Category: Fashion

Culture, Fashion, Lifestyle

The Best Online Streetwear Stores

Over the last few years, streetwear has infiltrated mainstream fashion. What used to be a niche community has blossomed into a category that’s even been adopted by major fashion houses. Just look at the design language Virgil Abloh has brought to his debut collection with Louis Vuitton, or Kim Jones enlisting legendary street artist Kaws to help design his inaugural offering for Dior this past year.

The relationship is slightly ironic given the counterculture and rebelliousness enveloped into the streetwear timeline, but the pairing has become inevitable. A series of brands once championed almost exclusively by the skate and hip-hop communities has grown into a pocket of fashion that can be spotted on anyone, no matter where you happen to be on a given afternoon.

This blurring of the line between high fashion and streetwear has made the subgenre a little difficult to define. Stüssy is a streetwear OG that, at its core, offers graphic T-shirts, hoodies, and accessories at a rather affordable cost. However, brands like Fear of God and Off-White have also been placed under the streetwear umbrella albeit with a more premium quality and exorbitant price tag. Still, they offer all of the basics you would expect from the traditional streetwear outfit.

As a result of the copious amounts of brands on the market, there is also now more than enough solid shops carrying the goods. Long gone are the days of hitting up Karmaloop to grab the latest Diamond Supply Co. and Crooks and Castles releases. There are various stations all over the globe you can access to satisfy your streetwear craving. No matter what side of the streetwear spectrum your taste leans toward, we have rounded up the 10 best online streetwear shops you need to check out.

READ MORE: https://www.complex.com/style/best-online-streetwear-shops/haven

Fashion

What’s Hot (and What’s Not) This Black Friday

By now, you have probably realized that the vast majority of Black Friday deals are duds. Many so-called bargains are undesirable products that have been marked down to help stores clear out inventory, or have discounts that aren’t any better than sales that happened earlier in the year.

It’s that time of the year again when retailers bombard you with ads promoting Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Yet there is a silver lining: This is the best time to buy a few items, like video game consoles, televisions and smart home accessories, which plummet to their lowest prices. If you know ahead of time what to focus on, you might score a few good deals.

[Read more about the best ways to spend your money (or keep it) on Black Friday.]

“Come into Black Friday with a list,” said Alex Roth, a commerce editor for Wirecutter, a New York Times product review site that tracks deals year round. “Don’t just buy things and figure you can return them later, because the holiday return lines are horrible.”

to help narrow your search for good buys on Black Friday, I teamed up with Wirecutter to round up the products that are worth following — and the ones you can skip.

If you’ve been planning to treat yourself or a loved one to a new video game console, this may be the best time of year to grab one. Some Black Friday ads for Best Buy and Walmart show that prices for some consoles will drop to their lowest all year, said Adam Burakowski, the deals editor for Wirecutter.

“This year in particular, the consoles are pretty much the best prices we’ve seen,” he said.

For example, both Walmart and Best Buy plan to sell Sony’s PlayStation 4 bundled with the new Spider-Man game for $200, down from the retail price of $300 for the console alone. In addition, Nintendo’s Switch console will cost about $300 together with a Super Mario Kart game — normally, the system costs that much without a game included.

For one, don’t be fooled by ads for so-called doorbusters — like jaw-droppingly cheap TVs — at retailers like Best Buy, Mr. Burakowski said. Those tend to be mediocre TV sets, or they sell out extremely quickly. For another, during Black Friday, manufacturers sometimes sell subpar televisions with model numbers that are nearly identical to popular, high-quality sets, he added.

The smartest way to buy a TV is to do research ahead of time and pick out a great set you want, then jot down the model number and periodically check retailers’ websites throughout the week to see if the price has dropped. (Price-tracking web tools like Camel Camel Camel can help automate this process.)

READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/personaltech/black-friday-deals.html

To help shoppers get started, here’s a cheat sheet of the products to track,
and the ones to ignore.
African American Issues, Culture, DANCE, Fashion

Brown Point Shoes Arrive, 200 Years After White Ones

ballerina

Ballet dancers of color have long painted, dyed or covered point shoes in makeup to match their skin. Could this small barrier to inclusion finally be disappearing?

For nearly her whole career, Cira Robinson has — like many ballet dancers of color — performed a ritual: Painting her point shoes to match her skin.

She did it first in 2001, when she was 15, at a summer program with Dance Theater of Harlem. The company said her shoes needed to be brown, not the traditional pink, but she couldn’t find any in stores, so she used spray paint. “It made them crunchy and just … ew,” she said in a telephone interview.

When she joined Dance Theater a few years later, she started using makeup instead. “I’d go to the cheapest stores and get foundation,” she said, the kind “you’d never put on your face as it’d break you out. Like, $2.95 cheap.”

She’d go through five tubes a week, sponging it onto 12 to 15 pairs of shoes — a process known in ballet circles as pancaking. It took 45 minutes to an hour to do a pair, she said, because she wanted to make sure the foundation got into every crevice and covered every bit of ribbon.

Did she find these steps annoying? “I didn’t know any different,” Ms. Robinson, 32, said.

But now, Ms. Robinson — a senior artist at Ballet Black, a British dance company — is no longer obliged to do so. In October, Freed of London, which supplies her shoes, started selling two point shoes specifically for dancers of color: One brown, the other bronze.

Freed is not the first firm to make point shoes for dancers of color — the American company Gaynor Minden has been producing some more than a year — but the new shoes from Freed, a large supplier in the ballet world, highlight one of the stranger rituals that dancers of color have to perform.

It’s also a reminder that black dancers — especially female ones — are still a rarity in ballet. They remain barely represented at the top of the field, despite some signs of change and an increased awareness of the need for diversity at the schools feeding professional companies.

Shoes aren’t the only costuming reminders of the lack of diversity in ballet. In September, Precious Adams, a first artist at English National Ballet raised the issue of pink tights. “In ballet people have very strong ideas about tradition,” she told London’s Evening Standard newspaper. “They think me wearing brown tights in a tutu is somehow ‘incorrect.’”