Fashion exists in a world of make believe. Our job is to offer an escape from everyday life and a fantasy of glamour and beautiful clothes. It’s easy to forget the real world with its very real problems. But it doesn’t have to be that way. | | | | | Hope I never have to explain these to my children. (Great Again Gear) | | | | |  | “Fashion exists in a world of make believe. Our job is to offer an escape from everyday life and a fantasy of glamour and beautiful clothes. It’s easy to forget the real world with its very real problems. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
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| | rantnrave:// The year is 2068. At least, you're pretty sure it is. You float on patched-up dinghy through the desolate swampland that was once TRIBECA, scanning for signs of life, though you've long since given up hope of finding any. Returning home to the fifth floor of an abandoned skyscraper, you set about starting a fire. You pluck a hat at random off the top of garbage bin brim-full of them -- this one reads "MAKE KANYE GREAT AGAIN." You wish you knew why they'd made so many of these things, what they meant to the people who'd made them. They must have had some sort of tribal significance. You're thankful for the abundant source of kindling, anyway... The year is 2024, and you've spent the past hour at a bridal boutique browsing shoe styles with an associate. Having settled on one, you produce a small baggie containing a lock of your grandmother's hair. The shop will extract DNA from this sample and use it to produce leather that will become the shoes you'll wear on your wedding day. While you're filling out paperwork, the associate explains that the technique was first used by a fashion student named TINA GORJAC, whose "Pure Human" collection was born from ALEXANDER MCQUEEN's genetic material. There's an interesting bioethics debate to be had here, but you've seen a documentary about MCQUEEN, and you're pretty sure he'd have been amused... The year is 2016. You wake up, make coffee and begin scanning your RSS feed. You see headline after headline suggesting that POKÉMON GO and the slew of augmented reality apps that will surely follow will usher in a new era of retail and restore the American shopping mall to its former glory. You stare into the middle distance, trying to convince yourself that ABERCROMBIE will be able to convince budding POKEMON trainers that they also need to catch a bunch of polos, and by catch, you mean purchase with legal tender. You think about this long enough that you begin to wonder if you actually know anything at all about retail, about shopping, about desire, about being a human in the world. You shake your head, dump out your french press and brew a second batch, because the first wasn't nearly strong enough... The year is 1935. You are ALBERT EINSTEIN, and if someone told you that in 2016 LEVI'S will buy your leather jacket for $147,000, you would tell that it's more likely that someone will detect the gravitational waves posited by your general theory of relativity. | | | - Adam Wray, curator |
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 | W Magazine |
| I could have sat at my desk and just focused on the work piling up. I could have just posted a picture on Instagram. But something compelled me to go into the streets last week and join the movement. For a while now, I have been touched by Black Lives Matter. | | |
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 | Racked |
| Vaccarini lives in that delightful valley between typical straight sizes and typical plus sizes, otherwise known as the in-between sizes. | | |
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 | Fast Company |
| These days, bespoke fashion is the epitome of luxury. Think London's Savile Row, where people pay thousands for made-to-measure suits, or ateliers in Milan or Paris, where a predominantly female clientele commission one-of-a-kind handmade gowns. A hundred years ago, though, customized clothing was the norm. | | |
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 | Quartz |
| Issues with the fit of clothing are among the top reasons customers return clothes and footwear bought online, and it's a costly problem for retailers. A 2015 report by IHL, a retail research firm, estimated that retailers worldwide lose billions each year from returns due to wrong sizing. | | |
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 | Business of Fashion |
| From brand-makers to dual-role CEO-cum-creative directors, fashion brands are experimenting with a range of creative configurations. | | |
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 | Not Just A Label |
| It is romantic to think that beautiful garments are spun from the creative imagination of the designer but in reality this is often far from the case. In an era of recession, commercial viability remains an unavoidable necessity for most designers. Trend forecasting agencies have become like secret weapons to many big brands but how valuable are they to emerging designers? | | |
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 | Glossy |
| A new global marketplace and a changing customer mindset has forced luxury brands to do many things they'd never have done before. That includes changing the entire way they market and set prices for their products. One movement gaining acceptance among certain brands is that of "global" or "harmonized pricing." | | |
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| Business of Fashion |
| Courtesy of 032c, BoF brings you a rare, in-depth interview with Lotta Volkova, the uber-stylist of Demna Gvasalia’s Vetements and Balenciaga. | | |
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 | AnOther |
| Behind some of the industry's foremost talents stands Linda Loppa – the influential Belgian tutor who gave rise to the Antwerp Six and put Belgium's progressive style apex on the map. Here, she reflects on her lauded career. | | |
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 | Dezeen |
| Central Saint Martins student Tina Gorjanc has proposed a conceptual range of leather accessories made of skin grown from late fashion designer Alexander McQueen's DNA. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| The news that François Hollande, the French president, spends $10,000 a month on his hair may have a lot of people rolling their eyes, and social media pretty excited (and some wondering how, exactly, he managed to spend so much on what appears to be so little), but the revelation also has implications beyond the country's borders. | | |
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 | High Snobiety |
| It was supposed to be the culmination of a week of glorious and over-the-top catwalk shows in Rome for the biannual Alta Moda Alta Roma where for seven days straight, fashion elite, designers and celebrities had gathered to bask in the latest haute-couture offerings. | | |
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 | Nikkei Asian Review |
| TOKYO -- Fast-fashion retailer Uniqlo's growth seems to be leveling out in Japan as customer traffic remains sluggish following a disastrous attempt to raise prices, threatening to rob operator Fast Retailing's international business of the capital needed to expand. Same-store sales at Uniqlo Japan grew 2.8% on the year in the March-May quarter, the parent said Thursday. | | |
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| Quartz |
| When it entered India in 2010, Zara was an oasis to Indians thirsting for fashion. Long lines of shoppers queued up at malls, in a frenzy only a few brands in India have managed to replicate. It was instant retail success for Inditex, Zara's Spanish-based parent company, and for a long time, sales were phenomenal. | | |
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 | Retail Dive |
| Google is launching a new ad format called Showcase Shopping ads, which are designed to help retail brands reach people searching for broad product terms with visual displays of their products. About 40% of shopping-related searches are for broad terms such as "living room furniture," ac cording to a Google blog post. | | |
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 | via YouTube. |
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