Jenni Avins

I graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2003. The four years I spent in Isla Vista—the square mile that abuts UCSB and the Pacific Ocean—were some of my happiest. I lived with five girlfriends, half a block from the beach. On Sunday mornings, we would drag an old comforter onto the front yard, curl up in the sun, and recount the escapades of the night before. That house, on a street named El Nido, which is Spanish for “the nest,” sits just yards from where Elliot Rodger opened fire on students on May 23, in a violent rampage that killed students Katie Cooper, Veronika Weiss, George Chen, Cheng Yuan Hong, Chris Michaels-Martinez, and Weihan Wang, and traumatized countless others.

One more consequence of “soft dressing,” beyond seeing your co-workers in yoga pants? According to the Wall Street Journal, US retailers are increasingly replacing numerical sizing—dresses sized zero to 16 and beyond, for example, or men’s waist sizes from 28 and up—with the somewhat vaguer sizing system of small, medium and large that they call “alpha sizing.”

This post has been corrected.

Artist Richard Prince has been appropriating other people’s images since before the internet existed. In the early ’80s, he began re-photographing advertisements featuring the Marlboro Man, re-printing them, and calling them art. Last week, one of Prince’s cowboys sold at auction for $3.7 million. Prince, who worked in the tear-sheet department at Time-Life, understood the sex appeal of advertising images like those of the Marlboro Man, and used it to his advantage while questioning their context.

Last week, Christie’s held a new sale of hyper-expensive, edgy contemporary art entitled ”If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday.” The New York sale was organized by the hotshot art specialist Loic Gouzer (who hangs out with people like Leonardo DiCaprio and January Jones) and included works by Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and Dan Colen. It was much-hyped online, via a video featuring a pro skater in Christie’s archives, which is notable for a fusty auction house that’s almost 250 years old.

The numbers: Not great. Gap Inc. reported quarterly net sales increased 1% to $3.77 billion, but profit fell 22% to $260 million.

With his starring role on Brazil’s World Cup soccer team and over 10 million Twitter followers, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior—better known simply as Neymar—is no stranger to the spotlight. An upcoming cover story of the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ magazine helps to solidify Neymar’s status as an international sex symbol with a series of photos featuring the 22-year old athlete employing a smoldering gaze, a boyish smirk, and a Prada suit.  

The numbers: Strong. Tiffany’s year-over-year sales rose 13% to just over $1 billion. Profits rose a whopping 50% year-over year.

By now, most of us are familiar with the inevitable question that reporters ask on the red carpet: “Who are you wearing?” Generally speaking, the answer that trips from celebrities’ lips is a luxury label such as Prada, Chanel, or Balenciaga.

Karl Lagerfeld yesterday debuted Chanel’s Resort 2015 collection on an island in Dubai.

Last year, Maker’s Mark got a 45% jump in sales after the whiskey brand announced that it would water down its bourbon to meet climbing demand, which prompted panicked customers to stock up on the unadulterated stuff. (Then Maker’s didn’t go through with the plan.) Now, the Kentucky-based Buffalo Trace distillery has announced impending bourbon “shortages,” causing a mild uproar (perhaps all bourbon drinkers can muster after being jerked around by Maker’s Mark). Meanwhile, in a case of very poor timing, low lumber stocks mean that distilleries are running low on the barrels they need for aging.

The raccoonish-looking critter above is in fact a member of the Canidae family, along with foxes, coyotes and the domestic dog. But last week the US Federal Trade Commission ruled that fur manufacturers can continue to label the fur of Nyctereutes procyonoides, which is native to Japan, eastern Siberia, China, Vietnam and the Korean peninsula, as “Asiatic raccoon.”

This past week the world’s eyes were on the fashion on the red carpet outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala. So it was easy to forget that the fashion show being celebrated is inside the New York museum: there’s a new exhibition, Charles James: Beyond Fashion.