Marc Bain

A strange ritual takes place across the United States each spring. It shares elements with the Hindu marriage ceremony, in which the young bride is wrapped in a red sari, and joined with her life-mate amid elaborate festivities. Or Japan’s Seijin-no-Hi, when young women adorn themselves in beautifully detailed kimonos and men don their smartest suits. Or the Ghanaian puberty rite of Dipo, in which girls wear ceremonial cloths as part of their initiation into womanhood each April and May.

Gap is, at its core, a denim company. It opened its first shop in San Francisco 48 years ago for a simple reason: Don Fisher, who cofounded the brand with his wife Doris, couldn’t find jeans that fit. “The right fit since 1969,” Gap declares on its site.

Chris Cornell, the lead singer for the grunge trailblazer Soundgarden and later for Audioslave, has died at age 52. A representative for Cornell confirmed that he died last night (May 17) after a show with the reunited Soundgarden in Detroit, and a medical examiner later ruled that Cornell hanged himself in a suicide.

Here’s a novel idea: What if giant fashion brands didn’t derive a profit from pay increases for the underpaid workers making their clothes that are meant purely to bring their incomes up to a living wage?

A lot of the shopping for clothes that takes place today in wealthy countries, such as the US, isn’t about the clothing. Rather, it’s the act of purchasing—the temporary buzz of acquiring, and the symbolic value we project onto the item—that is often the point. Then the buzz fades, and a new purchase is made in its place, while the clothes themselves pile up in an overstuffed closet, perhaps never to be worn.

Celebrities, fashion bloggers, social-media personalities—they’re all considered influencers on platforms such as Instagram because, as the name suggests, they can hold a good deal of sway over their audiences. Brands selling everything from sneakers to toothpaste routinely hire them to tout their products. But unlike commercials on TV, it’s not always clear on Instagram what’s a paid ad versus someone just talking about a product they like.

Heads up, Europe: Your luxury conglomerates are getting a new American counterpart—sort of.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, married celebrities, have a new joint venture that combines their fashion talents with their firsthand knowledge of infant humans. It’s a children’s clothing line called the Kids Supply, which after many months of teasing, finally goes live today (May 5).

Lonzo Ball is just 19, but the UCLA point guard is easily among the most promising players to be hitting the NBA draft in June. He’s potentially the sort of force who could change a team’s offense, and has all the ingredients to be a star, which also makes him an emerging marketing power for selling basketball sneakers.

The popularity of retro sneakers has been one of the driving forces behind Adidas’ remarkable growth streak over the past couple years. They’ve perfectly matched up with the market’s appetite for sports-inspired products that are as much about fashion as performance.

Adidas is on a roll. It has been grabbing a growing share of the important US market, and amazingly, even had the best-selling sneaker in the US last year, bumping Nike from the top spot for the first time in more than a decade.

The theme of this season’s highly anticipated costume exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the work of Rei Kawakubo, whose label Comme des Garçons has for decades gleefully blurred boundaries between art and fashion. Its focus is on how Kawakubo has challenged nearly every common assumption about what clothes are, and how they should make us look.

Rei Kawakubo looks almost exactly the same in every photo. Impassive, sphinx-like, the designer stares out from beneath the black fringe of her razor-edged bob. She is famously unsmiling, which makes her seem intimidating, despite her small frame. By reputation she is, of course, gigantic, among the grandest figures in fashion of the last half century, with her label—Comme des Garçons—casting its singular black shadow across the industry.

Fyre Festival was supposed to be an epic event. Guests who paid $3,200 to $4,400 for a ticket would be flown on a customized plane from Miami to the site on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas, where they would stay in geodesic domes, eat amazing food, and enjoy a lineup of musical acts including Migos, Major Lazer, Rae Sremmurd, and Blink-182. More lavish packages still, costing up to a reported $250,000 per person (paywall), were available. A host of famous models and entertainment moguls promoted the festival, and it sold out within weeks.

In just over 20 years, Under Armour has grown into the third-largest sportswear brand in the US. But unlike its two larger rivals, Nike and Adidas, it’s still mostly an apparel business. Footwear makes up only one-quarter of its sales.

Mass-market fashion is a tough business, but fast-fashion chains and ecommerce retailers are proving to have big advantages over their rivals.

Since US president Trump won the 2016 election with a campaign vowing to resurrect US manufacturing, you can’t shop at Nordstrom, lace up a pair of New Balance sneakers, or consider L.L. Bean duck boots without the act feeling somehow politically charged. A pair of jeans is now joining the list—in particular, a pair of distressed, faux mud-caked jeans, on sale at luxury department store Nordstrom’s website for $425.

US bricks-and-mortar retailers are bleeding badly. E-commerce is gobbling up a growing share of sales, store productivity has dwindled, consumer shopping habits are shifting toward fast, cheap fashion—or away from stuff entirely—and it all seems to be coming to a head this year.

If you’ve ever bought a pair of new, unlaced sneakers you know what it’s like to lace them yourself. It requires carefully wriggling the plastic-cased end of the lace up and through the tiny holes in the shoe’s upper from the inside. Sometimes there are two layers to navigate: the cushioned textile interior and maybe a hard plastic overlay used to tighten the shoe around your foot when you tie it up.

A common complaint among women who wear sizes 16 and up is that if they can find items in their size at all, it’s even harder to find clothes that fit well. More than just an annoyance, the problem can be dispiriting and humiliating, and leave women feeling excluded from fashion. What’s especially absurd about this situation is that the average American woman is now a size 16 to 18, according to the most recent research—suggesting that most women in America are struggling to find clothes that fit right.

Fashion is full of excess, frivolity, and plain weirdness, but once in a while an item will so completely encapsulate these qualities that it catches the spotlight outside the industry. Right now, that item is Balenciaga’s $2,145 “Extra-large Shopper Tote,” which has drawn coverage from sources including CNN because of its marked similarity to the blue, wrinkled plastic bags Swedish furniture chain IKEA sells shoppers for 99 cents.

Standard operating procedure in the apparel industry goes like this: Make clothes, and then sell them. It can take weeks, if not months, to manufacture clothes, so that step has to come first. It can be a costly upfront investment, and items that don’t sell get discounted, eating into margins.

At US president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on April 6, Ivanka Trump—the president’s daughter, and now officially an advisor—joined in on a dinner of steak and Dover sole with Chinese president Xi Jinping. It was part of a widely publicized summit where trade cooperation between China and the US was a main topic of discussion.

Ask a boutique selling pricey luxury goods in France or Italy who their top customers are and the answer probably won’t be French or Italian buyers. More likely than not, their main source of sales are Chinese tourists on an international spending spree.