Revenge of the Goths
01/03/2006
Fashion, having feasted on the styles of the cowboy, the trailer park rube, and the poor huddled masses is now making short work of the geeks. Goth, that forbidden, death-worshipping genre of black trenchcoats and bright red lipstick is finally ready for its turn in the mainstream, due in no small part to the efforts of Hot Topic, a retailer so enlightened that it all ... Read More
Posted in Apparel | Permalink
The Best New Way To Get People Staring At Your Crotch
11/15/2005
Living in a city, you're going to randomly run into a few folks who are flashing a lot of cash. There's the greasy hot dog vendor taking his paper bag of singles and quarters to the bank. There's the skinny dude on the subway with the airbrushed Scarface t-shirt hanging down to his knees, carrying his thick roll of twenties. And then there's you, with your wallet full ... Read More
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MTV Knows The Fans Will Work For Free
09/16/2005
In Britain, MTV's Starzine claims to be the world's first magazine to be created by its readers. Bored fans can submit photos and captions about their lives, which the editors then turn into Flash-enabled layouts, which are then voted on by other bored fans. The result is something like MySpace, except everyone gets to vote on who has the most interesting life and the ... Read More
Posted in Apparel, Art, Cities | Permalink
A Laser Is A Terrible Thing to Waste
08/30/2005
Originally, Nike came up with laser technology for the sake of performance, to cut out a few inessential parts of running shoes and shave a few extra micrograms of mass in the process. Now they've deployed this innovation on the new Air Jordan XX's "lace cover," which is coated in doodles of swooshes, Jumpmen, and wild tribal swirlimagigs of the sort you may have seen ... Read More
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The Suspenders Are Killing Us
08/22/2005
We weren't even going to report on the return of casual suspenders. We were worried, after touting cufflinks and fedoras, that our longtime Vulture readers would accuse us of milking the fashions of antiquity. Then we saw a young suspendered man in a camouflage shirt crossing Broad Street, his beard neatly trimmed over mocha skin, and we knew that if we waited but ano ... Read More
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Of Men & Flip-Flops: There ought to be a law
07/25/2005
We're cool with seeing men's feet. We're fine with the Birkenstock, which says, "I am a wandering monk who values comfort over aesthetics." Nor do we have a problem with Dad's Teva sandles, which say, "when the dog and I take long walks together in the woods sometimes we romp through the river." But we draw the line at the flip-flop and its sneering, "the world is my ... Read More
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From the Waists of Wasted Waifs comes the LED Belt Buckle
07/25/2005
LED stands for Light Emitting Diode, the same diodes you've seen doing their thing everywhere from power strips to scoreboards to taillights. And now they're on belt buckles of all places. You can have your very own squadron of LEDs scrolling out "Jimmy Rules" or "Semper Fi" like a personal pelvic stock ticker. That's right, we've now arrived in a future that Wired an ... Read More
Posted in Apparel | Permalink
Spring to Summer is the Season of Ripeness
06/26/2005
As for the young women, we're seeing a palette of colors that evoke highlighters, Lisa Frank stickers, Toucan Sam, and Stephanie on Full House: apricot, bright turquoise, bright lime, bright lemon, bright strawberry fuchsias, often swirled together like sickening stripes of sherbet. There is also the hideous and glassy-eyed wildlife, lacquered, stitched, and appliqued ... Read More
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But Fall & Winter Will Look Like a Roulette Wheel
06/25/2005
By which we mean reds, blacks, reds, blacks and more blacks. These are angry colors, the colors of siege and simmer, that tend to emerge whenever the urban intelligentsia set itself against the capital - look at Moscow in 1905, Paris 1789, Shanghai 1925, New York under Reagan, London under Thatcher. At long last, the outcast Goth kids will have their season in the sun ... Read More
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Today, the Tie, Tomorrow, the Cufflink!
06/25/2005
Ties are cheap. We've seen moving guys and bike messengers all wearing them on the clock. It's getting to be like the 1855, when you had factories full of workingmen wearing ties while they tended furnaces and nailed shoes onto the hooves of horses and got their formalwear covered in soot and dung. What did guys do back then when a tie wasn't a sufficient formalizer? ... Read More
