"Weekend Reading" is a weekly rundown of our favorite stories from around the web.
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In Fashion, the Beauty (and Challenge) of Looking Back
"THE ARCHIVES OF BALENCIAGA, the 100-year-old fashion house, are held in a raw concrete warehouse space in Paris. There are 6,000 items in total — sculptural silk ball gowns and cocoon-shaped coats and a tobacco-brown chenille-embroidered lace coat once owned by Wallis, Duchess of Windsor — all shrouded in calico garment bags. Especially delicate pieces are wrapped in acid-free tissue paper to protect against dust and moths and are laid to rest in cardboard boxes referred to in the business as ‘‘coffins.’’ Balenciaga’s haute couture maison, formerly located on the Avenue George V, was a chapel dedicated to the worship of fashion as art; here, in its cavernous catalog of designs past, the atmosphere is of a crypt — or even a shrine."

via: T Magazine

Anti Social Social Club Reportedly Owes Over 1,000 Customers Their Merchandise
"Earlier this week, HYPEBEAST took to Instagram asking readers to share shipment-related from Anti Social Social Club and other fashion brands. At the time of publication, at least 1,320 users reported they had yet to receive orders from this summer’s July 4 drop and at least 500 users reported they experienced two months of shipping delays before receiving their orders. According to analysis based on comments, the average value of missing orders is $380 USD, bringing the estimate of total unaccounted for merchandise close to half a million dollars. Anti Social Social Club and founder Neek Lurk denied to comment."

via: Hypebeast

Why Signature Shoes Matter Even When They're Not Selling
"Signature shoes are important — most often in basketball. From Jordans and Iversons to Kobes and LeBrons, the NBA has been defined as much by its signature players as their signature shoes over three decades. Brands have competed as fiercely for top-tier NBA talent as teams have because fans have traditionally followed in the style footsteps of their favorite players whether it be at a party or playing pickup at the local recreation center. That was tradition, but trends have changed. Signature shoes are on sale, but consumers aren’t buying in the same ways they used to. Though Nike still towers over just about every other brand, both LeBron James and Kevin Durant struggled to move the LeBron 14 and KD 9 last season, according to Forbes. After looking like a fast-growing upstart in basketball, company data shows Under Armour and Stephen Curry’s 2015 gains behind the Curry 1 and Curry 2 fell through last season with the struggles of the Curry 3."

via: SB Nation

Repealing DACA Will Have Big Consequences for Fashion
"The Pew Research Center has found that the textile, apparel, and leather manufacturing industry is second only to private households in employing the greatest share of immigrants, with a 22 percent share of authorized and a 14 percent share of unauthorized immigrants. Accordingly, the nation’s immigration policies directly affect the apparel industry."

via: Racked

Don’t Tell Me That Young People Can’t Fix Fashion
"As the Cut fashion critic Cathy Horyn pointed out in her decidedly optimistic essay prior to Fashion Week: “Someone in New York is always complaining about fashion.” But this season felt particularly upsetting because people weren’t just flippant; some of them were scared for their future. What was going to happen to a business that those like Myers, Carter, and Leive spent decades building? How could it possibly continue, with no one left with any “real” experience to lead it? Was the figure of the “magazine editor” dead, too? And what would it look like then if Instagram influencers ruled the world?"

via: The Cut

The Lonely Future of Buying Stuff
"Over the past couple of decades, humans have been entirely removed from the logistics business, which is now coordinated by machines and software. Making shoes long ago became a robot’s craft, at least on the low-end side of the business. Creating, selling, transporting and buying consumer goods such as casual footwear now requires just one significant human—the consumer—plus an individual here and there to oversee assembly and repair robots. Many of the basics we buy are now constructed, bought, and shipped with no one besides the customer ever laying eyes on them."

via: Bloomberg

Is Fashion Relying Too Much on Hip-Hop to Stay Relevant?
"Hip-hop is one of those cultural movements that isn't simply a movement. It can literally build communities or, as some people have generalized, cause bloodshed. In the right hands, it can become something that unifies and symbolizes hope, happiness and ebullience. But, in others, it can be made a mockery of. There's a very thin line, and it isn't black or white. Many times, it's green."

via: Fashionista

At Italian Vogue, a New Beginning
"In January, not long after returning from his winter holiday, Emanuele Farneti, the 42-year-old editor of Italian GQ, was chatting with a media friend when the subject of Italian Vogue, the powerful fashion magazine whose revered longtime editor Franca Sozzani had died at age 66 the month before, came up....At a moment when a formative generation of glossy-magazine editors is moving on — Elle, Glamour and British Vogue have experienced turnover at the top this year — Mr. Farneti represents the beginning of the next wave. It’s possible the stakes around him are even higher, because his predecessor did not retire or get fired, she died. Most of the industry hadn’t even realized she was sick, and the news was a shock."

via: The New York Times

Iris van Herpen’s Hi-Tech Couture
"Several years ago, Iris van Herpen, a Dutch fashion designer, began visiting CERN, the center for particle research near Geneva. Van Herpen, who is thirty-three, does not have a background in science; she attended design school in Arnhem, a small city in the Netherlands. Yet she regularly draws inspiration from the natural sciences to create rarefied, strangely gorgeous garments, many of which employ unexpected materials and 3-D printing. On a 2014 trip to CERN, she toured the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator, buried in a tunnel, which exerts a magnetic field about a hundred thousand times stronger than that of Earth. Innumerable magnets and electronic devices are linked together with color-coded wiring and brightly painted metal structures. It struck her as the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. “Now I find it hard to compare, because how can you compare such a thing to—a tree?” she told me not long ago. “But it was so overwhelming that people could have made it—the complexity, and the simplicity, of it. The construction looks like a big puzzle, like a big Lego. It is very simple in materiality, but what it researches is so complex. I found it mesmerizing.” "

via: The New Yorker

As Print Continues to Die, Why are Condé Nast and Hearst Launching New Magazines?
"Within the past two years or so, Condé Nast shuttered Self, Details, and Lucky magazines. Penthouse did away with its print edition, and More magazine folded entirely. Yahoo announced in February 2016 that it would shutter a significant number of its digital magazines, and before that, in 2009, a huge slew of magazines, including Domino, Men’s Vogue, and a number of other Condé titles, as well as Hearst’s CosmoGirl, all ceased publication. All the while, amidst layoffs and restructuring at just about every other print magazine, rumors were abound regarding additional closures of additional glossies. So, why – in the age of rather regular magazine deaths – are both Hearst and Condé Nast working on brand new print publications?"

via: The Fashion Law

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