VIP: Intellectuals

Many retailers offer discounts on clothes and goods to celebrities and athletes (athletes can fall under celebrity status, but I insist on calling specific attention to the group for purposes to be discussed later in the blog.) Every company that I have worked for offers discounts or free product to celebrities that come into the store.
At Ralph Lauren, I was flipping through the V.I.P. list and celebrities receive up to a 50% discount on clothes. Celebrities like Jon Stewart, Brad Pitt and athletes made the list. From a P.R. perspective, a retailer would want to give celebrities a discount so they are seen wearing their clothes. From a proponent-of-the-arts perspective, I would like to see more intellectuals make the list.
Why not authors, painters, dancers and opera singers?? Is John Updike not famous enough to make the VIP list? Why can't Paul Cezanne walk into Paul Smith and get 50% off a tailored suit? (Aside from the fact that he is dead.) Were these artists not worthy enough of a discount from "fine" retailers? If it were up to me, more artists would make the list and fewer athletes. This is just another reflection of our societity's confusingly, sports-obsessed nature. Let's fill our heads with something other than meat for a change.

Imperfection is the new perfection.

GASP

Who wishes that this was real?
Movie: Death of a President

Great new book. I recommend anyone interested about what happened to the famous Dutch filmmaker to read it. Pretty fast read with some interesting points.

More Than Just a Shirt

These days brands are discovering what it really means to be philanthropic. Consumers no longer just want to buy a shirt, they want a shirt, service and to cure the world of AIDS, poverty, famine and drought. Consumers today almost expect companies to be donating money to humanitarian programs or working with community service groups. Young consumers expect the most of big-business. They are the ones who really care about the aid money incorporated into the price of whatever they buy. People feel good when they buy and when they donate, so why not integrate the two? More and more companies are developing altruistic programs that make mundane companies like the Gap seem like the United Nations.
With Gap's new Red Campaign, consumers can buy Gap Red products and profits will help combat AIDS in Africa. You can also buy a Motorola Red phone to help fight Aids and a bottle of Kiehl's body wash. Fighting the virus, feeling good about it and getting something for it; Ralph Lauren also offers products that donate money to help combat breast cancer.
Thinking critically, we must look at the details of these programs. Ralph Lauren only donates 10% of the profits to breast cancer. Kiehl's donate the entire sale price but the body wash only comes in one scent, and half of the sales of Gap's Red products go to fighting AIDS (and I only discovered that through reading press releases. I was not able to find the actual amount donated on the regular website.)
Yes, it is a good thing that these companies are socially aware, but are they in it for the right purpose? Or do they just want to seem in-tune with younger consumers?
Many younger designers who are more in-tune with what young people want are utilizing better methods to help improve the world -- methods that will help undeveloped nations become more self-sufficient. Many young designers are now using Fair Trade, organic cottons. This means that cotton farmers are being paid fair wages for their labor and that they aren't using harmful chemicals on their farms either. Coffee houses having been popping up that only serve Equal Exchange coffee, which again, ensures proper royalties paid to coffee farmers in developing nations. Younger people who are also building new shops, home, buildings, etc. are more aware of the need to build green. It is not enough to blindly donate money, businesses need to start making grassroots changes in the ways they operate their businesses. Google has announced that it's headquarters will soon run on 30% solar power collected from panels around its facility. News like that from Google will keep me from switching to Yahoo or AOL. The NYTimes is building a new green building in Midtown and are reducing the amount of paper used in their newspapers. This will also keep me with the NYTimes (although the reduction of paper-use could be just for cutting costs, it is still a good thing.) Companies that are truly altruistic transform business practices that help change the world from the bottom up.

This is great. I wish I had a whole stack of these stickers to put on ads that I absolutely hate.

Monduli

In Tanzania, I felt life.
I lived life.
It wasn't fed to me through a TV,
or given to me in a shopping bag.
Life was real.
As real as the breathing forests
as lively as the innocent children.
In Tanzania, you don't forget what life feels like.
You know you are breathing
you know you are feeling
you know you are hurting
you are living.
Here it is different.
Sometimes we forget we are living.

Outfitting Urban Thieves

For most of suburban America, Urban Outfitters is their outlet to everything that is cool, trendy, and "avant-garde." They see it as a source for what people in the big cities are wearing and they feel hip shopping there. Within the grassroots fashion designer circle, Urban Outfitters is seen as a very EVIL empire. Urban Outfitters has been known to spy on up-and-coming designers and steal their designs. They have also been known to copy indie designers and then quickly mass-produce and claim their designs.

Johnny Cupcakes (indie designer in Boston) released a few tee shirts displaying cupcakes falling from an airplane. A few weeks later, similar tee shirts were seen in Urban Outfitters picturing slightly different cupcakes falling from slightly different airplanes. Clearly industry espionage and theft! The current tees at Urban Outfitters are suspiciously similar to original brands such as Barking Irons, Rag and Bone and Beard and Bangs.

This kind of design theft kills business for the designers who are truly creating from experience, thought and life. It is easy for Urban to milk money from suburban kids desperately striving to be urban-hip. Good designers deserve all the attention they can get and Urban Outfitters creates an impermeable roadblock for those designers who are truly innovative and artistic.

Don't you hate it when someone steals an idea that you thought of first? How do you think designers feel when Urban steals their designs and then claims to be authentic and bohemian? Urban Outfitters executes its manipulating marketing strategy toward teens very well and tries to foster this feeling of faux authenticity and bohemia. In reality, Urban is the antithesis of everything that is authentic and bohemian. I would even say that they are doing a good job at killing the ideologies of bohemia.

Support local designers. Don't shop at Urban Outfitters. Know before you buy.

Stop tanning, start planning!

Boston City planners and developers need to really get their acts together. First off, are there any bike lanes in Boston? Cambridge, yes. I have yet to see a single bike lane in the cit of Boston. Why not? Bike lanes in Boston would do this city nothing but good. Reducing traffic, slashing obesity and creating a more cosmopolitan environment are all the obvious benefits of bike lanes. As we all know, the T sucks, and bike lanes would help to create a more robust local economy. An individual’s mobility would be greatly increased and they would be more likely to ride their bikes to places that they normally wouldn't want to walk to or take the T to. In Boston, people fear cars, and bike lanes would be comforting for those who want to ride their bikes and feel that doing so interferes with automobile traffic. Overall, bike lanes are brilliant! What is Boston waiting for?

Government Center = a terse, sterile, Stalin-like urban wasteland. What is with all that brick? And what the FUCK is with the Gov't Center T stop? It looks like someone threw up bricks and just landed on top of the T station. Why not green? Why not more trees? Why not a more desirable place for Bostonians to gather? Currently, the Government Center space is not in any way inviting. Just because someone put some benches down doesn't mean that people will sit on them. Who wants to sit and enjoy life in the middle of a field of bricks and scorching sun? Did the planners take cues from Lucifer when designing the space? That's the only "person" I can imagine that would actually enjoy sitting there. Did GREEN escape their vernacular at that time? Or was the point to keep every breathing organism away from City Hall / Government Center? All I know is that something really needs to be altered over there.

Escalating Anger

On my way to work I usually walk past the John Hancock building and sit on a bench in the park for a bit before I have to head in to work. I usually sit there because generally, there is something interesting, exciting or drama-filled going on there. Homeless people yelling at each other, tourists looking confused and the odd-looking Bostonians set the scene in that area.
I usually enter the Copley shops using the Westin entrance. There is an escalator that is only wide enough to fit one person, and on a good day I can walk right up the escalator. On a bad day however, some lazy beast that can’t find the energy to walk up a flight of moving stairs halts my hike up the escalator! Why is it that people stop walking once they hit the escalator? Was not the point of an escalator to accelerate one's trip up a flight of stairs? It was an idea by an urban planner who thought that decreasing one's time on stairs would help the flow of transportation better. Instead, what we have is an urban disaster created fueled by laziness and the general opinion of "saving one's energy." For what? Eating, and riding escalators.
People need to start walking up escalators and using them in the way in which they were intended to be used. One can walk up a flight of stairs faster than an escalator brings you up, so why not walk up the escalator? Even if you feel the need to stand, at least keep to the right and avoid being scoffed at by informed escalator riders.