Gawker: thursgay styles

Steampunk

Sheila — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:48:37 EDT

Steampunk! According to the NYT's Thursgay Styles, it's a "subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives." They describe steampunkers as fusspots with a taste for gaslight-era style: "he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass." But steampunk's been around for a while, of course. Despite the length of the piece, glossed over is the fact that this hot new movement started with a book called the Difference Engine—in 1990!

Steampunk isn't completely about clothes and accessories; it's an offshoot of the science fiction genre cyberpunk. Author of cyberpunk novel Neuromancer William Gibson (coiner of the word "cyberspace") collaborated with Bruce Sterling for the classic steampunk alternate history novel The Difference Engine, set in Victorian Britain. Just saying!

Anyway, it must be reaching a critical mass: the recent 24th Chaos Communications Congress, a hacker event, had steampunk as the theme for their ball. And a steampunk store? Open soon in Manhattan. You'll be able to finally buy a brass case for your iPhone.

I just realized: our new offices are totally steampunk—check out the vintage reception desk!

Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds [NYT]

[Photo: Kit by Nadya Lev Photo]

The Department Stores Have All Become Museums

Sheila — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:42:09 EDT

In the future, Andy Warhol once said, "All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores." This has already happened: see the Prada store on Broadway, the former location of the Guggenheim Museum's SoHo branch. It's also occurred at Christian Louboutin, the French purveyor of $900 classic fuck-me pumps, the NYT's Thursday Styles section reveals. Here, the shoes are displayed fetishistically in cases, with red carpet and mirrors... yet, they are not available.

Critical Shopper Cintra Wilson reveals a scene of hysterical tourists and WASPS demanding to buy them. But there's nothing left in their size! Or anybody's size!

"There is simply nothing," [sales clerk] Bubble lamented with an oversize shrug. "Your size is the most popular one. I wish I could sell you some shoes. All we have is 5, 6 and 40... We don't know anything! We have no computer. We don't know if they have anything on Horatio," Bubble said, referring to the downtown Louboutin boutique, "or at Bergdorf, or in Los Angeles."

The Louboutin store has surpassed the outmoded task of selling shoes. Now all they need to do is create a demand; the sales are beyond the point:

"We want since two days!" the man bellowed, the brass buttons on his nautical blazer melting in fright.
His wife let out a visceral moan and gnashed her perfect teeth; her eyes rolled upward in despair as she clutched in rueful hands the wrong size. For a moment she resembled the anguished Mary of Michelangelo's Pietà — only evil.

And so the department store has become the museum. But has anyone been to the Museum of Modern Art Store lately? They've got some rad scarves for sale.

Open-Toed Fetishes (and More) [NYT]

Breaking: Girls Wear Girl Clothes

Pareene — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:33:02 EDT

We were going to hate on this prototypically obvious Thursgay Styles piece about how some women wear dresses even though shockingly unfeminine "trousers" are the next big thing (Katharine Hepburn could not be reached for comment) but we ended up being kinda charmed by it because basically it's Spring and it's getting nice out and Guy Trebay quotes that bit in Citizen Kane where Mr. Bernstein talks about the girl on the ferry. Are we going soft? If it helps, the piece on how men are wearing patterns that clash on purpose suitably annoyed us. Anyway: pants! On girls! That'll be the day! [NYT]

I'll Have What He's Having

Pareene — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:00:09 EST

COMPARED with an array of beverages, sports drinks are "wildly skewed to non-bloggers," said David Lockwood, a director of research at Mintel International, a market research group. Part of the reason, he said, is that bloggers tend to avoid the lack of mind- or personality-altering affects.

"Getting some of the benefits of a sports drink without all the 'physical activity' is something a lot of bloggers at the MacBook are looking for," said Alex Balk, the diet and nutrition editor at Radar, a magazine for bloggers. Alex Pareene, the day editor at Gawker.com and an alcoholic, tested three drinks while typing nonsense about Nicole Richie's baby, banning commenters and obsessively checking traffic stats. He found them suitable for a range of activities, but mostly for moderate-intensity Denton-ignoring.

COFFEE $1 for a large cup at the bodega across the street, Bed-Stuy. This hot beverage carries a decent-sized dose of the stimulant caffeine, and "allows me to become alert enough to finally trawl through and occasionally respond to the hundreds of typo-corrections, emails from flacks, student loan reminders, and obscenity-filled tirades from former Gawker employees that accumulate and are ignored each afternoon as the previous morning's buzz wears off," Mr. Pareene said. "Then I break for lunch."

TECATE $9 for six 12 oz. cans, same bodega. This refreshing Mexican beer (or "cerveza") is "cheaper and better than that Corona shit," Mr. Pareene said. He recommends placing the one mug you haven't drunkenly broken yet in the freezer before use, and enjoying your beer ice cold and frosty, as your landlord fucking refuses to find any medium in the building's heat between "just not on at all" and "Turkish bath" and you can't open the windows because the cats will run away. Best at "lunch," spent while staring with dead eyes at 1,000+ unread headlines in Google Reader, wondering what percentage of them are from certain Tumblrs.

OLD OVERHOLT STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY $16 for a 1 ltr bottle, the liquor store. An excellent source of alcohol.

I'll Have What She's Having [NYT]

Who Are ASmallWorld's Members? Are They Prosties?

Doree Shafrir — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:20:57 EDT

Today's Thursgay Styles piece in the Times on ASmallWorld.net, the "exclusive" social networking site with 150,000 members (this guy, pictured, among them), says members include "Hollywood strivers, fashion models, financiers and minor European royalty." But there's a dark side. And maybe a sexy side!

But users also include publicists and party promoters who use the site as a personal database. In theory, they are just a few clicks away from [Harvey] Weinstein, a member, or boldface names like Naomi Campbell, Quentin Tarantino and Frédéric Fekkai. (Sycophants beware: members who engage in cyber-social climbing may find themselves exiled to the chilly Siberia of a Big World, aSmallWorld's less-exclusive sister site.)

Hmm! So, like, even if they're hangers-on, they're probably still relatively rich or connected. Right? Well, not according to the email we received the other day in response to our post about hookers on Craigslist.

A Small World, the private and by invite only is notorious for hookers. 80% of their members [are] men from the Middle East. They were blocked in Dubai and set up a mirror site to continue with this practice.

Oh, really now. Maybe they'll start a mail-order bride site next.

A Facebook for the Few [NYT]

How Alex Kuczynski Almost Became A Blogger

Doree Shafrir — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:53:22 EDT

A few months ago, the Times decided to ramp up some of their more lucrative "verticals" on their website—including Fashion and Style. They had lots of ideas, which they put on the company wiki for everyone to read and comment on. But did all of their plans come to fruition? Well, let's just say we were spared the disaster that inevitably would have been an Alex Kuczynski blog. The wiki, and what really happened, follow.

Target: The sophisticated shopper to the aspirational young fashionista
The names: Cathy Horyn, Alex Kuczynski

Expand coverage of daily trends and fashion phenomena

Cathy Horyn & Suzy Menkes fashion blog (launching Jan 07)

Product finder/database: Trish's Editor's Picks underway for Nov 30 launch

Discuss e-commerce revenue stream, shopping partnerships

Launch a Critical Shopper area on the site, Alex Kuczynski blog (?)

Hire a reporter to expand coverage of trade/retail/consumer news about fashion in order to become an industry must-read

More slideshows and more video

Acquisition idea: Glam.com

Collaborators/Competitors: WWD.com (Women's Wear Daily), Glam.com, Style.com, future style site from Elizabeth Spiers of Dealbreaker.com

So! The NYT was, perhaps, taken by surprise when Alex Kuczynski decided to stop writing the Critical Shopper column, if they had been planning on building out the entire Styles section around her. Whoops! Hence the promotion of Michelle Slatalla as the new Alex Kuczynski, we suppose.

The fashion blog looks like something else that didn't turn out exactly as planned, if originally the blog was going to be done by both Cathy Horyn and Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune. The IHT is, of course, owned by the Times, but Menkes clearly gave the idea of blogging the cold shoulder.

Product finder/database? We think that never existed. Ditto the "e-commerce revenue stream" and "shopping partnerships." Wonder how the rest of the paper would feel about "shopping partnerships"?

The "Critical Shopper area" on the site idea seems to have been shelved, now that there's a rotating cast of characters writing the column. And honestly, it's a little disappointing that the Alex K. blog never came to fruition, if only because, well, MATERIAL, hello?

"Hire a reporter to expand coverage of trade/retail/consumer news about fashion in order to become an industry must-read"—yeah, that hasn't really happened. The Times does a good job covering fashion from a critical perspective and also a decent job covering retail from the business desk. Eric Wilson is the closest they come to expanding coverage of this sector, but he's pretty much relegated to Thursday Styles, and he rarely breaks news.

"More slideshows and more video"—yes, check.

Acquisition idea: Glam.com. Really? Right now, they have a feature up called "What Would Scarlett Wear? See If You Can Guess What Johansson Wears Around NYC." We can't imagine that meshing so well with the rest of the Times' content, but then again, they do own About.com.

With regard to their perceived competitors, all we can say is, interesting! The aforementioned WWD is a trade publication; does the Times really think it can compete with its breadth? Maybe! Style.com's slide shows and video are updated much more frequently than the Times' fashion coverage is; to really compete there, they'd have to make a few more hires, it seems. And as much as we love Cathy Horyn's blog (really, we do—have you read it lately? It's weirdly, almost absurdly meditative and good, and her commenters are batty), it's not quite in the same vein as Fashionista. (She also updates it roughly once every two weeks when there are no runway shows.) But at least the Times has realized one important truth: The Internet will save them. Maybe.

When The Kucz Is Tired Of Personal Shopping, We Are Tired Of Life

abalk2 — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 09:51:21 EST

We've all been wondering, and we've shared the same fears, but WWD brings something like confirmation today:

For those wondering about the status of The New York Times' Thursday Styles column "The Critical Shopper," which has traditionally been the provenance of plastic surgery aficionado Alex Kuczynski, Style editor Trip Gabriel said the fate of the column is still undecided. One thing is for sure: "Alex is all shopped out for the moment." Kuczynski is still contributing occasionally to the column and to the Thursday and Sunday Styles sections, Gabriel said, but remains a freelancer rather than a staffer.

Noooooooooooo! This cannot be happening! That was a guaranteed post! We'll be pouring out a little ros on this Thursday's print edition.

Shopped and Dropped? [WWD]

Freemans Sporting Club: Utterly Gay, Yet Ball-Free

Emily Gould — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:45:37 EST

"It's just like not being all those fucking metrosexual dickfaces," Freemans Sporting Club member Jack Dakin told the Observer back in November. Oh really? Thursgay's Critical Shopper column details the wares of the Lower East Side taxidermy-filled barbershop'n'$2,000 suits emporium, and it paints a very metrosexual, very dickfacey picture. $390 hand-stitched rubber wellies! $3,000 custom tailoring! A $40 fade haircut! But there is one genre of hipster accessory the FSC doesn't sell, writes Shopper-sub Horatio Silva: "The focus here is clearly on authentic work wear and on the trappings of masculinity—in other words, on the importance of being Ernest Hemingway. Which explains why there are no man jewels available at this Big Papa's House."

Stag Party At The Hunting Lodge [NYT]
Earlier: Freeman's He-Man Woman Haters No Metrosexual Dickfaces Club

We Knew That Evite Article Sounded Familiar, Several Times Over

Doree Shafrir — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:55:46 EST

Earlier today, we noted the moronic story about Evite responses in Thursgay Styles, which also seemed at least two years behind the curve. Turns out, it was!

Random House publicist Sloane Crosley wrote about this exact same phenomenon exactly two years ago in the Village Voice (remember when the Voice was actually ahead of the curve? Okay, try harder), and she had a better take on it, to boot:

No one cares that you might be out of town but your flight gets in at 7 p.m., so if you literally run from the airport . . . save a shot for me, Bob! Because Evite is a public forum in a private space, I am still working on reminding myself I don't actually have to read the responses. There's nothing more irritating than a private joke played out among a small segment of the invitees.

Tina: "I'll be there . . . as long as I can touch Bob's pineapple."

Jeff: "Happy birthday man, even though we all know your pineapple has been canned since Atlantic City."

But maybe Stephanie Rosenbloom, who wrote the Styles piece, found inspiration more recently.

Last month, Meghan Daum (she of "I moved to Nebraska and wrote a book about it" and "I love Jewish men" fame) wrote an Evite piece in the LAT that sounds reeeeeally familiar to anyone who read today's piece:

It's not enough that Evite allows you to see who else has been invited to the event and whether they're planning to attend (if you can decipher some of the screen names), it's all but mandatory to accompany your "yes" or "no" with an extremely witty remark. These remarks turn the whole enterprise into a cutthroat game of one-upmanship.
If one recipient (let's call him MikeTheDude77) responds to a 1980s nostalgia party invitation with "I'm there, bro — gonna put on the Spandex unitard and party like it's 1979," MissShakeNBake has no choice but to raise the bar with "will come bearing Ruinite and the Jane Fonda workout video!" It's also customary to respond with inside jokes that only the host and a few select invitees will understand — "I'll bring the fish sticks if Adam supplies the Oxford English Dictionary."

At least we know where Stephanie Rosenbloom gets her ideas now.

Eviting Trouble [LAT]
E-nough is E-nough [VV]