"Weekend Reading" is a weekly rundown of our favorite stories from around the web.
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Shia LaBeouf Is Ready To Talk About It
"Shia LaBeouf is nervous about this story—'I have so much fear about this thing,' he confesses to me when we first meet—and it drives him to do what he’s always done when faced with something he cannot fully control: Prepare. Obsessively. For the past two months, he’s conducted practice interviews over the phone with his therapist, anticipating all of the possible scenarios, workshopping his responses to my questions. It’s been a long time since Vanity Fair put him on the cover of its August 2007 issue, wearing a spacesuit over a suit-suit (it looks as awkward as it sounds), and heralded him at age twenty-one as “the Next Tom Hanks.” More than a decade on, LaBeouf’s arc is less a stratospheric ascent than a misguided rocket wobbling across the sky, strewing wreckage."

via: Esquire

Miuccia Prada: The Vogue Interview
"Miuccia Prada slips off her mannish grey coat in the concrete surrounds of her Milan office. Underneath, she's wearing a crisp white shirtdress, legs bare despite the cold, with kitten heels from her latest collection. Her hair is pulled back from her handsome face, and the little red crocodile bag she carries is struggling to cope with everything she's crammed inside. Prada is the most unlikely-looking punk, but that is how she sees herself. 'It's true,' she explains, grey pearl-drop earrings dancing at her earlobes as she speaks. 'Not punk in a superficial way, but in finding a way to change things, to go against the system.' For Prada, punk is not about safety pins through noses. Punk is a state of mind, an approach to life and a constant, restless questioning of the status quo."

via: British Vogue

Will Diet Prada Save Fashion From Itself?
"Fashion is in a state of emergency and, like with many major conflicts throughout history, there's a radical whistleblower demanding the industry right its wrongs. Diet Prada, Instagram's unofficial authority on 'ppl knocking each other off,' has recently risen to the forefront of fashion as a relentless watchdog calling out copycat culture — something they argue is needed now more than ever. 'I think the industry has been lacking in a voice that doesn't fear speaking the truth,' DP says. To that end, the anonymous founders (there are thought to be two of them) use their account to call out imitations or appropriations in order to push fashion through this bleak era they describe as 'peak sameness.' Before creating DP, the handle's co-creators had worked together for 5 years in the business. During this time, they began to take notice of striking similarities between new collections they'd see on the catwalks and older collections they recalled from previous seasons or more recent lines made by younger, more obscure designers who did not have the same platforms."

via: Paper

The Race to Find a Streetwear Unicorn
"If you were going to design the closet of the world’s biggest sneakerhead, it would look a lot like Stadium Goods. The storefront a block north of Canal Street in lower Manhattan features hundreds of cellophane wrapped kicks on the walls, from a $35 Nike Toki Low TXT to a $34,000 Air Jordan 11 Jeter, the latter pair displayed behind glass in the Trophy Case along with other astronomically-priced shoes including an $8,500 Air Jordan 1 Retro High (“or as little as $880/mo”). Venture through another door and you'll find the Stadium Goods Market Center, where the growing company will happily consign your much-loved but unwanted sneakers, selling them in store or online for a 20 percent cut."

via: GQ

It Turns Out Bill Cunningham Wrote a Secret Memoir
"Bill Cunningham, street-style pioneer and one of the humblest men in fashion, was also apparently a memoirist, too. According to a story published by the 'Times' on Wednesday, the photographer wrote a 'secret memoir' before his death in June 2016. 'The Times' likens this discovery to a 'major archaeological revelation,' since Cunningham was a private soul and never publicly divulged the manuscript’s existence."

via: The Cut

The Whistle-Blower Behind the Facebook Data Scandal Has a Surprising Fashion Background
"Over the weekend, 'The New York Times' and 'The Guardian' both published articles revealing that U.K.-based data firm Cambridge Analytica—the company Wylie and Steve Bannon built with the help of a $15 million investment from Republican billionaire donor Robert Mercer—had unethically obtained and exploited the personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users without their consent. This data was then analyzed to identify connections between personality traits and political leanings, becoming the foundation for techniques later used by the Trump presidential campaign. "

via: The Hollywood Reporter

Kering, Owner of Gucci and Saint Laurent, Faces Swiss Tax Inquiry
"Swiss prosecutors said on Wednesday they had opened a criminal investigation into a tax case involving the French luxury group Kering, widening the legal scrutiny of its tax practices in Europe. The announcement comes four months after Italian authorities began looking into Kering’s flagship brand, Gucci."

via: The New York Times

Is Dry Cleaning Dying?
"A customer once gave John Curry some advice: “Have a small field and flower it well.” The words of wisdom came shortly after the death of his father nine years ago, not long before Curry purchased the family dry cleaning business in Savannah, Georgia. He took the remark to heart. While, over these last seven decades, Curry and his family haven’t been plowing the same plot of land, they have been laundering the apparel of Savannah’s doctors, teachers, lawyers, and film actors working in the city at Curry Dry Cleaners, their family-owned and -operated dry cleaning shop — a bonafide field of flowers, passed down from father to child twice over."

via: Racked

Inside Dapper Dan and Gucci’s Harlem Atelier
"From the outside, the brownstone in Central Harlem looks like any other building on the block. But enter through the ground-floor door, pass through the red velvet curtains and you will find yourself among roaring jaguars, long-tailed dragons and hip-hop greats from the ’80s and ’90s, including LL Cool J, Salt-N-Pepa, Rakim and Eric B, the Fat Boys and Jay-Z. Welcome to the appointment-only atelier of the couturier Daniel Day, better known as Dapper Dan, and the luxury label Gucci. Their joint venture opened in January, following years of mutual admiration and imitation."

via: The New York Times

This is the real story of American retail
"But it is changing in significant and fundamental ways. In an in-depth study conducted over more than a year, Deloitte dug into what’s really going on in the industry, which employs millions of Americans and accounts for an important share of the country’s GDP. It examined the large-scale changes happening in the US economy, polled a representative sample of 2,000 consumers, and even laid out all public US retailers along a value spectrum for its analysis"

via: Quartz

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