Nike set to release 23rd Air Jordan

BEAVERTON, Ore. (AP) -- It's gotta be the shoes, right?

No other basketball shoe has changed the face of business, athletics and marketing like the Air Jordan. This month, Nike releases the 23rd edition, and it is expected to be just as venerated as its predecessors.

The sleek design and link to Michael Jordan's jersey number make it a touchstone in the line. It's also Nike's first basketball shoe designed under its "Considered" ethos, which aims to reduce waste and use environmentally friendly materials wherever possible.

The Air Jordan XX3 will be released in three hyped-up rounds from January to February, starting with a limited edition to be sent to only 23 retailers to be sold for $230 and concluding with the national launch at $185.

There had been talk at Nike about retiring the shoe at No. 23, because of his iconic jersey number. But company officials won't say whether this will be the last of the line. Neither will Jordan.

"You'll just have to wait and see," Jordan said in an e-mail to The Associated Press, responding to questions about the upcoming release.

Before launching the first shoe in 1985, Nike had just signed Jordan for $2.5 million over five years. Nike won't say what Jordan's current contract with the company is worth.

Jordan's deal with Nike opened the door for sneaker manufacturers to chase after athletes, signing them up --sometimes just out of high school-- for multimillion-dollar contracts in hopes of being able to cash in on the next superstar. It sent sneaker prices to new heights, which has since generated a backlash against selling pricey shoes to basketball-loving kids.

"The Air Jordan franchise created the most coveted basketball footwear in the world and changed the basketball landscape forever," said Nike Brand President Charlie Denson.

Unlike most basketball shoes to date, which were often white and utilitarian, the Air Jordan was a shock of black and red. It was initially banned by the NBA for not conforming with other players' shoes.

Jordan continued to wear them and was fined $5,000 a game, which Nike paid.

"Nobody expected the mass hysteria created by its release," Jordan, who has been a part-owner of the Charlotte Bobcats since 2006, said in his e-mail to The AP.

A new edition was launched each year, and release dates had to be moved to the weekends to keep kids from skipping school to get a pair.

The frenzy got dangerous. People were mugged and even killed for the shoes.

The Air Jordans helped spawn a subculture of collectors, who line up at stores to buy the shoe's latest edition.

Jordan said he never expected that the shoe would become an icon.

"Like every kid growing up, I dreamed of making winning shots at the buzzer and I was fortunate to live out that dream, but never in my wildest dreams did I ever entertain the idea of the success of the Air Jordan franchise," he said.

The Air Jordans moved basketball shoes from true high-tops or low-tops to a middle range and used unheard of styles, such as patent leather toes and elephant print.

As Jordan's success grew on the courts, so did Nike's in the shoe industry.

People from the streets to the suburbs were wearing $100-plus basketball shoes, which was unheard of at the time.

That price is the norm today, but it has launched a backlash, such as the partnership between New York Knicks player Stephon Marbury and the Steve & Barry's store chain to sell basketball shoes for $14.98 -- a direct stab at pricey sneakers like Air Jordans.

At that time, the Air Jordan captured a mix of design, marketing, athleticism and player charisma that hadn't been seen before in the industry -- everyone wanted to "Be Like Mike."

"Athletes had been endorsing products for years prior to this," said Tinker Hatfield, Nike's Vice President of Innovation Design and Special Projects.

"But they were just signing their name to the shoe. I think there was a very understandable difference...Michael's personality and even the changes in the game and inspiration from other walks of life were all sort of being designed into this product and that made it more interesting."

Jordan and Hatfield work together on the design and function on many of the Air Jordan shoes. Jordan has final say on design matters.

Air Jordan was the lightning in the bottle that every company hopes for.

Advertising images of Jordan soaring across the sky were ubiquitous. Spike Lee could be heard hollering "It's gotta be the shoes" on television. And Jordan's outstretched arms with the swoosh nearby adorned walls across the country.

Nike quickly moved from a running company and newcomer to the basketball category to the market leader. Some industry estimates put Nike's current share of the basketball shoe market at about 85 percent. Far behind are Adidas and Reebok.

The idea of adding such unusual style to a product or so closely aligning with a personality was novel at the time, but it paid off.

Other companies tried to follow suit but it was like trying to come up with the next Harry Potter or iPhone for basketball.

The relationship completely changed the idea of sports marketing. Companies now make athlete sponsorships the centerpiece of their business, spending millions signing them and designing product lines and marketing platforms around them.

Jordan's original deal seems like a pittance compared to multimillion-dollar contracts inked these days, such as Nike's $90 million agreement with LeBron James.

"The beginning of the Jordan era marked a new and more sophisticated approach to leveraging an athlete," said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.

Like any bet, athletic companies take their risks -- some pay off, like Tiger Woods or LeBron James. But some don't, a la Michael Vick. Nike terminated its contract with Vick last August after his plea agreement on dogfighting charges.

Jordan was spun off into its own division in 1997, a move that some high up in Nike questioned when Jordan retired.

But the business is a key component, with new players signing on under the brand. Nike has spun that Jordan swagger into performance and luxury apparel for men and woman.

The Air Jordan remains the pinnacle piece for shoe collectors. The original Air Jordan 1 can sell for thousands of dollars, depending on various factors.

Jordan said: "It blows my mind that even after five years removed from the game the shoe would be stronger than ever and I would still be greeted by fans as if I had just won a championship all over again."

Happy Smurfday!

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — They're turning 50 without a hint of gray.

Just blue. Lots of blue.

The Smurfs are hitting the half-century mark, and Papa Smurf and Smurfette helped kick off a year of celebrations Monday with sarsaparilla juice and — naturally — Smurfberry cake.

The late cartoonist Pierre Culliford — best known by his pen name, "Peyo" — first introduced the tiny blue figures in a comic strip in October 1958. He called them Schtroumpf; they became known worldwide as the Smurfs.

The Smurfs, forest dwellers who live in little white-capped mushroom homes, developed their own "Smurf" language in which nouns and verbs were interchanged.

Their debut on U.S. television in 1981 launched their global rise to stardom and made the Smurfs a household name. A Smurf is a Pitufo in Spanish, a Schlumpf in German, Nam Ching Ling to the Chinese, a Sumafa in Japan and Dardassim in Hebrew.

"I think that if he could see all that has been done with his characters since his death and the success and interest that the Smurfs still attract, he would be very, very, very, very happy and very proud," said Peyo's son, Thierry Culliford.

To mark 50 years of Smurfdom, organizers are planning everything from a 3-D animation feature film expected to be released next year to new comic book collections and a remastered release of the popular 1980s television animated series, Peyo's family said.

Peyo's widow and two children will help kick off a European birthday tour in Brussels. The Smurfs celebration will continue in Paris and Berlin.

The Smurfs also will team up with the UNICEF to promote children's rights and education worldwide, said Yves Willemont of UNICEF Belgium.

"The Smurfs and UNICEF have a lot of values in common — values about joy, happiness and respect," Willemont said. "We also have in common the fact that we are dedicated to the cause of children and to the promotion of every child and the right of every child to survive."

UNICEF and the Smurfs joined forces two years ago to raise the plight of ex-child soldiers in Africa.

Born in Brussels, Peyo worked as a movie projectionist before entering the world of comic strip drawing.

The Smurfs appeared as a supporting cast of characters in Peyo's 1958 "Johan and Pirlouit" cartoon, which was set in the Middle Ages.

The Smurfs quickly grew in popularity and by 1960, the Smurfs had their own comic strip series and. With the help of the Hanna-Barbera Productions, the Smurfs became an animated cartoon in 1981.

Thierry Culliford said the Smurfs promote love and friendship. He said many who grew up watching the Smurfs on TV during the 1980s and 1990s now are parents and want to introduce the Smurfs to their children.

Demand for Smurf stories continues, said Hendrik Coysman, managing director of IMPS, which controls the rights of the Smurf brand worldwide.

"Thousands of fans are asking for more stories and these will be based of course on the fantastic asset that Peyo has left us," Coysman said.

Peyo, who died 15 years ago, "would be very happy if he were here today" to see Papa Smurf, Smurfette, Handy, Jokey and the troop of 96 others celebrate 50 years of Smurfmania, daughter Veronique Culliford said.

Got Crocs? Be Careful on the Escalator

WASHINGTON (AP) — At rail stations and shopping malls around the world, reports are popping up of people, particularly young children, getting their toes caught in escalators. The one common theme seems to be the clunky soft-soled clogs known by the name of the most popular brand, Crocs. [read more]

The Devil Wears Hermès (He Bought It at the Caesars Palace Mall in Las Vegas)

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: August 21, 2007

Dana Thomas has written a crisp, witty social history that’s as entertaining as it is informative. (more at The New York Times)

Yeah! I want Cheesy (Tots)!

I'm not hip enough to publicly not like fast food, so I'll admit I eat a lot of it on my "dinner hour" between The City and Big Green. Usually Arby's, McDonald's or Long John Silvers (Long Green Slivers as Eddy calls it).

There's a Burger King on the way as well, and though I'm pretty much off The King after eating so much in college (they were open late), I pop in so every so often I won't suffer from McBurnout, Roast Beef Malaise, or whatever the hell eating too much LJS will do.

The latest trip was largely disappointing as usual, but I discovered a new menu item: something called Cheesy Tots.

This one-time experimental breakfast item apparently caught on at BK and has built up a following. Some people have raved about them, and others have urged its return when taken offf the menu temporarily

I love tater tots (almost went to Sonic to get some actually) and I like cheese sticks, so I figured these golden brown, saucer-shaped chicken nugget-looking bites might be worth a shot.

Not so fast.

Maybe I got a bad batch or something, but I thought they were awful. The mix of mozzarella and cheddar cheeses was decent enough, but the deep-fried coating was hard and starchy and the few potato bits found inside distracted too much from the cheese. The lack of a dipping sauce was a problem, as ketchup didn't work well at all with the other flavors, and there are only so many condiments that might work. Though I might suggest they find some to mask the overall taste :-)

Still, for the price, it wasn't a bad deal. Burger King isn't exactly known for their culinary prowess in the first place (see also: Chicken Fries), and if you're sick of french fries and onion rings, it does add another option to the palette.

Just don't offer me any. I'll pass.

A Winter White That Works for Spring

By DAVID COLMAN

WHATEVER the charms of the International Tennis Hall of Fame gala, held every year during the United States Open, looking for men’s fashion trends there would seem to be a fool’s errand.

But at last September’s event, the tennis legend Stan Smith spotted a spring look months ahead of time: a group of stylish young men had come in black tie and brand-new Stan Smiths, the white, stripe-free Adidas sneakers that have done more to enshrine Mr. Smith’s name in the annals of pop culture than his tennis record ever did.

“It was pretty neat,” said Mr. Smith, 60, who won the United States Open in 1969 and had the shoe named after him in 1971. “For me, they’re my work shoe.”

And now city men are wearing them to work, too, bringing sprightly new meaning to the WASPy old-man expression “white shoe.” A combination of factors — hip-hop stars who brag that they wear a new pair of clean white Nike Air Force 1’s every day; designers like Marc Jacobs (who has worn Stan Smiths since junior high) and John Varvatos (who made Converse Jack Purcells and Chuck Taylors must-haves again) — have converged to make the all-white, old-school sneaker into Le Shoe for the smart set.

They are, it turns out, perfect for young, for old, for rich, for poor. They go with jeans, a suit, even a tux; you can wear them to work, to play and even to appear on Oprah (as Mr. Jacobs did). They can be cheap (basic Stan Smith’s are $55 at adidas.com) or not (the 25th anniversary Air Force 1’s are $2,000 at Barneys New York) or in between. They even come with a brand of fashion approval: several designers now offer their own version of the white sneaker, among them Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent, Neil Barrett, Dries van Noten and Miuccia Prada.

Sneaker craziness may not sound like anything new, but this time there’s a rub, and like it or not, it involves a toothbrush.

“They need to be clean,” said Daniel Peres, the editor of Details. “It’s a good look, a right-out-of-the-box-clean pair of white sneakers, and it’s the only kind you can wear with dressier clothes, nice jeans or even a suit.” But he reiterated his proviso. “Some people do everything they can to make them look worn and dirty, which is wrong. I’ve seen fashion editors in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, shuffling their feet in the dirt to make their Chucks look worn in. I just stood there in horror.”

According to a nurses’ advisory site, the best way to keep white shoes dazzling is with Murphy’s Oil Soap and a toothbrush, and those white rubber soles might call for a go with whitewall-tire cleaner. Or you can subcontract the work and take them to the shoeshine man.

Sean Donovan, a sneaker collector who just bought a fresh pair of Stan Smiths for a new job (as a salesman at the Marc Jacobs store, in fact), said he was careful to keep his new shoes in rotation with, say, his white Air Force 1’s. He sprays them immediately with water and stain repellent, which makes normal scuffs easy to wipe off. “If you want to get crazy, you can go at them with an old toothbrush and some Soft Scrub,” he said.

Mr. Donovan, who has about 65 pairs of sneakers, agreed that clean is key. “A white shoe, it makes you feel fresh,” he said. “It’s like when you wash and iron your clothes, it makes you feel like everything’s together.”

Given the care the humble shoes require, the current trend is not without a kind of upended silliness. “It’s really turned an ordinary product into a luxury product,” said Bradley Carbone, an editor at Complex magazine, an urban young men’s magazine, which, naturally enough, follows sneaker obsessions closely. “A few years ago when you had rappers like Fat Joe and Jay-Z talking about wearing a new pair every day, people responded by trying to keep theirs as crisp and clean as possible. So it has an aspirational seal to it, even though it’s on an inexpensive shoe.”

While Mr. Peres likes the look, he won’t be sporting it any time soon. “They draw all attention to your feet,” he said. “I don’t want to have to compete with my shoes.”

i LV u

How much do you love Louis Vuitton?

Obviously, the iconic French fashion brand has become increasingly popular over the past few years across a wide spectrum of socioeconomic classes, spawning any number of imitators in its wake. But is it special enough to theme your entire wedding based on the classic LV coated cavas pattern?

I got this email the other day and it cracked me up (I've been on a 'posting spam' kick lately). Don't know if these picturea are real, but they sure are laughable.

The happy bride and groom.

A very creative fabric treatment on the train of the bride's dress.

Good enough to eat?

Only a fine automaker like Oldsmobile is worthy of the LV emblem. :-)

a year of spam

Note from Steve: I got this email from my friend Sonya. It cracked me up!

SUMMARY OF MY LAST YEAR 2006 ON THE COMPUTER

• I must send my thanks to whoever sent me the one about rat poop in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet towel with every envelope that needs sealing.
  
• Also, now I have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason.
  
• I no longer have any savings because I gave it to a sick girl (Penny Brown) who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time.
  
• I no longer have any money at all, but that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are sending me for participating in their special e-mail program.
• I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me, and St. Theresa's novena has granted my every wish.
  
• I no longer eat KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes or feathers.
  
• I no longer use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day
  
• Thanks to you, I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an email to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes.
  
• Because of your concern I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains.
  
• I no longer can buy gasoline without taking a man along to watch the car so a serial killer won't crawl in my back seat when I'm pumping gas.
  
• I no longer drink Pepsi or Dr. Pepper since the people who make these products are atheists who refuse to put "Under God" on their cans.
  
• I no longer use Saran wrap in the microwave because it causes cancer.
  
• And thanks for letting me know I can't boil a cup water in the microwave anymore because it will blow up in my face...disfiguring me for life.
  
• I no longer check the coin return on pay phones because I could be pricked with a needle infected with AIDS.
  
• I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with a perfume sample and rob me.
  
• I no longer receive packages from UPS or FedEx since they are actually Al Qaeda in disguise.
  
• I no longer shop at Target since they are French and don't support our American troops or the Salvation Army.
  
• I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number for which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica , Uganda , Singapore , and Uzbekistan.
  
• I no longer have any sneakers -- but that will change once I receive my free replacement pair from Nike
  
• I no longer buy expensive cookies from Neiman Marcus since I now have their recipe.
  
• Thanks to you, I can't use anyone's toilet but mine because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my butt.
  
• Thank you too for all the endless advice Andy Rooney has given us. I can live a better life now because he's told us how to fix everything.
  
• And thanks to your great advice, I can't ever pick up $5.00 I dropped in the parking lot because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting underneath my car to grab my leg.
  
• Oh, and I can no longer drive my car because I can't buy gas from certain gas companies!

If you don't send this e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhea will land on your head at 5:00 PM this afternoon and the fleas from 12 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a hairy hump. I know this will occur because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbor's ex-mother-in-law's second husband's cousin's beautician...


• A South American scientist from Argentina , after a lengthy study, has discovered that people with insufficient brain activity read their e-mail with their hand on the mouse.

Don't bother taking it off now, it's too late!

Sneakerheads love to show off footwear

By Sarah Skidmore, Associated Press Writer

PORTLAND, Ore. --Matt Halfhill is crazy about sneakers. He worked in a shoe store as a teenager, buying shoes on clearance. He has charmed his wife with kicks, buying limited edition pink and red Nikes for her on Valentine's Day. He collects them obsessively, lining the walls of his home with about 500 pairs of shoes. Welcome to the world of the sneakerhead, where shoes reign supreme.

Collectors range from casual fans of sneaker fashion to those who buy and sell shoes like a cardboard-encased commodity. True fanatics will camp out overnight for the latest pair, buy multiple pairs (in case one gets scuffed) and sometimes even wear them.

It's an obsession that has been gaining traction in recent years, even as sneaker sales have grown only slowly. There are Web sites, magazines, books, movies and radio shows dedicated to sneaker culture. There have even been television shows, like ESPN2's "It's About the Shoes" that included tours of collectors' enormous closets.

"I think people are more aware (of sneaker culture), the general public, because of the media and Internet," said Alex Wang, creative director for Sole Collector magazine and admitted shoe aficionado.

Sneakers have been a part of urban culture for decades. Run DMC rapped about "My Adidas" in the 1980s, and it remains a part of hip hop culture with famous sneakerhead artists like Missy Elliot and Fat Joe.

But sneaker love has spread. British teen pop star Lilly Allen sings about her "trainers" and rocks them onstage while wearing a posh dress.

Everyone from Manhattan businessmen to Midwestern teens are coming in with a hankering for shoes, store owners say.

"You can tell so much about a person by what they have on their feet," said Andre Speed, 36, at a Portland specialty sneaker store called Lifted. "You might not have the freshest outfit but if you have the kicks, you are going to get the respect."

Shoes can cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars depending on their cachet.

"The scene is on fire," Speed said.

Shoe makers are feeding off the energy. They work with artists to develop specialized pairs, such as Puma's electric blue and red trainers designed by Brazilian artist Frederico Uribe. There are stores where people can order styles of their own.

Shoe companies regularly rerelease old favorites and also market updated styles and limited edition shoes.

Adidas released 30 NBA Superstar shoes -- one for each team in the NBA -- in December. Shoes flew off the shelves.

In February the company will offer several player-specific shoes, like a Tim Duncan pair that incorporates his tattoos into the design and will only be available at the NBA All-Star weekend in Las Vegas.

Nike celebrated the 25th anniversary of its Air Force 1 last month with a huge party in New York where there were 1,040 different versions of the shoe on display.

One attendee described it as "awesome, out of control awesome."

The rest of us can catch a replay on Jan. 13 on MTV, which is airing highlights of the party as part of a special on the culture surrounding Air Force 1.

Some sneaker designers have become celebrities themselves, such as Tinker Hatfield, Nike's legendary leader of the Innovation Kitchen, who is the star of sneakerhead events.

Adidas has heard from university equipment managers who get calls from sneakerheads looking for shoes that aren't available to the public.

"It's absolutely amazing. Even if it's the smallest niche, they'll buy all of them," said Terrell Clark, a spokesman for Adidas USA, based in Portland.

NPD Group, a market research firm, estimates total U.S. footwear sales were nearly $42 billion in 2005, up 9 percent from the year before. But of that, athletic shoes only grew 3 percent.

Industry analysts say sneakerheads make up a small but crucial part of the shoe industry.

"There is incredible value for how it exists for the company as a tool for them to take a pulse for what kids will see as hip and relevant," said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. "You are always trying to find the Pied Piper for the industry."

Shoe collectors dictate what will be hot and what will be bought.

"Nike gets really great fashion and trend ideas from these kids, who are really cutting-edge," said John Shanley, a clothing and accessories industry analyst for Susquehanna Financial Group. "They can capitalize on (that) down the road from a mass production mode."

So shoe companies are compelled to reach out to sneakerheads.

They offer "quick hit" shoes, which might have a hundred or so pairs, and pop-up stores, which open for a day or week to sell a limited edition shoe and then disappear.

"It's always changing," said Dave Ortiz, co-owner of popular New York store Dave's Quality Meat. "As long as people have feet, they are going to have shoes. Walking around barefoot is not going to come back into style."

Shoe experts point to a mix of popular culture, nostalgia, technology and disposable income as drivers for the increased fascination with sneakers.

"It's hard to explain to a regular person," Wang said. "There is always a memory or a story with a sneaker, even if you aren't into it -- you had sneakers at one point."

Originals like Adidas Shell Toes or Puma classics remain strong. Anything related to Air Jordan, which revolutionized the industry with its mix of style, technology and an iconic player, remains hot more than 20 years after its debut. And some East Coast stores say they are seeing a lot of Vans heading off their shelves lately.

"That is the good thing about sneakers in general," said Wang, who prefers running shoes from Asics and Nike. "Everyone has a preference."

Collectors say they have a hard time specifying why they love their kicks so much.

"My wife thinks I'm crazy," said Halfhill, who runs a Web site called nicekicks.com. "She does complain to me to stop talking about shoes all the time."

But it's been a financially lucrative obsession for some. They say they could make a down payment on a house or pay off a car loan if they sold their collection -- not that they would.

Collecting sneakers is no different from collecting baseball cards or Barbie dolls, said Wang, who grew up watching basketball and worshipping Michael Jordan.

"It's just another hobby."

And sneakers are his.

Words getting shorter? Whatevs

Though thriving in the age of text messaging and IM, abbreviated lingo is nothing new.

By Rachel Liebrock
McClatchy-Tribune

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Sitch. Whatevs. Biz Ca Fri. Go with?

Huh?

If you get the meaning behind the above words and phrases, then you've obvi got the 411 on today's abbrev ling.

Because speaking in full sentences and words is, like, so 20th century. In this golden age of text messages, instant messaging and e-mails, our need for shorthand that economizes words, syllables and typing time has spilled over into everyday conversation.

The phenomenon isn't just about technology -- it actually dates back hundreds of years. Spoken language is constantly changing, and some experts contend the result isn't just speedier dialogue. It also could increase the potential for literacy.

'Sup with that?

In a July article, The New York Times pinned the "anti-language" trend on 'tweens and teens who've created a deconstruction of dialogue that "rises out of the ashes of the current Internet craze."

But that's only part of the story, says Grant Barrett, author of "The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English."

The habit of verbally "clipping" or "blending" words to create new ones is centuries old, he says.

"It's [happened] at every point in the history of language," said Barrett, talking on the phone from his Manhattan office. "[Now], it's just more easily recordable and more easily researchable."

Modern versions of such slang date back several decades, he adds. For example, we first substituted "za" for "pizza" in the '50s and the term "whatevs" started replacing "whatever" in the mid-'90s.

The phenomenon behind shortening our sentences ("go with?" for "do you want to go with me?" et al.) is relatively new and a direct result of how we communicate with each other in e-mails, chat rooms and text messages, he adds.

As with the telegraph, Barrett says, the increased use of new technologies has prompted a noted, accelerated shift in our communication.

True, says UrbanDictionary.com founder Aaron Peckham, who says he's noticed a major increase in user submissions to his online slang dictionary.

The site's received more than 3 million submissions since its 1999 inception -- with more than two-thirds of those posted in the past year alone, Peckham says.

"We're morphing our language every day, [but] it's really started to change in the last 20 years," said Peckham, a 25-year-old Sacramento native.

Many of those entries are abbreviated versions of existing words and phrases, he adds, ticking off examples such as "boys" or "BF" instead of "boyfriend" and "ridic" for "ridiculous."

The result, Peckham says, is a new tech-fueled vocabulary for the digital generation.

"New technologies are making it easier to communicate across [international borders] -- it's a way we share pop culture," he said. "It really makes the English-speaking world a lot smaller."

Suzanne Kemmer agrees. The associate professor of linguistics at Houston's Rice University has archived thousands of slang terms in her online "Neologisms Database."

While all languages experience "constant mutations," English is one of the easiest to play around with, says Kemmer, on the phone from Helsinki, Finland, where she was attending an academic conference.

The modern trend is strongly rooted in Japan and Europe, where users have long relied on cellphones for more than verbal conversations, she adds.

Now, expect more abbreviations as more Americans adopt text messaging -- we sent more than 64 billion messages in the first half of 2006 alone, according to the CTIA, the Wireless Association, a company that tracks international usage.

"The structure of our language and word-formation devices naturally lends itself to this blending and clipping," Kemmer said.

This, coupled with an ever-increasing ability to communicate anywhere, anytime, means that, culturally, we've adopted a need for speed.

"Once [we] added this new media of text messages and IMs and e-mails, we put a premium on time," Kemmer said.

"It's the principle of economy; we want to get our message across fast, and typing or saying the full word or phrase just takes too much work."

So is there a downside to all this verbal slash and burn?

What's next -- hand gestures and primal noises?

Yes and no, Barrett says.

While text- and e-mail-influenced language could have a negative impact on how students read and write, Barrett predicts the ultimate result will be increased literacy.

"I'll take a kid who speaks to me in IM lingo over a kid who doesn't [communicate] at all," he said.

After all, the future of communication, he says, is theirs. "Kids have ownership of language -- it's theirs and they know it," Barrett said. "We will always see them discovering the delights of words, toying with language and using it in ways that feel like they're excluding adults and creating something of their own."

Eventually, he says, the rest of us will catch on and catch up as a matter of social survival.

"History has a tendency to simplify -- and we do this by making things shorter," he said. "It's OK as long as the message intended is the message received."

Slabs Are Joining Scoops in Ice Cream Retailing

By KATE MURPHY

With Baskin-Robbins and Dairy Queen, not to mention thousands of independent scoop shops, there are plenty of places to satisfy a craving for ice cream. But three companies say there is still room for something different — their premium ice creams, served with a flourish.

The three are competing to be to ice cream what Starbucks is to coffee — a ubiquitous chain offering a high-priced, high-quality version of a relatively mundane product.

The companies, Marble Slab Creamery, Cold Stone Creamery and MaggieMoo’s International, sell various flavors of premium ice cream, which is defined by the industry as having more than 12 percent butterfat. Moreover, they allow customers to choose from an assortment of “mix-ins” like crumbled cookies, candies, fruits and nuts. Employees then blend the ingredients into the ice cream on a cold granite or marble slab before packing it into a cup or freshly baked waffle cone. The cost escalates with the number of mix-ins and can easily top $5 for a medium serving.

“These guys are all hoping to be the next Starbucks,” said Donna Barry, a dairy consultant who analyzes the ice cream industry for the market research company Packaged Facts in New York.

Part of the experience is waiting in line and watching employees prepare concoctions. “It’s entertainment,” Ms. Barry said. “I myself get intrigued by what other people order,” like peanut butter ice cream with bananas, marshmallows and brownie chunks.

But in an already crowded market, it remains unclear whether there is a sustainable niche for high-end ice cream, much less one that can support a store on every corner.

Following the Starbucks model, the three chains are densely situating their stores, particularly Cold Stone. Founded in 1988, with its headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz., Cold Stone has 1,400 franchises in the United States, Japan and South Korea — most opened in the last five years. A former Procter & Gamble sales manager, Douglas A. Ducey, was named chief executive in 2000 to lead the expansion.

“I saw an opportunity to reinvent a stagnant category like what happened with coffee,” he said.

Marble Slab, based in Houston, and MaggieMoo’s of Columbia, Md., have also pursued rapid growth strategies in the last five years. Marble Slab, which opened its first store in 1983, now has 371 franchises in the United States, Canada and the United Arab Emirates, with another 220 under development. Started in 1989, MaggieMoo’s currently has 190 franchises in the United States with an additional 150 under development.

“These guys are definitely trying to saturate the market,” said Darren Tristano, managing director of Technomic, a food service research and consulting firm in Chicago. “It’s all a game of beating the other guy to the best locations.”

Americans spend about $21 billion a year on ice cream, according to the International Dairy Foods Association. That amounts to 1.6 billion gallons of ice cream, or 21.5 quarts a person a year. Almost two-thirds of that ice cream is eaten away from home.

“It’s not a small category,” said Harry Balzar, president of the NPD Group, a market research company in Port Washington, N.Y., but one that has remained flat for more than a decade and is “not likely to grow.”

To succeed, Cold Stone, Marble Slab and MaggieMoo’s need to take customers from the market leaders Dairy Queen and Baskin-Robbins and the more than 15,000 other independent and chain ice cream shops scattered across the country. This includes Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs, which are steadily adding locations, though their focus is more on grocery store sales.

“The Cold Stones and the like have to take business from competitors or increase the frequency of customer visits,” Mr. Balzar said.

Demand was arguably high as several people waited in line on a recent weekday afternoon at a Marble Slab Creamery in Houston. “I was on my way home from jury duty and figured I’d use the $6 they paid me to buy an ice cream,” said Lee Beauchamp, a petroleum marketer, who was enjoying a double dip of dark chocolate coconut and birthday-cake-flavor ice cream.

But Howard Waxman, editor of The Ice Cream Reporter, an industry newsletter, questioned how much of an appetite there is for expensive customized ice cream. “People often have very personal or psychological associations with ice cream,” Mr. Waxman said. “They’ll try something new but they tend to go back to the kind of ice cream they grew up eating.”

That is the way it was for Tony Green, a management consultant in Chicago, who tried Cold Stone and Marble Slab once or twice because he said his two children “are all about mixing as much candy into their ice cream as possible.” Even so, the family favorite is still an independent, old-fashioned ice cream parlor called Margie’s Candies that they have gone to for years. “It’s a throw-back nostalgia kind of place,” Mr. Green said.

Such loyalties and perhaps market saturation might explain why sales at Cold Stone stores open for more than a year were down for the first time last year, by 6.6 percent, and are down 7 percent so far this year. Including revenue from newly opened stores, the company expects sales to reach $465 million this year, up 46 percent from last year. Mindful of the decline in sales at existing stores, Mr. Ducey said Cold Stone would slow its expansion. “We first wanted to secure premier locations and build awareness and now we are going to focus on the amount of product sold,” he said.

Marble Slab, which has pursued a more measured growth strategy, estimates this year’s sales will be $90 million, up from $75 million last year, with sales at stores open for more than a year increasing 3 percent.

“Our primary focus has always been on trying to offer the highest-quality product — we only open new stores when it makes sense,” said Ronald Hankamer, Marble Slab’s president and chief executive.

MaggieMoo’s projects $50 million in sales this year, up from $43 million last year. The company would not release sales at stores open for more than a year. It has dropped to 416 from 169 in 2004 on Entrepreneur Magazine’s ranking of the top 500 franchise opportunities. Cold Stone and Marble Slab have climbed in the 2006 rankings, to 24 and 297, respectively. MaggieMoo’s closed six underperforming stores in Bangkok this year and canceled plans for further overseas expansion.

Still, the three chains are hardly hurting for franchisees. Cold Stone, for example, received 25,000 applications last year.

“A lot of people want to get into the business because it sounds like fun,” said Mr. Waxman of The Ice Cream Reporter. And it is relatively inexpensive to buy in, with $200,000 to $450,000 in upfront costs and fees plus 6 percent royalties on sales. By contrast, purchasing a McDonald’s franchise requires a $506,000 to $1.6 million initial investment plus a minimum of 12.5 percent royalties on sales.

The majority of franchisees at Cold Stone, Marble Slab and MaggieMoo’s own more than one location and as many as 11. “It’s how you create economies of scale so you can increase your margins,” said Rudy Puig, who owns three Cold Stone stores in Miami, and plans to buy another next year.

But he said the real reason he was in the ice cream business is “my kids used to cry if we didn’t stop for ice cream.” Now that is not a problem.

Newest chef's surprise is the $40 entree

NEW YORK, Oct. 21 (UPI) -- The $40 entree becoming more common at U.S. restaurants and is being applied not just to surf-and-turf extravaganzas.

The New York Times noted Saturday that even fish and pasta dishes are topping the $40 barrier in places like Denver and Fort Lauderdale, not just in upscale eateries in Manhattan or Las Vegas.

Diners told The Times that seeing a $40 price on the menu makes them think the dish must be out-of-this-world tasty, or it is simply overpriced.

Nevertheless, restaurant owners say the higher prices reflect the cost of prime ingredients and the developing trend of customers spending more time on their meals, meaning they can turn their tables fewer times in an evening.

A New Trend for Men’s Wear

By DAVID COLMAN

ACCORDING to the current fashion playbook, Thom Browne has made several crucial errors in his five years as a men’s wear designer. He has been out of step with the real world, focusing on a fastidiously tight and buttoned-up look when most designers aim to accommodate a dressed-down workplace. He has been out of step with fashion, working in fusty, old-man fabrics like gray flannel, while others are dressing men in denim, velvet and nylon.

He has yet to have a proper runway show. He is not a fixture on the party circuit. He does not give clothes to celebrities. And his basic suits, which average about $3,500, are so expensive that, even on sale and with a friendly insider discount, the young trendies who talk up and flaunt new designer labels are completely unable to play along.

Worst of all, he wears his pants profanely short, revealing not only ankle — he does not wear socks — but a good three inches of shin. This not only elicits jeers from wiseacres on every street — “Hey, Pee-wee!” is one of the most printable — but also sneers from fashion snobs who prefer their $350 skinny jeans to crumple just so over their Dior winkle-pickers.

The result of all those blunders is that Thom Browne, 41, is today the most envied and influential American men’s wear designer. Five years ago, the short-jacket-and-pants silhouette he created looked sweet but goofy, a look no real man would wear. Now he has won the Council of Fashion Designers of America award as men’s wear designer of the year; the venerable Brooks Brothers has signed him up to do special collections; and his signature look is being copied, however blurrily, by more than a dozen men’s wear lines, from traditionalists like DKNY and Zegna to edge-of-fashion houses like Nom de Guerre.

“He hasn’t conformed to normal business strategy,” said Tommy Fazio, the men’s fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman, where Thom Browne is a top-selling line. “At the beginning, I think people were skeptical. But he’s always true to his aesthetic, and now everyone is following suit.”

You can debate whether he has actually made it fashionable for men to show off their ankles, since almost none of his customers wear their Thom Browne pants as short as he does. But he has made the “break” — that faint crumple of trouser leg dusting the top of the shoe, a strict standard of men’s business dress for decades — look sloppy and obsolete. It is a difference of perhaps a half-inch, but what a half-inch.

“There’s something about dressing like Pee-wee Herman that I didn’t fully understand at first,” said Daniel Peres, the editor of Details. “And in all honesty, I am not certain I fully understand it today. But whether you personally appreciate the silhouette or not, he’s taken something men do every morning for years — put on a suit — and made it different. It’s really a tremendous feat.”

Moreover, his enthusiasm for minute details of tailoring (not trained as a tailor himself, he steadfastly insists on having the suits in his line handmade by expert Italian tailors in Queens) has made the idea of putting on a suit seem not an unwelcome duty but a luxurious option, a concept almost alien to a generation of men in their 30’s and 40’s. And for better or for worse, his prices have helped legitimize the suit as a status item with young men for whom Brioni and Kiton seem old hat (and even for the not so young: Ronald O. Perelman has four of them. Other clients include George Stephanopoulos and David Bowie.)

Mr. Browne’s business is still small — his line is sold in 22 stores worldwide and only six in the United States — but last month, Brooks Brothers signed him to an open-ended two-year contract to design men’s and women’s collections for the store, with projected first-year sales in the range of $10 million to $20 million. It was a match initiated by the Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, who called Claudio Del Vecchio, the company chairman, to suggest that Browne might help revitalize the Brooks brand.

“Thom Browne is going to give us a different dimension,” Mr. Del Vecchio said. “He’s more on the edge of fashion, but it will still fit in the store.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Browne sought and received permission from the Chambre Syndicale in Paris to show at the men’s collections there, a first for an American men’s designer. Yesterday Harry Winston announced that it had hired him to design a line of men’s jewelry. And this week, Mr. Browne is opening a 2,000-square-foot store at 100 Hudson Street in TriBeCa, its ivory terrazzo floor and gray marble walls bringing to mind, as his clothes do, an elegant early-60’s bank somewhere between Milan and Pittsburgh.

In his counterintuitive plan of attack are lessons about what it takes to cut through the fierce and famously stodgy world of men’s wear. If other designers try to create looks in step with fashion, with just enough personality to stand out, Mr. Browne began by making clothes that he wanted to wear, and was soon wearing them all day, every day, slipping out of character only for his morning run in Central Park.

In 2001, urged on by his then boyfriend, Charles Fagan, an executive at Polo Ralph Lauren, and his longtime friend David Biscaye, an architect with Biscaye Frères (he designed Mr. Browne’s store and wears his clothes), he quit his job as the creative fashion director of Club Monaco and started simply. With some backing from his siblings, he rented a little showroom and store in the meatpacking district.

Just as important, he started eating breakfast — black coffee and white toast — every morning around the corner at Pastis, neatly dressed in a Thom Browne suit-slash-sandwich board.

“I was very conscious about that, because I did want people to recognize what I stood for,” Mr. Browne said last week at Il Cantinori, the Greenwich Village restaurant where he dines on grilled salmon, green peas and Champagne roughly three nights a week. “At the same time, I really do wear these clothes because this is what I like.”

It was at Pastis that he and his shrunken fit caught the attention of stylish men like Euan Rellie, a natty-dressing British-born banker, and Frank L. Fleming, a costume designer, who enlisted Mr. Browne to design clothes for Ewan McGregor’s character in the film “Stay” (2005). “He was this little inside secret, there every day, never talking to anyone, just drinking his coffee and looking impeccable,” Mr. Rellie recalled.

His style also caught the eye of Robert Burke and Ron Frasch, then of Bergdorf Goodman, who bought his line for the store. There, the line was so clearly different that you wondered if it would not be better on the more conservative second floor rather than the third, where his sober-sided gray flannels and navy cashmere clashed with the colorful designer scene.

But the clothes caught on with an underserved customer: the businessman who wants to look both conservative and cool. Brian Swardstrom, a prominent agent who had known Mr. Browne in the mid-90’s when he was living in Hollywood and struggling to be an actor. Running into him years later, Mr. Swardstrom bought a suit, and after a brief panic at how short it was, became a devoted customer.

“They’re actually really classic,” he said. “They remind me of the 60’s, when Lew Wasserman was running MCA, when it was still an agency. He had a policy that everyone had to wear dark suits, white shirts and dark ties, and that’s kind of the Thom Browne aesthetic.”

Not everyone embraces the look, of course. “Maybe if you’re 5-foot-6 and 140 pounds, you can pull it off,” said the men’s wear designer Alan Flusser. He also derided Brooks Brothers for choosing Mr. Browne to design for the company. “One of the things for them is a certain naturalness about how you wear clothes, and his style is anything but natural. It’s contrived.”

Where Mr. Flusser sees artifice and pretense, Mr. Browne sees spirit and individuality. “I think that clothing being natural is all in the way a guy wears it,” he said, adding that he is not after an army of men in clam-diggers, but men who are “classic, with a little personality.”

Indeed, one of the curious secrets of Mr. Browne’s clothes is that they do look good, even natural, on a wider range of men than one would guess. It helps to be relatively fit, but that can be said for almost every fashion line. And if he is frustrated by the perception that his clothes are designed for a select group of rich, superlean esthetes, he is aware that it has helped him more than hurt.

As David A. Aaker, the vice chairman of Prophet, a brand management company, pointed out, “One aspect of brand success is creating something that’s different and memorable.”

And as David Byrne once observed, “People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.”

“I never heard that, but I love it,” Mr. Browne said when told of Mr. Byrne’s remark. “People think wearing a uniform makes you less interesting, but I think the opposite.”

Even in his uniform, Mr. Browne has imagination to spare. His presentation for fall 2006 was a kind of boy’s school alpine fantasy on ice, with models on skates displaying his signature plays on proportion, like shorts and floor-length overcoats, and old-world touches like sock garters.

His spring 2007 presentation was a haunting 30-minute film by the artist Anthony Goicolea, called “The Septembrists.” It was set in some bizarre, rural tailoring-fetish commune, like a blend of an Amish community and a military academy. In a series of vignettes, a dormitory full of young men arise, pick their own cotton to make and sew clothes, go octopus fishing at night to extract the inky dye, and perform ritual baptisms — all the while scrupulously dressed to the nines in tailored gauze and broadcloth.

Beautifully filmed at a farm in Massachusetts, the film makes an excellent metaphor for how fanatical, verging on fetishistic, Mr. Browne’s vision is. And how blinkered. “I don’t like to know what’s going on,” he said, explaining why he does not like to go shopping. “It’s too easy to be influenced. It’s better to be totally off base and have it be something you love.”

It is also easier not to see himself as a player. “It’s not hard, really, if you do your thing,” he said. “Then it’s not the game of fashion.”

And, it appears, it’s easier to win.

A Ladies’ Man Everyone Fights Over

By LOLA OGUNNAIKE

LOS ANGELES -- This time six years ago, Flavor Flav, the flamboyant clock-wearing member of the groundbreaking rap group Public Enemy, was living in a low-rent apartment near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. He was scalping baseball tickets for extra cash, battling a long addiction to drugs and racking up arrests for driving without a license.

These days life is looking a lot brighter.

His reality series, “Flavor of Love,” a ghetto-fabulous spoof of the dating series “The Bachelor,” has been a colossal hit for VH1. The show’s first-season finale in March drew nearly six million viewers, making it the highest-rated show in the cable channel’s history. More than three million people tuned in to watch the second-season premiere early August.

No one seems to be enjoying the success more than Flav, as he is known to one and all.

“I’m the king of VH1,” he crowed over a surf-and-turf dinner at a soul food restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. “Your man Flavor Flav is doing his thiiiiing.”

That thing has made the show as polarizing as it is popular. On blogs and at the office, on message boards and in op-ed columns, viewers are both riveted and repelled by “Flavor of Love.”

Fans of the show call it a harmless guilty pleasure, and its star a lovable and unlikely Romeo. Critics have accused the show of trafficking in racial stereotypes and have called Flav everything from a sellout to a modern-day Stepin Fetchit.

“Anytime we mention ‘Flavor of Love’ on our show, the phone lines start blowing up,” said Donnell Rawlings, a New York morning radio personality on the popular hip-hop radio station Power 105.1. “Good or bad, our listeners love talking about Flav. They can’t get enough of it. You’ve got beauties and you’ve got the beast, and it’s become one of those shows you must watch every week.”

On “Flavor of Love,” 20 contestants vie for the rap star’s affection while living with him in a mansion in Encino. Instead of roses, they are given oversize clocks when they’re invited to stay at the end of each show, and the winner is awarded a personalized gold dental grille, a jeweled ornament for the teeth.

The women, who tend to look like castoffs from a bad rap video, dress provocatively (the shorter the skirt, the lower the neckline, the better their chances), engage in raunchy make-out sessions with Flav and, when given the opportunity, profess their undying devotion.

“You could be across the room and I can feel you,” Krazy, the rare white face on the show, said in a recent episode. (Flav, whose real name is William Drayton, has trouble remembering the contestants’ real names, so he gives them nicknames like Deelishis, Toastee and Bootz.) “My heart is so big and I’m such a compassionate person and I see the same thing in you.” Krazy then broke into song. “I will be with you forever,” she crooned — off key.

Occasionally, the women even trade blows. This season’s premiere began with two women brawling over a bed and ended with one contestant defecating on the floor as she raced to the bathroom after a meal that didn’t agree with her. To Michael Hirschorn, the executive vice president for original programming at VH1, the reasons millions of viewers tune in every Sunday night are clear. “The accidental appeal of the show was the play between ‘Are these women for real or not? Are these women there for him or are they there because any fame is completely intoxicating?’ ” he said. “Instead of covering that part of the show up, we decided to make it integral.”

Asked whether the show was exploiting racial stereotypes, Mr. Hirschorn, who is white, said he didn’t think so. “I would also say I’m not in the position to make that judgment.” But, he pointed out, “the show is disproportionately popular among black viewers, and the comedy is very inclusive.”

Not all are amused, however. Nicole Young, a fashion designer in Manhattan who is black, said the defecation scene in this season’s premiere turned her off the show for good. Late last week, during a heated dinner argument with friends about the series, she pronounced it “absolutely hideous,” and proceeded to denounce Flav and his paramours. “In a day and age when it’s still really hard for people of color to find reasonable representations on television,” she said, “that show is a huge smack in the face and a step backwards.”

In an interview on a sports blog, thebiglead.com, Jason Whitlock, a sports columnist for The Kansas City Star, said, “It’s about time we as black people quit letting Flavor Flav and the rest of these clowns bojangle for dollars.”

In an editorial last month, DeWayne Wickham of USA Today wrote: “On one level, his buffoonery is laughable. But more often than not, it makes my skin crawl to know that as Lincoln Perry (who played Stepin Fetchit) and Johnny Lee (who was TV’s Algonquin J. Calhoun) did, Drayton has to assume such a shallow black role to find stardom in Hollywood.”

Nelson George, the cultural critic and author of “Hip Hop America,” said one reason the show has struck such a nerve has less to do with stereotypes and more to do with the fact that Flavor Flav is not exactly a sex symbol. “If he didn’t have gold fronts and didn’t wear a clock and if looked like Jamie Foxx, there wouldn’t be as much controversy,” he contended. He added that black viewers can be overly sensitive about how blacks are portrayed on television: “Black people tend to think that every image that is projected in the media is somehow a judgment on their reality. And that’s just not the case.”

“It is what it is,” he said. “Just another reality freak show.”

Flav, 47, did not seem ruffled by criticism. “Right now anybody that has negative things to say to Flavor Flav, it’s O.K.,” he said, “because that’s not going to stop me from being Flav. I get power from the negative.”

Although not conventionally attractive (he bears more than a passing resemblance to a California Raisin character), off camera, Flav appears to be a warmhearted man, one who is possessed with a manic energy that makes him mesmerizing to watch. Dressed for dinner in baggy jeans, a red rayon shirt, matching patent leather sneakers and a baseball cap, he was all jittery movements and smiles, doling out hugs, handshakes and autographs to anyone who approached.

“A lot of people favor Flavor because I have good karma,” he said. A giant cream-colored clock hung around his neck (he has close to 100 of his signature accessories), and his nom de rap was engraved on a gold dental grill, which he removed as if it were a retainer when it was time to eat. He also carried an assortment of more than 50 keys. “These are the keys to my future,” he said, cackling loudly.

His over-the-top shtick is not new. As the resident court jester in Public Enemy, Flavor Flav, with his trademark phrase, “Yeeeaahhh Boooooyyy,” provided levity to counterbalance the group’s strident, often political messages. “He was the bit of comic relief in a group that at its best could be inspirational and at its worst be didactic,” said Danyel Smith, the editor in chief of Vibe magazine.

Flavor Flav joined Public Enemy while in college and became its mascot. The group quickly became known for hits like “Fight the Power,” used on the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” and for politically conscious albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and “Fear of a Black Planet.”

At the group’s height of fame, Flav began using drugs. He spent the 1990’s in and out of rehab, and in 2002 he spent a few months on Rikers Island for failing to pay traffic fines.

Upon release, eager for a new beginning, he moved to Los Angeles. Mark Cronin and Cris Abrego, creators of the VH1 series “The Surreal Life,” which brought together has-beens from various fields, were casting their third season. Flav met with the producers and made an instant impression. “He was ricocheting off the walls, saying his name 700 times,” Mr. Cronin said. “We knew he’d be perfect for television.”

The first day of filming, Flav showed up in Viking horns. His tempestuous relationship with a castmate, Brigitte Nielsen, an ex of Sylvester Stallone, made him and the series stand out.

Their bizarre affair led to a spinoff reality series, “Strange Love.” But alas, it was not meant to be: The couple parted ways, leading to Chapter 3 in Flav’s reality-series career, “Flavor of Love.” Although the star found love again last season with Nicole Alexander, a former basketball player he nicknamed Hoopz, the brief union ended after the cameras stopped recording. “All of a sudden, Hoopz got too busy,” he said, “and I couldn’t get in touch with her.”

Flav now claims there is no need for a third installment of his reality series because he has found love on the show with one of the contestants, but obviously cannot reveal who it is.

Mr. Cronin said he and his partner are working on a spinoff of “Flavor of Love,” which will feature 20 men vying for the affections of one woman. This doesn’t mean VH1 viewers have seen the last of Flav. Ideas for a nighttime talk show, an animated series and another reality show, where he acts as a Cyrano de Bergerac dispensing dating advice, are being batted around. He also plans to release a self-titled independent album on Halloween.

As for those who insist that he has traded a piece of his soul for fame, “Sometimes a lot of people misunderstand me,” Flav said, his wide grin disappearing. “But that’s okay, because I know one day they will understand me. Either they will like me or they will K.I.M., keep it moving.”

What I Like About Dracula

By DAVID COLMAN

IT’S easy — too easy — for a working man to look good today, thanks to a sea of slim-cut suits, snappy dress shirts and an Equinox in every upscale Zip code. How’s a guy to keep his edge?

Well, if having smarter ideas, logging longer hours or being a bigger mensch than the next guy does not do the trick, there is the Wall Street mohawk. This latest bit of stockbroker savagery is a modified take on the already modified original: a crew cut around the sides and back with a mop of hair at the crown.

“I noticed it a few years ago in London,” said the New York hairstylist John Barrett. “The stockbroker types down in the City were getting their hair cut this way. It took a while to cross the Atlantic, but there are definitely guys now with conservative jobs who want an edgier look, and they come in every three or four weeks to get it.”

The do may not yet have a zingy name — the CEO-hawk? — and may seem a rather tepid version of the shellacked spikes of yore or even the “faux-hawk” that has been a hipster fave of late. But its low-key style is part of a mystique that some corporate raiders love.

“That’s the thing, “ Mr. Barrett said. “It can look very Brooks Brothers by day. They say, ‘I don’t quite want a mohawk, but I want to be able to make it look like that at night.’ ”

The same can be said for a subtly aggressive trend in men’s clothes, one that lets a man express his latent Goth-rocker self while still playing by at least some of the company rules. The NoLIta men’s wear company Barker Black made its name with corp-Goth accessories like wingtips with uppers faintly perforated with a skull pattern; this season, with skulls everywhere, it introduced rep ties with a more understated design: diagonal stripes of crossbones.

Around the corner, the men’s shop Duncan Quinn sells suits and shirts with red linings and cuffs — for just a hint of blood — as well as silk ties bearing dragons, crowns and Maltese crosses. The look is meant to suggest both the gentility and ferocity of the business world.

“Whether it’s a tie with a dragon or a cross, it relates to the old idea of putting on 50 pounds of armor and hacking away at each other,” Mr. Quinn said. “In the business world, everything is a competition, so I like having an underlying connection. It’s not just a piece of eye candy.”

Jewelry designers, too, are offering dryly barbed pieces for men — silver talon rings, bleeding-heart cuff links, carnelian signet rings — with just a hint of menace.

No one owns the look this season as does Alexander McQueen. His vampire-fantasy runway show might not have screamed suit and tie, but it concealed an array of beautifully tailored suits and shirts that are now in stores. Finally, those Damons, Damiens, Gideons and Gabriels born in the late 1970’s (“The Omen” came out in 1976) have something to wear to day jobs on the Street. Why style yourself as a Master of the Universe when the Dark Prince has the better wardrobe?

Mr. McQueen said he wanted to tap into a decadent 1920’s British-peer lifestyle, one with accouterments like velvet evening jackets, a valet (one named, say, Renfield) and a little packet of Sen-Sen to get the whiff of blood off your breath. “It’s more about the richness and aristocracy of Dracula,” he said. “And about a sense of history, like finding an old jacket in the attic and being able to carry it off.”

And in a way, it is about restoring dignity to the word “Goth,” which he all but sneered at. “Goth to me means Camden Market and teenagers in L.A. buying stuff on the Internet,” he said. “I prefer the word ‘dark.’ There’s a richness, a romanticism there.”

Whether they indulge in the haircut or the clothes, men are quick to downplay the idea that they flaunt any kind of edge at work.

“Eyeliner’s not my thing,” said Chris Sharp, who works on the trading floor for a Wall Street firm and was seduced away from Dunhill suits to McQueen, he said, because of the tailoring, not the skull-print ties. “I have one of the ties — my wife gave it to me. It’s fun for an evening out, but not for a client meeting.”

“For me, edgy is a single-breasted suit with a peak lapel,” he added. “I’m getting fitted for one on Saturday.”

Be warned, mortals. That’s how it all started with Count Dracula. With a peak lapel.

American Brandstand

By ROSECRANS BALDWIN

In 1911, the L.L. Bean duck boot was designed to withstand weeklong hunting trips in the Maine woods. Over the century it’s held up just as well against New Haven tailgate parties and snowy slogs to the Westport station. But the tabletops of Bungalow 8?

“I love those boots,” says the designer and nightclub habitué Lazaro Hernandez, who had his Bean Boots refurbished after two years of everyday use. Hernandez, half of the fashion wonder team Proenza Schouler, insists, “All my friends have been copying me.”

Dig out your tote bags: fashion’s true believers, arguably the least authentic humans on the planet, are clamoring for the “real” America. Trend-deaf homegrown brands, whether fancy or just plain homely, have never been hipper. Will downtown Manhattan start looking like Martha’s Vineyard? “I look at old images of Bill Blass with his duck shoes and a cable-knit V-neck sweater and, like, a pipe in his library — it’s amazing,” Hernandez says. “It’s like wearing your grandfather’s clothes. It feels cool.”

Cool to be a part of the Kennebunkport clan? Well, yes. Fashion folks have always dressed way left of the Republican Party — they were the ones wearing Dr. Martens in high school, sneering at the preppies with their starched collars and sweater vests — but now the uniform of future bankers and country-club members has a certain cachet. Even to the former club kid. “Woody Allen is better-looking than any young guy I’ve ever seen,” says Andy Spade, the designer of Jack Spade. Though Allen’s family tree is more shtetl than Mayflower, his rumpled, tweedy look has inspired the mackintoshes and doctor’s bags at the Jack Spade shop in SoHo. The store, which also offers accessories like first editions of “The Catcher in the Rye” and “A Separate Peace,” is an homage to utilitarian 1950’s American classics. It’s hard to believe that Spade didn’t start manufacturing 60 years ago and simply mothball his stock until the fashion cycle spun its way back. “Everything,” Spade says, “comes down to the real McCoy.”

Which is why forward-thinking European designers have been brushing up on their Americana. Not that the modernist, high-tech designs of Prada or Giorgio Armani are out of fashion, but neither can they compete with the rugged charm of C.C. Filson (formerly C.C. Filson’s Pioneer Alaska Clothing and Blanket Manufacturers). Back in 1897, when Filson began, the company catered to the needs of Yukon gold seekers, hunters and explorers. Filson’s current customers are still apt to brag about surviving bear attacks. But these days its handsome canvas luggage — both rugged and professorial in the Indiana Jones vein — is used more often for toting home wild-boar sausage from the Greenmarket.

“We are not a fashion company,” insists the chief executive, Doug Williams. Filson may be as concentrated on function as its wool vests suggest, but Williams reveals that the top ZIP code for catalog deliveries isn’t grizzly country — it’s Manhattan. (In other wool-vest news, Woolrich, the 176-year-old Pennsylvania company that once bundled up frontiersmen and today supplies fabric for Civil War re-enactors’ uniforms, did a brisk business at Bergdorf Goodman last fall.)

American designers are also looking homeward for inspiration. It was the quest for the ideal pair of chinos that lured Michael Bastian from his position as the men’s fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman to start his own namesake men’s-wear label. “Look at Frank O’Hara,” Bastian says, referring to the New York School poet and Cedar tavern regular. “You see these pictures of him, and he was so beautifully put together, very traditional, wearing old Brooks Brothers, an old rumpled-up raincoat, a perfect white oxford button-down.” In his search for paragons, Bastian recently worked with an Italian mill to produce Nantucket red pants that look as if they’ve spent 10 years fading in the sun.

There is a clear sense of nostalgia in dressing up in khakis and duck boots. It harks back to the Kennedy era and beyond, a simpler time when this country represented the American dream rather than the evil empire, a time before global warming, globalization and military quagmires. Perhaps the act of wearing “American” is, in fact, a subversive statement: dressing like the establishment helps you infiltrate the closed circles of your enemies more effectively than a nose ring.

Could preppy become the new punk? At least one stodgy label is betting on it. “The young customers we have now are, like, really hip kids,” says Mark McNairy, the new design director at J. Press, which has been dressing blue bloods since Theodore Roosevelt was in office. The company deliberately keeps its stuffy shops limited to New Haven; Cambridge, Mass.; New York; and Washington — the better to hook Ivy Leaguers on its blazers and “shaggy dog” wool sweaters before they head off to run the world. However, McNairy has decided not to ignore his more fashion-literate patrons. A recent addition to the J. Press line of icon-emblazoned neckties is one with skulls and crossbones, not a nod to Yale’s secret society but a wink to the new customer who has a closet full of ironic T-shirts.

Team U.S.A.: Ten Grand Old Brands

Alden: A New England shoemaker since 1884, Alden makes hand-sewn shell cordovan loafers that are required footwear on Martha’s Vineyard. There’s an Alden shop on Madison Avenue, but the firm stays true to its Massachusetts roots. www.aldenshoe.com.

Allen-Edmonds: Established in Wisconsin in 1922, Allen-Edmonds shod the soldiers in World War II; today its dress shoes are renowned for their elegant welted construction, and the company’s generous repair policy allows you to send in your favorite wrecked wingtips to be completely restored. www.allenedmonds.com.

Arrow: Founded to sell detachable shirt collars in the mid-1800’s, Arrow has responded to all the subsequent turns in men’s fashion with restrained Yankee design. www.arrowshirt.com.

Brooks Brothers: Abraham Lincoln was shot in a Brooks Brothers coat, Franklin Roosevelt wore a Brooks cape, even Jack Kerouac preferred its oxford shirts. Credited with introducing ready-to-wear suits to the States and with inventing the button-down collar in 1896, Brooks Brothers is as American as the mint juleps at the Harvard Club. www.brooksbrothers.com.

C.C. Filson: Established to outfit miners, Filson still sells many of the same rugged pieces — in particular, its patented Mackinaw Cruiser coat, designed in 1914 — to weekend sportsmen in need of canvas luggage and waxed cotton jackets. www.filson.com.

Hart Schaffner Marx: When G.I.’s were returning home from World War II, signs on the docks in France encouraged them to buy an H.S.M. suit before seeing their honey. This Chicago suit maker’s current lineup includes a fit that honors suits from the 50’s: a shorter blazer with a cuffless, plain-front pant. www.hartschaffnermarx.com.

J. Press: Dressing the Ivy League for more than 100 years, J. Press keeps its dusty American stores limited to key university towns to hook tomorrow’s leaders on its tailored blazers and oxford shirts. www.jpressonline.com.

L.L. Bean: This Maine institution made its name with duck boots and tote bags, but has expanded to sell similarly sturdy goods, from luggage to mountain bikes. www.llbean.com.

Wigwam: This century-old knitwear king has a track record of inventions, like the colored toe seam so that 50’s housewives wouldn’t waste time sorting. www.wigwam.com.

Woolrich: Though Woolrich once wove blankets for the Union Army during the Civil War, its legendary wool Buffalo Check shirts, circa 1850, are now significantly softer. www.woolrich.com.

Sex Appeal Shining Through

By DAVID COLMAN

AS if style were not an inherently inexact science, the fast-changing mores of men’s wear are even harder to quantify these days, with young men feeling ever less sheepish about picking up trends almost as enthusiastically as their American idols do.

But if you wanted some precise way to pinpoint the shifting male mood, you could do worse than get out your scale to gauge the weight of the cotton used for the most popular new T-shirts. The results show that the needle has tipped downward, from the sturdy 6.1-ounce cotton fabric that made the oversize Hanes Beefy-T a brand buzzword throughout the 1990’s to the finer 4.4-ounce cotton jersey that has made American Apparel such a runaway success.

Now the needle is dipping even lower. This summer American Apparel introduced an even lighter and silkier T-shirt, fittingly called the Summer Shirt, made of 3.8-ounce cotton. And Calvin Klein introduced a line of superfine pima cotton T-shirts and underwear, which, at a comparable weight, is about a third lighter than the house’s main line.

The new introductions, which as recently as two years ago might have been regarded as too sheer, have struck a nerve in the T-shirt world, which, if you had not noticed, is a little on the overcrowded side. The lighter fabric clings more subtly to the body than a heavier shirt does.

“It’s more revealing,” said James Perse, the Los Angeles designer whose soft-as-a-cloud tees printed with low-key graphics (or lately, none at all) have won him a following among men willing to shell out on casual wear with style. The trick with a lightweight fabric, he said, is cutting it to flatter, not just to bare — tight across the chest, for example, and slightly loose around the waist. “You don’t want to show every ripple or bulge,” he said.

But the main appeal of these shirts is in the “hand,” the textile term for how a fabric feels to the touch. John Dewis, a young actor based in Los Angeles, has gone to great lengths over the years to keep his mother from throwing out his father’s old Hanes T-shirts, which, after decades of laundering, are finally soft enough for his taste. Earlier this year, Mr. Dewis and his picky fingers stumbled onto the Summer Shirt at an American Apparel store, and he bought five.

“I don’t have very many clothes, so that’s saying something,” he said, praising the tees’ understated style and modest price — nothing more than good fit and light, soft fabric, for $20. “They don’t look like you went out of your way to get some fancy T-shirt.”

And they have the feel he wants. “It’s like the anti-Beefy-T,” he said. “I love my dad’s old shirts with holes in them, but I am running out. These are like those, without the holes.”

Lighter weight, said Yarden Gagnon, the vice president for men’s design at Calvin Klein Underwear, is also a boon to men who prefer to wear undershirts under a dress shirt but want to maintain a slim silhouette. He, too, credited touch in the line’s success, as is also the case with another new line from the company, called Micro Modal, after the silky synthetic it’s made of.

“It’s all about the touch,” Mr. Gagnon said. Though the new shirts are usually sold in boxes, these are out on hangers so men can feel how soft and light the fabric is. “They can’t resist it,” he said.

Even so, there’s a limit. “We’re not going to go any lighter,” he said. Mr. Perse echoed the concern, in terms of fabric as well as cut. “You can make it look feminine,” he said. “We try and avoid that.”

Soft, lightweight, well-worn — that’s one thing. Lingerie? That’s another.