♥ One way I’ve stayed connected with loved ones while social distancing is through the exchange of care packages, but I don’t always have the mental bandwidth to assemble them, so I am grateful for e-tailers that offer a turnkey solution. I’ve partnered with CarePackages.com today to give away a care package from their site. To enter, simply 1) visit CarePackages.com, 2) follow @carepackages4everyone on Instagram, and 3) leave a comment below to let me know what your favorite care package from their site is. I will select a winner on 08/31/2020 and announce it here. Thanks, everyone, for entering. The winner–Lena Liu–was selected using a random number generator.
♥ Behold, ‘Workleisure’ (The New York Times): “… just because you can wear your stretchy old workout gear in front of the computer, doesn’t always make it a good idea … We all have rituals that serve as psychological cues; we don not just different clothes, but with them, different versions of ourselves … workleisure begins with the basics of the off-duty wardrobe … translated in the materials and details of the office. That means elastic waistbands are acceptable, but only if attached to the type of fabric … that suggests a different kind of effort. That, when you catch them out of the corner of your eye, suggest you sit up just a little bit straighter.”
♥ How High Can High-Waisted Pants Go? (The New Yorker): “High-waisted pants have been around regardless of gender, in various iterations, for centuries … What feels different about the current demand for skyscraper pants is the sentiment that they cannot ever be high enough—if the pants are not giving you an instant wedgie or a yeast infection, then they are too low-cut … the structure and strictures of the high waist allow a person to feel immediately pulled together, and not at all casual. Wearing a high-rise pant, you feel like you are really dressed … Low-rise pants are walking billboards for extreme thinness and androgynous frames, but high-rise styles can conform to bodies of all shapes and sizes. They not only highlight hips and butts—they demand them.”
♥ Meet the Next-Normal Consumer (McKinsey & Co.): “Over the months of social isolation, consumers’ net intent to take part in a variety of activities in the home has shifted, with an increase of 54 percentage points for cooking, 30 to 40 percentage points for at-home entertainment, and 22 percentage points for home improvement … Getting customers to buy will require an omnichannel experience that includes drive-through, curbside pickup, and other delivery options that cater to the new emphasis on health, safety, and convenience.”
♥ Can Fashion Film Save Retail? Martin Margiela: In His Own Words Is Streaming Now at All Your Favorite Stores (Vogue): “In addition to being released through small, independent theaters in the U.S., the film will also be distributed through select fashion retail partners as an affiliate link that will direct viewers to a platform to watch the film. Revenues from the link will be split between Oscilloscope and the stores … These partnerships are the first of their kind, merging the worlds of fashion and film in an ingenious new way … small retailers have the opportunity to list a streaming movie alongside this season’s best-selling items.”
♥ Does Robinhood Make It Too Easy to Trade? From Free Stocks to Confetti (The Wall Street Journal): “Robinhood and other newer trading apps … inherit design elements from tech companies that influence user behavior to desired outcomes: Buy a product, use a service, view advertising. Traditional brokerage apps are stodgy. Robinhood blasts users’ screens with digital confetti and makes Netflix-style recommendations for stocks to buy. Buttons tapped to buy a stock are bigger and brighter than those for canceling a trade. Such cues can exacerbate humans’ behavioral biases and can affect investing behavior … Robinhood’s minimal interface has proved to be a draw for younger investors. The brokerage boasts of having 13 million users who have a median age of 31, and was recently valued at $11.2 billion … Robinhood made more than $270 million from selling order flow in the first six months of the year.”
♥ How a Joke Twitter T-Shirt Exposes a Frustration Many Asian Women Share (VICE): “… the ‘Asian wife guy,’ whose outward identity is formed not on his own culture but on his wife’s … Through that relationship, the ‘Asian wife guy’ absorbs elements of his wife’s culture, often reimagining himself as an authority on that culture … It’s an unfortunate truth for Asian women that sometimes people are interested in us solely because we are Asian, and at worst, the encounter with an ‘Asian wife guy’ can be a way for a man to signal this particular affinity, a behavior that often leans on racial stereotypes and takes advantage of global inequalities.”
♥ Eyewear Brands Cash In on Our Screen-Time Overdose (The Business of Fashion): “The jury is still out on whether these lenses actually work. Brands advertise benefits including decreased eyestrain and better sleep. A 2017 study by the University of Houston College of Optometry found that blue light does impact sleep quality, and wearing screen glasses before bed would improve sleep. Yet, in the same year, the College of Optometrists found there was ‘no strong evidence’ that these lenses alleviate eye fatigue or improve sleep quality … Blue light glasses may have limited growth potential. The key selling points of the product can be technical, and explaining this in a snappy, eye-catching way that will travel on Instagram isn’t easy. Plus, it’s the kind of reading solution most consumers won’t realise they need until they’ve tried it.”
♥ The Glory (and the Taboo) of ‘WAP’ (The New York Times): “If vaginal lubrication were celebrated, then female masturbation wouldn’t be taboo, and both women and men would learn in sex education that the increased blood flow to the vaginal tissues allows fluid to leak across the cells, resulting in an additional 3 to 5 milliliters of lubrication. Men and women would also know that needing or liking lubricant isn’t a sign of personal failure … To be a woman and to partner with men is to constantly walk the edge of the knife between too wet and too dry. Gush on command, but not too much because then you’re promiscuous or gross or both.”
• J. Crew‘s extra 72% off sale ends today: use code 3DAYS at checkout. Several hundred sale styles were added this week, so it’s worth another look. Among the newly discounted styles are the well-reviewed Front-Pocket Cropped Sweater-Blazer and Abbie Ankle Strap Thong Sandals in Leather.
♥ Is Your Organization Ready for Permanent WFH? (HBR): “A recent study found that people are willing to give up as much as 8% of their pay for the opportunity to work from home … before the pandemic Americans spent more than 52 minutes every day, on average, commuting to and from the office. The numbers were even worse in traffic-congested metropolitan areas: They ranged from an hour and 12 minutes in New York City to two hours in Jakarta. On the basis of these estimates, shifting to remote work could free up the equivalent of 28 to nearly 50 workdays per year per employee.”
♥ Would You Buy A Box Of Mystery Clothes For £30? (Refinery29): “Lost Stock sells ‘surprise’ packages of garments direct from factories whose products would have been sold on the high street but had their orders cancelled without payment during COVID-19. The contents of each package would have retailed at £70 RRP but will set you back just £35, and the money supports a garment worker for a week.”
♥ Un-Adopted (The Cut): “In the kindest light, Myka, now 33, and James, 35, were painted as well-meaning but naïve parents who had gotten in over their heads; in the harshest, they were fame-hungry narcissists who’d exploited a child for clicks and profit only to discard him when caring for him proved too difficult.”
♥ How to Handle a Jerk (The Wall Street Journal): “Dealing with an everyday jerk is a two-part process. Part one: Do not engage. Once the jerkiness comes out … separate yourself from the encounter … part two: Be thankful! This keeps you from spiraling into negativity. You can be grateful you’re not a jerk. And you can be thankful that successfully handling the encounter—without acting nastily yourself—makes you stronger. Dealing with someone who is acting poorly in a positive way gives you a chance to affirm your values, to model good behavior for everyone else, and to protect the world from getting uglier.”
♥ Don’t Cut Your Marketing Budget in a Recession (HBR): “… products launched during a recession have both higher long-term survival chances and higher sales revenues. That’s partly because there are fewer new products to compete with, but it also comes from the fact that companies maintaining R&D have focused the investment on their best prospects … the best period to launch a new product is just after a recession’s mid-point. This is when consumers start to think about non-necessities.”
♥ The Pandemic Changed the Way People Live. How Can Fashion Adapt? (The Business of Fashion): “Nesting, experts say, won’t be a fad. Millions of former office workers now face the prospect of working from home permanently. This lifestyle requires fewer new clothes, more candles. Some urbanites, in fact, are buying houses in smaller, less dense cities where they have more space to make a home. An April poll conducted by Harris found that nearly 40 percent of respondents who live in urban areas say they would consider moving toward less dense areas. In the Northeast, new home sales rose nearly 90 percent in June, according to the Commerce Department.”
♥ Want to Make It Big in Fashion? Think Small (The New York Times): “If most of what Mr. Kinori makes costs a lot … it is in part because they are produced in such limited quantities … The editions are numbered as a form of inventorying and a way of keeping things at a manageable scale. Sales of Mr. Kinori’s clothes grossed him just over a half-million dollars last year, roughly what some designers pay influencers to shill for them. While he maintains a respectable social media presence, his primary means of exerting influence is the handwritten note.”
♥ Recently ordered: Reformation Norton Dress, Uniqlo Airism Seamless Tank Top, NutriBullet Blender Combo, Marc Fisher Oshay Pointed Toe Bootie, and Steve Madden Kaylah Pointed Toe Bootie.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
