Former president of Argentina Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has made no secret of her displeasure with her successor, Mauricio Macri, who was elected by a narrow margin and sworn into office on Dec. 10, ending a 12-year reign for Kirchner’s leftist party.
Nearly 35 years after their release, Americans taken hostage at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 are finally being offered compensation.
China’s Yutu lunar rover, a gold unmanned space craft also known as the “Jade Rabbit,” has discovered a new kind of moon rock.
From athleisure to Zoolander‘s return, 2015 has been a weird year for fashion. We’ve seen regime change at the industry’s highest levels (Goodbye to: Raf Simons at Dior, Alexander Wang at Balenciaga, Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, and Donna Karan at, erm, Donna Karan), and the frenzied pace of the industry’s product cycle continues to be the source of much hand-wringing.
A century before Pantone made Serenity or Essie did Cocktail Bling, John Wanamaker invented Independence Blue.
In its 123 years, Vogue has generally perpetuated an image of American beauty that is thin, white, and heterosexual. Now, the fashion magazine of record has a new year’s resolution, according to editor-in-chief Anna Wintour’s letter in the magazine’s upcoming January 2016 issue:
At the end of 2015, world cotton stocks are “extraordinarily high,” says the USDA, estimating that nearly 50 billion pounds of cotton (around 104 million 480-pound bales) will be sitting in global stockpiles by the middle of 2016 (pdf). That’s enough to make about 127 billion t-shirts—or 17 for every single person on the planet—according to the National Cotton Council’s conversion estimates.
For years, I was resistant to wearing workout clothes outside the gym. I wore leggings and a ratty concert t-shirt to exercise, and saved my money for things like vintage dresses, expensive shoes, and pants with actual waistbands.
List the foundational garments of the working woman’s wardrobe, and several obvious staples come to mind: dresses, pants, sweaters, skirts, blouses, tees, jackets, tights and…bodysuits? Yes, bodysuits.
Shinola, the Detroit-based maker of retro-classic watches, bicycles, and leather goods has only been around for about five years, but has already established itself in the realm of high-end American accessories. The brand has opened stores in cities including London, Los Angeles, New York, and Miami; its watches are among Google’s top-searched gifts this holiday season; and public fans such as Bill Clinton tout the company as an “American success” story.
Many brides end up spending more time and money on their wedding gowns than they would have judged sensible in their single days, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s the pressure of the spotlight, for one, and the symbolic significance of feeling at your most comfortable and beautiful at the beginning of a new life chapter—and perhaps later, on social media.
By now, the dust has settled from Black Friday, which in the US marks the post-Thanksgiving kickoff to the Christmastime consumer frenzy. It’s when Apple products, Legos, and cashmere scarves replace turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie.
Google has shared a map of the “top searched holiday cookies” in the US, and apparently we live in a gingerbread nation. At the time of publication, there were only 11 states in which “gingerbread cookies” were not the “top searched holiday cookies,” according to Google.
Even the most sophisticated shoppers can get swept up in the consumer frenzy of the holiday season. This year, struggling retailers worldwide are likely to make it even crazier by starting sales sooner, offering deeper discounts, and inundating our inboxes, while annual events like Black Friday make holiday shopping in the US a nightmare.
In Good Girls Revolt, a new Amazon pilot that dramatizes the true story of how 46 women sued Newsweek in 1970 for gender discrimination, the sexism is as obviously retro as the typewriters and ashtray-laden desks. Like Mad Men with their secretaries, each male writer at Newsweek—or “News of the Week,” in the fictionalized drama—had a female researcher-reporter who supported him behind the scenes, while he got the bylines.
Last winter, I contemplated purchasing a particular pair of leather boots for months before pulling the trigger. After I checked them out on at least two different websites to compare prices, they started to appear in ads all over my screen, stalking me with me promotional ads, and eventually a discount.
Like a blank page, the sight of an empty suitcase can fill a person with dread. No matter how many times we face the task of packing for a trip, it can still be angst-producing, time-consuming, and inefficient. But done correctly, it makes all the difference. What a relief when your suitcase contains just the thing to make you feel at home, professional and polished, or ready to party—and it’s easily findable.
Tuesday night (Nov. 17) on Fox News, Saba Ahmed, the president and founder of the Republican Muslim Coalition, joined news anchor Megyn Kelly to address Donald Trump’s continued assertions that the United States should close mosques in the wake of Friday’s attacks in Paris.
“There’s a one in 12 chance you are on your period right now,” announces one ad for a new campaign by underwear maker Thinx. “Yet we rarely discuss menstruation outside of whispers from woman to woman.”
The new Bond movie, Spectre, is brazen in its product placement, with brands such as Aston Martin, Belvedere, and Tom Ford starring in the film alongside actor Daniel Craig. But in the real world, that kind of conspicuous consumption could draw unwanted attention to an agent on a mission. That’s the idea behind the 1M Hauly Heist, a bag specifically designed for transporting $1 million in cash—discreetly.
Bloomingdale’s holiday catalog holds an unpleasant surprise this year, with one page that suggests in no uncertain terms that a man spike a woman’s drink without her knowledge.
A musician in purple velvet pauses with his guitar; two boys with shadows of mustaches smile in graduation caps and gowns; a woman touched with summertime sheen brandishes a watermelon. In the Instagram age of digitally-enhanced, over-filtered, super-styled selfies, Italian photographer Lele Saveri has captured the gritty, offbeat beauty of commuters in the New York City subway.
It’s unlikely that grunge legend Kurt Cobain had premonitions of fashion immortality when he pulled on a fuzzy, pea soup-colored cardigan before recording Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York.
Most of us know the hazards of over-indulging on irresistibly cheap, semi-disposable, fast fashion clothes from global chains such as H&M and Forever 21: We have overstuffed closets with nothing to wear, with consequences that are environmental, ethical, and even neurological. But the challenge that fast fashion attempts to answer—the need to dress presentably on a limited budget—remains.
