The city of Paterson, New Jersey is considering a ban on baggy pants.  The baggy, saggy drawers look is apparently too much for the city council of the North Jersey town who are contemplating fining people for the offense.  Councilman Anthony Davis is spearheading the measure, introducing a bill that would make wearing baggy pants a violation of Paterson’s indecency laws. 

I was forced to wonder how much of this is about race and/or class upon reading this.  Then I discovered that Councilman Davis is in fact African-American which placed this rights infringing measure squarely in the “classism” column.  The baggy-saggy look obviously had its origins in the young African-American community in this country. Often these days the look is banned in an effort to maintain a certain clientele and keep a certain “element” out at certain nightclubs, some of the few places where discrimination, of all sorts, is not only alive and well, but also part of the draw for many club-goers.  But the style has grown and expanded to include multiple races, making it a statement of a subculture that spans across the old boundaries. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Ecologic Designs, a company based in Boulder, creates bags and shirts out some pretty interesting stuff - billboards, inner tubes, recycled plastic, and climbing ropes. In fact, using recycled and reclaimed materials isn’t just part of the company’s business model, it’s the reason for the business itself. As the company states on its website,

Ecologic Designs Green Gear^TM is an innovative eco-conscious line of bags and soft goods developed for people who want tough, dependable, functional gear, yet do not want it at the expense of the environment. Dedicated to the design and manufacture of gear and products from recycled or environmentally friendly materials, Ecologic Designs is able to help the earth while providing its user with incredibly durable, dependable and stylish products.

Read the rest of this entry »

The US Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base has a giftshop. As reported by Mary Ann Akers‘ blog The Sleuth for the Washington Post, the highly controversial Gitmo detainee operations center sells T-Shirts, windbreakers and baseball caps to visiting journalists reporting on the facility. Apparently military base officials were thrilled to have reporters buying up their wares as souvenirs for the folks back home in transactions that have redefined the term “crass commercialism”.

Thankfully, the future of the detainee facility is now in serious doubt due to yesterday’s 5-4 Supreme Court ruling which restored the right of habeas corpus to enemy combatants imprisoned at the center, reaffirming their right to a fair trial in a United States Federal Court. The ruling struck down the Bush Administration’s efforts to confine any judicial review of the prisoner’s cases to kangaroo courts military tribunals set up at the facility.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yves Saint-Laurent, the legendary fashion designer, has passed away at the age of 71. The reclusive French couture giant was one of the most dominant forces in 20th Century fashion along with Christian Dior and Coco Chanel. Saint-Laurent had retired form haute couture in 2002 and had been of poor health for a long time at his passing.

After winning several Parisian design contests as a young man, Saint-Laurent was hired to design for Christian Dior. After Dior abruptly passed away three years later, YSL took over the revered fashion house. However in 1960 Saint-Laurent was drafted to fight in the French-Algerian War. He was granted an exemption three weeks later, but by that time had already been replaced at Dior. It was then that Saint-Laurent with the help and business management of his longtime partner and lover Pierre Berge ventured out to form his own label, which would revolutionize the fashion of the second half of the 20th Century. You can see a film from one of Saint-Laurent’s early fashion shows with his own label after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 4 woman are finally back in town and after weeks of tantalizing trailers, HUGE billboards and spoiler alerts, I FINALLY saw Sex and The City. And even better, in the city itself.

Shrieking, running, stiletto heel-wearing girlfriends from all over the country stormed into the theater as though Louis Vuitton bags were being given away. At first, I thought it was rather inspiring that so many women, around the country are coming together to share the love and loss with these four women. But when the movie was over, I was a little less enthused.

“Just like old times,” Samantha says at one point when the four women go out together. Well, not really. I miss the slightly less fancy clothes, slightly smaller heals and the moments of their relationship that weren’t about the men. Would it be too much to ask for some dialog about something happening in the world? Something that cant be cured by an exorbitant shopping spree?

Or perhaps shows who first find their home on a risk-taking, say anything network like HBO, shouldn’t try to jump to the big screen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rachel Ray has been outed by Michelle Malkin as the Jihadi I had always suspected she was. But now, thanks to Malkinian journalism, we have the proof: an incriminating Dunkin Donuts ad in which Ray dons a Keffiyeh, a traditional head scarf worn by Arab men.

We still have to be vigilant. Who knows what cell Ray is really with. Since the Keffiyeh is worn in several countries, Ray could be worse than just a Yasser Arafat fan. She could be a Bedouin sympathizer, a Somali apologist, or even a die hard Laurence of Arabia fan, whether man or movie?. In fact, couldn’t the Keffiyeh be Ray’s red herring? Could Ray be hiding Osama Bin Laden. If not, how do we explain this terrorist gesture which was first popularized by Osama Bin Laden?

Dunkin’ Donuts tried to play on Americans’ natural freedom-loving and paisley-loving sensibility by insisting that the scarf was “a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design.” But Michelle Malkin saw through that silk facade and exposed the truth about Ray’s scarf: it’s cotton. And it’s an accessory of mass destruction. Malkin explained the air tight slam dunk intelligence which proved Rachel Ray’s Arab/Muslim/Palestinian/terrorist affiliations:

Read the rest of this entry »

Hot off the presses:

• Women prefer men in hybrids over Porsches. That’s the word from General Motors. Wired has the story:

So says a survey by General Motors that found nearly nine in 10 women would rather talk to a guy in a Prius than a Porsche. Dumping the SUV in favor of an econobox would make you more popular at parties, too. Eighty percent of respondents said they find people who drive fuel efficient cars more interesting than those that don’t.

• The trailer for the new A&E mini-series “The Andromeda Strain” has arrived. A journalist is the hero. Yep, mark this one down as sci-fi.

• And speaking of journalists, the politics of high school newspapers are apparently as catty as those of any other industry filled with people jockeying for public recognition. That’s what the 17-year-old star of the MTV series “The Paper” found out. From the N.Y. Times:

[The show] devoted ample screen time to behind-the-scenes conflicts among the students at The Circuit and the friendships that were tested or broken by its demanding environment. [Show star Amanda] Lorber came in for particularly rough treatment; her colleagues at the paper were frequently shown on camera making critical or nasty comments about her behind her back.

“If other students want to participate in something like this, they should think long and hard about it,” Ms. Lorber said in a telephone interview.

She said she was not surprised that “The Paper” placed so much emphasis on the in-fighting and unraveling of friendships, nor did she find it uncomfortable to relive these experiences when the show was broadcast. “Once I’ve come to terms with everything that’s happened on the show, it’s not hard for me to think about other people seeing it,” Ms. Lorber said. “I agreed to broadcast my junior year and my senior year on camera. It comes with the territory.”

• Al Franken is getting buffetted by bloggers in his quest for a U.S. senate seat from Minnesota. A local blogger, who writes from his kitchen table, has unearthed several stories that have put Franken on the defensive throughout the campaign. From the N.Y. Times:

[The blog] has dealt several blows to Mr. Franken’s campaign lately: revelations that he owed $25,000 to the State of New York for failing to pay workers’ compensation insurance and that his corporation was in forfeiture in California.

… The reports led Mr. Franken to hire a new team of financial advisers to review his finances. … [T]he campaign was clearly worried: it created an emergency phone bank one evening to call the more than 2,500 Democratic convention delegates and alternates and deliver the news before it came out the next day in the newspapers.

• And finally, Ben Stein, our favorite economist/actor/T.V. show host/former-economic-advisor-to-Richard Nixon … phew! … muses about the relevance of the Mad Max movies in connection with $5 gallons of gas.

AS I watch the drama about gasoline and oil prices play out on the streets and in the news media, some images and memories come to mind.

… There are also scenes from the great “Mad Max” movies. In one of them, Australia has been reduced to chaos amid a cruel shortage of oil and gasoline. Men will kill in an instant for a few drops of precious gasoline to power their motorcycles, and life as we know it has stopped because of a deficiency of that magnificent stuff.

• Steven Soderbergh’s ambitious, sprawling, two-part biopic, Che, about the life of communist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, opens to mixed-positive reviews at Cannes. From the AP:

“The heart of the film is the robust yet subtle portrayal of the asthma-stricken revolutionary by Benicio del Toro. He is an idealist who obviously really believes in the possibility of equality between human beings, but Soderbergh is mostly content to show repeated examples of his benevolence rather than develop its potentially complex contradictions.”

• Fashion icon Diane Von Furstenberg is set to host a VIP lunch in Cannes to fete Madonna’s new documentary about AIDS in Malawi (that’s Africa). The difference between the lunch’s setting and its subject matter is, uh, notable:

“The fete will take place aboard EOS, the $200 million 300-foot yacht owned by Von Furstenberg’s husband Barry Diller. And guests shouldn’t be late. “Launches will be waiting at 1:30 p.m. SHARP,” the invite reads. “

• An Israeli animated war documentary may beat out Clint Eastwood’s entry at the festival. The war doc, “Waltz With Bashir,” examines Israel’s 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut:

“Israeli director Ari Folman, a former soldier, unravels his own repressed memories of the horror of the killings and breaks new ground stylistically with the first-ever animated documentary at Cannes.

“I hope young people will watch this film, I hope they might be moved by the animation, the music, and I hope it might help them see that war really is about them just being used as pawns by other people,” Folman told AFP.”

Ecoist is turning trash into fashion. The Miami based eco-design firm is riding a fast rising star in the burgeoning world of eco-friendly fashion with their elegant handbags made entirely of recycled materials. Purses made from candy wrappers, rice bags, movie billboards, and pull tabs from aluminum cans (seen left) not only look fantastic but also saves tons of garbage from making its way into overfilled landfills while providing a fashionable and readily available alternative to the large amount of energy needed to produce new materials for the merchandise.

Ecoist has also just partnered with Coca-Cola, Aveda and Luna Bar to create handbags made from misprinted or discontinues packaging materials. Says company co-founder, Jonathan Marcoschamer:

“We tap into that source of waste because it is reliable and unfortunately it’s abundant,”

Read the rest of this entry »

In Houston, Texas a Madison High student named Marche Taylor was not let into her prom because her revealing, skimpy dress violated a school dress code. When she asked for her ticket money back, school officials called the cops who then placed her in handcuffs and escorted out of the prom venue! (Check out the news video footage at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/)

“She shook her head, she was like you are not getting into this prom,” said Taylor. “We were arguing back and forth because I wanted to know why I can’t get into my prom.”

Even after offering to provide more cover, Taylor was still denied access to the final soiree of the school year.At that point, Taylor said she was furious. After all this was her senior prom. She argued if she couldn’t get in, she wanted her money back.Things got so bad, the next thing she knew, someone had called the police. Officers showed up, handcuffed her and escorted her out. [Dallas Morning News]

Okay fine, the school has dress codes. However arresting a girl at her prom? That’s way tackier than this showgirl style frock (yeah, I’m not so into the dress). Is a bare belly really so offensive to a bunch of high schoolers who probably see much more skin on TRL? What do you think?