11 Of The Best Men’s Fashion Subscriptions - Forbes |
- 11 Of The Best Men’s Fashion Subscriptions - Forbes
- The Future Of Style: Slow Fashion Plus ... Merch Tees? - KPBS
- The State of Fashion Models in a Pandemic - The New York Times
- A Fashion Historian on the Relationship Between Clothing and Disease - Hyperallergic
| 11 Of The Best Men’s Fashion Subscriptions - Forbes Posted: 22 Apr 2020 12:00 PM PDT Taking the guesswork out of your wardrobe, ironically, takes some work. Shopping for essentials and accessories alike that align with your taste takes time, research, money... in other words, it can be a serious commitment. That's where subscription boxes come in. Subscription boxes for men and men's fashion do the heavy lifting for you (generally, if you could call it that). There are a couple kinds: ones that upgrade your essentials or accessories, and others where a personal stylist takes the time to know you and send you what they think will align with what you want. From there, all you have to do is wait a little time for your box to arrive. Depending on what service you choose, it'll be either a stylist's idea of what you like... or a pleasant surprise.  Wouldn't you be as excited to receive your first box? GettyIn any case, subscription boxes are surprisingly cost-effective—saving you both time and cash. The prices for the individual items in each box usually cumulatively surpasses that of them boxed together. These services do the work for you and deliver it to you in a box every month or quarter, depending. Check out below for seven of the best fashion subscriptions boxes for men around and skip the lines at the mall. Nordstrom Trunk ClubNordstrom's own styling service has you build a profile before you're assigned a personal assistant. You'll be asked about your personal style on a workday, on a weekend, if you're a slim or regular fit, where you typically shop (and how much you spend), any issues you want your personal stylist to know, and your sizes. You'll even be asked which colors you hate wearing. Then you'll be given the option to receive new clothes every month, two months, or three months. It's one of the most thorough fashion boxes around we've seen—tailored just to you. If you need a consistent, sophisticated style upgrade, check it out. Basic ManWe could all use an upgrade to our undies, socks, and undershirts. Basic Man has you covered by first asking your size (obviously) for each of your basics, then you subscribe. It's as simple as that. The key proposition here: you'll never have to worry about your basics ever again. You'll get a new box every month with fresh socks, underwear, and an undershirt in a different color than the previous month's. It definitely eliminates a step when it comes to your shopping. Stitch Fix MenStitch Fix is all about getting to know you and your personal style. It all starts with a really comprehensive quiz that asks you about your shopping experience, personal preferences, and sizing. Then you'll be assigned a stylist who will hand-pick five pieces for you to try on at home. Return what you don't like, and re-up your Stitch Fix whenever you feel like it. There's no recurring fees, shipping and returns are totally free, and you'll be getting big items—no hats per se, but pants, shirts, jackets, and more. To get a good sense of how they pair you, check out their style guide. Bespoke PostBespoke Post is one of the true innovators in the subscription box space. Every month, you get a themed box with all sorts of goodies. (Don't worry, you can preview the box before it gets shipped to you, and you can skip it if you're not a fan.) The boxes go way beyond just fashion, each according to its theme. For example, the "Over Easy" box comes with a cast iron skillet, pot holder, Bloody Mary mix, and and pancake mix. The "Slumber" box is just a really silky-smooth duvet cover. And the "Forge" box is a beautiful knife with a luxe leather cover. Each box is a small step forward toward a more elevated and sophisticated life—not just a new shirt that suits your personal style. And you'll save more cash than buying each of these individual items; according to the brand, each box is worth at least $70, but only costs $45. If you're in the process of upping your accessories, it's pretty much a no-brainer. Gentleman's BoxGentleman's Box makes your accessory shopping a whole lot easier. There are a couple subscription options: for $29 per month, you get a monthly box with four to six elevated accessories. Wallets, ties, bracelets, and the like. Or, for $100 per quarter and an ongoing membership, you'll get a seasonal box with more luxe accessories. Headphones, watches, and more. Much like Bespoke Post, it's not as tailored to your personal sense of style. Rather, it's the brand's point of view on what makes a gentleman—a little more on the dapper side than drab. You get to keep all the items, feel fancy, and enjoy a surprise every month. SprezzaBoxSprezzaBox takes the guesswork out of accessory shopping with boxes that contain everything a gent needs, from pocket squares to cufflinks—and even accessories like sunglasses and pocket knives—all from a diverse group of brands. For $29 per month (although there are cheaper plans if you commit for a longer period of time), you'll get a monthly curated box of dapper goods that add subtle pops to your wardrobe. Getting hitched soon? SprezzaBox even offers custom groomsman boxes with everything you need for your big day. If you're not sure where to start, check out SprezzaBox's guide to get a little perspective on where they're coming from. It's an illuminating little expedition. Menlo ClubAnother fantastic option for a box that gets to know you to deliver just what you like. Menlo House's Menlo Club start with a short quiz about your style—are you more "casual" or more "classic"?—and fit to pick just the right duds to be delivered to your door. For only $60 per month or $75 per season, you'll get a box each month of curated Five Four, Grand AC, and New Republic clothes. You'll get 2 items a month, and shipping and returns are totally free. Membership also comes with a curated newsletter and discount at Menlo House for any extra clothes you want. 8. Frank & Oak Style Plan For MenFrank & Oak's excellent Style Plan starts with a questionnaire about yourself, then jumps right into your stylist providing you with curated boxes—the only upfront fee is a $25 styling fee. Each month, you'll be able to preview your box, filled with four of the most on-trend items in the market today, ranging from $29 - $149 in value. Once you get the box, you'll have 30—that's right, thirty—days to return what you don't want, and keep the rest. You'll save up to 20% on regular Frank & Oak items you want to keep. BombfellBombfell works a lot like other stylist-led subscription boxes that are tailored looks for the office. You start with a questionnaire and then a stylist gets back to with your curated outfit—all for only a $20 styling fee. You then get 7 days to try on the clothes and return the ones you don't want. For the ones you do love, well, that $20 fee goes toward them. And them more you keep, the more you save: two items nets you a 10% savings, and four gets you 20%. Each look is curated, sophisticated, and suave. Time to re-up your work outfits. Watch GangInto watches? Then it's hard to think of a better subscription box for you. Grow your watch collection exponentially with Watch Gang. Starting at only $50 per month (though tiers go up from there), you'll get a watch every month that's worth at least $150. The Watch Gang starts with a short inquiry into what you like—metals, leathers, more chic or more rugged—and curates your picks for you from top brands like Fortuna, Jack Mason, and more. Every watch is yours to keep. Hard to think of a better way to grow a budding watch collection. Amazon Prime WardrobeAmazon Prime Wardrobe is an excellent way to try before you buy—and it's just for Amazon Prime members. While it's not quite a subscription, it basically works like this: you see a few items you like (of eligible items) on Amazon, you get them shipped to you. You have seven days to try it on. If you like it, you'll be charged for it, and if you don't, just return it, no sweat. You can try up to eight items at a time, all in the comfort of your own home. Keep track of what you want to keep and return in the "orders" section of the site; each box comes with a return label in case you're not feeling something. And if you need a little guidance, for an extra $5, go for Amazon Personal Shopper, where a stylist will help you pick your items.  |
| The Future Of Style: Slow Fashion Plus ... Merch Tees? - KPBS Posted: 22 Apr 2020 05:58 PM PDT Trista Roland, founder of San Diego pattern company Sugardale, discusses fashion's post-pandemic future  Credit: Michael Armstrong Above: Sugardale's founder Trista Roland works on a pattern in her studio in an undated photo. I was still in the same leggings I'd slept in the night before when I called Trista Roland, founder of Sugardale and part of San Diego's hand-sewn clothing movement. I tried to remember six weeks ago, deciding what nice but pinchy thing to wear to work, but it felt like something that had happened to another person. I asked Roland — who identifies more as a pattern designer than a dressmaker, though she makes and designs many of her own clothes — what she's been wearing during the pandemic. She said she's been keeping it super comfortable, but it's hard to believe because her Instagram feed brims with flawlessly made outfits and a general, enviable put-together-ness. "I have gotten dressed up for shooting photos for Instagram and I'll just stay in those clothes all day," she admitted. Sugardale's patterns are stylish but practical pants or skirts, with the option of overalls-, coveralls- or dress-style tops, each one a balance of playful and tailored, and each amendable and customizable. (And always with pockets. "It's a security thing," she said.)  Unlike much of the world adjusting to carefully displaying (or hiding) our work-from-home attire over video conferencing, the sewing and fashion communities have been sharing their outfits digitally on Instagram for years, and not all that much has changed for them. Opportunities for dressing up still exist, if you know where to look. Roland described "frocktails," an IRL meet-up where the local sewing community could get together and wear their own handmades, just to show them off. She added that frocktails have pivoted to Zoom. "It has been fun to just play dress up for no other reason, just to do it," she said. When it comes to the pandemic's longer-term impact on style, particularly women's fashion, Roland isn't really thinking about what people will wear to work; she looks at an even bigger picture. The coronavirus pandemic has only just begun to spotlight systemic problems with working conditions and the global supply chain for all industries, Roland said, who studied in the fashion program at San Diego Mesa College about a decade ago and launched Sugardale several years later. We have a new societal understanding of the conditions and risks low wage earners go through to provide products and services, she said, and we're aware of the impact on the economy of the loss of these jobs. She thinks this will apply to fashion, too. The "fast fashion" industry's impact on human rights and the environment is bleak. The standard set of seasons has morphed into some 52 "microseasons," for the fast fashion climate — getting trends into stores as quickly as possible. Consumers are encouraged to constantly buy new items, as quickly made and cheaply made as possible, and discard their old things — sending tons of synthetic fabrics and microplastics to the landfills. Global manufacturing waste and pollution present another problem.  For Roland, "slow fashion" embraces the opposite approach. "It's not even just the quality of the garment itself, but thinking all the way down the line: how it was made, where it was made. Was it ethical? Are the people working and making your clothes being treated ethically? Do they have good working hours? What is their working life like?" she said. "How does that garment get onto your body?" In the slow fashion movement (and in the hand-made movement, which is an extension of slow fashion) care is taken in source, quality, process and longevity. There's a focus on capsule wardrobes, where slow fashionistas build multiple outfits out of a small collection of staples. It's not about constantly having the newest styles, but is about finding pieces that will work well for a long time. Roland hopes that more people will turn towards making their own clothes, and thinks this may be a natural progression after so many individuals dusted off their sewing machines to try mask making. "You might have a bunch of people with a new hobby," she said.  As Sugardale grows, Roland is also hoping to help guide her customers to "hack" their own designs from her pieces. She's posting more tutorials online and will launch a Patreon-style subscription service in the coming months. Roland pointed out that there's one unique way people are still buying clothes right now, despite not having anywhere to wear them. With coffee shops, restaurants, bars, bands and more all shut down or doing limited work, many are offering merch for sale online to stay afloat. She said that with an increasingly grassroots approach to where their money goes, people are doing what they can to support their favorite businesses. Unlike slow fashion, merch shirts are not always about the quality of the product, but they mark a greater focus on the people and work the consumers want to support, Roland noted, which is still a form of using fashion to support workers. "Maybe that's what'll happen," Roland said. "We'll all be in jeans and logo'd shirts at the end." FEATURED PODCAST KPBS' daily news podcast covering local politics, education, health, environment, the border and more. New episodes are ready weekday mornings so you can listen on your morning commute.  Julia Dixon Evans
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| The State of Fashion Models in a Pandemic - The New York Times Posted: 22 Apr 2020 10:56 AM PDT  Taryn Harvey moved to New York City in January, hoping to break into the city's competitive modeling market after working in Toronto (her hometown) and Cape Town. It took her three years to secure a work visa for the move, she said. By February, she was walking in New York Fashion Week. By March, the world had changed. "I felt like I just got here, and then coronavirus happened," said Ms. Harvey, 34. Ms. Harvey was one of 212 working models who participated in a survey organized and released Wednesday by Model Alliance, a labor rights nonprofit. The results of that survey, analyzed by the Worker Institute at Cornell University, detail how the coronavirus has affected the modeling industry. Models have long faced unpredictable working conditions. Typically classified as independent contractors, they miss out on the benefits and legal protections of full-fledged employees. But like millions of people — and the rest of the fashion industry — models are feeling even more financially vulnerable these days. Jobs have dried up as advertising budgets have been slashed, runway shows have been canceled, and traditional photo shoots have become impossible under social-distancing and stay-at-home orders. About half of the models surveyed said they were currently owed money by their clients or agencies. (Or both, for about a third of models.) Two-thirds said they were concerned about being able to pay for housing; one-fifth said they did not have health insurance. The pandemic has also exacerbated the industry's racial disparities, according to the survey. Among white models — the majority of survey participants — 86 percent said they could afford basic necessities, compared with 60 percent of black models. When asked how confident they felt in pushing for coronavirus-related precautions while working, 43 percent of white models said they felt very confident or extremely confident in asking, compared with 22 percent of black models. "It is really hard to talk about race as a woman of color in this industry because you're always met with some pushback," Ms. Harvey said. "You feel like you'll be seen as the 'angry black woman.'" Ms. Harvey attended her last in-person casting in mid-March, for a beauty ad. Models were asked not to come if they had traveled in the last two weeks, she said. The only other precaution Ms. Harvey noticed was extra hand sanitizing. "I did feel that sense of: Should I wear a mask? Should I wear gloves?" she said. "Do I feel safe? Do I not feel safe?" Ms. Harvey plans to return to Toronto soon. She'll come back to the United States when there's work again, she said, but it won't be easy. "Especially in New York, it can take six months to build yourself up and get clients," she said. "Going home and coming back, I'll be starting all over again." Her second job won't supplement her income, either. When not modeling, she's a freelance makeup artist, a profession susceptible to similar problems. "What we've captured in this report probably applies to a lot of other creatives as well," said Sara Ziff, the founding director of Model Alliance. "Concerns about getting paid moneys owed are going to escalate — that's just my own hunch." Along with the survey, Model Alliance has published an open letter to modeling agencies concerning a "lack of information, resources and support" being provided to models. In recent weeks, the organization has been assisting people in filing unemployment insurance claims, an issue it began researching after hearing questions from models about their eligibility. (Model Alliance is encouraging New Yorkers to file their claims as employees of their agencies, rather than as independent contractors, citing the inclusion of "professional model" within the state's legal definition of employment.) One model said she applied more than a month ago but hasn't yet heard back from the labor department.  |
| A Fashion Historian on the Relationship Between Clothing and Disease - Hyperallergic Posted: 22 Apr 2020 12:18 PM PDT
"Clothing can both harm and protect us," says fashion historian and author Dr. Alison Matthews David. For centuries, accessories like hats and gloves have been used as shields and even tools of self-defense. But clothing has also been an insidious "carrier of disease." On Tuesday, Matthews David was invited by New York City's National Arts Club to share her research in a Zoom talk titled "Fashion Victims: Germ Warfare." (The presentation drew heavily from her book Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present.) The topic is only timely, as we consider what to wear and how to protect ourselves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do virus particles spread through clothes? Should we wash our clothes every time we leave the house? These anxieties, Matthews David revealed, are nothing new. In Victorian times, people believed long skirts dragged all kinds of diseases — a 1900 cartoon from Puck magazine shows a maid dusting off clouds of influenza and typhoid from one such skirt. (Typhus did, in fact, travel through clothes that couldn't be laundered.) To help combat this, in the early 20th century, women began carrying around skirt grips to hitch up the trailing fabric. Matthews David suspects that the switch to shorter skirts had at least something to do with paranoias around hygiene.
Large, voluminous skirts, known as crinolines, are also being revisited as early forms of "social distancing." While this seems funny at first, Matthews David says that women really did think of the skirt that way — it "gave them space in public," so that "people couldn't touch or grab them." Similarly, broad-rimmed hats created a kind of protective orbit, preventing people from encroaching (in one caricature, a woman pokes a man with her hatpin for sitting too close to her on the train). The hats and skirts were social measures reflective of their era, but their relevance to our current moment is hard to overlook. A hoop skirt might be useful on those infrequent grocery trips.
Today, in pandemic times, "we're all rethinking about what we touch," said Matthews David. We're asking ourselves things like, "Should I wear gloves?" According to the historian, if we were to time travel to the 1800s, any member of the elite class would probably be disgusted by the suggestion of leaving the house without gloves — shaking with one's bare hands was considered downright dirty.
The other major clothing item we're all thinking about is, of course, masks. In one of her cleverly illustrated slides, Matthews David compared the masks that plague doctors wore — equipped with a beak infused with sweet smells, which were thought to be protective — to the "more modern" prototypes being fabricated by the likes of Chanel.
Once upon a time, masks were considered fashion items "to protect ladies from dust and wind," Matthews David pointed out. But today, in Western culture, masks have primarily become signs "of suspicion and distrust" (the masked bandit). When I asked Matthews David if she had to predict one change in how we dress after this pandemic has hopefully passed, she asserted, "Social practice around clothing will change […] From a Western consumer perspective, I imagine that the cloth mask will become a staple in many wardrobes, especially in urban areas and close quarters like supermarkets. We'll start carrying them around with us and put them on when necessary."
Our relationship to clothing is arguably already evolving, as we share our work-from-home outfits and dress for comfort. In an email exchange, Matthews David shared that she's been thinking about "all the women sighing with relief in terms of going braless" and "whether women's dress tends to shift more than men's after times of crisis." (Consider the 1920s, when women's dress radically changed after World War I.) As she touched upon during her talk, there is a powerful link between our mental and psychological health and what we wear. Major shifts like the pandemic we are experiencing now make us grow more conscientious of this connection, as some of us find newfound pleasure in putting on a nice outfit to run a supermarket errand. At the end of the talk, which you can watch in full on YouTube, a listener asked Matthews David what measures she takes, if any, to avoid the various "dangers" of fashion in our present moment and beyond. Her advice: "I'm very careful to launder everything before I wear it."  |
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