The shopping mania that attends the holidays each season has arrived. On Black Friday alone, consumers in the US and around the world bought billions of dollars worth of stuff, including a whole lot of clothes. That clothing haul is something environmental organization Greenpeace is not happy about.
Director and symmetry-fetishist Wes Anderson has a new short film out. Called Come Together, it’s a Christmas tale about a train crew trying to make the best of an 11.5-hour weather delay, which guarantees to disrupt the Christmas celebrations of the train’s several passengers. It’s also an ad for H&M’s holiday campaign.
Art Peck, the CEO of Gap Inc., has had enough of creative directors. “We have cycled through so many, and each has been proclaimed as the next savior,” he told the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in a story about the Gap’s ongoing struggle to stay relevant. He dubbed these creative leads ”false messiahs.”
The Black Friday shopping frenzy that takes place the day after Thanksgiving in the US is, at this point, as much a part of the holiday as turkey. The day is supposedly so named because that’s when retailers’ ledger books move from the red into the black—i.e. profitability—as a wave of shoppers hits stores to make their holiday purchases. (More on that later.)
When it’s sunny out, there’s energy all around us. But right now, portable solar panels generally can’t store the energy they produce. It either has to flow into a device directly, or requires a separate, heavy battery to store it, making solar power still a work in progress for everyday consumer use.
The 20,000 people who gathered at New York City’s Javits Center for Sneaker Con earlier this month were there to buy, sell, and swap; to admire rare and unusual sneakers; and of course to see what everyone else was wearing.
Imagine you’ve just purchased a new jacket from your favorite brand. You put it on for the first time, and scan a tag embedded in the sleeve with your phone. A menu of options pops up.
Synthetic spider silk is one of the most exciting new textiles in development.
As of November 18, a woman who walks into the Neiman Marcus in San Francisco’s Union Square will be able to browse a selection of designer clothes, find a jacket or dress she loves, and leave with it—without having purchased it. Eventually she will have to bring it back though, because it’s only a rental.
Ivanka Trump already has 1.8 million followers on Instagram, but that’s nothing compared to the 20 million viewers who watched her being interviewed with her father, US president-elect Donald Trump, on 60 Minutes.
The American sneaker manufacturer New Balance has gotten itself into a thorny situation.
When Heidi O’Neill, president of Nike’s direct-to-consumer business, was talking to potential customers about what they would want to see in a new Nike store, one father told her he’d like it to be a place where he could drop off his kids to play on a rainy day.
The volume of merchandise sold on Singles Day—the predominately Chinese event that occurs on 11.11 and is basically the invention of ecommerce behemoth Alibaba—is jawdropping. This year, in just the first two hours of the world’s biggest shopping day, sales on Alibaba platforms alone topped $7 billion. In the hours since, they have blown past last year’s total of about $14.3 billion, and at the end of the day, clocked in at $17.8 billion.
Like others US presidential races before it, the 2016 election was more than a contest of differing policy positions. To many Americans, it was a referendum on the direction their country is heading. For supporters of Hillary Clinton, the victory of the Trump-Pence ticket felt like a sharp turn toward social conservatism, and more disturbingly, toward xenophobia, homophobia, racism, and sexism.
Democrat Hillary Clinton faced the most difficult task of her run for the presidency today. After a bitter, divisive campaign against Republican Donald Trump, who ultimately proved victorious, she conceded defeat in a speech that stressed the need for a united nation. “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans,” she said of her fierce rival over the last year.
In a win that has surprised pundits and pollsters, the real-estate entrepreneur and reality-television star Donald Trump has been elected the next president of the United States.
American women are celebrating. For the first time in history, they have the option to vote for a woman as the presidential candidate of one of the major parties.
For more than a year, Adidas has been teasing the release of a shoe made almost entirely from discarded plastic fished out of the oceans. It revealed its first prototype of the sustainable sneaker, created in collaboration with environmental organization Parley for the Oceans, in June 2015. Finally, in mid-November, the first mass-produced quantity—7,000 pairs, to be exact—will go on sale, and according to Adidas, that’s just the start.
Athleisure, in which stretchy workout clothes double as everyday wear, has grown into a major force driving the way people dress in the US, Western Europe, and beyond over the course of the past several years.
For millions of American women, the chance to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton is understandably emotional. In the 96 years since women won their right to vote in the US, never have they had a greater chance of electing a woman to the highest office in the country.
To get a sense of the immense pressure that fast fashion has put on the global apparel and footwear industry, all you need to do is look at this chart. It shows average year-over-year sales growth for a group of fast-fashion leaders, including H&M, Zara, Primark, and Forever 21, compared to the rest of the apparel industry.
A three-year study (pdf) that tracked clothing costs versus what global consumers are willing to pay has some bad news for fashion retailers: “On average, across all womenswear categories tested between January 2013 and June 2016, consumers were willing to pay only 76% of full price.”
Wall Street slammed Under Armour’s stock yesterday (Oct. 25), serving the American sporting goods maker its biggest hit in more than seven years. The market reaction came after Under Armour said it would not meet the growth target it laid out about a year ago, and projected sales to increase in the low to 20% range through 2017 and 2018. That forecast would be enviable for many businesses, but it marks a slowdown for Under Armour, which has enjoyed a sustained growth spurt for years.
Beyond being one of fashion’s most revered brands, Christian Dior Couture is known as one of its most creative, and that quality has enabled its long-term financial success. ”The company has been growing for the last 20 years almost every quarter,” Sidney Toledano, the label’s president and CEO, noted at WWD’s Apparel & Retail CEO Summit in New York yesterday (Oct. 25). Dior is currently a $2 billion business, roughly 10 times larger than when Toledano became president and CEO in 1998.
