One feature of good design is that it solves a problem, and anyone with children knows that the speed at which infants outgrow clothes is a problem.
While robots are already an established part of the manufacturing process for cars, electronics, and semiconductors, they have been much slower to take over production of sneakers and clothes.
Nike has dominated the sneaker world for so many years that it has come to seem invincible, particularly in the US, its home turf and the world’s biggest sneaker market.
The physical risks of being a fashion model aren’t the same as those of, say, a coal miner. Traumatic injuries tend to be rare when you’re walking the runway or shooting a new campaign.
Amazon has barely made any noise about the clothing lines it has been steadily rolling out while it works to take over clothing retail. These brands, which focus mostly on basics—items such as men’s polos, kids’ clothes, and workwear for women—seem like they’ve been practically designed to generate sales without generating attention.
Here’s a tip for you the next time you’re about to post a photo to Instagram of your perfect-looking avocado toast, neatly positioned beside your folded sunglasses and a cappuccino with the heart drawn in the foam: Don’t.
The major tennis tournaments each have their own character. Wimbledon is the straight-laced one. The dress code, which mandates that players wear almost entirely white—not off-white, not cream, and definitely not white with any prominent color-blocking—is so strict that officials will check players’ underwear to make sure it follows the rules.
More and more, shoppers today want to know their products were made ethically and sustainably, and clothing is one category they’ve put under particular scrutiny. For decades, the garment industry has served up horror stories of sweatshops, child labor, abuses, and deadly industrial disasters. Brands including Levi’s (pdf), Nike, Adidas, and Gap (pdf) have responded by publishing lists of all the suppliers producing for them. You have to search for them, but they’re accessible.
Sewing simple items of clothing is one of those repetitive, labor-intensive tasks that seems like it would have been automated ages ago. But getting a robot to do it right is tricky. Fabric stretches, especially the comfy, flexible knits used for t-shirts. A human can easily adjust on the spot, guiding the fabric as it moves around to make sure seams stay straight, but robots aren’t always great at that sort of improvisation. (Putting shoelaces on sneakers is similarly challenging.)
On Aug. 25, a fashion show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, displayed an America not normally seen on the catwalk.
At its core, Amazon’s goal is to remove as much friction as possible from a customer finding what they want, ordering it, and having it land on their doorstep. Its ambitions started with books, but have since extended to just about every other category, including clothes.
When the undefeated boxer Floyd Mayweather and the mixed-martial arts champion Conor McGregor square off in a Las Vegas boxing ring on Aug. 26, it won’t just be a battle between two fighters. It’ll be a battle of two celebrity brands.
A United Nations committee has issued a formal warning to the United States and its president, Donald Trump, over recent racial violence in the country, indicating serious concern that conflicts like the recent one in Charlottesville, Virginia, will spread.
Imagine it’s freezing cold outside. Now imagine that instead of bundling up in a coat, all you need to do to feel comfortable is dial up the temperature of the base layer you’re wearing, like a heated seat in a car. Researchers from the US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development & Engineering Center are trying to make that scenario a reality.
Steve Bannon, who until yesterday was chief strategist to US president Donald Trump, has barely been out of the White House a day, but whisperings have already begun about what he may do next.
In 1962, a teenager in Oregon named Lou Tomososki and a friend both made the mistake of looking directly at a partial solar eclipse without any protective eyewear. Tomososki saw bursts of light, like those from a flashbulb. His vision in his right eye never recovered. “You know how the news people blur a license plate out,” he recently told NBC News. “That’s what I have on the right eye, about the size of a pea. I can’t see around that.”
If you’re judging by what’s happening in Apple’s App Store, Game of Thrones is currently generating more money than hookups, music streaming, crushing candy, and any of the lot of weird shows Netflix has on offer.
Foot Locker sells sneakers and clothes from many of the top brands in the sportswear industry, and Nike, including its Jordan brand, is by far the label that dominates its stores. Last year, about 68% (pdf, p. 26) of the products Foot Locker purchased came from Nike, according to the company’s annual report.
Alibaba is on a tear. Since the start of 2017, New York-listed shares for China’s largest e-commerce company have jumped almost 90% in value, and the company’s stock got another big bump today (Aug. 17) as it reported profits that nearly doubled the same quarter last year.
Tiffany has become synonymous with a few different things in the 180 years the jewelry brand has been in business. One is its little boxes in their cheerful aqua blue. Another is the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Last but not least, there’s the Tiffany setting, which uses a ring of prongs that protrude from the band to hold a single diamond, allowing it to catch light all over.
It didn’t take protesters much effort to topple a century-old Confederate statue at a rally in Durham, North Carolina, on Aug. 14. One protester climbed atop its stone plinth, inscribed with “In memory of the boys who wore gray,” and tied a rope around the statue of the Confederate soldier—a symbol of the slave-owning South from the US Civil War. Then, with a good pull, the crowd, gathered in solidarity with the anti-racist demonstrators who clashed with white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend, sent the towering effigy crashing hard to the ground.
We trust the tags on our clothes to truthfully identify where the clothing was made. But they don’t always tell the whole story.
After another sharp decline today, following yet another batch of disappointing quarterly results, JCPenney’s stock has hit an all-time low. It fell below $4 a share for the first time today (Aug. 11).
Major US department stores are delivering some less-bad news for a change.
