"Weekend Reading" is a weekly rundown of our favorite stories from around the web.
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Can This Upstart Athletic Brand Take on Nike and Adidas?
"APL’s California-based twin founders, Ryan and Adam Goldston, 30, are marketing the fusion of fashion with performance to elbow their way into the hardest to crack segment of the athletic industry. “We’re competing with giants,” says Ryan with ample bravado, of the $86 billion value of the global athletic footwear market. 'That’s what makes it so exciting. The fact that there are so few players and it’s such a big ocean creates a lot of opportunity.'"

via: Business of Fashion

How Soccer Became Fashion's Latest Obsession
"But of late, soccer and fashion have found a new common ground. At fashion weeks in Paris and Milan, soccer scarves have adorned a host of editors and street style starlets—a trend sparked by Gosha Rubchinskiy and Demna Gvasalia, of Vetements and Balenciaga. Both designers have included faux-soccer scarves in recent collections, like the kind fans would typically wear to show their allegiances on match day. As part of both its Spring and Fall 2018 collections, Parisian label Koché debuted a number of spliced and embellished soccer jerseys created in partnership with the city’s main team, Paris Saint Germain. This is one of the few cases where fashion’s current soccer obsession has resulted in an official collaboration with a team. Versace’s most recent FW18 menswear collection also included soccer scarves, while Donatella posted a picture of herself to Instagram wearing a “Versace FC” jersey in anticipation of the collection. And just last week, Nike unveiled the latest installment of its collaborative conquest with Virgil Abloh, in the form of soccer jerseys and “soccer-inspired” sneakers."

via: Garage

Retail Therapy: Nike Takes a Well-Placed Kick at the Sneaker Market
"Users can then inflict their own creative genius on the shoes, for an effect not dissimilar to sending a crayon-holding kindergartener into a white-walled play room. And yet, despite the copious possibilities for disaster, we can safely say that, however horrendous the design, Nike's 90/10 shoes will be way more acceptable to wear in public than Christopher Kane's bedazzled, spring-boosted sneaks, first reported by Vogue."

via: Retail Dive

Kanye Covers the NY Subway With #YeezySeason6 Instagram Screenshots
"Featuring screenshots of January’s ‘Klone’ IG posts, a series of posters were plastered along walls and turnstiles throughout 34th Street Herald Square subway station. In a typically ‘Ye move, the posters also displayed the ‘likes’ the posts attracted on Instagram – in some cases (namely Kim's uploads), around the 2m mark – and the thousands of comments left by followers."

via: Dazed

Farfetch’s VP of Creative Yasmin Sewell: ‘Fashion Authority Doesn’t Come From Analyzing Data’
"Sewell is currently leading a full website relaunch that will include a new content portal — and it’s all being done in house, without the help of an outside agency. To help pull it off, she’s hired a creative director and editor-in-chief to support her team, and plans to make more hires down the road. Her goal is that Farfetch — an aggregator that sells products from more than 700 luxury brands and boutiques to customers in every country — will become known for driving trends."

via: Digiday

Bitcoin Millionaires Are Coming for Streetwear
"19-year-old Erik Finman is about to be the subject of a new CNBC documentary chronicling the lives of Bitcoin millionaires. This, he tells me, is what viewers can expect to see: “I wake up and I'm just in my blanket made of hundred [dollar bills] and I get up and they fall off my face and I jump into my Yeezys as soon as I get off the bed and brush my teeth with a Supreme toothbrush. It's just a day in the life, so if it so happens to be flexing in that day in the life, then what a coincidence,” he says with an immense amount of swagger. Finman says he’s only kidding about blanketing himself in hundred dollar bills (not that he hasn’t done it—that’s, like, first day millionaire stuff) and the ‘Preme toothbrush (not that one hasn’t come out of the brand’s mad science lab of accessories), but it wouldn’t be too far removed from reality. As Bitcoin booms, cryptocurrency and streetwear are intersecting in horrifying, hilarious, and circular ways: kids are learning how to invest by picking up streetwear, buying into crypto, accumulating riches, blowing said riches to flex in rare streetwear, and going on spending sprees. And in the process, they're encouraging more retailers to accept the currency."

via: GQ

Levi's Will Soon Rely Entirely on Lasers to Give Its Jeans That Classic Finish
"The designers no longer need to spend days going back and forth with physical prototypes. They design everything digitally, using tools Levi’s developed itself to allow them to work with photo-realistic samples of jeans that don’t physically exist yet. The digital file contains instructions for the lasers, so there’s no longer any need to worry about how to replicate the look in mass production. The change has cut development time for a new pair of jeans in half. “In the past, when a recipe might be 15 to 20 different steps of manual and machine applications, now all of our recipes are three steps,” Sights says, “one of those being a laser.”"

via: Quartz

I’m a Male Model, and I’m Coming Forward About Bruce Weber
"When I first spoke up about my experience with Bruce Weber and sexual harassment in the modeling industry, I chose to remain anonymous. I was scared — I’m still a working model, and until I could support myself as a writer and artist, I wasn’t willing to risk losing my main source of income. And honestly, I was a victim of the pressure around what it means to be a man in today’s society. To have another man abuse his power and take advantage of you can feel like one of the most emasculating and stigmatizing experiences that a young man can have."

via: Racked

What's the Proper Response to Religious Headwear on the Runway?
"The most arresting thing about Gucci's Fall 2018 show in Milan this season was almost inarguably the severed heads carried down the runway. But for some, a more crucial conversation bubbled up around Gucci's choice of headwear in the show — including a number of cobalt-blue turbans that resembled those worn by adherents of Sikhism. And Gucci wasn't alone in featuring religious headwear: It also cropped up in the form of the hijab, which was worn at Max Mara, Pyer Moss, Chromat, Maki Oh, Molly Goddard and Daniëlle Cathari x adidas Originals, in addition to less explicit but still very hijab-like headwear at Marc Jacobs."

via: Fashionista

Fashion, Keep Your Hands Off Our Gear
"Fashion Week has wrapped up in New York. And we don’t care, except that they keep sucking outdoor brands into their pop-culture vomitorium via a trend New York magazine coined “gorpcore.” Which is kind of a brilliant word, actually—a mashup of GORP, an acronym for Good Old Raisins and Peanuts that’s also used as a slur against outdoorsy people, and “core,” short for hardcore, meaning the subset of society who do shit besides go to Fashion Week."

via: Outside Magazine

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