Weekend Reading: August 25, 2017
- Words Grailed Team
- Date August 25, 2017
"Weekend Reading" is a weekly rundown of our favorite stories from around the web.
Target Bets Big on In-House Brands
"In Manhattan, little draws more envy than a spacious loft apartment so high up in the sky that light streams in from every angle. It was fitting, then, that Target chose such a venue to showcase its range of new brands, which have been developed in the hopes of elevating the big box retailer’s apparel and home offerings into something more aspirational than utilitarian."
via: Business of Fashion
Its Competitors Make Noise, but A.P.C. Is Happy to Make Clothes
"There is an indelible truth about A.P.C., the willfully anonymous French fashion label that has been quietly going about its business for three decades, one that is both right and not quite right. It concerns the clothes that A.P.C. makes, and also its ambitions, the A.P.C. epithet and albatross: “This eternal thing: ‘They do basics,’” said Jean Touitou, the A.P.C. founder, sitting at his dining table, battling back his bugbear of decades. “This has been for 30 years." "
via: The New York Times
Jun Takahashi, the Sorcerer of Fashion
"Early this year, on a stage in Paris, a silent figure stepped under a spotlight. She was wearing a double-layered honeycomb-net skirt made of red organza, her hair twisted into giant ram’s horns. She was part Alice in Wonderland, part monarch painted by Velázquez. To the sounds of an unearthly accompaniment sung by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, she began to move like a clockwork doll that had become possessed by some demon force within her. She bent, strained, writhed, all with a blank gaze that suggested hypnosis. Then she returned to the darkness and was joined, behind a red velvet curtain, by other intricately imagined live figurines: regal humanoid insects, birdlike soldiers, characters with hats borrowed from 15th-century Flemish nuns"
via: T Magazine
An Interview With Maria Grazia Chiuri, the First Woman to Helm Dior
"In her first year as Creative Director of Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri has embraced the global feminist zeitgeist head on. But as we joined her on travels from Tokyo to Calabasas and back to Paris, a more personal motivation came to light."
via: i-D
Hip Hop Show Brings Luxury Streetwear to China’s Millennials, Thanks to 200 Million Viewers
"Hip hop fashion and streetwear culture, though popular in the West, have never gone mainstream in China. But that may be changing owing to a popular online reality show and rap competition called The Rap of China, which features four celebrity producers tasked with training and guiding a rotating cast of young competing rappers."
Who Is Streetwear’s Most Influential Influencer? We Asked a Social Media Expert
"We live in an age where streetwear and fashion are now one and the same. It’s impossible to ignore that streetwear is no longer a guarded niche community – but rather one that’s global, ubiquitous and infinite in its reach. We’ll always have streetwear’s OGs to look up to, but today the scene’s biggest names aren’t legacy label founders but hugely successful rappers, musicians, and creatives who have turned their careers into personal brand power."
via: Highsnobiety
Cathy Horyn: Why I’m Actually Looking Forward to New York Fashion Week
"I’m actually looking forward to New York Fashion Week — and have ever since they liberated us from the deadly Lincoln Center venue. There’s plenty to get excited about this season in particular. Let’s get down to cases..."
via: The Cut
The Legacy of Stussy
"Over nearly 40 years, the pioneering Southern California label has established a truly global tribe of surfers, skaters, ravers, hip-hop heads, and humans from Tijuana to Taiwan. "What's so cool about the brand is that it was taken on by different subcultures in different parts of the world at different times. In California, it was skate and surf. In New York, it's more hip-hop. In London, it was much more club, more rave," Willms explains. "It means different things to different people geographically and generationally." "
via: i-D
The New Uniform of White Supremacy
"But when demonstrators assembled in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, those white robes were few and far between. To be sure: Markers of white supremacy such as Nazi and Confederate flags were on display. But on the march, it looked as if an army of JC Penney mannequins had become sentient. Scores of white men dressed in crisp polos and khakis, turning the uniform of business-casual blasé into a white-hot statement. "What we see in a lot of images coming out of Charlottesville are these very clean-cut-looking young men," says Susan Campbell Bartoletti, the author of They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group and Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow. "They're putting the face of a gentleman on values that are, in my opinion, anything but gentlemanly." "
via: GQ
How High Fashion Won Over Rap
"Fashion has always been essential to hip-hop culture. Though the youthful black and brown New Yorkers who developed rap in the ‘70s and ‘80s weren’t well-off financially, their purchase of clothes was every bit as important to them as the priceless words they fashioned. Tight budgets failed to inhibit the growth of a dashing sense of style: Thrown back on their own resources, kids and young adults in the Bronx, Queens, Harlem, Brooklyn, and Staten Island competed relentlessly to see who could dress most distinctively. Within the space of a decade, a sartorial code no less intricate and elegant than the luxury houses of Paris had evolved to the scale where, allied with street poetry, it could make its presence known and commercially viable on a national stage. Just as Run-D.M.C.’s 1986 triple-platinum album Raising Hell confirmed to a skeptical music industry that rap was both potentially profitable and far more than a fad, its standout third track “My Adidas” at once pioneered the use of rap as a fashion advertisement and paved the way for the first endorsement deal between rap and clothing designers. Adidas sneakers were already the footwear of choice for Run, D.M.C., and Jam Master Jay, but after the song’s success, Adidas would be paying them to wear new sneakers, not the other way around."
via: Vulture