Marc Bain

Lucinda Chambers, the Vogue UK fashion director of 25 years who departed this May, has sounded off on a number of topics in a bracingly candid interview in the niche journal Vestoj. For example, she revealed that she was fired without warning, that pleasing an advertiser was the guiding force on at least one recent cover, and that she finds Vogue largely irrelevant.

One misconception about fashion designers is that they’re all in the business of making beautiful clothes. But beauty, in the sense of design that is graceful and harmonious, that seeks to please the eye and strives toward the exalted and sublime—is not always the goal.

Clothing company Bonobos built its business on a simple idea that turned out to meet a real need: It made a better-fitting pair of men’s pants. “The innovation was a curved waistband,” cofounder Andy Dunn told Racked in 2015. “And our pants were not too tight, but not too loose on the thigh.” The brand, which sells primarily online, has since expanded into other products and some physical stores, accruing a large and loyal following in the process, particularly among millennial online shoppers.

It’s official. Until Nike CEO Mark Parker said on a call with investors today (June 29) that Nike is partnering with Amazon, the deal hadn’t yet been confirmed, though rumors started swirling last week. But there’s no doubt now: Nike, which had long resisted the e-commerce behemoth, will start selling its products directly through the site.

To see your name on your business, or on the products you’ve designed, can be a tremendous source of pride for an entrepreneur with a new venture. But as good as it may feel, naming your company after yourself is a potentially terrible decision.

Panasonic will soon release a new way for you to freshen up your clothes that it claims involves nothing more than hanging them up.

What are you buying when you pay $5 for a cup of organic, single-origin, fair-trade coffee? Or a locally produced, sustainably sourced linen tunic? Or a Tesla Model X electric SUV?

Each spring, at the fashion shows in London, Milan, Paris, and New York that regularly reflect and often define what stylish guys are wearing, there are shorts. Off the runways, where streetstyle photographers snap the best-dressed as they go about their business, you will see shorts. On the legs of some of menswear’s most influential names, including Thom Browne and Raf Simons, you can find shorts. And on hot days in cities all over, men brave the heat in shorts.

Nike, the world’s largest sporting-goods brand, is making some sweeping changes to the way it produces and sells sneakers in order to keep up with today’s demanding consumers.

Pope Francis has his own way of doing things. Four years into his papacy, the Catholic Church’s outspoken leader has at times taken unconventional stances on issues such as homosexuality and divorce. As pontiffs go, even his clothing style is fairly unique.

Alia first noticed the Ivanka Trump label appearing at the garment factory in Subang, West Java, where she’s employed about a year ago, according to the Guardian, long before Trump resigned from operational and management roles at her company in January. A mother of two, Alia has worked for the factory for years, making the legal minimum wage for the area, which is among the lowest in Indonesia.

A production of Julius Caesar by New York’s Public Theater has raised an outcry for plainly recasting Caesar as US president Donald Trump. This Caesar wears a suit and has a coiffed crown of blondish hair. His wife, Calpurnia, even speaks with a vaguely Slavic accent, much like Melania Trump. The real controversy, though, is that Caesar, you’ll likely remember, is assassinated in the play.

Google’s latest project may be the most widely accessible and comprehensive fashion collection on the planet. All you need to view it is an internet connection.

In 1985, Donna Karan launched a collection centered on what she called her seven easy pieces. It offered working women a stylish, flattering capsule wardrobe that could be simply mixed and matched for a variety of looks—and a solution to the perennial problem of what to wear to the office.

If SpaceX is going to send humans to Mars, those people are going to need special clothes. The company reportedly hired Jose Fernandez, who is responsible for designing several of Hollywood’s superhero costumes (e.g. Spiderman and Batman), to design a suit for its mission to Mars, though it’s not clear what it will look like.

Slow, labor intensive, and low tech are just a few of the words you could use to describe the way sneakers have traditionally been made. It takes big sneaker companies dozens of steps and up to 18 months to develop a new shoe, and with just a few exceptions, the manufacturing processes involved haven’t changed significantly in decades.

Just a few years ago, J.Crew seemed invincible. Sales were rocketing, as was the clothing retailer’s cultural cachet.

First, it was Jenna Lyons. In April, J.Crew parted ways with the creative director, who, more than anyone, was responsible for creating the look that defined the brand for over a decade.

When China was still largely rural, poor, and socialist, politicians exhorted the country’s people to patriotic activities such as increasing grain output for their economy’s sake. Now, to sustain China’s economic boom, the country needs good citizens to go shopping.

A runway show full of dramatic gowns or sharp suits from Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, and their ilk is always a major production—sometimes of epic proportions. But it’s an open secret in fashion that the big luxury houses are no longer truly in the clothes business.

The word “organic” is a powerful marketing tool. In clothing—just as in food—brands love to tout their use of organic agricultural products to show they’re doing their part to fight the industry’s outsized environmental footprint. They know consumers want products they believe are better for them and the planet. “Organic,” which generally means something was grown without synthetic additives or pesticides and wasn’t genetically modified, seems to promise as much.

Movement is energy. Anytime you move an object, including your arms or legs, you’re transferring energy to it. That kinetic energy can be turned into other types of energy, which means you could potentially harvest it and turn it into a power source—a dream scientists have been working on for some time.

A decade ago, J.Crew was a defining force in the way Americans dressed. In 2008, its colorful, unfussy prep reached a milestone, when Michelle Obama wore one of the brand’s yellow cardigans on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. That cardigan signified accessibility. Everyone could—and did—wear J.Crew, up to and including the first lady of the United States.

Our addictive feeds of fitness models, exotic travel, and photo-perfect moments don’t often match with our comparatively humdrum and badly lit lives. The discontent caused by that disconnect is enough that a growing body of research suggests social media is contributing to mental-health problems such as anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, and body-image issues in young people, who are the heaviest users of social media.