“So TNT is drama, TBS is comedy, MTV is young lifestyle and music, Discovery...
Lyle Lovett- If I Had A Boat
If I were Roy Rogers
I’d sure enough be single
I couldn’t bring myself to marrying old...
A view of Nueva Esperanza cemetery during “Day of the Dead” celebrations on the outskirts of Lima, Peru on November 1, 2009. From The Big Picture.
wu-tang clan - “visionz”
inspectah deck produced this FIRE FIRE FIRE beat. masta killa should be kicked out of the clan for...
Urban Improv of the Day: Improv Everywhere agents take the Trump Tower atrium by storm with yet another spontaneous musical mission. (The mission...
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.
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.
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
Gross, on why it may not be as bad as you think.
Hosenball, on the Xe tip.
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’
“Crime of Shadows”, Mark Bowden’s Vanity Fair piece about the gray areas involved when police go trolling online for sex predators, is excellent.