There were several reasons people were buzzing about Timothée Chalamet at the 2018 Oscars. The 22-year-old actor, who played one of the leads in the visually sumptuous Call Me By Your Name, earned the distinction of being the youngest nominee for best actor in almost 80 years. He also had a turn as an erudite badboy in Lady Bird, another Oscar contender.
Gap is back—sort of.
Watch your backs, suits. Leggings are coming for you.
The sneaker business has long revolved around men. The shoes available to women are too often just styles originally created for guys, then resized and recolored. “Shrink it and pink it” is the shorthand for the lazy practice. For the sorts of limited-edition collaborations sneakerheads go crazy for, there may not even be a range of women’s sizes.
Sex and high-status individuals—from celebrities on TV to influencers on Instagram—are advertising staples. Our first question tends to be whether they work, but just as important a question is why. Are they playing on cultural norms and the way each of us has been socialized? Or are they tapping into something more primordial in us, some social trigger deep in our brains, shaped by evolution?
One of the draws of denim—arguably its main draw—is how it ages. No other fabric breaks in quite the same way, leaving a history of the wearer on its surface in faded indigo.
The 1990s were a clothes shopping spree for Americans. At the start of the decade, the US consumed about 40 garments per person annually. By its end, that number had ballooned to about 65 garments per person.
Limited-edition sneakers can make people do some idiotic things, and one of the most hyped and limited shoes of the moment comes courtesy of Adidas, in collaboration with singer and producer Pharrell Williams. The most sought-after versions are a take on Adidas’ NMD sneaker, and on the resale market, they can go for several hundred or even thousands of dollars.
Since Alessandro Michele took over as Gucci’s creative director in 2015, the brand has been on an unstoppable winning streak. The designer breathed a strange new life into the label that has turned it into the hottest thing in fashion (paywall), and sales have followed. When Kering, its parent company, reported earnings on Feb. 13, Gucci’s outstanding success was the focal point. The brand grew more than 40% last year, topping €6.2 billion ($7.6 billion) and overtaking the luxury powerhouse Hermès in size.
Peter Humphrey, the British private investigator whose arrest and nearly two-year-long detention by Chinese authorities made international news, has written an account of his ordeal in the Financial Times (paywall). His revelations about life in Qingpu Prison, on the outskirts of Shanghai, over several months in 2014 and 2015 focus mostly on the grim, dehumanizing conditions he endured. But he also shares a detail that should alarm some international companies manufacturing in China.
Chinese label CLOT’s runway show at New York Fashion Week was neatly embodied in a single soccer jersey. On one side sprawled a dragon, on the other a Nike swoosh.
Amazon’s size and reach—not to mention its willingness to sacrifice profits for market share—make it a company that every other business is scared to go up against. Among them are America’s fashion retailers, who have had to face off with Amazon ever since it started an aggressive push into selling clothes.
There were two very different sides to Under Armour’s story in 2017.
Nike’s newest ad is garnering lots of praise for its fun, frenetic depiction of London life as experienced by the city’s young athletes—as well as a bit of criticism.
L.L.Bean is officially bringing its well-known lifetime return policy to an end. The reason, according to the venerable American purveyor of outdoor gear: too many fraudulent returns.
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of the Nike Tanjun. It isn’t among Nike’s more famed shoes, like an Air Max or an Air Jordan. It’s a simple, inexpensive style for men and women that costs about $65 and sells at outlets like Kohls and Shoe Carnival. Sneaker-obsessed kids aren’t waiting in lines for the latest Tanjun drop.
In frigid, mountainous Pyeongchang, South Korea, most of the athletes in the 2018 winter Olympics will be wearing warm (or even self-heating) uniforms. The figure skaters, however, will take the ice in costumes.
It’s easy to forget while we’re ambling around in our comfortable, fashionable sneakers that the lineage of those shoes in every case leads back to footwear that helped athletes to perform better at their chosen sport.
Laurent Potdevin, Lululemon’s CEO since 2014, is out as chief executive and as a board member, after he ”fell short” of Lululemon’s standards of conduct, the company has announced. His resignation is effective immediately.
Critics proclaimed Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl halftime show a lackluster, sonically messy dud.
When the group Time’s Up encouraged all actresses and actors who would walk the Golden Globes red carpet to dress in a show of solidarity against sexual harassment of women in Hollywood and other workplaces, the color it asked them to wear was black. On Jan. 30, a group of women in the US congress followed their lead, donning black for the first state of the union address by president Trump, who has himself been accused by numerous women of sexual misconduct.
Farfetch, a global powerhouse in luxury e-commerce, is joining forces with Chalhoub Group, the family firm that is one of the Arab world’s biggest luxury players. The companies announced the deal yesterday (Jan. 31), and together, they’re aiming to dominate the online market in the Middle East, which remains a large and relatively untapped source of potential sales for luxury fashion.
H&M’s newest brand will always be on sale.
