A lot of the retail business is in a shaky state right now. A number of companies are propped up with risky, leveraged loans, leaving them vulnerable to default in the form of missed payments, forced debt restructuring, or even bankruptcy, all of which can lead to trouble with financing in the future.
In his testy meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on Dec. 11, Donald Trump was clear about who would bear responsibility for a government shutdown if he couldn’t get at least $5 billion in funding for his long-promised wall along the US-Mexico border.
Airports are starting to show the strain of the partial shutdown of the US government, which has now eclipsed the three-week mark to become the longest in history. The situation is creating headaches of its own, and to make matters worse, winter storm Gia is slamming the Midwest, freezing the travel plans of many passengers.
A lot of men who shop at Lululemon got their introduction to the brand through a woman. They were boyfriends or husbands who tagged along on a shopping trip, or a woman may have just gone ahead and bought them something herself.
The last days of Sears look to be drawing nearer.
Talk of diversity in fashion usually focuses on the outward-facing stuff: The people featured on runways, magazine covers, and ad campaigns. There’s good reason for that. Models are the visible faces of brands. Customers are demanding that the brands they support reflect their own diversity, and that pressure has helped.
When Apple slashed its sales forecast for the holiday quarter on Jan. 2, laying most of the blame on weakness in China, the news sent a shudder through financial markets. Apple’s announcement renewed anxieties about the slowdown of the world’s second-largest economy, read as a signal that the countless companies which have come to rely on China to buy their stuff should be concerned.
In 1992, before he became one of New York fashion’s brightest stars, or ascended to the creative helm of the French fashion house Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs was a 29-year-old designer fumbling his creative leadership of the American sportswear label Perry Ellis. At the time he seemed unable to find a clear vision for the brand, or for himself. That would change with one runway show.
A lot is shifting in the retail business. Stores are changing, new technology is emerging, retail space is shrinking, phones are an increasingly popular way to buy pretty much everything, and who even knows if Sears—a 125-year-old retailer that once defined how Americans shopped—will exist for much longer.
Cosmetically speaking, it’s a different world than it was a few decades ago.
While a number of other retailers were celebrating a strong holiday season yesterday (Dec. 26), Gap Inc. confirmed some more bad news for the company.
This week, Donald Trump made a surprise trip to Iraq—his first visit to troops in an active war zone since taking office. As he spoke to the crowd at Al Asad Air Base near Baghdad on Dec. 26, Trump revealed another surprise, telling hundreds of members of the US military that he had secured the troops a raise of more than 10%, which he said was their first pay bump in more than a decade.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average got a late Christmas present today (Dec.26), recording its biggest single-day point gain ever.
Netflix’s new thriller, Bird Box, is a clunker.
The latest earthquake set off by the ongoing eruption of Mount Etna has been the most powerful in recent days.
One thing you can say about fashion trends in 2018: There were a lot of them.
On Dec. 20, when Donald Trump announced that US defense secretary Jim Mattis would be resigning at the end of February, the president thanked him warmly for his service on Twitter and said how helpful Mattis had been.
At the end of 2017, the price of bitcoin was on a tear. At one point in December, it rose to within a hair of $20,000, and though it moderated some after that, hopes remained high that its climb would continue through 2018.
How much better is one voice assistant than another? Each year, Loup Ventures, which describes itself as a research-driven venture capital firm, tries to figure that out. It asks each assistant the same 800 questions to determine whether it understands the question, and whether it can respond with the right answer.
In Sony’s new animated movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, some of Spider-Man’s first lines to Miles Morales, the movie’s teenage hero, are about his sneakers.
Luxury goods are a social signal, as psychologists and economists will attest. They broadcast a message about status and taste, in part through their high-end materials, craftsmanship, and of course price tags.
In the Xinjiang region of western China, a network of internment camps holds up to 1 million detainees, mostly Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. The ruling Communist Party bills the camps as “education and training” centers for people “influenced by extremism.” By laboring on the production lines, Beijing claims, the detainees can work their way out of poverty, join modern China, and avoid being turned into religious radicals.
This year has been brutal on British retailers. But the hope, at least, was that the holiday shopping season would turn things around and give them some cause for cheer.
In February 2014, shortly after taking over as creative director at Moschino, designer Jeremy Scott showed a runway debut for the Italian luxury label full of pop-culture references. Among its odd bits of iconography were the McDonald’s and Budweiser logos, prints that looked swiped straight from candy wrappers, and SpongeBob SquarePants.
