When Gianni Versace was murdered on the front steps of his Miami mansion in 1997, the company immediately announced that his strong-minded sister, Donatella, would take over as creative director and his brother, Santo, would be CEO. The decision made sense at the time. The luxury fashion business was soaring, thanks to the new wealth of the Internet boom, and Gianni Versace was a favorite of the bling set, with his flashy designs, celebrity friends, and lavish lifestyle. The company was poised to become a luxury megabrand like Gucci, Giorgio Armani, and Louis Vuitton.

Instead, Donatella plunged into profound drug addiction and made erratic business and creative decisions. While competing fashion brands turned into global powers, Versace has watched its sales plummet from $1 billion in 1996 to less than half that today. Major retailers such as Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman have dropped the line. The company has lost both its prestige and design influence.

Starting in 2003, after what Santo described as “seven years of woes,” the Versace siblings acknowledged they couldn’t run the company by themselves and hired a string of outside managers to straighten out the mess. But the outsiders failed too—in large part, Versace sources say, due to Donatella’s and Santo’s resistance to change. “The industry had changed and they did not evolve,” says a former Versace executive who would speak only on condition of anonymity.

Dana Thomas’s piece on the fall of the house of Versace is a great read.

Your morning Ralph Stanley.

This is Why You Were Bored as a Teenager

From NurtureShock:

In his new book, Dr. Joe Allen has concluded that our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time.

Basically, we long ago decided that teens ought to be in school, not in the labor force. Education was their future. But the structure of schools is endlessly repetitive. “From a Martian’s perspective, high schools look virtually the same as sixth grade,” said Allen. “There’s no recognition, in the structure of school, that these are very different people with different capabilities.” Strapped to desks for 13+ years, school becomes both incredibly montonous, artificial, and cookie-cutter.

Emergency government-run health care administered to angry protestor of government-run health care.

andrewromano:

African chair by Marcel Breuer (1921). On display at the Museum of Modern Art as part of “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” through Jan. 25, 2010.

Your daily dose of Romano

Much of the horrific explosion in the national debt—the deficit soared from $248 billion in 2006 to $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009—can be pinned on cyclical factors. When the economy goes in the tank, it creates a fiscal double whammy, gutting tax receipts and boosting demand for the usual (increasing unemployment benefits) and extraordinary (bailouts, stimulus) government spending programs. Spending rose 18 percent and revenue fell 16.6 percent in fiscal 2009—the worst decline since the 1930s. But as the financial system returned from the brink, banks paid back billions in TARP funds. In late July the Office of Management and Budget dialed back its estimate for the fiscal 2009 deficit from $1.84 trillion in May to $1.58 trillion. The stock-market rally, recovering corporate profits, and an expanding economy have translated into higher-than-expected tax receipts. And so, when the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service closed the fiscal year in October, the final numbers came out better than expected: a $1.42 trillion deficit, $138 billion less than was forecast in July.

Gross, on why it may not be as bad as you think.

Your tax dollars at work: as part of their effort to stop doing business in Iraq with companies affiliated with the controversial paramilitary contractor formerly known as Blackwater, the State Department earlier this year hired a rival contractor to fly civilian U.S. personnel around the war-torn country by helicopter. But officials subsequently learned that helicopters the replacement contractor, Dyncorp International, was planning to use for this service didn’t meet government safety standards. So as a result, the Department was forced to extend for several months its air-transport contract with an affiliate of … the contractor formerly known as Blackwater.

Hosenball, on the Xe tip.

When I was a kid all the maps said

resurrecthobbes:

pragmatism:

notthatkindagay:

jasencomstock:

Peking.

When I was a kid there were 2 Germanies.

USSR and/or CCCP were still on most of our maps.

Zaire instead of Democratic Republic of the Congo and Yugoslavia still existed…

“Here Be Dragons”

Today in things we love: The Illustrated ‘Missed Connections’

Today in Things We Wish We'd Written

“Crime of Shadows”, Mark Bowden’s Vanity Fair piece about the gray areas involved when police go trolling online for sex predators, is excellent.