♥ Nordstrom recently added a few hundred new styles to its sale section, including the Reformation Lou Midi Dress, the sleeved version of the Reformation Rou Dress that I own and love (reviewed here).
♥ The Company That Sells Love to America Had a Dark Secret (The New York Times): “Fourteen years was a long time to abide deep and overt discrimination at your job. It’s also a long time to be a named claimant in a lawsuit, which at one point grew to include nearly 70,000 women. It is a long time for that lawsuit to have made just about no progress toward a resolution. And it is a long time to wonder just how an enormous, publicly traded company was able to keep the details of its working conditions from its shareholders and from the public, and why those secrets might have been the company’s most valuable assets after all.”
♥ The Instagram Aesthetic Is Over (The Atlantic): “Fast-rising young influencers … all reject the notion of a curated feed in favor of a messier and more unfiltered vibe. While Millennial influencers hauled DSLR cameras to the beach and mastered photo editing to get the perfect shot, the generation younger than they are largely post directly from their mobile phones … many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse.”
♥ Lululemon Chief: ‘No Need’ to Discount $100 Yoga Pants (The Wall Street Journal): “Lululemon Chief Executive Calvin McDonald said that despite the launch of many copycat products, the retailer won’t discount or expand beyond its own stores or website. ‘There is no need … We are in the early innings of our growth’ … Lululemon still has lower brand awareness than major competitors … In a 1,000-person survey conducted by the firm, roughly half of U.S. respondents hadn’t heard of Lululemon. The result changed to about one-fourth when counting respondents with household incomes greater than $75,000 … Comparable sales at Lululemon increased 18% in the fiscal year ending in January after increasing 7% the prior year.”
♥ Raw and Red-Hot (Harvard Magazine): “… the idea that inflammation—constant, low-level, immune-system activation —could be at the root of many noncommunicable diseases is a startling claim … Critics might suggest that inflammation is just a symptom in these diseases, rather than a cause. But … ‘Chronic inflammation is uniformly damaging and is absolutely causal to the process, because if you interfere with it, you can reverse the pathology.’ And this ability to control such diseases simply by reversing inflammation is a biological response, dating far back to the time of a common ancestor.”
♥ The Rise of Live-Streamer Style (The New York Times): “… video game culture is more visible than ever; the streaming app Twitch’s audience has come to rival that of the largest cable news networks, with hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers. And the gamers in those broadcasts want to look good … Esports organizations have outfitted players with custom jerseys since the early 2000s. But the influx of apparel brands treating those players as they would athletic stars is tied to how lucrative the pro gaming industry has become.”
♥ Neiman Marcus is running a 2-day beauty event: take $50 off online beauty purchases of $200+ with code BEAUTY. Plus, use code GLAMGIFT for a free beauty bag with any $125 beauty purchase. Shipping is free on all orders.
♥ Another beauty event that started today is the Sephora Beauty Insider Spring Bonus Event. Rouge members can use code HEYROUGE at checkout for 20% off.
♥ What’s Better Than 2-Day Amazon Shipping? 1 Day (Bloomberg): “… this speed goal, an effort that … would add $800 million in costs in the second quarter … For a while, that one-two punch of value and speed was unmatched in retail. But lately, the brick-and-mortar giants have caught up and, in some ways, have even undercut Amazon … The company spends about 12 percent of its sales — or $30 billion in the last year — for sorting, transporting and other shipping-related tasks.”
♥ Why Investors Don’t Care That Snap and Lyft Are Hemorrhaging Money (The Wall Street Journal): “The lesson here is one that has been with us since the Dutch invented the public company 400 years ago: Growth sells … What makes tech companies different? The belief that their product has a much brighter future where revenues will eventually rise to cover an astronomical cost base, and that they’ll eventually be freed of the cutthroat competition that forces them to buy market share.”
♥ Renters Are Mad. Presidential Candidates Have Noticed. (The New York Times): “Renters heavily overlap with key Democratic constituencies, including younger adults, African-Americans and Hispanics, and urban residents. Voter turnout of renters in 2016 was about 12 percentage points lower than that of homeowners.”
♥ Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little Kids (The Atlantic): “More and more, adults are sprinkling their speech with the language of children … The adoption of some of these linguistic tics by adults … has given rise to a register we might call kidspeak. It’s a new way of sounding ‘real’ … Clearly, kidspeak affords its users certain rhetorical advantages—the way it playfully softens blows is part of why younger people on social media now often couch what they say to one another in the toddler-esque.”
♥ Take 50% off select styles at LOFT until 04/28/19, no code needed; discount taken in cart. My picks: Double Strap Sandals, Floral Button Cami, Bouquet Cardigan, Floral Flutter Jumpsuit, and Tossed Flower Wrap Dress.
♥ What’s New About Conspiracy Theories? (The New Yorker): “The Internet revolution ‘has displaced the gatekeepers, the producers, editors, and scholars who decided what was worthy of dissemination’ … This has opened the way for ‘conspiracy entrepreneurs’ who proffer ‘a seemingly infinite array of wild accusations’ … what’s new about the ‘new conspiracism’ is the number of people exposed to it … after all, almost two billion people click on YouTube videos every month.”
♥ Bike—and Even Run—in These Tailored Suits (The Wall Street Journal): “… more brands [are] adding stretch, anti-wrinkle and moisture-wicking via wool-blend ‘performance fabrics’ to suits.”
♥ Yes, You Can Play With Your Clothes (The New York Times): “Fidget spinners may be so 2017, but their explosive sales revealed … our compulsive need for something (anything) to occupy our hands, calm our nerves and focus our thoughts … Enter Fidget Fashion: the dangling fringe, reversible sequins, jingly charms and sliding jewelry that is suddenly ubiquitous at brands including Paco Rabanne, Altuzarra, Gucci and Loewe.”
♥ Inside The World Of Stay-At-Home Moms Who Blog For Profit (Buzzfeed): “What’s different about this specific blog ecosystem is that the product many of the bloggers are selling is guides to setting up your own affiliate-linked blog or Shopify site, where you can sell your printables. The content of those printables and blog posts themselves seems secondary — their primary purpose is to give the blog a reason to exist … Suddenly the oddly haphazard nature of the posts I was seeing made sense. These aren’t blogs primarily meant for telling a story, or establishing someone’s digital personality — they’re blogs for earning money. And among the most popular items for sale, it would seem, are guides for how to make money through blogging. They are blogs about blogging.”
♥ People Underestimate How Fun It Is to Do the Same Thing Twice (The Atlantic): “… a new study suggests that this notion that having already seen it—or read it, done it, visited it—automatically precludes a second go-around might be mistaken. Repeating something, it turns out, ‘may turn out to be less dull than people think’ … It’s not that watching a movie for the second time in 24 hours is just as enjoyable as the first time—it probably won’t be. But it does seem likely to be more pleasant than one would predict.”
♥ The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona (The New Yorker): “… the home-sharing movement had fallen victim to the tragedy of the commons. An individual apartment dweller might flourish for a while by renting out his spare room on Airbnb, but if his landlord decided that it would be more profitable to turn the entire building into tourist accommodations, he would find himself kicked out when his lease was up.”
♥ ‘Anna Delvey,’ Fake Heiress Who Swindled N.Y.’s Elite, Is Found Guilty (The New York Times): “… a jury convicted Ms. Sorokin, 28, of most of the charges against her, including second-degree grand larceny, theft of services and one count of first-degree attempted grand larceny. She faces up to 15 years in prison on the second-degree grand larceny charge. But jurors found her not guilty of one of the most serious charges — attempted grand larceny in the first-degree regarding a $22 million loan she tried to obtain.”
♥ Recently purchased: n:PHILANTHROPY Finn Romper, Banana Republic Floral Ruffle Wrap Dress, J. Crew Sleeveless Shirtdress in Cotton Poplin, Madewell Top-Stitched Jumpsuit, Uniqlo Pleated Long Skirt, LOFT Crepe Tie Waist Shorts, and Abercrombie & Fitch Easy Cardigan.
Have a great weekend!
