined to placate him.
"He shouldn't be coming to me," Browne says, "if he doesn't want these proportions."
Plokhov's work is more reassuring. He has a shop in SoHo filled with substantial wooden tables, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a custom-made leather sofa reminiscent of something that might be found in an old-fashioned gentleman's club. There is nothing flashy or off-putting about the surroundings or the clothes that fill the racks. Plokhov creates fashion that sneaks up on a man.
The Russian-born designer is tall with ivory skin and rosy cheeks. He speaks slowly compared with the rat-a-tat pace of the typical New Yorker and considers each word, not because he is cautious or because his English is uncertain but because he is precise.
His background is as a patternmaker for designer Marc Jacobs and he once had a bespoke business in Chicago. Plokhov is a man trained to obsess about the details.
His Cloak label is inspired by the military, by rock-and-roll and by the idea that a man's clothes should be serviceable for more than a season -- which is why he chose a career in menswear in the first place.
"The lasting quality is what was attractive for me," he says. "Guys don't change their entire wardrobe in a season. It's not about length and silhouette but about minute changes."
Plokhov compares the process of designing menswear to the typically male pastime of working on a car: "You're constantly in there poking, constantly tinkering."
"The changes are so minute you can tell the collection by the shoulder," he says. The signature Cloak shoulder has a subtle curve, like a barely perceptible wing. The sleeves are narrow and the armhole is set high. He chooses shades of gray and black for the majority of his work. He uses signature wolf-head buttons and favors skinny jeans and longish coats that skim the body. During his five years in business, he has avoided creating clothes that fit only the most emaciated young men. His work is fashionable and pleasantly macho.
"I want to keep that 'guyness,' " he says.
The Lauren Factor
Earlier this year, Ralph Lauren put his menswear collection on a New York runway for the first time in 30 years. (When he wasn't debuting the collection in Europe, he was presenting it informally in his offices.) The show was billed as a last-minute decision, and it was one that made other menswear designers practically giddy. The bulk of Polo Ralph Lauren's $3.3 billion in revenue comes from the sale of men's clothing. So when the designer speaks, mumbles or even whispers, the industry listens.
"Ralph is one of the biggest figures in menswear, not in America, but in the world," Plokhov says. "If he felt like he should put his clothes on the runway, God bless him. "
Lauren's show had the panache and glamour that one would expect. The models were so attractive and meticulously groomed, they looked like they'd been flown in from Gattaca.
The clothes painted a nuanced picture of Lauren's painstakingly crafted lifestyle of 20-room cottages and gentleman ranchers. And the audience had a fine sprinkling of glitter: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, talk show host Charlie Rose, comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Lauren's return, it seemed, was a celebration of New York men and their panache.
Afterward though, Lauren wouldn't discuss the new generation of designers, the state of American menswear or his leadership role. If the industry thought it had found a public voice in Lauren, it was wrong. Lauren, his spokeswoman Maria Prorok explained, doesn't participate in stories that are not solely about him.
Menswear is "coming onto the radar screen," says the CFDA's Herman. But the industry continues to search for a Ralph Lauren-size designer who will not only give its motley schedule of shows razzle-dazzle and stature, but also serve as an ambassador and anchor.
The industry buzzes with creativity, but rising talents struggle daily with the less glamorous elements of fashion: manufacturing, distribution and financing. Bergdorf Goodman remains Browne's sole significant retail outlet. Plokhov's clothes are not widely available either -- limited to a few specialty stores, three branches of Barneys New York and a handful of Japanese retailers.
"It's still really hard at the department store level to get any kind of business," says Bartlett, who sells to Saks Fifth Avenue. "They're very focused on large brands."
The sky-high prices need to come down, too, says Herman.
After all, if the ideal customer was selling pot at recess, fancies himself a slacker musician or invests all his money in limited edition sneakers, he won't be in a position to buy a $3,000 suit.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
ironman kris
I am pleased to announce that my friend (and frequent steve's blog poster) Kris Litman recently completed the Ford Ironman Coeur d'Alene Triathlon in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho with a total finishing time of 14:58:14
Completing this race has been a long time wish of Kris's and I am certainly proud that he achieved his goal. I can live vicariously through him on this, because I don't think I'd be able to pull it off myself.
If you'd like to view a photo album of the race, you can visit this Flickr page If you'd like to watch a video of Kris crossing the finish line, click on this link
jack will be back
For the past few months, I have had a tiny eBay venture called Jack Swain that I thought I could turn into an internet department store. In the time since I started on this, my free time has decreased dramatically, my ability to find merchandise that matched up with my original merchandising idea has decreased, and my interest in the project has waned.
It is simply the wrong idea at the wrong time, as previously conceived. So I have decided to pull my one item, close down temporarily, and focus on getting something in there that people want. The new Jack Swain has no definite timetable, but I’d like to do something a little more interesting and easy to store than just shoes.
I’ve also got to figure out a way to squeeze in something at night other than answering email, talking on the phone, and reading message boards. A little better time management would greatly help what I’m doing, even if I regress and just sell shoes again.
It is simply the wrong idea at the wrong time, as previously conceived. So I have decided to pull my one item, close down temporarily, and focus on getting something in there that people want. The new Jack Swain has no definite timetable, but I’d like to do something a little more interesting and easy to store than just shoes.
I’ve also got to figure out a way to squeeze in something at night other than answering email, talking on the phone, and reading message boards. A little better time management would greatly help what I’m doing, even if I regress and just sell shoes again.
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
(submitted to steve's blog by Al Cabino)
An upcoming book by Wired magazine's Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, sounds very interesting. Some have said it's the new Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell).
It talks about some of the same "changing of the marketing gaurd" concepts that we have explored here at steve's blog, and adds a more formal theoretical slant to them.
An upcoming book by Wired magazine's Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, sounds very interesting. Some have said it's the new Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell).
It talks about some of the same "changing of the marketing gaurd" concepts that we have explored here at steve's blog, and adds a more formal theoretical slant to them.
The Long Tail is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google.The Long Tail will be available in bookstores on July 11, 2006.
However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know.
The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what's commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches (more).
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Walk a Mile in My Shoes (and My Shirt)
By MELENA RYZIK
THE bargain hunters started filtering in at 9:05 p.m., toting garbage bags, carts and wheeled backpacks full of clothes. They descended into Botanica, a divey subterranean bar on Houston Street that, on this Monday night at least, looked more like a boutique dressing room. Except that none of these style-savvy men or women were there to shop. They were there to swap.
"This is cute," one woman said, as she pulled a tiny green ruffled miniskirt on over her jeans. Wearing it, she dived back into the piles of clothing almost as quickly as her fellow swappers laid them out: the coffee table held dainty sweaters, designer jeans, T-shirts and pants. Vintage dresses and coats were hung on a portable metal rack. Shoes covered the couch — hiking boots, zebra-striped loafers, black flip-flops, patent-leather sneakers, and clear plastic jellies, which quickly found a new owner in Jill Pakulski, a tall, willowy musician.
"I just found a size 10 in jellies!" Ms. Pakulski said, grinning and waving them around like a prize. "Do you know how freakish that is? And I didn't pay for them — I traded for them!"
Ms. Pakulski, 24, is one of a growing number of people whose wardrobe comes free of charge, courtesy of perfect strangers. The clothing swap gained traction in the last decade as a kicky girl's night in; one woman would invite a dozen friends over to trade cast-offs, kvetch and drink. But now it has become a night out, moving to public spaces like bars and community centers, where anyone is welcome.
With more visibility came more popularity: the relatively new Web site clothesswap.meetup.com has members in more than 50 cities; in Portland, Ore., there are multiple swaps, arranged according to clothing size. And Swap-O-Rama-Rama, which started as a one-time event last October in New York, has expanded to include franchises all over the world.
"It's a real phenomenon," said Suzanne Agasi, whose at-home swaps outgrew her apartment in San Francisco just a few years after she started them in 1996. Back then, she said, "no one knew what a clothing swap was." On Thursday, Ms. Agasi will be host to her 100th swap. The people attending these fashion free-for-alls are not just the young starving artists, hipster students and fashionistas-on-a-budget who first made them popular, but women — and men — of all ages and income levels. And they have embraced bartering as much to protest consumer culture as to look good without emptying their wallets.
"It's a karma thing," said Amy Israel, 32, who sells energy commodities and is a frequent swapper. "Instead of dropping stuff off for money, you come here." (Ms. Israel's karma must be very good. At the Botanica bar event, which is known as ThriftOn, she scored a pair of Prada pants.)
Gabriel Willow, who runs nature education courses for children in Brooklyn, had his own way of explaining the appeal of swapping. For him, it is "equal parts philosophy, stinginess, and the excitement of finding something."
Mr. Willow, 28, is easily excitable. At ThriftOn, which draws about 100 people at each of its seasonal events, he pawed through a mess of T-shirts until he came up with one that read "Married June 3, 2003" (he wasn't). On it went, over a purple ruffled polyester shirt and above a pair of tight black striped trousers. He topped off his new outfit with a perfectly distressed leather bomber jacket.
"I'd never buy a new leather jacket, because I don't want to support the leather industry," he said. "But I like recycling. Some days I find that everything I'm wearing, I got here."
Like most clothing swaps, Swap-O-Rama-Rama and ThriftOn encourage visitors to take as much as they want from piles of variously organized (and unorganized) garments. There are usually no changing rooms, so swappers just try things on over their clothes, relying on others for the thumbs up or thumbs down.
Rules about what to bring and what condition the clothing should be in vary from swap to swap, and not all require donations. Some require that items be cleaned or pressed, and forbid unmentionables. Most swaps cost nothing to attend, though it is becoming more common for organizers to charge a nominal entry fee to cover costs like space rental. And, inevitably, a few people have even begun to view swaps as business opportunities. (So much for karma.)
Last month, Ms. Agasi quit her job in sales to pursue swap-hosting full time. At her next event on Thursday, she'll charge swappers $30 each, bringing a boutique attitude to a barter culture.
"I want to take clothing swaps to a new level," she said, adding that she hopes to do specialized swaps for groups like mothers and gay men, and to invite sponsors like beauty companies to fill gift bags. Eventually, she wants to write a how-to book. Wendy Tremayne, 38, an event-planner-turned-artist who founded Swap-O-Rama-Rama, is also making a living from her creation, but only because she recently moved from Brooklyn to Truth or Consequences, N.M., so she could afford to pursue it.
"It's the right idea at the right time," Ms. Tremayne said of the three Swap-O-Rama-Ramas she's held, two in New York, and one in San Mateo, Calif., which was part of a larger craft fair and drew 2,500 people. The Swap-O-Ramas are traditional clothing swaps with a do-it-yourself bent, with stations for redecorating shirts and jeans with sequins or trim, and local designers who can lend a deft hand with the stitching. The swaps have proved so popular that Ms. Tremayne has franchised the idea, allowing local organizers in Cambridge, Mass.; Durham, N.C.; Washington, D.C., and even Jerusalem to hold their own versions.
Explaining the growth of bartered-clothing culture, Al Hoff, the secondhand guru who founded the '90's zine Thrift Score, said that the stigma of wearing someone else's used tank top has fallen away. "Once you accept that you don't have to pay retail money for things, you don't go back," she said. The bartering culture has been given a boost by the Internet, with sites like Craigslist turning the business of trading among strangers into a mini-adventure.
And the Web is the easiest way to publicize a swapping event. ThriftOn and Swap-O-Rama-Rama are advertised mostly online, and Ms. Hoff credits the Internet with making it easier to hold a swap. When she wrote her 1997 book "Thrift Score," she suggested inviting six friends over for a swap. Now, with the Internet, she said, "I could post it and be guaranteed that 100 strangers would show up."
An early "Thrift Store" convert was Julie Covello, who founded ThriftOn, one of the first public swaps. For Ms. Covello, 43, swapping is a way to part with things that would otherwise collect dust and to give something back. (As with most swaps, unwanted clothing goes to charity.)
But though she has been successfully holding swaps for about a decade, Ms. Covello, a D.J. who is known as D.J. Shakey, does not consider her event a potential cash cow.
"I've never charged admission," she said. "To me, it's like a community service."
And she understands how trading can benefit pack rats like herself. "Personally, I have trouble letting go of stuff," she said, "but I feel better if I can see someone take it at a party and love it."
The appeal for men may be different, she theorized. "Guys don't like to shop, and they don't like to spend money," she said. "So they come here and they get free stuff. Or maybe they just want to meet girls."
And though some of the wares can be off-putting — "Sometimes people bring smelly T-shirts," said Ms. Pakulski, the owner of the size-10 jellies — there are no signs that the clothing swap phenomenon is waning.
"I've taken part in a lot of movements, and you always have to convince people to keep the momentum going," said Sally Newman, a political activist and an organizer of the Swap-O-Rama in Cambridge. "In this case, there's not a lot of that that needs to be done. Everybody already thinks it's a good idea."
Even if some of the clothing finds are not such a good idea. "I'll probably bring this back next time," Mr. Willow said of the ruffled purple shirt. Which is one of the best things about clothing swaps, he added: "No buyer's remorse."
THE bargain hunters started filtering in at 9:05 p.m., toting garbage bags, carts and wheeled backpacks full of clothes. They descended into Botanica, a divey subterranean bar on Houston Street that, on this Monday night at least, looked more like a boutique dressing room. Except that none of these style-savvy men or women were there to shop. They were there to swap.
"This is cute," one woman said, as she pulled a tiny green ruffled miniskirt on over her jeans. Wearing it, she dived back into the piles of clothing almost as quickly as her fellow swappers laid them out: the coffee table held dainty sweaters, designer jeans, T-shirts and pants. Vintage dresses and coats were hung on a portable metal rack. Shoes covered the couch — hiking boots, zebra-striped loafers, black flip-flops, patent-leather sneakers, and clear plastic jellies, which quickly found a new owner in Jill Pakulski, a tall, willowy musician.
"I just found a size 10 in jellies!" Ms. Pakulski said, grinning and waving them around like a prize. "Do you know how freakish that is? And I didn't pay for them — I traded for them!"
Ms. Pakulski, 24, is one of a growing number of people whose wardrobe comes free of charge, courtesy of perfect strangers. The clothing swap gained traction in the last decade as a kicky girl's night in; one woman would invite a dozen friends over to trade cast-offs, kvetch and drink. But now it has become a night out, moving to public spaces like bars and community centers, where anyone is welcome.
With more visibility came more popularity: the relatively new Web site clothesswap.meetup.com has members in more than 50 cities; in Portland, Ore., there are multiple swaps, arranged according to clothing size. And Swap-O-Rama-Rama, which started as a one-time event last October in New York, has expanded to include franchises all over the world.
"It's a real phenomenon," said Suzanne Agasi, whose at-home swaps outgrew her apartment in San Francisco just a few years after she started them in 1996. Back then, she said, "no one knew what a clothing swap was." On Thursday, Ms. Agasi will be host to her 100th swap. The people attending these fashion free-for-alls are not just the young starving artists, hipster students and fashionistas-on-a-budget who first made them popular, but women — and men — of all ages and income levels. And they have embraced bartering as much to protest consumer culture as to look good without emptying their wallets.
"It's a karma thing," said Amy Israel, 32, who sells energy commodities and is a frequent swapper. "Instead of dropping stuff off for money, you come here." (Ms. Israel's karma must be very good. At the Botanica bar event, which is known as ThriftOn, she scored a pair of Prada pants.)
Gabriel Willow, who runs nature education courses for children in Brooklyn, had his own way of explaining the appeal of swapping. For him, it is "equal parts philosophy, stinginess, and the excitement of finding something."
Mr. Willow, 28, is easily excitable. At ThriftOn, which draws about 100 people at each of its seasonal events, he pawed through a mess of T-shirts until he came up with one that read "Married June 3, 2003" (he wasn't). On it went, over a purple ruffled polyester shirt and above a pair of tight black striped trousers. He topped off his new outfit with a perfectly distressed leather bomber jacket.
"I'd never buy a new leather jacket, because I don't want to support the leather industry," he said. "But I like recycling. Some days I find that everything I'm wearing, I got here."
Like most clothing swaps, Swap-O-Rama-Rama and ThriftOn encourage visitors to take as much as they want from piles of variously organized (and unorganized) garments. There are usually no changing rooms, so swappers just try things on over their clothes, relying on others for the thumbs up or thumbs down.
Rules about what to bring and what condition the clothing should be in vary from swap to swap, and not all require donations. Some require that items be cleaned or pressed, and forbid unmentionables. Most swaps cost nothing to attend, though it is becoming more common for organizers to charge a nominal entry fee to cover costs like space rental. And, inevitably, a few people have even begun to view swaps as business opportunities. (So much for karma.)
Last month, Ms. Agasi quit her job in sales to pursue swap-hosting full time. At her next event on Thursday, she'll charge swappers $30 each, bringing a boutique attitude to a barter culture.
"I want to take clothing swaps to a new level," she said, adding that she hopes to do specialized swaps for groups like mothers and gay men, and to invite sponsors like beauty companies to fill gift bags. Eventually, she wants to write a how-to book. Wendy Tremayne, 38, an event-planner-turned-artist who founded Swap-O-Rama-Rama, is also making a living from her creation, but only because she recently moved from Brooklyn to Truth or Consequences, N.M., so she could afford to pursue it.
"It's the right idea at the right time," Ms. Tremayne said of the three Swap-O-Rama-Ramas she's held, two in New York, and one in San Mateo, Calif., which was part of a larger craft fair and drew 2,500 people. The Swap-O-Ramas are traditional clothing swaps with a do-it-yourself bent, with stations for redecorating shirts and jeans with sequins or trim, and local designers who can lend a deft hand with the stitching. The swaps have proved so popular that Ms. Tremayne has franchised the idea, allowing local organizers in Cambridge, Mass.; Durham, N.C.; Washington, D.C., and even Jerusalem to hold their own versions.
Explaining the growth of bartered-clothing culture, Al Hoff, the secondhand guru who founded the '90's zine Thrift Score, said that the stigma of wearing someone else's used tank top has fallen away. "Once you accept that you don't have to pay retail money for things, you don't go back," she said. The bartering culture has been given a boost by the Internet, with sites like Craigslist turning the business of trading among strangers into a mini-adventure.
And the Web is the easiest way to publicize a swapping event. ThriftOn and Swap-O-Rama-Rama are advertised mostly online, and Ms. Hoff credits the Internet with making it easier to hold a swap. When she wrote her 1997 book "Thrift Score," she suggested inviting six friends over for a swap. Now, with the Internet, she said, "I could post it and be guaranteed that 100 strangers would show up."
An early "Thrift Store" convert was Julie Covello, who founded ThriftOn, one of the first public swaps. For Ms. Covello, 43, swapping is a way to part with things that would otherwise collect dust and to give something back. (As with most swaps, unwanted clothing goes to charity.)
But though she has been successfully holding swaps for about a decade, Ms. Covello, a D.J. who is known as D.J. Shakey, does not consider her event a potential cash cow.
"I've never charged admission," she said. "To me, it's like a community service."
And she understands how trading can benefit pack rats like herself. "Personally, I have trouble letting go of stuff," she said, "but I feel better if I can see someone take it at a party and love it."
The appeal for men may be different, she theorized. "Guys don't like to shop, and they don't like to spend money," she said. "So they come here and they get free stuff. Or maybe they just want to meet girls."
And though some of the wares can be off-putting — "Sometimes people bring smelly T-shirts," said Ms. Pakulski, the owner of the size-10 jellies — there are no signs that the clothing swap phenomenon is waning.
"I've taken part in a lot of movements, and you always have to convince people to keep the momentum going," said Sally Newman, a political activist and an organizer of the Swap-O-Rama in Cambridge. "In this case, there's not a lot of that that needs to be done. Everybody already thinks it's a good idea."
Even if some of the clothing finds are not such a good idea. "I'll probably bring this back next time," Mr. Willow said of the ruffled purple shirt. Which is one of the best things about clothing swaps, he added: "No buyer's remorse."
The town that was divided by sneakers
BY BILLY WITZ, Staff Writer
Inside SOCAL, Los Angeles Daily News
HERZOGENAURACH, Germany - Walk through the gates of the town cemetery, turn right, and a dozen paces down the footpath is the gravestone of Rudolf Dassler. Turn around and head for the opposite corner of the graveyard, climb stone steps up several terraces, and there lies Adolf Dassler.
That the two brothers are buried at the far ends of the cemetery is no coincidence.
For more than 50 years, the feud between Adi and Rudi has played out not just in this small northern Bavarian town, but on playgrounds, shoe stores, and ad campaigns around the world through the shoe companies they founded: adidas and Puma.
While the manufacturing plants in town have long-since closed, both adidas and Puma are still headquartered here. Naturally, they are separated by the Au Rach river that runs through town.
"The town is really famous because of them," said Helga Schlemmer, 66, a lifelong resident. "People don't know where Herzogenaurach is, but they know where adidas and Puma are."
The World Cup being in Germany has focused extra attention on the two companies as well as the 23,000-population town about 15 miles north of Nuremberg.
Adidas won FIFA's sponsorship rights. The balls being used are adidas and it has produced striking ads, such as the one of German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn stretched out over a road near the Munich Airport, his feet anchored on one side of the road and his hands with the ball on the other side. Puma has also benefited, thanks to the sponsorship of 12 teams, more than adidas (six) or Nike (eight).
Puma and adidas hope the exposure of the World Cup will help them gain ground on Nike in the soccer apparel industry.
The German shoe companies, which combined to sell more than $10 billion in merchandise in 2005, arose from humble beginnings.
The Dassler brothers helped earn money as boys by delivering clothes for their mother's laundry business. In 1924, they converted their mother's washroom to a shoe factory and focused their new venture solely on sports shoes.
They began with track and soccer shoes, and in 1936, they received a boost when American Jesse Owens ran and jumped his way to four gold medals with spikes manufactured by Dassler brothers.
After World War II ended, the brothers had a falling out that, depending on whom you believe, was over a) an affair, b) dipping into the till c)getting credit for creating the first screw-in soccer studs.
In any event, when Rudi returned from a stint in an American prisoner of war camp in 1948, he left the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory and founded Puma. Shortly thereafter, adidas - short for Adi Dassler - was created; and the feud was on.
Soon the town was split into two camps. If you worked at adidas, you didn't socialize, date or marry anyone from Puma. Herzogenaurach has been described as "the town of bent necks" because locals wouldn't talk with anyone until they looked to see what shoes they were wearing.
The brothers' feud wasn't limited to splitting the town. They frequently sued each other, often over such picayune things as adidas' advertising claim that it sold "the best sports shoes in the world."
If Adi scored a coup helping Germany win its first World Cup in 1954, then Rudi had his turn when Pele, just as a World Cup final was about to kickoff, bent down to tie his shoes. The TV cameras followed, showing the world his Pumas.
Horst Linke, a photographer who grew up in Herzongenaurach, remembers his first holiday job as a teenager at the adidas plant, where his mother worked. He showed up for his first day wearing brand-less shoes.
"Adi looked out a window and said in his best Franconian manner," Linke said, referring to the region's people, who are known for their gruffness. "What kind of ... shoes are those? Somebody get that boy some shoes.
"My first pair of adidas came from Adi himself."
In the 1960s, few Germans could afford more than one pair of sports shoes. Thus, it was one or the other.
"Almost everybody had one pair, and you wore it until it fell off," said Gundi Mueller, a docent at Sneaker Culture, an exhibit in town that documents the shoe companies' histories. "My aunt worked at Puma, so we had Pumas."
Now, Mueller said, she and her husband wear whichever feel more comfortable.
The us-or-them attitude has softened for a variety of reasons. The brothers have been dead for more than 25years, more people can afford to wear both and the two companies, which nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s, are now run by business people, who are busy fighting the bottom line.
The families have stepped to the background.
"They are still fighting, but it's not the families," said Edith Kern-Miereisz, a reporter for the Nuremberg Presse, who lives in town. "The uncles and nephews and grandsons leave it to the speakers at the plant to fight."
In fact, the two have even worked together to crack down on bootlegged gear made in China, she said. That sort of cooperation, which may leave Rudi and Adi turning in their graves, would never have happened in the past.
Now, as uncomfortable as it might be, Puma and adidas understand how it feels when the shoe is on the other foot.
Inside SOCAL, Los Angeles Daily News
HERZOGENAURACH, Germany - Walk through the gates of the town cemetery, turn right, and a dozen paces down the footpath is the gravestone of Rudolf Dassler. Turn around and head for the opposite corner of the graveyard, climb stone steps up several terraces, and there lies Adolf Dassler.
That the two brothers are buried at the far ends of the cemetery is no coincidence.
For more than 50 years, the feud between Adi and Rudi has played out not just in this small northern Bavarian town, but on playgrounds, shoe stores, and ad campaigns around the world through the shoe companies they founded: adidas and Puma.
While the manufacturing plants in town have long-since closed, both adidas and Puma are still headquartered here. Naturally, they are separated by the Au Rach river that runs through town.
"The town is really famous because of them," said Helga Schlemmer, 66, a lifelong resident. "People don't know where Herzogenaurach is, but they know where adidas and Puma are."
The World Cup being in Germany has focused extra attention on the two companies as well as the 23,000-population town about 15 miles north of Nuremberg.
Adidas won FIFA's sponsorship rights. The balls being used are adidas and it has produced striking ads, such as the one of German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn stretched out over a road near the Munich Airport, his feet anchored on one side of the road and his hands with the ball on the other side. Puma has also benefited, thanks to the sponsorship of 12 teams, more than adidas (six) or Nike (eight).
Puma and adidas hope the exposure of the World Cup will help them gain ground on Nike in the soccer apparel industry.
The German shoe companies, which combined to sell more than $10 billion in merchandise in 2005, arose from humble beginnings.
The Dassler brothers helped earn money as boys by delivering clothes for their mother's laundry business. In 1924, they converted their mother's washroom to a shoe factory and focused their new venture solely on sports shoes.
They began with track and soccer shoes, and in 1936, they received a boost when American Jesse Owens ran and jumped his way to four gold medals with spikes manufactured by Dassler brothers.
After World War II ended, the brothers had a falling out that, depending on whom you believe, was over a) an affair, b) dipping into the till c)getting credit for creating the first screw-in soccer studs.
In any event, when Rudi returned from a stint in an American prisoner of war camp in 1948, he left the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory and founded Puma. Shortly thereafter, adidas - short for Adi Dassler - was created; and the feud was on.
Soon the town was split into two camps. If you worked at adidas, you didn't socialize, date or marry anyone from Puma. Herzogenaurach has been described as "the town of bent necks" because locals wouldn't talk with anyone until they looked to see what shoes they were wearing.
The brothers' feud wasn't limited to splitting the town. They frequently sued each other, often over such picayune things as adidas' advertising claim that it sold "the best sports shoes in the world."
If Adi scored a coup helping Germany win its first World Cup in 1954, then Rudi had his turn when Pele, just as a World Cup final was about to kickoff, bent down to tie his shoes. The TV cameras followed, showing the world his Pumas.
Horst Linke, a photographer who grew up in Herzongenaurach, remembers his first holiday job as a teenager at the adidas plant, where his mother worked. He showed up for his first day wearing brand-less shoes.
"Adi looked out a window and said in his best Franconian manner," Linke said, referring to the region's people, who are known for their gruffness. "What kind of ... shoes are those? Somebody get that boy some shoes.
"My first pair of adidas came from Adi himself."
In the 1960s, few Germans could afford more than one pair of sports shoes. Thus, it was one or the other.
"Almost everybody had one pair, and you wore it until it fell off," said Gundi Mueller, a docent at Sneaker Culture, an exhibit in town that documents the shoe companies' histories. "My aunt worked at Puma, so we had Pumas."
Now, Mueller said, she and her husband wear whichever feel more comfortable.
The us-or-them attitude has softened for a variety of reasons. The brothers have been dead for more than 25years, more people can afford to wear both and the two companies, which nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s, are now run by business people, who are busy fighting the bottom line.
The families have stepped to the background.
"They are still fighting, but it's not the families," said Edith Kern-Miereisz, a reporter for the Nuremberg Presse, who lives in town. "The uncles and nephews and grandsons leave it to the speakers at the plant to fight."
In fact, the two have even worked together to crack down on bootlegged gear made in China, she said. That sort of cooperation, which may leave Rudi and Adi turning in their graves, would never have happened in the past.
Now, as uncomfortable as it might be, Puma and adidas understand how it feels when the shoe is on the other foot.
china man
I realize posting this will probaly cement my reputation as a fruity eccentric, but I thought I'd mention I started on my china service last night at Belk. Stop laughing and pointing.
I have always been facinated by china, crystal and flatware. I guess it's hereditary, considering how much of the stuff Mom and I have amassed at the club. My aunts on Mom's side are somewhat obsessed with it as well.
I started on the path to getting my own service a few years ago with the flatware. I saved money each payday for about 3 months to get 12 place settings and a host of serving pieces from the Easton pattern stainless flatware by Oneida. The next goal was to get this china, but I had other priorities and put it off for a while.
It's the Eternal pattern by Lenox. I'm getting the 5-piece place settings and the coordianting accent plate. It's crafted of ivory fine china accented with 24-karat gold in a timeless pattern that will likely never be discontinued.
I'm serious. Stop laughing and pointing.
The price of this stuff is a little exorbinant (though not as bad as you might think), so I devised a plan to buy a setting and accent plate each payday until I get all the dishes I want. That way, I don't go into debt for it, and I get what I want.
Eleven more to go.
Friday, July 07, 2006
sneakerplay
Sneakerplay is a new, innovative social network designed specifically for the global sneaker culture, kind of like MySpace with more rubber and leather, or Flickr for sport shoe addicts.
They're currently in a private, invite-only beta, which means you need to know somebody to set up an account to access the site. I totally want in. I'm no Josh Spear, but it's obvious if you read this blog, I do keep up with what's hot in sneaker culture.
Members can create galleries, tag and organize collections, meet new people and see great sneakers. One of its coolest innovations is the 'Battle' system, pitting sneaker vs sneaker with a winner decided by the community, which works nicely as a baramoter of whats hot in the sneaker world at the moment.
Check it out. Hopefully it won't be too much of a wait until the final release.
They're currently in a private, invite-only beta, which means you need to know somebody to set up an account to access the site. I totally want in. I'm no Josh Spear, but it's obvious if you read this blog, I do keep up with what's hot in sneaker culture.
Members can create galleries, tag and organize collections, meet new people and see great sneakers. One of its coolest innovations is the 'Battle' system, pitting sneaker vs sneaker with a winner decided by the community, which works nicely as a baramoter of whats hot in the sneaker world at the moment.
Check it out. Hopefully it won't be too much of a wait until the final release.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Mystery of sneakers' origins still eludes historians
By Tracy Gordon Fox, The Hartford Courant
COLCHESTER, Conn. --They are becoming the buzz in Tokyo. And they may soon be all the rage on fleet French feet, too.
Vintage basketball sneakers, marketed as the first modern basketball shoe, with the label Colchester Rubber Co., will be sold overseas as early as August, according to the clothing collectors who found an old pair in a closet of an estate sale in December 2005.
The entrepreneurial salespeople, who named the sneaker company after the rubber company, turned up in Colchester last week to do some more research on the rubber company, which burned down in 1908. But they've received a cool reception from the town, where some historians were skeptical of their claim.
However, after inspecting prototypes of the shoes, produced in Shanghai, China, and talking to Cynthia Johnson, president of the company, town historian Stanley Moroch said he is beginning to change his mind.
Maybe Colchester was the birthplace of the basketball sneaker after all, he said.
"I think she's got me convinced because she's done a lot of research," Moroch said last week, after meeting with Johnson and seeing the sneakers she is helping to market.
Moroch said he hopes the company will give the Colchester Historical Society some proceeds from their sales. The shoes may someday be marketed in the United States, but are first being sold overseas.
One reason historians weren't buying the story was that they did not know Colchester Rubber had the ability to make white rubber. But Johnson found evidence in the town's library that showed the company had been making white rubber aprons before the shoes were manufactured.
Gary L. Pifer found the pair of homemade sneakers at an estate sale in California, in the closet of a house emptied for an estate sale. The shoes carried the insignia of the Colchester Rubber Co. and when he researched the name on the Internet, Pifer learned that the company closed in 1892, one year after basketball was invented. Converse claims it made the first basketball sneaker, in 1917.
But Pifer and his company suspect the Colchester shoes may have been created as prototypes for James Naismith, who invented basketball in Springfield, Mass. Naismith at the time had been approached by companies that worked with rubber to make basketball shoes, according to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield.
The sneakers were found in a Victorian-era trunk in the home believed to be a relative of one of Naismith's friends.
Most of the records were lost when the building burned down in 1908. As a result, it could be impossible to learn the full story behind the sneakers.
Even so, they are marketed as "National Treasure Vintage," which has whetted the appetite of Japanese designers who love anything American retro. The high-top and low-top canvas sneakers are even on the cover of a Japanese fashion magazine this month and received high ratings for their appearance.
"I've been amazed at the response of this little lost piece of American history we stumbled across," Johnson said. "It's a real cool piece of American history."
COLCHESTER, Conn. --They are becoming the buzz in Tokyo. And they may soon be all the rage on fleet French feet, too.
Vintage basketball sneakers, marketed as the first modern basketball shoe, with the label Colchester Rubber Co., will be sold overseas as early as August, according to the clothing collectors who found an old pair in a closet of an estate sale in December 2005.
The entrepreneurial salespeople, who named the sneaker company after the rubber company, turned up in Colchester last week to do some more research on the rubber company, which burned down in 1908. But they've received a cool reception from the town, where some historians were skeptical of their claim.
However, after inspecting prototypes of the shoes, produced in Shanghai, China, and talking to Cynthia Johnson, president of the company, town historian Stanley Moroch said he is beginning to change his mind.
Maybe Colchester was the birthplace of the basketball sneaker after all, he said.
"I think she's got me convinced because she's done a lot of research," Moroch said last week, after meeting with Johnson and seeing the sneakers she is helping to market.
Moroch said he hopes the company will give the Colchester Historical Society some proceeds from their sales. The shoes may someday be marketed in the United States, but are first being sold overseas.
One reason historians weren't buying the story was that they did not know Colchester Rubber had the ability to make white rubber. But Johnson found evidence in the town's library that showed the company had been making white rubber aprons before the shoes were manufactured.
Gary L. Pifer found the pair of homemade sneakers at an estate sale in California, in the closet of a house emptied for an estate sale. The shoes carried the insignia of the Colchester Rubber Co. and when he researched the name on the Internet, Pifer learned that the company closed in 1892, one year after basketball was invented. Converse claims it made the first basketball sneaker, in 1917.
But Pifer and his company suspect the Colchester shoes may have been created as prototypes for James Naismith, who invented basketball in Springfield, Mass. Naismith at the time had been approached by companies that worked with rubber to make basketball shoes, according to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield.
The sneakers were found in a Victorian-era trunk in the home believed to be a relative of one of Naismith's friends.
Most of the records were lost when the building burned down in 1908. As a result, it could be impossible to learn the full story behind the sneakers.
Even so, they are marketed as "National Treasure Vintage," which has whetted the appetite of Japanese designers who love anything American retro. The high-top and low-top canvas sneakers are even on the cover of a Japanese fashion magazine this month and received high ratings for their appearance.
"I've been amazed at the response of this little lost piece of American history we stumbled across," Johnson said. "It's a real cool piece of American history."
Neiman Marcus to Test New Cusp Concept
Chain Store Age
DALLAS - Neiman Marcus Group said that it plans to open a new type of store called Cusp for younger shoppers, according to a report by The Dallas Morning News. Four test stores will open in the next several months, with two in the Washington area and one in Los Angeles. One location has yet to be announced.
Cusp will sell women's contemporary apparel, handbags and shoes at lower prices than a Neiman Marcus store. "There's growth in the contemporary fashion category, and some customers prefer boutique shopping, so we wanted to see if we can do it better," Ginger Reeder, Neiman Marcus VP, told the publication. Cusp will target women ages 21 to 45, but it's "not just for a chronologically younger woman," she said. "It's about a younger mind-set.”
The stores will have polished concrete floors and exposed ceilings, and merchandise will be grouped by “key looks.” The new concept has been in the works for two years as the chain said it was looking for ways to expand its business.
DALLAS - Neiman Marcus Group said that it plans to open a new type of store called Cusp for younger shoppers, according to a report by The Dallas Morning News. Four test stores will open in the next several months, with two in the Washington area and one in Los Angeles. One location has yet to be announced.
Cusp will sell women's contemporary apparel, handbags and shoes at lower prices than a Neiman Marcus store. "There's growth in the contemporary fashion category, and some customers prefer boutique shopping, so we wanted to see if we can do it better," Ginger Reeder, Neiman Marcus VP, told the publication. Cusp will target women ages 21 to 45, but it's "not just for a chronologically younger woman," she said. "It's about a younger mind-set.”
The stores will have polished concrete floors and exposed ceilings, and merchandise will be grouped by “key looks.” The new concept has been in the works for two years as the chain said it was looking for ways to expand its business.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Independence Day Party at Forest Oaks Country Club
As I mentioned earlier, we have a huge Independence Day party every year at my mom’s country club. We usually have a respectable turnout of about 30 to 50 people each year, but some years we have many more.Anyway, I thought I’d share a few pictures from this year's party. I assure you there were dozens more people there than the pictures show, but taking the shots without people lets you see what we had up a little better.
...and we're back
Thanks to all of you that have stuck around in my temporary absence from steve's blog. I have been really behind, so my priorities had to shift temporarily to catch up.
We have a huge Independence Day party every year, and planning and attending left me a little short on time. We had it on the 2nd, I had to go to work on the 3rd, so when July 4th rolled around I just slept all day to catch up.
Anyway, to all those who have written, I will get back to you soon. To those looking for new stories, they're coming.
I’ll holler at you soon.
We have a huge Independence Day party every year, and planning and attending left me a little short on time. We had it on the 2nd, I had to go to work on the 3rd, so when July 4th rolled around I just slept all day to catch up.
Anyway, to all those who have written, I will get back to you soon. To those looking for new stories, they're coming.
I’ll holler at you soon.
cabino world
steve's blog's resident internationally renowned sneakerographer, Al Cabino, is still at it, with just over 20,000 signatures on his online petition:
Sneaker activist wants to go 'Back to the Future' News.blog CNET News.com
Sneaker Fan Fights For McFly Moonboot
The Tattered Coat The Passion of Al Cabino
Sneaker activist wants to go 'Back to the Future' News.blog CNET News.com
Sneaker Fan Fights For McFly Moonboot
The Tattered Coat The Passion of Al Cabino
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
my neighborhood | Georgia Retail Memories
Were you sad when Rich's departed? Do you remember Cumberland Mall in its glory days? Did you find "everything under the sun" at Richway or buy your cereal at Big Star? Do the names Davison's, Levy's, Kirven's, Kessler's or J.B. White ring a bell?My friend J.T. has created Georgia Retail Memories, a blog dedicated to photographing, preserving, documenting and capturing what has been lost in terms of retail in Georgia (with some content from Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina). Anything retail is fair game here including malls, discount stores, catalog retailers, small tenants, restaurants, drug stores and fast food places.
Anybody who visits J.T.'s site is free to contribute information, photographs or anything else they'd like to make this site even more interesting and informative.
He states, "I want this to be as fascinating for everybody else here as this is to me, and this will give me a chance to feature the highlights of my work in researching and photographing so many of these places I grew up with that now have either died or changed drastically."
It's a wonderful website, and I highly suggest checking it out.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Earth to Milan: Show a Little Restraint
By GUY TREBAY
MILAN -- LATELY it seems that the intervals separating the eras and styles designers relentlessly recycle have shrunk to the point where nobody makes reference anymore to real time. Rather, the collective fashion mind whips up whole-cloth fantasies of, say, the 1980's based not on the period so much as on whatever delirious interpretation of it was retailed six months ago, or maybe six months before that.
Of all the authentic 80's personalities design has consulted, there is one whose voice and message may be of use right now. I found myself thinking often of this woman last week during the spring 2007 men's wear collections, as the hours clocked by and 50 or more designers filled 14-hour days with their latest ideas.
No matter where I was, Nancy Reagan's countenance seemed to drift unbidden into consciousness. Maybe it was all the Adam Ant music the D.J.'s played. In my mind's eye, Mrs. Reagan's outsize head, perched atop a stem neck and framed by a broad-shouldered power dress — red Adolfo, of course — tended to morph into the disembodied face of the winsome charlatan from Oz, by way of Kansas.
At a certain point — I believe it was Frida Giannini's debut designing men's wear for Gucci — I began to fantasize about Mrs. Reagan appearing in the skies above Milan's great wedding-cake cathedral, the Duomo, and intoning in a disembodied celestial voice her famous message of abstention. Far below her huddled the poor fashion folk, modishly dressed but terribly troubled and lost.
"Just Say No," I could hear Mrs. Reagan say. "Just Say No."
And in this dream, I joined my voice to hers, perhaps for the first time in my life.
Just say no to Oxford shoes in green or orange or two-tone leather (Gianfranco Ferré). Say no to self-belted trousers, voile shirts, spray-on tans, flower-embroidered business clothes. Say no to appliqué effects, vinyl raincoats and cinched trench coats worn by girly-man models crammed into Rastafarian tam-o'-shanters (Burberry.) Say no to man-sandals (called mandals) and man-purses (murses) and suede hot pants worn so short that they produce a kind of pipe-cleaner leg not improved by fringed hippie boots worn loose and low (Gucci).
Say no to zippers so brief that they are an affront to the masculine anatomy (Costume National). Say no to boring minimalist blazers worn over tights that leave little doubt as to whether the wearer has been circumcised (Calvin Klein). Say no to seersucker swallowtail coats for the beach (Etro); to pastel golf wear seemingly designed for caddies with a sideline in a soft-core porn (Missoni). Say no to the unfortunate trouser length that, as the stylist L'Wren Scott remarked, now blights the streets of London.
"What are those?" Ms. Scott asked as she waited for a show to begin, referring to pants truncated at midcalf. "They're not clam-diggers or Bermuda shorts. Maybe they should be called Mapris," or man Capris.
Stop the Mapris, or at least make efforts to contain them before they become a global contagion. And halt, before it is too late, belt buckles and sandals adorned with a designer's profile in silhouette (Mr. Ferré).
Strange as it is to say, the most credible designs of the week were, with a notable exception, distinguished by measured sobriety. Although no word in the context of fashion means less than "modern," there is such a thing as a vital present. And like members of a recovery group chanting the Serenity Prayer, the designers who presented the most engaging ideas looked as if they were taking both life and fashion a day at a time.
The most literal example of this is Donatella Versace, whose cocaine addiction is now behind her and whose collection was well pitched to the revitalization of her family company. In the tailored proportions of jackets and trousers, Ms. Versace steered clear of pitfalls that have beset past collections. There was no Sonny Crockett flash, and few garments that could be mistaken for key pieces in the wardrobe of a made man.
Instead, Ms. Versace showed well-shaped and trim-cut jackets in neutral hues and took a Goldilocks path in terms of trouser width. Her palette was mellow; beyond slabs of neon color on print shirts, there was nothing to suggest a man who looks as if he secretly wishes to wear his girlfriend's clothes. That it was intended to be a masculine show, in the premetrosexual sense of the word, was clear from the casting.
"We really wanted guy guys," the stylist Bill Mullen said backstage. Most models working Milan's runways lately bear an unnerving resemblance to the underage characters in Larry Clark films.
One of the encouraging experiences of an intense but often dispiriting week was observing how effectively a tight palette can be deployed by designers as skilled, though unalike, as Valentino, Alexander McQueen, Raf Simons at Jil Sanders, Tomas Maier at Bottega Veneta or Giorgio Armani, who invented it all.
In his moment of ascendancy, Mr. Armani was often praised for a controlled use of color and tone-on-tone effects. Revisiting the lessons of his early career, Mr. Armani concentrated this time on unfussy suits in shadowy colors and fabrics that were fluid but not blowsy. The full pinstriped trousers he presented with ironed creases looked appropriate to the sartorial moment, cool although not nearly so hip as the Al Parker mustaches glued on all the models at his earlier Emporio Armani show.
THE Bottega Veneta and the Valentino shows, so neutral they were almost monochrome, seemed to have been created by designers with an ear cupped to the complaints of men, who, it turns out, lost interest in becoming the new women once it sunk in that women have to rethink and refresh their wardrobes constantly.
"I was focusing on the leisure suit from the 1970's," Mr. Maier said backstage after his fine show of simple, short jacketed and close-fitting but unconstructed suits in colors like khaki and basalt gray. "Two pieces and you're gone from the house," he said. Don't forget the $3,000 woven leather tote on your way out the door.
If one can fantasize Nancy Reagan as a blob of ectoplasm adrift in the streaky Milanese sky, I suppose it is O.K. to float the hope that Mr. Maier may one day design a line for H&M, so that ordinary mortals can buy his clothes. It seems unjust that the only people who can afford to look like expensive slackers in his version of a leisure suit or in Valentino's handsome khaki Sahara jacket and lean linen trousers are those with a Gulfstream V or, at the very least, a fractional share.
The Trussardi presentation, designed by Beatrice Trussardi, was brief, tightly edited and unexpectedly assured. The theme of surf culture seemed like a stretch when Ms. Trussardi explained her brief beforehand.
"Actually, it's all sports and the way that sports are not so elitistic any more," she said in charmingly imperfect English.
Anyone who has studied photographs from the pre-Gidget era of the sport once called wave-riding would recognize how effectively Ms. Trussardi approximated, with slender trousers at ankle-grazing lengths and boxy lightweight jackets, the intense detailing that went into making surfers' studied nonchalance so ineffably hip.
Another kind of cool was evoked by Raf Simons, who has somehow managed to channel Jil Sander without compromising his own aesthetic or lapsing into parody. Mr. Simons's swing coats and one-and-a-half-breasted blazers came straight from the Sander lexicon. His contribution was to shift the silhouette and subtly widen the shoulders, which makes it clear that he is designing for people with Y chromosomes.
Beneath the risible "Death in Venice" styling was an Alexander McQueen show in which fashion's most gifted underachiever once again proved his ability to cut and shape a suit, most successfully one in lightweight glen plaid with checkered piped lapels.
Is this the place to note that the most inescapable, not to say oppressive, theme of the week was short pants? It is. There were short shorts and Gurkha shorts and Bermuda shorts and cuffed shorts out of "Chariots of Fire." There were tennis shorts and shorts worn as the bottom half of suits and shorts so abbreviated that they were little more than cummerbunds with a zipper and a seam up the crotch. If these presentations said anything about the larger culture, it could be that the West is being readied for a future in which China has conquered the planet and the rest of us have been hired to make UPS deliveries or mow the lawn.
As usual, it was Miuccia Prada who kick-started the trend with a collection so obstinately noncommercial that it made this viewer fall in love all over again with Italian fashion's resident intellectual iconoclast.
"If you don't get it, how do you think we feel?" asked the president of one high-end American retailer after the show. He gave a defeated shrug.
The beauty of the Prada show was its designer's eccentric, albeit financially risky, insistence on finding the oddest materials, most unexpected shapes and the most degraded sartorial conventions imaginable and proving what she can make of them.
Ms. Prada's short shorts looked like the kind worn by African game-trackers, although rendered in the colors of road-caution signs. They were worn beneath vinyl jackets impractically fastened with Velcro slabs and with open-toed sandals of vinyl paired with heavy socks.
If a bus happened to stop on Milan's fancy commercial drag, the Via Montenapoleone, and disgorge a group of tourists dressed like the models on Ms. Prada's runway, the shopkeepers would yank down their riot gates so fast they'd risk hernia. It is a fact that all designers put on airs, but less often true that they are willing to take a look at their own aesthetic pretension. What is rare about Ms. Prada is how compelled she is to stick pins into the bloated balloons of the fashion business, sometimes even pricking her own.
MILAN -- LATELY it seems that the intervals separating the eras and styles designers relentlessly recycle have shrunk to the point where nobody makes reference anymore to real time. Rather, the collective fashion mind whips up whole-cloth fantasies of, say, the 1980's based not on the period so much as on whatever delirious interpretation of it was retailed six months ago, or maybe six months before that.
Of all the authentic 80's personalities design has consulted, there is one whose voice and message may be of use right now. I found myself thinking often of this woman last week during the spring 2007 men's wear collections, as the hours clocked by and 50 or more designers filled 14-hour days with their latest ideas.
No matter where I was, Nancy Reagan's countenance seemed to drift unbidden into consciousness. Maybe it was all the Adam Ant music the D.J.'s played. In my mind's eye, Mrs. Reagan's outsize head, perched atop a stem neck and framed by a broad-shouldered power dress — red Adolfo, of course — tended to morph into the disembodied face of the winsome charlatan from Oz, by way of Kansas.
At a certain point — I believe it was Frida Giannini's debut designing men's wear for Gucci — I began to fantasize about Mrs. Reagan appearing in the skies above Milan's great wedding-cake cathedral, the Duomo, and intoning in a disembodied celestial voice her famous message of abstention. Far below her huddled the poor fashion folk, modishly dressed but terribly troubled and lost.
"Just Say No," I could hear Mrs. Reagan say. "Just Say No."
And in this dream, I joined my voice to hers, perhaps for the first time in my life.
Just say no to Oxford shoes in green or orange or two-tone leather (Gianfranco Ferré). Say no to self-belted trousers, voile shirts, spray-on tans, flower-embroidered business clothes. Say no to appliqué effects, vinyl raincoats and cinched trench coats worn by girly-man models crammed into Rastafarian tam-o'-shanters (Burberry.) Say no to man-sandals (called mandals) and man-purses (murses) and suede hot pants worn so short that they produce a kind of pipe-cleaner leg not improved by fringed hippie boots worn loose and low (Gucci).
Say no to zippers so brief that they are an affront to the masculine anatomy (Costume National). Say no to boring minimalist blazers worn over tights that leave little doubt as to whether the wearer has been circumcised (Calvin Klein). Say no to seersucker swallowtail coats for the beach (Etro); to pastel golf wear seemingly designed for caddies with a sideline in a soft-core porn (Missoni). Say no to the unfortunate trouser length that, as the stylist L'Wren Scott remarked, now blights the streets of London.
"What are those?" Ms. Scott asked as she waited for a show to begin, referring to pants truncated at midcalf. "They're not clam-diggers or Bermuda shorts. Maybe they should be called Mapris," or man Capris.
Stop the Mapris, or at least make efforts to contain them before they become a global contagion. And halt, before it is too late, belt buckles and sandals adorned with a designer's profile in silhouette (Mr. Ferré).
Strange as it is to say, the most credible designs of the week were, with a notable exception, distinguished by measured sobriety. Although no word in the context of fashion means less than "modern," there is such a thing as a vital present. And like members of a recovery group chanting the Serenity Prayer, the designers who presented the most engaging ideas looked as if they were taking both life and fashion a day at a time.
The most literal example of this is Donatella Versace, whose cocaine addiction is now behind her and whose collection was well pitched to the revitalization of her family company. In the tailored proportions of jackets and trousers, Ms. Versace steered clear of pitfalls that have beset past collections. There was no Sonny Crockett flash, and few garments that could be mistaken for key pieces in the wardrobe of a made man.
Instead, Ms. Versace showed well-shaped and trim-cut jackets in neutral hues and took a Goldilocks path in terms of trouser width. Her palette was mellow; beyond slabs of neon color on print shirts, there was nothing to suggest a man who looks as if he secretly wishes to wear his girlfriend's clothes. That it was intended to be a masculine show, in the premetrosexual sense of the word, was clear from the casting.
"We really wanted guy guys," the stylist Bill Mullen said backstage. Most models working Milan's runways lately bear an unnerving resemblance to the underage characters in Larry Clark films.
One of the encouraging experiences of an intense but often dispiriting week was observing how effectively a tight palette can be deployed by designers as skilled, though unalike, as Valentino, Alexander McQueen, Raf Simons at Jil Sanders, Tomas Maier at Bottega Veneta or Giorgio Armani, who invented it all.
In his moment of ascendancy, Mr. Armani was often praised for a controlled use of color and tone-on-tone effects. Revisiting the lessons of his early career, Mr. Armani concentrated this time on unfussy suits in shadowy colors and fabrics that were fluid but not blowsy. The full pinstriped trousers he presented with ironed creases looked appropriate to the sartorial moment, cool although not nearly so hip as the Al Parker mustaches glued on all the models at his earlier Emporio Armani show.
THE Bottega Veneta and the Valentino shows, so neutral they were almost monochrome, seemed to have been created by designers with an ear cupped to the complaints of men, who, it turns out, lost interest in becoming the new women once it sunk in that women have to rethink and refresh their wardrobes constantly.
"I was focusing on the leisure suit from the 1970's," Mr. Maier said backstage after his fine show of simple, short jacketed and close-fitting but unconstructed suits in colors like khaki and basalt gray. "Two pieces and you're gone from the house," he said. Don't forget the $3,000 woven leather tote on your way out the door.
If one can fantasize Nancy Reagan as a blob of ectoplasm adrift in the streaky Milanese sky, I suppose it is O.K. to float the hope that Mr. Maier may one day design a line for H&M, so that ordinary mortals can buy his clothes. It seems unjust that the only people who can afford to look like expensive slackers in his version of a leisure suit or in Valentino's handsome khaki Sahara jacket and lean linen trousers are those with a Gulfstream V or, at the very least, a fractional share.
The Trussardi presentation, designed by Beatrice Trussardi, was brief, tightly edited and unexpectedly assured. The theme of surf culture seemed like a stretch when Ms. Trussardi explained her brief beforehand.
"Actually, it's all sports and the way that sports are not so elitistic any more," she said in charmingly imperfect English.
Anyone who has studied photographs from the pre-Gidget era of the sport once called wave-riding would recognize how effectively Ms. Trussardi approximated, with slender trousers at ankle-grazing lengths and boxy lightweight jackets, the intense detailing that went into making surfers' studied nonchalance so ineffably hip.
Another kind of cool was evoked by Raf Simons, who has somehow managed to channel Jil Sander without compromising his own aesthetic or lapsing into parody. Mr. Simons's swing coats and one-and-a-half-breasted blazers came straight from the Sander lexicon. His contribution was to shift the silhouette and subtly widen the shoulders, which makes it clear that he is designing for people with Y chromosomes.
Beneath the risible "Death in Venice" styling was an Alexander McQueen show in which fashion's most gifted underachiever once again proved his ability to cut and shape a suit, most successfully one in lightweight glen plaid with checkered piped lapels.
Is this the place to note that the most inescapable, not to say oppressive, theme of the week was short pants? It is. There were short shorts and Gurkha shorts and Bermuda shorts and cuffed shorts out of "Chariots of Fire." There were tennis shorts and shorts worn as the bottom half of suits and shorts so abbreviated that they were little more than cummerbunds with a zipper and a seam up the crotch. If these presentations said anything about the larger culture, it could be that the West is being readied for a future in which China has conquered the planet and the rest of us have been hired to make UPS deliveries or mow the lawn.
As usual, it was Miuccia Prada who kick-started the trend with a collection so obstinately noncommercial that it made this viewer fall in love all over again with Italian fashion's resident intellectual iconoclast.
"If you don't get it, how do you think we feel?" asked the president of one high-end American retailer after the show. He gave a defeated shrug.
The beauty of the Prada show was its designer's eccentric, albeit financially risky, insistence on finding the oddest materials, most unexpected shapes and the most degraded sartorial conventions imaginable and proving what she can make of them.
Ms. Prada's short shorts looked like the kind worn by African game-trackers, although rendered in the colors of road-caution signs. They were worn beneath vinyl jackets impractically fastened with Velcro slabs and with open-toed sandals of vinyl paired with heavy socks.
If a bus happened to stop on Milan's fancy commercial drag, the Via Montenapoleone, and disgorge a group of tourists dressed like the models on Ms. Prada's runway, the shopkeepers would yank down their riot gates so fast they'd risk hernia. It is a fact that all designers put on airs, but less often true that they are willing to take a look at their own aesthetic pretension. What is rare about Ms. Prada is how compelled she is to stick pins into the bloated balloons of the fashion business, sometimes even pricking her own.
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