Tag Archives: fashion

Things I Learned This Week

Among the things I learned this week:
* V/A – Ruff Ryders, Volume 1 is an album that has held up surprisingly well. Let’s be careful and not confuse me for a Ruff Ryder fan. (Courtesy: Ruff Ryders)

* Painting a house is even worse than I expected, but I know it will be worth it in the end. (Courtesy: Personal experience)

* Popping one’s collar was the original style for polo shirts. (Courtesy: Valet.)

* “Retirement job” is a common phrase–Google has about 500k results–that people speak without hesitation. Its existence is both surprising and a reflection of the economy and people’s engagement with the economy. (Courtesy: CF)

Taking My Shoe Conversations to the Web and in Monologue Form

The New Yorker has an excellent article by Lauren Collins on Christian Louboutin in the March 28, 2011, issue–an issue that features a gorgeous cover. The entire article is worth reading, but here are two quotes that made it into my circle-and-rip-the-page-out category:

Louboutin, however, is not sympathetic to complaints about the deleterious effects of high heels on locomotion. He told me a story about a client who, having bought her first pair of his heels, was forced to slacken the pace of her morning walk. “She began to notice the little details of her neighborhood for the first time,” he said, proudly.

This is a different and more positive spin to the high-heels-are-painful line of thinking I make, which is that if you are walking or on your feet long enough that you feel pain, you are dating the wrong guy.

Also:

“When a woman buys a pair of shoes, she never looks at the shoe,” Louboutin said. “She stands up and looks in the mirror, she looks at the breast, the ass, from the front, from the side, blah blah blah. if she likes herself, then she considers the shoe.”

Coach is not Couture

The New Yorker has a solid piece on Coach’s Reed Krakoff that is, unfortunately, behind its paywall. I write “unfortunately”, because all those women who rock Coach are not able to read the piece and realize the brand is the exact opposite of fashionable–a sentiment I stopped trying to convince people of years ago.

Because, and thankfully, Coach buyers are not a subset of New Yorker subscribers, here are a couple choice nuggets:

Krakoff’s detractors think that he is a brand architect who made a fortune at Coach by marketing middlebrow goods to barely fashionable consumers…”

and

At Coach, Krakoff designs for a clientele–ranging from upmarket homemakers to their babysitters–whose sensibility is markedly different from his.