In cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin, the success of eyewear company Warby Parker is written across many faces. It’s nearly impossible to enter a hip restaurant, startup office, or house party without meeting at least a few sets of eyes peering through the company’s retro-classic frames.
Most people are accustomed to the image of a heroic Bruce Willis in the five Die Hard movies rescuing whatever needs rescuing: his wife, an airport, New York City, or the planet. But Russians associate the American actor’s steely stare with something else too: Since 2010, he has fronted ads for Trust Bank, a mid-sized private lender.
Before the days of YouTube and Google, when one could still fall deeply in love with a piece of pop culture and then lose it in the ether, I was haunted by a small Muppet otter.
For several seasons now, fur has been fashionable on city sidewalks, turning up as trims and linings for hooded parkas, boots, and hats. As the anti-fur movement also continues to gather steam, lots of that fur is fake, made from synthetic fibers such as polyester and acrylic, and dyed to match the fur of real animals (or sometimes colors not found in nature).
Fashion brands and technology companies are understandably breathless over the promise of wearable devices. The financial opportunity appears enormous—a tenfold market increase to $50 billion dollars in three to five years, by some projections, and the upcoming release of the Apple Watch in 2015 has only fanned the flames of excitement.
If you think trying to finish shopping ahead of the holidays is stressful, try getting it done as your currency collapses. That’s apparently what many rich Russians are doing, amid a rout in the ruble.
This time of year, the old song, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” plays in my head, but I’ve changed the word “Christmas” to “pre-fall.” It’s the only way I can remember what season designers are showing now. It’s one that, on most peoples’ calendars, doesn’t really exist: pre-fall.
The day after the US Senate released a 525-page summary of the CIA’s torture practices, Brazil released its own report on torture: thousands of pages detailing the human rights violations committed between 1946 and 1988—especially during the country’s two decade military dictatorship.
Every December, my mother promises that she’s “not going crazy” with Christmas gifts, and then she asks me what I want. In the past I’ve taken the “not going crazy” as a cue to demur: Aw shucks, I don’t really need anything, you’re generous all year long, etcetera.
At Art Basel Miami Beach—which opened to the public today, but has been in preview and pre-party mode since Tuesday—the mood is decidedly beachside bacchanalian. Money, sex, and, sun compete with contemporary art for starring roles at the fair, which feels far removed from the outside world and its turmoil. That is, until one turns a corner at the convention center to meet a 10-foot-wide drawing in deepest, matte-black charcoal of a faceless Ferguson police force, its riot gear backlit in a smoky haze.
At Art Basel Miami Beach, the international art fair best-known for the parties that surround it, a meeting at the crack of dawn will only draw the diehards.
This is part one of our holiday gift guide for your Quartziest friends and relatives. Collect all the installments here.
I consider myself a confident, adept baker. I can make cookies with one eye closed, and my muffins never fail to please. But when it comes to making pie—as I have been asked to do this Thanksgiving—my chest tightens up. It has nothing to do with the filling, and everything to do with the crust.
Earlier this week, the Italian tire company Pirelli shared photographs from its racy 2015 calendar: the 51st in its annual series that features naked and nearly naked supermodels in seductive situations. This year, those supermodels wore skin-tight, high-shine latex, shot by fashion photographer Steven Meisel and styled by Carine Roitfeld in what many identified as a “fetish-themed” calendar.
If statistics (and marketing) are to be believed, most of us women are walking around wearing bras that do not fit us properly. Straps are digging into our shoulders; under-wires are compressing our ribs; our cups runneth over.
When it comes to social media, Michael Kors is at the top of the fashion heap. The designer has 16 million fans on Facebook, and 2.4 million on Twitter (an interactive bunch). On Instagram—where he has 3.1 million fans—he just made moves to convert his “likes” to actual sales.
Luxury fashion has a conflicted relationship with e-commerce. Luxury prizes exclusivity, a characteristic that tends to lose meaning on the web. If everyone—everyone with a web browser and a high credit limit, anyway—can access the most coveted handbag, coat, or pair of sneakers, those items lose their niche appeal.
As winter descends on the northern hemisphere, a new healthy beverage trend is on the horizon. It sits at the intersection of current tendencies toward old-fashioned comfort food, and the lust for primitive paleo diets. And it is most at home in a Mason jar.
In today’s fashion industry, a social mission is a highly effective branding tool. Eyewear company Warby Parker, which contributes a pair of glasses to someone in need for every pair it sells, sold half a million pairs of glasses in 12 months. In August, Bain Capital bought half of the Toms shoe company, which also works with a sell-one-donate-one model, in a deal that valued the manufacturer of cotton slip-ons at $625 million. For brands at the higher end of the market, selling socially conscious ideals is a more complicated challenge. The luxury realm of Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, Prada, and Hermés favors the idea of heritage—and specifically of the European persuasion, at that. Self-righteous startups need not apply.
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This Sunday, Brazilians will vote in a runoff election for their next president, deciding whether to keep the incumbent, Dilma Rousseff, or replace with her with the more business-friendly challenger, Aécio Neves. Neves is the underdog, but not by much. The two candidates remain neck-and-neck in polls, with Rousseff most recently turning up just ahead of Neves.
To a certain sort of stylish literary super-fan, Joan Didion is not just one of America’s greatest writers. She is a muse, guidepost, and icon: the ur-girl crush. These readers appreciate Didion’s spare, evocative, and unflinching prose, as well as her personal presentation.
Fashion designer Oscar de la Renta died yesterday, at age 82. The Dominican-born designer dressed first ladies, Hollywood stars, uptown socialites, and fortunate brides—most recently, Amal Clooney. The romantic, Latin spirit that imbued de la Renta’s strongest designs was not only aesthetic; it was part of his character, and it made him magnetic.
Kering, the parent company of luxury brands including Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, and Alexander McQueen, has teamed up with the International Trade Centre (ITC)—a joint agency of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations—to launch a program to monitor and manage the trade of Nile crocodiles from Madagascar.
