Fall is drawing near, and right on schedule, ads offering discounts on backpacks, notebooks and pencils are beginning to pop up on television and online. But this year, during a pandemic that has school officials agonizing over how and whether to safely reopen, masks are appearing among the glue sticks and glitter as essential back-to-school […]
Read More
The recent outpouring of support for Black-owned businesses has brought attention to fashion labels that work with African prints. The labels, many of them founded by West African designers living in the United States and Britain, are turning the traditional patterns of West African fabric into contemporary American silhouettes. “May was our biggest month ever, […]
Read More
The owner of Men’s Wearhouse and JoS. A. Bank, which once dominated the market for affordable men’s suits, filed for bankruptcy protection late Sunday, as demand plummeted for its corporate clothing with the coronavirus pandemic keeping America’s office workers at home. The company, Tailored Brands, had approximately 1,400 stores and 18,000 employees. It had already […]
Read More
When Beyoncé took a speaking role as Nala — the eventual queen — in the 2019 remake of “The Lion King,” she decided to delve beyond Disney’s Hollywood version of Africa. She added a new, gospel-charged song, “Spirit,” to the film’s soundtrack, and gathered an international coalition, featuring up-and-coming African songwriters and producers, to join […]
Read More
When Bev Barnum, a 35-year-old self-described “suburban wife and mother of two” first sent out the Facebook call for a “wall of moms” to help protect protesters in Portland, Ore., against federal troops, she included one stipulation. “I wanted us to look like moms,” she told The New York Times earlier this week. “Because who […]
Read More
Kansai Yamamoto, the unapologetically flamboyant fashion designer whose love of color, unfettered imagination and exploration of genderless dressing caught the eye of David Bowie and helped define the look of his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, died in Japan on July 21. He was 76. The cause was leukemia, a statement on his office website confirmed. […]
Read More
TOKYO — Rieko Kawanishi is the first to admit that the pearl-laden mask she designed is not the most effective defense against the coronavirus. “It’s full of holes,” she said with a laugh. But her handmade face covering, which she recommends wearing over a regular mask, reflects a sudden burst of creative attention in the […]
Read More
Michael Preysman, a founder and the chief executive of Everlane, a fashion brand that targets the ethically minded with minimalist basics, stood onstage in May 2019 at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit and preached the gospel of his company. “Everlane launched eight years ago with the basic principle that the fashion industry and retail in general […]
Read More
This article is part of a series exploring how the Americans With Disabilities Act has shaped modern life for people with disabilities. I have always believed that fashion is the window to the soul. As a Black disabled woman with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder that affects movement on the right side of my body, […]
Read More
TAICHUNG, Taiwan — At Wansho Laundry in central Taiwan, most dirty clothes dropped off to be steamed or washed or dry-cleaned end up right back in the hands of their rightful owners, cleaner than when they arrived. Abandoned garments, however, can end up on Instagram. The blouses and skirts and trousers adorn the bodies of […]
Read More
When Sara Ziff, a fashion model and labor activist, boarded a train in Philipstown, N.Y., in June 2019 after a four-day hike along the Appalachian Trail, glamour certainly didn’t get on board with her. “I was thoroughly exhausted and smelly,” said Ms. Ziff, who has been the face of campaigns for designers like Stella McCartney […]
Read More
When the bankruptcy filing of Brooks Brothers was announced this month, I received more condolence emails and texts than I had when my beloved dog Henry died. The American haberdashery, with a pedigree matched by none, was in serious trouble. James Madison’s suits, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wardrobe and the Union Army’s uniforms during the Civil […]
Read More
On Thursday, more than 190 organizations spanning 36 countries issued a call to action, seeking formal commitments from clothing brands to cut all ties with suppliers implicated in Uighur forced labor and to end all sourcing from the Xinjiang region of China in the next twelve months. Roughly one in five cotton garments sold globally […]
Read More
The owner of Ann Taylor and Lane Bryant, which just a few years ago was one of the country’s largest clothing retailers for women and girls, filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, after declining sales and high debt were exacerbated by store closures mandated by coronavirus lockdowns. The company, Ascena Retail Group, will close “a select […]
Read More
The relationship between photographer and subject has been fraught since long before Susan Sontag characterized it as part of the “shady commerce between art and truth” in her 1977 collection of essays On Photography. Photographers, after all, make the eye of the beholder literal, placing the subject consistently at their mercy to be idealized, stripped […]
Read More
At the end of February, just as the coronavirus was beginning to cast its pall over Europe, an elite crowd that included the likes of Anna Wintour, Jeff Bezos and Seth Meyers gathered in the gilded 19th-century halls of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs in Paris to watch Diane von Furstenberg be awarded […]
Read More
When the coronavirus prompted the Council of Fashion Designers of America to postpone the 2020 CFDA Fashion Awards, the annual “Oscars of the Fashion World” (industry prom) originally scheduled for June 8, it seemed like another glittering evening of voyeurism and celebration had fallen to the pandemic. On Monday, however, the organization revealed that while […]
Read More
In 1964 Andy Warhol trained a camera on the Empire State Building for about six and a half hours, in a meditation on the nature of monuments, thought and perception. On Friday, Alessandro Michele of Gucci trained a camera — actually a few — on a Gucci campaign shoot for 12 hours in a livestream […]
Read More
“I was a strange and rebellious child,” says the designer Isabel Marant, who, after her French father and German mother separated when she was 7, was largely raised — in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine — by her stepmother, who was from Martinique and dressed in head-to-toe Yves Saint Laurent. The glamour wasn’t wasted on […]
Read More
The editor of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, said he was racially profiled after being told by a security guard to “use the loading bay” as he entered the magazine’s offices in London this week. Mr. Enninful, who in 2017 became the first man and the first Black editor to take the helm of Britain’s most […]
Read More
We have seen the future of European fashion, and it is California. Peering out from behind the curtain of a long lockdown, designers in Paris and Milan seemed unanticipatedly hopeful during the digital shows this past week. It was not so much that they were willing to forgo the inimitable theater of the fashion show […]
Read More
I feel it sometimes, like a phantom limb, banging against my side as I move around the house. I sense it nestled in the crook of my arm as I wander from room to room. It was the one-time receptacle of all I held immediately important: purse, receipts, identification, charger, books, tissues (fresh and used), […]
Read More
Until about two weeks ago, Dario Calmese didn’t know he was the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of Vanity Fair. But he had a suspicion, so he asked the editors, who went digging. “To the best of our knowledge, it is the first Vanity Fair cover made by a Black photographer,” Radhika Jones […]
Read MoreWelcome to the weekend. Though the pandemic has put so much on hold, we can still salvage something from plans gone awry. If you were supposed to be getting down on the dance floor at a wedding this summer, why not blast these D.J.s’ classics and dance around your home instead? And as we face […]
Read More