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While I smirked at the transparent publicity-hounding of Nike’s store-you-can’t-go-in-unless-you’re-cool-enough when I first saw it a few weeks ago, I figured it couldn’t work; no one’d fall for it and actually care because–hello!–it’s such an obvious stunt. I mean, the craptrap restaurant Jekyll & Hyde on 57th & 6th never lets people in immediately, either, but lines them up on the street. If tourist maroons fell for it, I always figured New Yorkers could spot a Barnum-level manipulation a block away. I guess I was wrong.
In this week’s NYT Magazine, a writer accompanies three celebrities in whose reflected glow NikeID wished to bask: an artist, a designer, and an NBA shoe salesman. [Never mind that the whole thing is fraught wtih publicist-paper complicity issues. This ain’t On The Media, folks, and I have a lot of room to talk, anyway, what with the Times picking up about a quarter of my Jamba Juice tab each month.]
What I got from the Times piece, though, was how hermetic NikeID’s own design concept for customization turns out to be, and how thoroughly at odds it is with the influencers and outside creatives’ tastes. I mean, “despite some gentle urging from the design consultants,” Vince Carter replicated the archetypal Nike shoe–white with a Carolina Blue swoosh–and both Sarah Morris and Narciso Rodriguez chose monochrome designs; Morris even chose the putty grey sample shoe.
Customizing Nikes is to expressing your individual creativity what rhythmic gymnastics is to sports. Whatever the people who actually do it obsessively say, most sensible people can see it for what it is after a couple of colorful swooshes.

Just Do It Yourself [nytmag]
Note: this post was inspired by Jen’s inspired takedown on Unbeige

While I smirked at the transparent publicity-hounding of Nike’s store-you-can’t-go-in-unless-you’re-cool-enough when I first saw it a few weeks ago, I figured it couldn’t work; no one’d fall for it and actually care because–hello!–it’s such an obvious stunt. I mean, the craptrap restaurant Jekyll & Hyde on 57th & 6th never lets people in immediately, either, but lines them up on the street. If tourist maroons fell for it, I always figured New Yorkers could spot a Barnum-level manipulation a block away. I guess I was wrong.
In this week’s NYT Magazine, a writer accompanies three celebrities in whose reflected glow NikeID wished to bask: an artist, a designer, and an NBA shoe salesman. [Never mind that the whole thing is fraught wtih publicist-paper complicity issues. This ain’t On The Media, folks, and I have a lot of room to talk, anyway, what with the Times picking up about a quarter of my Jamba Juice tab each month.]
What I got from the Times piece, though, was how hermetic NikeID’s own design concept for customization turns out to be, and how thoroughly at odds it is with the influencers and outside creatives’ tastes. I mean, “despite some gentle urging from the design consultants,” Vince Carter replicated the archetypal Nike shoe–white with a Carolina Blue swoosh–and both Sarah Morris and Narciso Rodriguez chose monochrome designs; Morris even chose the putty grey sample shoe.
Customizing Nikes is to expressing your individual creativity what rhythmic gymnastics is to sports. Whatever the people who actually do it obsessively say, most sensible people can see it for what it is after a couple of colorful swooshes.

Just Do It Yourself [nytmag]
Note: this post was inspired by Jen’s inspired takedown on Unbeige

So according to the NYT, Helmut Lang’s business sucked so bad, that sales dropped 60%–from $100 million to $37 million–over five years, and Prada rattles off a whole host of reasons why. It’s terrorism, Lang’s lack of business sense, he just wasn’t friendly, he cared more about art than fashion. And then there’s the possible effect of Bertelli’s decision to cancel the company’s jeans licenses “which were responsible for more than half of the brand’s revenues.”
Prada and Bertelli bought and killed a major one-time threat to their own power, and now they spin and cover it up with the willing help of the Times and the rest of the kiss-ass fashion press. They’re the Bush & Cheney of the fashion world. I have a feeling Karl Rove’ll be dressing better real soon.
I said it before, but damn, those people piss me off.
Decline and Fall of Helmut Lang [nyt]
Previously: Miuccia Pravda

So according to the NYT, Helmut Lang’s business sucked so bad, that sales dropped 60%–from $100 million to $37 million–over five years, and Prada rattles off a whole host of reasons why. It’s terrorism, Lang’s lack of business sense, he just wasn’t friendly, he cared more about art than fashion. And then there’s the possible effect of Bertelli’s decision to cancel the company’s jeans licenses “which were responsible for more than half of the brand’s revenues.”
Prada and Bertelli bought and killed a major one-time threat to their own power, and now they spin and cover it up with the willing help of the Times and the rest of the kiss-ass fashion press. They’re the Bush & Cheney of the fashion world. I have a feeling Karl Rove’ll be dressing better real soon.
I said it before, but damn, those people piss me off.
Decline and Fall of Helmut Lang [nyt]
Previously: Miuccia Pravda

I just got back from a visit to the new conservation department digs at MoMA [one word: AWESOME], and they’d just taken down the Richard Tuttle Letters sculpture today, to get it ready for the SFMOMA retrospective, and it was lying around on the table.
The conservator talked about interviewing Tuttle to see what his intentions were for the weak or broken solders, the accumulating fingerprints on the galvanized steel, even which side was the front and which was the back. Tuttle actually preferred the imperfections, the minor breaks, the accumulated history of wear and randomness, everything but the stickers some German museum stuck on what they thought was the back of the pieces. In another nod to non-prescriptiveness, Tuttle says there is no front or back.
This intentional abrogation seemed suitably interesting, admirable, even, and then I read Clay Risen’s review of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin in The New Republic. Risen decries the inevitable but apparently unanticipated transformation of the grim, abstracted Holocaust memorial, now full of children, into “the world’s greatest playground.” He cites Eisenman’s casual embrace of picnickers, skateboarders, and even defacement. “Maybe it would add to it,” he said. For some reason I can’t quite pin down, Eisenman’s “maybe” bugs.
Can advocating chance ever be be cleanly differentiated from abrogating or denying responsibility for the life of a work? Risen also slams the open-ended whateverness of abstraction, especially for memorials. He calls Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial a rare exception, an abstract memorial that succeeds by not dictating a message; it’s telling that he can’t come up with any others.
There’s little downside, little impact on our culture, ultimately, if a Richard Tuttle sculpture is repaired or displayed “wrong.” But what is the impact of a Holocaust memorial in Germany being “misread”? Or turned into a skatepark? Are there situations when embracing randomness is wrong, or when it should be questioned?
Stone Cold [tnr.com, sub req]