"Weekend Reading" is a weekly rundown of our favorite stories from around the web.
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You Won’t Have to Wait in Line for Micromerch
"Niche stars and not-quite celebrities are churning out namesake products — T-shirts, coloring books, tissue boxes — made for a dedicated few."

via: The New York Times

Inside the London Leisure Palace of Design Phenom Luke Edward Hall
"At only 28 years of age, Luke Edward Hall has emerged as a mixed media creative wunderkind to watch. His Cocteau-like drawings and paintings have appeared in Burberry campaigns and on a line of ceramics of his own design. He’s curated an exhibition of young designers at Christie’s, and designed a line of beachwear with a hotel in Positano, Italy. He even has a collaboration with uber-WASP Palm Beach brand Stubbs & Wootton on jaunty, jewel tone velvet slippers emblazoned with columns and snakes. “A lot of people are quite bored by minimalism,” Hall tells me over the phone from London, where he lives in an apartment that might as well be a temple for minimalism-haters everywhere. His three-room Camden apartment, which he shares with boyfriend Duncan Campbell, is an exhibition of his whimsical aesthetic universe, which is so dialed-in it’s no wonder he’s developed a devoted following and long client list, which now reaches from the world of objects and clothing to interior design."

via: GQ Style

A Nineteen-Year-Old Chef Masters the Rules of Fine Dining
"s a kid, Flynn McGarry knew exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up, but, unlike most kids, he didn’t have to wait. He started his career as a professional chef around the age of twelve, running a supper club out of a kitchen that his parents installed in his bedroom at their Los Angeles home. (It was modelled after the one at Chicago’s Michelin-starred Alinea, where McGarry later interned.) By fifteen, he’d been featured on the cover of the Times Magazine and was working several days a week at a restaurant in downtown L.A. The supper club led to pop-ups at restaurants in L.A. and New York. This year, at the age of nineteen, he’s opened a place all his own, called Gem, on the Lower East Side, where he oversees both the kitchen and the dining room, serving many of the dishes himself, wearing an apron with a pair of tweezers tucked neatly over the collar."

via: The New Yorker

Why Brands Are Under Increasing Pressure to Be Transparent About What They Believe In
"Few brands have the freedom—or the chutzpah—Cards Against Humanity does. But nearly all are feeling the pressure to take stronger social, environmental and political stances, especially from the youngest consumers to flex their marketing might, Generation Z. How nimbly brands navigate that minefield is crucial to their future survival."

via: AdWeek

All in the Family: Why Heritage Logos Are Back After Having Never Left
"When considering clothes, couture, and other forms of commerce in the fashion industry, it is easy enough to say that questions of regional politics and social mores—to put it bluntly—don’t matter. Clothes are clothes, and politics are politics. To put it more delicately: there are two histories to the Versace family, one that concerns lineage and one that concerns fashion, and they don’t always intersect. But if we are to read and understand their logos, then both histories are of equal importance."

via: Ssense

Style Is an Algorithm
"Amazon’s Echo Look, currently available by invitation only but also on eBay, allows you to take hands-free selfies and evaluate your fashion choices. “Now Alexa helps you look your best,” the product description promises. Stand in front of the camera, take photos of two different outfits with the Echo Look, and then select the best ones on your phone’s Echo Look app. Within about a minute, Alexa will tell you which set of clothes looks better, processed by style-analyzing algorithms and some assistance from humans. So I try to find my most stylish outfit, swapping out shirts and pants and then posing stiffly for the camera. I shout, “Alexa, judge me!” but apparently that’s unnecessary."

via: Racked

Stella McCartney: ‘Only 1% of clothing is recycled. What are we doing?
"The designer’s ethical stance made her a style outsider – but now the industry is finally catching up. Ahead of a new V&A show, she talks about reclaiming her name, the joy of nature and the trouble with fast fashion"

via: The Guardian

Jack Ma Condemns Trade War: “Is America Going to Forfeit This Opportunity?”
"In a post published on Alibaba’s blog Alizila Wednesday, CEO Jack Ma questioned the rationality of the emerging trade war between China and the United States. Entitled “Trade War Kills Jobs, Opportunity and Hope”, Ma’s piece is an unusually direct way, analogous to Trump’s tweets, of communicating a familiar argument: there are no winners in a trade war."

via: Jing Daily

Watch the Dramatic Trailer for the New Alexander McQueen Documentary
"'McQueen offers a vivid portrait of the tortured but inspired auteur’s work and persona,' a synopsis on the Tribeca Film Festival reads. Directed and produced by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, who came together to co-direct the film, it captures the short life of the late British fashion designer."

via: Dazed

"The Future Is Here": A Design Conversation With Kanye West
"The hip-hop mogul interviews his interior designer Axel Vervoordt and reveals his own plans for a philosophy book, thoughts on Virgil Abloh going to Louis Vuitton, and his future goals for the brand: "I don’t wish to be number one anymore, I wish to be water.""

via: The Hollywood Reporter

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