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rawiswhore · 5 years ago

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Triple H x Fem Reader- “My Heart Belongs To Daddy”

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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The year is 2003.

The former World Wrestling Federation has now changed its name to World Wrestling Entertainment, all thanks to the World Wildlife Foundation.

While the most famous wrestling company in the world, the company people ALWAYS think of when people think about pro wrestling or even wrestling in general, has changed its name, it hasn't changed the way it's been for the past couple of years, at least for the most part anyway.

It's still bloody and violent, it's still okay for wrestlers to swear, and it's still okay for divas to rip their clothes off until the only thing they're wearing is lingerie.

Speaking of lingerie, you were a top star during the late 90's Attitude Era, however, you left the company in the year 2000, due to suffering from a real life sex addiction and depression.

What does this have to do with lingerie, though?

In 2002, before you made a huge comeback to the WWE which would increase a huge boost in the ratings, you sang and performed at the Pussycat Dolls burlesque show, alongside other female celebrities like Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani and Carmen Electra.

Much like Christina and Gwen, you sang some of the same "burlesque"/"old school hoe anthem" songs they had sang (Peggy Lee's "Fever" and "Big Spender" from "Sweet Charity").

And not just that, you also had sang and performed some other 20th Century songs that some other female celebrities would sing there, some of which didn't sound very vintage burlesque-like, but they were your idea.

When you returned to the WWE in 2003 (that rhymed), you kept your slutty nymphomaniac gimmick during the late 90's Attitude Era, however, since you were a talented singer and performer and previously a Pussycat Doll, one thing you did during the WWE was sing.

Yes, sing.

And have little musical numbers where you would sing to some pro wrestlers.

And tonight, you were going to sing to a certain pro wrestler.

Who was that pro wrestler?

The one responsible for giving you a career, Triple H.

Speaking of Triple H, many pro wrestlers go through several gimmick and character changes. Just ask Stone Cold Steve Austin. Just ask Mick Foley. Just ask Billy Gunn.

And Triple H is one of them.

He went from a classy, haughty 1800's blueblood gentleman to a 1990's frat boy making obscene gestures (complete with an equally obscene and now iconic catchphrase) and blatant sexual innuendo to a denim clad biker, now his latest gimmick seems to be a rich "Entourage"-esque playboy accompanied by someone he's influenced by (Ric Flair) and two up and coming WWE stars (Randy Orton and Batista).

Looking at him now, dressed in those JC Penney's pantsuits and sunglasses, being shown walking out of limos with his entourage dressed in similar attire, surrounded and smothered by sexy women in skimpy cocktail dresses, or even backstage in the WWE drinking champagne and buying expensive cars, he looks all the most like a sugar daddy.

And tonight, you were going to sing an iconic sugar daddy anthem that you used to sing at the Pussycat Dolls burlesque show.

While Triple H and his team known as Evolution were in the ring, dressed in those pantsuits and just talking, some music started playing.

And it wasn't your entrance music the crowd recognizes.

A silhouette of a sexy female figure was shown underneath the titantron, the figure had a body similar to early 90's supermodels like Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell.

Despite not playing your entrance music, the audience knows about your whole gimmick of showing your silhouette and singing a big band-esque song.

Your gimmick now is basically a Pussycat Doll, and not a Pussycat Doll that would become a hugely popular girl group years later, but rather the burlesque show Pussycat Doll.

This got an immediate "pop" reaction from the crowd, all of the men immediately standing up from their seats; cheering and lauding you on, some of them holding up signs and posters related to you.

You then turned around, showing your face and front part of your body.

You were dressed in a short, slinky silver dress, similar to the one Roxie Hart wears in the movie "Chicago", holding a microphone in one hand.

Jerry Lawler of course was going absolutely nuts, that pervert.

The song was perfectly and sexily arranged, sounding slightly similar to the one you sang when you performed at the Pussycat Dolls burlesque show.

While sauntering across the little catwalk many wrestlers either march or run through, you held the microphone up to your lips.

"I used to fall in love with all those boys who'd maul the young cuties" you crooned and sang.

Indeed, you did used to fall in love with boys who'd maul young cuties, be it during your wrestling career (*cough Shawn Michaels cough*) or even before your wrestling career.

Unlike Jillian Hall or most other female pro wrestlers or even some pro wrestlers in general, you were someone who can actually *gasp!* sing.

And are a talented singer.

Not quite Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera, but a talented singer nonetheless.

"Boys who'd maul the young cuties?" Jerry Lawler asked, looking at Jim Ross sitting next to him. "She talkin' about Shawn Michaels? Or me?!"

Typical Jerry Lawler.

You could nearly roll your eyes over Jerry exclaiming this.

"But now I find I'm more inclined my heart belongs to daddy" you sang, pointing your index finger to Triple H.

"Daddy?!" Jerry Lawler cried. "She singing about her father?"

A smile broke out on Triple H's face, while this was rehearsed, even he couldn't resist this.

Neither could Ric Flair, whose gimmick was always a playboy, but Ric Flair has always looked like someone's grandpa trying to be a wrestler, and now he really looks like an old grandpa.

Not sexy.

Batista and Randy Orton were enjoying this too.

I'm sure some of the women and especially teenybopper girls watching this wish you could be singing about Randy Orton and flirting with him instead of Triple H, but you like who you like.

Some of the males in the audience and probably watching this on TV were disgusted at you calling Triple H "Daddy" since they find daddy fetishes disgusting, what with the incest factor.

You strolled to the ring, where you crawled through the ropes a la Stacy Keibler, trying to look sexy.

Once you were inside the ring with Evolution, you began singing again.

"If I invite a boy some night, to dine on my fine finnan haddie" you sang and crooned, your head turning and looking at Randy Orton.

While you were singing this, you were sexily sauntering and walking up to Triple H, all while looking at Randy.

Randy couldn't help but break out into a smile, his eyes were eying you up and down, checking you out.

So were some of the other men in the wrestling ring.

Randy started walking up to you.

"I just adore his asking for more" you sang, your eyes looking at Randy, head tilted back and hand sitting on your heart. "But my heart belongs to Daddy".

While you sang the "but my heart belongs to Daddy" part, your straightened your head up and turned it towards Triple H, looking at him and curling up next to him, wrapping one of your arms across behind his neck and atop of his shoulders, the other hand was on his chest, drawing circles on his chest.

One of your legs was slightly bent and nudging against his leg, trying to flirt with him.

"Shouldn't she be singing about Ric Flair?!" Jerry Lawler cried out.

That's meant to be a terrible sugar daddy joke, since Ric Flair is an old man, and there's the stereotype that sugar daddies are these old, rich men.

Some people wonder if this idea was Vince McMahon's idea, considering he's old enough to remember this song, so is Ric Flair, for that matter.

But this was your idea since you were previously a Pussycat Doll, the whole idea of you singing these big band-ish songs was your idea.

"Yes, my heart belongs to Daddy, so I simply couldn't be bad" you sang, drawing circles with your index finger on Triple H's chest.

You were still holding onto Triple H while you were singing.

"Yes, my heart belongs to daddy" you crooned, "da da da, da da da, da da daaaaaaaaaa..."

"So I want to warn you laddie" you sang, looking at Randy Orton and interrupting him walking up to you by holding your index finger up at him. "Though I know you're perfectly swell..."

When you sang the "though I know you're perfectly swell", your head tilted back and you put your hand on your heart, gushing like you're in love.

"But my heart belongs to daddy" you sang, your head turned towards Triple H now and looking at him "because my daddy, he treats me so well..."

You smiled while looking at Triple H, running your finger up and down his chest, flirting with him.

"Stop the music!" Randy Orton interrupted, holding the microphone up to his mouth.

The instrumental music you were singing to completely haulted, where you and Triple H both looked at Randy, so did Batista and Randy Orton for that matter.

Your facial expression went from flirty to shocked.

"Indeed, your 'daddy' treats you so well" Randy stated, crooking his fingers like quotation marks when saying "daddy". "Your sugar daddy Triple H is the only reason you're in the WWE".

Your jaw dropped, your face looking disgusted.

"Hey Randy" you quipped back, holding the microphone to your lips. "Didn't your daddy teach you not to throw stones in glass houses? Because if it wasn't for YOUR father and YOUR grandfather, you wouldn't be in the WWE either!"

The audience got a huge reaction out of this, going "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!".

Randy basically got served and you beat a man during this argument.

What you stated is something many pro wrestling fans say.

Not to mention, to add to you covering a song most famous for being in a Marilyn Monroe movie...

In 1999, when you were popular, but not as hugely popular as you were in 1998, you did a WWF commercial, that parodied Marilyn Monroe's musical number in "Let's Make Love", where she sang? "My Heart Belongs to Daddy".

However, in your commercial, you slid down a stripper pole and stated in the commercial "My name is Dita, and I'm not supposed to play...with boys!". You didn't sing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy".

Where it cut to footage of you either flirting or getting sexual with WWF stars (Triple H, Shawn Michaels, Billy Gunn, even The British Bulldog and Bart Gunn) in the ring or backstage (that was scripted) or footage of you actually wrestling and beating the crap out of male wrestlers.

Some of the footage was even from photoshoots you did for wrestling magazines where you're surrounded by amorous male wrestlers looking at you like they're checking you out.

Your wrestling name was Dita after Madonna's alter ego during her early 90's "Sex"/"Erotica" era.

Though, if you got famous as your wrestling name being Dita, the WWF wouldn't have Lita (which isn't her real name and she didn't even like the name "Lita" given to her), they'd probably have to give her a different name.

#triple h #triple h x fem reader #wwe #2003 #2000s #00s #ruthless aggression #ruthless aggression era #valentine's day #happy valentine's day

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angel-vintage101 · 5 years ago

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About Miss Angel

Hi there! I’m Angel Vintage (aka lil Miss Megan) according to my friends because I’m only 4 foot and 10 inches tall. I’m new to this whole great big world of blogging. I’ve played around with the idea of creating a youtube channel for a while and since I am fairly new to the whole social networking platform, I decided to start out small first and start a blog. Since there aren’t many social platforms for rockabilly and vintage, etc I’d like to try to create one here on tumblr.

Anyways, enough about that. You actually clicked on here to hear a little more about how Miss Angel got into vintage and rockabilly. I was about 5 years old. My mother packed most of my things and sent for my grandparents to come and get me. My family were having some personal issues at the time that my parents were trying to protect my fragile, young mind from. Little did I know, those days I would spend with my mamaw and poppy would be the very best days of my life. I had many loving years with them, only going to stay with my parents some of the time, but don’t get me wrong, I loved my parents and understood clearly why they had to do what they had to do. They really had no choice, considering the yearly long crisis they were going through at the time.I didn’t fully go back to living with my parents until I were 12.They moved all three of their children out of state thinking things would start to get better.

Those days were the best ever though. It was as if my grandparents lived in a time warp. I definitely didn’t live a regular lifestyle for a child growing up in the late 90′s-early 2000′s. I later discovered in my adult life that a lot of the ways they lived their lives was a lot like the vintage 50′s era and soon grown a closeness to the era and decade. When you walked into my grandparent’s house you were to take your shoes off, supper was always on the table at a certain timeframe each night, we only regularly watched the television at night and when we did it was always turned to Andy Griffith ( what I used to call Mayberry as a young child), Hee Haw, Beverly Hillbillies, Lucy, etc. There were even some times we would get the privilege to indulge in shows such as Jackie Gleason or watch some older westerns with my poppy.

Life in their household were such fun during the day. My grand parents grown a garden, in which they still do every year, in which we picked many vegetables from and my mamaw canned sometimes. We made jewelry and played board games during the day. They listened to a lot of oldies, classic country, and gospel. Car rides were mostly to the groccery store or to run errands and they were so peaceful. I lived a very quiet life. I never wanted those days to end. I went outside to play. They weren’t many other kids that lived on that street, but I managed to make my own fun outside and went in when my grandma called me in for dinner or when it started to get dark since my grandparents didn’t have a streetlight. The way I lived with them for all of those 7 years impacted my decisions later on in life increasingly much.

That’s how come I got into rockabilly. The community reminded me a lot of how I used to live with them, and I longed for that kind of lifestyle again. Unlike the technology driven people of today I was looking for a much simpler way of life and that I found in the rockabilly culture.

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mayor-nicola · 6 years ago

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✨21 Questions ✨

Tagged by: @fxwne (thank you so much <3 ) Sorry it got a little long 😅

Rules: Answer 21 questions and then tag 21 people who you want to get to know better! (I’ve answered a lot of these already in another ask meme, so I’m going to switch up a few of the questions)

Nickname: Frankie (my real name is Frances Jean, but I’m not an old lady yet, so I’m going to save that one for later)

Chinese Zodiac: Boar 🐗 I was born in 1996, however, my birthday is February 5th which was on/before Chinese New Year that year (this year it’s on my birthday again)

Occupation: Unfortunately, I lost my job at the toy store because of my school schedule. However, I’ve been interviewing around and am hoping to get another one at a bookstore near my school. (like I’m taking 1 class that’s 2 days a week. I can handle it employers. I promise. Please! I need money for study abroad.)

I also work at my local convention every year in the celebrity photo ops department. I’ve got a lot of tales from the con.

My current relationship status: A Train Wreck™ I don’t know what I’m doing between the crush on the guy I only get to see 4 days a year and the guy who’s literally the most wholesome thing on earth (who’s kindness is probably being misinterpreted for greater feelings)

Favorite movie: Labyrinth (1986) I don’t remember when exactly when my fixation on this movie began, but I just love it to death. I remember watching it my grandma’s house a lot. I’ve got the VHS, DVD, board game, comics, visual history guide, art prints, etc. I also went to the Jim Henson exhibit a couple years ago.

What do you collect: Well, the big one right now is Calico Critters/Sylvanian Families. I used to collect them when I was younger and after I started working at a toy store, my collection has spiraled out of control. I also collect vintage Pokemon and Sailor Moon merch (90′s) Polly Pocket compacts, Labyrinth stuff, and Harry Potter stuff.

Song stuck in my head: Complicated by Dimitri Vegas Like Mike vs David Guetta (I heard it at a house party last Friday night and had never heard it before. Now it wont leave)

Youtube channels you watch: h3h3 and pyrocynical are probably the big two right now. (I’ve also started watching pyro’s friends like imallexx and WillNE) MischaCrossing is probably my favorite girl gamer (I don’t meant that derogatory. I love her content.) So, a lot of gamers and reactionary channels. (Dan and Phil, Dylan is in Trouble, Call Me Kevin, Polygon are a few others)

Fashion sense: Mostly comfy, however, I’m also interested in Japanese fashion. I’m a Lolita (not the gross kink, the very modest fashion based off rococo and Victorian era clothing). So, sometimes I’m wearing a sweater and jeans, and then other days I’m wearing a big frilly dress with at least 5 layers of petticoat.

Favorite store: For clothing, Cath Kidston and Angelic Pretty. And (although I haven’t been there yet. I’m 98% sure I’m going to adore it) The Sylvanian Families Shop in London.

Three things you wish you did but don’t: Exercise more🏃‍♀️, socialize more😂 (me attending that house party was rarer then finding a shiny Pokemon in the wild. I never go out), and write more 📝.

Lucky Number: 3

Most embarrassing moment: I was working an event shift at the aquarium and needed to be on the other side of the building after my break. So, I’m rushing back and just so happen to stumble across the octopus feeding. There’s a big crowd and I figure I’ll cut under the stanchions of another exhibit to get there. I duck under and tumble to the ground, scrape my knee and somehow manage to prop my other leg on the wall during my fall. Also, during the fall the zipper on my skirt broke, so when I went to stand up it started falling off.

Your favorite mythological creature: I’m not sure if I have one. I have a favorite magical creature though. It’s the Niffler. 10/10 good boi.

Do you have a crush on a fictional character: Tom Riddle was/always will be a garbage boy, but when I was younger he was a dream. I also like Enoch from the Miss Peregrine’s series (which is ironic, considering the latest book dragged me so hard. I’m Frankie. Literally.).

Introvert or extrovert: I think I’m somewhere in between. A reformed introvert.

Best prank: One time I put hot sauce in a guy’s hot chocolate when we were on a class sailing trip (we were in maritime together). Why’d I do it? Oh boy. When you hear what he did to me, you’ll be like: “Yeah, he deserved it.”

Goals for the next three months: I hope to do well in my class (it’s about women comic book writers), get a job, see my convention family, and head back to study abroad in London for the 2nd time a more mature and accomplished person.

Patronus (or spirit animal): Harbor Seal or a Rabbit

Describe yourself as aesthetic things: pastels, vintage, flowers, ocean, cottage. (basically the aesthetic of the Calico Critters, tbh)

Some things you hate: I hate gum and other loud crunchy things (I’ve got hypersensitive hearing and it really screws up my focus)

I tag @tealeify @starry-mayor @hootcrossing @aforestlife @kxavierreyes @acnl-claytown@sammie-crossing @0carnations @chewy-and-the-porgs @crossing-a-starr @notexing (nearly the same crew I tagged last time, but I literally changed like all the questions so you should be good)

#personal #asks #thanks for asking #ask game #non ac

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iamandco · 5 years ago

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The latter end of this decade will be forever known as the era of “Clothes That Actually Fit.” While we’ve achieved a lot of good, some subtle fashion shenanigans have gone under the radar. We’re currently in a pants phase that I like to call “ankles be damned, and it needs to be addressed. Every single pair of pants on the market is cropped, and with little protection for our ankles, I don’t know how they’ve survived the last three seasons. My ankles have tan lines that look like the opposite of house arrest. In fact, these tan lines speak to house freedom and the mosquito bites on my ankles prove I’m just a buffet in Mother Nature’s ecosystem. This experience causes me to mentally escape to a time when jeans may have been pin-rolled, but ankles were protected by several inches of thick white socks. I escape to the 80s when fashion-especially denim- was inconvenient. This was a time when Cher and Diana Ross danced all night in jeans that weighed as much as them. Still, I have to believe that if they knew then what we know now they’d opt for the more ethical pair and they’d support brands that made trendy jeans available to everyone. These are the 80s jeans your favorite 80s style icons would’ve totally worn. CHER, STUDIO 54 1977 - GETTY IMAGES Grey Mom Fit Jeans $60 at time of publication Buy At Shop.Mango.Com This photo of Cher vibing at Studio 54 illustrates how I want to feel every day. If I could ask “studio 54 Cher” what her recipe was for looking so overtaken with joy, I’m sure she’d say it was 100% the denim and nothing else. Well, maybe the suspenders as well. I, too, lose it over a well-styled suspenders. To copy this look you’ll for sure need these Grey Mom Fit Jeans and make sure you don’t forget the suspenders . These 80s jeans are available at shop.mango.com . MADONNA, 1988 - GETTY IMAGES PHOTO: COURTESY AMERICAN EAGLE Ripped X-Long Mom Jean $50 at the time of publication Buy At AE.com This photo convinces me that Madonna invented airport style. Airport style is a skill. Not everyone has the forethought to put together a high-key trendy outfit that’s low-key comfortable. A loose fit basic tee, leather biker jacket and thick white socks ( because planes are cold) and trendy jeans are the go-to airport ensemble. Still, I think given the option I think Madonna would opt for a ripped Mom Jean for even greater lightweight comfort. Oh, and the x-long style is a must for a commanding cuff. These 80s jeans are available at ae.com . LISA BONET PHOTO: COURTESY EVERLANE Women’s 90s Cheeky Straight Jean $78 at time of publication Buy At Everlane.com Lisa Bonet (Lilakoi Moon) might very well be Mother Nature in the flesh. And, last time I checked, the enchantress still looks exactly. like. this. 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DEBBIE HARRY, 1978 PHOTO: COURTESY LEVI’S Levi’s Medium Wash Wedgie Fit Jeans $98 at the time of publication Buy At Levi.com In one of many captivating Debbie Harry performances, she sported Levi’s classic yet lesser-known 505 style. In a Telegraph interview , Levi’s historian, Tracey Panek said the 505 was dubbed the “coming of age jean.” The sea of denim we see in archive pictures of Woodstock festival are there because young people were so enamoured with denim as democratic, affordable clothing that everyone could share. — Tracey Panek The design of Levi’s 505 was largely a convenience play. The straight-leg silhouette was the same as Levi’s Original 501 but rather than a button fly the 505 used a zip fly which was more flattering and convenient. Debbie Harry adored the 505 and wore them repeatedly during performances. But, if Debbie Harry had to do it all over again we’re certain she’d wear Levi’s Wedgie Fit Jeans. They’re lighter weight, would flatter Harry’s waist and butt and come in a variety of sizes. These 80s jeans are available at levi.com . DIANA ROSS, STUDIO 54 1979 - GETTY IMAGES PHOTO: COURTESY REFORMATION Willow Jean $128 at time of publication Buy At TheReformation.com Oh to be a fly on the wall at Studio 54 while Diana Ross danced all night long in her sandal sling-backs, ripped tank, and perfectly tailored jeans. Reformation’s brand is built on effortless femininity and celebration of the female form. Divinely feminine describes Ross and her legacy perfectly. Well, that and a relentless proclivity to boogie. Reformation’s Willow Jean has an inseam high enough and a waist tapered enough to facilitate Diana Ross’s best dance moves until the sun comes up. These 80s jeans are available at thereformation.com . PAMELA ANDERSON PHOTO: COURTESY SHOPBOP Unif Twerk Jeans $120 at the time of publication Buy At Shopbop.com Of course Pam Anderson made boyfriend wear sexy in the 80s. Those jeans were not just distressed, they were in a full-blown panic state and so was every teenage boy, and girl. Not just any pair of jeans would’ve worked for her. No, they needed to be comfortable, they needed to be cheeky. They needed to look like she rolled out of bed impossibly stunning and threw on a pair of her flavor-of-the-month’s jeans. They needed to look like Unif’s Twerk Jeans. These 80s jeans are available at shopbop.com . CHER “I’d RATHER BELIEVE IN YOU” PHOTOSHOOT PHOTO: COURTESY ToPSHOP Washed Black Raw Hem Straight Leg Jeans $30 at the time of publication Buy At Topshop.com Could Cher have known how much of a statement her “I’d Rather Believe in You” photoshoot would make? Each camera flash bore a new subtle movement. Still, the shoot was so iconic that even Kim Kardashian felt compelled to recreate it . That image is a reminder that merely existing is beautiful, especially when you’re Cher. The Washed Black Raw Hem Straight Leg Jeans from Topshop are the perfect affordable jeans to recreate the look. If these jeans were available then, Cher would totally go for them. These 80s jeans are available at topshop.com . SARAH JESSICA PARKER High Rise Rolled Hem Mom Jeans $60 at the time of publication Buy At UrbanOutfitters.Com Sarah Jessica Parker came out of the womb a fashion icon. No matter the decade, no matter the trend, she’s never missed a beat. The woman can’t get it wrong. When you find a throwback photo of SJP leaning against a red vintage drop-top in a tuxedo jacket, pill rolled jeans, white sneakers, and thick, socks you just nod and take it in. These 80s jeans are available at urbanoutfitters.com . BROOKE SHIELDS PHOTO: COURTESY LEVI’S Levi’s 501 Original Dark Wash Buy At Levi.com No list of 80s jeans could be considered authentic without Levi’s 501 jeans. The 501 jean is as much of an 80s fashion icon as Brooke Shields is. And Brooke is no stranger to the power of a good pair of jeans. You may have seen her throwback Calvin Klein jeans campaign. PHOTO: COURTESY RICHARD AVEDON Well, it caused quite the uproar in the 80s. A then 15-year-old model, Brook Shields, appeared in Calvin Klein ads in a revealing button-down shirt and their straight leg skinny jeans. Some Americans were none too pleased. The commercial was pulled from airing in CBS’s and ABC’s New York market. If Brooke had to do it all over again, I’m hoping she would but in Levi’s 501s since the Original Calvin Klein jeans are no longer available. These 80s jeans are available at levi.com . JANET JACKSON - PHOTo: COURTESY GETTY IMAGES PHOTO: COURTESY TOPSHOP Grey Pleat Mom Jeans $80 at the time of publication Buy At Topshop.com Before Janet invited nasty folks to call her “Miss Jackson,” she sang a song called “Young Love.” The chorus went like this: “Young love Ring around the roses Young love Searching for a heart so true Young love A pocket full of posies Young love All adds up to me and you” Who needs love? Am I right? Nobody can hug you tighter than a pair of good jeans. I like to imagine that rather than young Janet searching for love, she searched for these Grey Pleat Mom Jeans to complete her look. These 80s jeans area available at topshop.com .

#self care #self love

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anglelyre2-blog · 5 years ago

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Automotive Museum In Southwest Philly Goes The Distance (And Then Some)

The Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum at 6825-31 Norwitch Drive may be well off the beaten path, but its collection of historic race cars is astounding. | Photo: Michael Bixler

If modern evolution is a linear progression of technological advancements, in no place is this more evident than the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum. The easily overlooked building on Norwitch Drive in Southwest Philadelphia is a treasure trove of rare racing cars. It is a place where the past comes to vibrant life, where long forgotten machines are reintroduced to new generations and the early days of racing culture are celebrated.

The museum is currently home to 70 immaculately maintained and extremely coveted race cars, lined up and displayed by decade in colorful diorama-type settings. Dating back to the early 1900s, cars like Ferraris, Jaguars, BMWs, and Maseratis sit proudly as tangible remnants of eras gone by. The varied assortment of vehicles are not merely parked and gathering dust. They all run, a museum requirement, and are regularly taken outside to be showcased on the museum’s three acre back lot.

What propelled the museum into existence was one man’s personal collection. Gathered over the course of decades by Dr. Frederick Simeone, a prominent Philadelphia-based neurosurgeon at Pennsylvania Hospital, the cars were first stored in an unassuming public parking garage at 8th and Lombard Streets. Simeone rented the garage and gradually began to fill it with his treasures, simultaneously keeping it open as a public garage. Ultimately, the space filled with his collection and was no longer open for public use.

“Any collection doesn’t start as a gigantic collection. It starts with one piece at a time. Back in the 1970s when the collection started, it was still possible to get really great cars. The general public had not caught up with the iconic value of certain types of cars. You had to be a historian. They were affordable to buy and I was able to select the ‘Mona Lisa’ cars of the sports racing world. They aren’t available now,” Simeone remarked.

This exhibit features Le Mans racers from the 1930s through the 1970s. | Photo: Michael Bixler

Crediting his lifelong fascination of cars to his father who encouraged his interest, Simeone always had a penchant for early sports cars that were not Formula One cars. He liked racers with beautiful designs that could also drive casually on the open road. Simeone acquired the first three quarters of his collection at affordable prices, focusing on cars with noteworthy racing histories. As time went on, early racing cars morphed from hobby objects into art collector pieces. This led to a high demand and made them impossible to purchase. Simeone used other vintage cars he had attained that weren’t sports cars as trades to acquire those harder to purchase vehicles and added them to his lot.

As the collection continued to grow, Simeone was nudged by people who came to see it to preserve the collection for the future. He created a charitable foundation and found a larger location on Norwitch Drive to display the cars properly to the public. Simeone had two main goals for the foundation: the preserve the vehicles and to keep the collection together.

“I wanted to make sure there was a place for them to stay in perpetuity. The original purpose of museums was to preserve. In the process of preserving, you then have the opportunity to exhibit. These cars are all very special and cannot be duplicated. They are from an era that was iconic,” he said.

Simeone noted there was specific criteria he looked for when acquiring a car or accepting one into the museum. Each car must hold historical significance and must be a car that won a race. The cars must also have original parts, and be aesthetically attractive, to demonstrate the design of the period it was made.

Hill climbs, where an automobile’s power and speed is tested, were popular in England in the 1920s. | Photo: Michael Bixler

“We want to have the finest cars that represent the ‘winners’ of the race world. We want to tell the evolution of these cars by the winners, to show the ingredients that lead to success. A lot of museums don’t care. We’re very fussy that they have all the right, important things particularly the original chassis, engine, and body.”

Along those lines, Simeone decided the theme of the museum would be “The Spirit of Competition” based on the concept that competition spurs forth advancements and better ways of doing things. He hoped this would especially reach younger visitors to the museum, who are finding their place in the world. The museum offers educational programs like STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) and a popular summer camp that demonstrates this focus.

“Our theme is based on the belief that competition makes everything better. The alternative is not competing. With that, there would be no evolution or development. The cars are set up chronologically, so you can see the progression. As technology evolves, things change,” Simeone said.

Preserving and maintaining the vehicles is a top priority of the museum. Among the collection, the oldest car is a 1907 Renault that was once belonged to William K. Vanderbuilt. It was donated to the museum by a man who had it in his family for 90 years. Simeone noted the rarest car in the collection is also his favorite, a blood red 1938 Alfa Romeo 2900 B. One of only four made, it is considered to be the best pre-WWII sports racing car. The museum also has rotating visiting exhibits that are popular among car clubs and those wanting to learn more on a particular make of car. Most recently, the museum showcased an exhibition of MGs.

A 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport in the Watkins Glen exhibit. | Photo: Michael Bixler

Another draw to the museum are its Demo Days, when one or two cars are taken outside and raced in the museum’s lot. Each Demo Day event focuses on a particular historical race, event, or make of a car. The day includes a brief discussion and social commentary about the featured cars.

“My real obligation is to create activities to ensure the museum is socially relevant and to use it as an educational device. The Demo is about taking an interesting car and explaining what makes it important. We associate the day with either a social event, the driver, the venue, or what was going on in the world. People love to see the cars in motion.”

Despite the impressive collection, which has garnered recognition and multiple awards overseas, the museum continues to stay under the radar of Philadelphia attractions. This has made fundraising efforts difficult. Cars in the collection can be “adopted” if a person takes a special interest in, one which usually stems from a personal connection one feels for a certain make or model.

“We have no philanthropy at all. People just don’t donate to car museums. It is a shame because the value level of the contents make us one of the highest in Philadelphia. It’s more valuable than the contents at the Rodin Museum, for instance. We are very overlooked,” Simeone remarked.

“We’ve been voted ‘Best Car Museum in the World’ twice, which is more than any other. The International Historic Motoring Awards in London gave us the ‘Best Museum’ award four times. They know about us in Europe, but not much in Philadelphia, sadly. We’re a hidden gem, I’m afraid,” he added.

This exhibit depicts the Targa Florio, a race through the hills of Sicily, Italy. | Photo: Michael Bixler

One longtime fan of the collection is Mike Wolfe from the show, American Pickers. Wolfe, an Iowa native, has been visiting Philadelphia for years, prior to his show, and met Dr. Simeone along the way. Simeone eventually acquired a Fiat 600 cut away engine from Wolfe which he “picked” in Italy. Now on display in the museum, the exposed, functioning engine is used as a teaching aid. Wolfe holds a deep appreciation for the museum’s preservation efforts and noted its worldwide importance.

“It’s a collection that you cannot see, literally, anywhere in the world,” Wolfe said. “When I travel in Europe, they all know Dr. Simone and respect him and the collection. He has the rarest of the rare. They envy everything he has because so much of it was pulled out of Europe. It is the type of collection you could never put together today, no matter how much money you have, because the cars have all been bought up. It’s one of the best-preserved collections of European and American Le Mans cars. It’s stuff you don’t even think exists anymore.”

Wolfe noted the artistic component of the collection. “There are types cars that tour art museums because the museums understand those cars are works of art. That is what Dr. Simeone’s whole museum is like. Everything is next level. When you go to a car museum like, his you realize it’s more art than anything else. When you think about art does it always to be a sculpture or a painting on canvas? Or can it be something that was made in an era that will never come again.”

On Demo Days the public gets to see the museum’s cars in action. | Photo: Michael Bixler

Also onsite is an extensive 6,000 square foot research library, filled with automotive literature that Simeone began collecting when he was just 14 years old. The library specializes in original car company literature that came with cars upon purchase, repair instructions, early automobile designs and illustrations, and pre-World War II magazines. There is a large assortment of hard bound books. Simeone continues to gather materials and noted private collectors have donated their literature collections to the museum to keep them intact.

“Automotive literature is the classic ephemera,” said Simeone. “It disappears. There is no card catalog for automotive books. Libraries don’t ordinarily have automotive sections. The materials are really important for restorers, historians, and for people who are selling their cars and want to make sure it is authentic and original. It is one of the highlights here. It’s actually where I spend most of my time.”

Simeone hopes that anyone who visits the museum will leave with something memorable. With a plethora of rarities from all over the world, it is hard not to gain an appreciation for race car technology. As early automotive pioneering continues to catapult us into the future, we are all along for an inspiring ride.

About the author

Virginia Lindak is a three-time Keystone Press Award-winning journalist, photographer, and author. As a journalist for nearly a decade, her 500-plus published articles span the Philadelphia region into New Jersey and Delaware. She has also co-authored four books on Lancaster County. Additionally, she works full-time in development at a non-profit organization in Chester County. In her free time she enjoys adventuring off the beaten path and delving into local history. Lindak holds a B.A. in Communications, Public Relations and Journalism from Immaculata University and a M.A. in Communication Studies from West Chester University.

Source: https://hiddencityphila.org/2019/05/automotive-museum-in-southwest-philly-goes-the-distance-and-then-some/

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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Why Don’t Rich People Just Stop Working?

“Billionaires should not exist,” Senator Bernie Sanders said last month. And, at the Democratic presidential debate this week, he said that the wealth disparity in America is “a moral and economic outrage.”

“Senator Sanders is right,” said Tom Steyer, a businessman from California who happened to be the only billionaire onstage that night (as far as we know).

“No one on this stage wants to protect billionaires — not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires,” noted Senator Amy Klobuchar.

It’s an idea that’s going around. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who is worth close to $70 billion, is apparently open to it. “I don’t know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have,” he said in live-streamed question-and-answer session with company employees in early October. “But on some level, no one deserves to have that much money.”

Yet here we are, chugging into the 10th year of an extremely top-heavy economic boom in which the 1 percenters, by all statistical measures, have won, creating the greatest wealth disparity since the Jazz Age. This era, in length and gains, dwarfs the “greed is good” 1980s, that era of yellow ties, nigiri rolls and designer espresso machines that has come to symbolize gilded excess in popular imagination.

And yet the only thing we know in this casino-like economy — a casino that may, in fact, soon be shuttered — is that for those at the top, too much is never enough.

Many normal, non-billionaire people wonder: why is that?

Studies over the years have indicated that the rich, unlike the leisured gentry of old, tend to work longer hours and spend less time socializing. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, whose worth has been estimated in the hundreds of millions, has said that he wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to mount his daily assault on his corporate rivals. Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, is worth some $23 billion but nevertheless considers it a victory that he dialed back his “bonkers” 120-hour workweeks to a more “manageable” 80 or 90.

And they continue to diversify. Lady Gaga makes a reported $1 million per show in her residency at the Park MGM in Las Vegas, and has evolved from pop music to conquer film — but still also recently unveiled a cosmetics venture with Amazon.

Almost everything rich people touch makes money, but this current financial inferno has meant little for the bottom 50 percent of earners in the United States, who have 32 percent less wealth than they did in 2003.

The 1 percent have, as of last decade, 85 percent of their net worth tied up in investments like stocks, bonds and private equity, where value has exploded. According to Redfin, the average sale price of properties in the top 5 percent are up 43 percent nationally over the past decade, and up even more in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Fine vintage watches, which have become a must-have for the young male money class, are exploding in value, with prices on certain five-figure models of Rolexes doubling in just a few years.

Gold, once derided as a relic, is up 40 percent in the past few years.

What’s happening?

No One Has a Retirement Number These Days

“What’s your number?” asked anyone caught up in the dot-com boom of the 1990s.

Could you retire to Napa with $5 million? $20 million?

Some hit their number and some went bust, but Silicon Valley is more than ever a showcase for the unfettered capitalism of 2019.

Yet no one seems to talk about their number anymore, said Antonio García Martínez, who sold a start-up to Twitter and served as a Facebook product manager before publishing his memoir, “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” in 2016.

Yesterday’s big score is just seed capital for tomorrow’s bigger one.

“There’s never some omega point,” Mr. García Martínez, 43, said. “People who get to that point don’t stop once they get there.”

“People say, ‘Why don’t you develop a hobby, or do philanthropy?’” Mr. García Martínez said. “But for many, they simply can’t stop doing it. They derive transcendent meaning from capitalism. Without their money, what else would they have?”

At a time of low taxes, friendly interest rates and torrents of venture capital available to would-be moguls, it’s a historic moment in the quest for more among the entrepreneurial class.

Tim Ferriss, the life-hacking author and podcast star who was an angel investor in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, wrote in an email that many of these people have been “navigating work and life in sixth gear for decades.”

Without Constant Work, We Must Face the Nature of Existence

“Once they have no financial need to work — are ‘post-economic,’ as some say in San Francisco — they have trouble shifting into lower gears,” Mr. Ferriss wrote. “They’re like drag racers who now have to learn to navigate the turns and intersections of neighborhoods at 30 miles per hour.”

“Without ambitious projects to fill space,” he added, “there is often a void that makes some of the bigger questions hard to avoid. The things you neglected are no longer drowned out by noise; they are the signal. It’s like facing the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

In a sense, it has been going on in this country for two and a half centuries. “We are a nation founded on the overthrow of kings and the idle rich, so the hustle is deeply baked into mainstream notions of what it means to be American,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who is a New York Times opinion contributor.

And today’s competitive personality types are unable to slow down, in part because they fear slipping from their lofty perches.

“Driven people are just driven,” said Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business anchor. “They want to stay fresh and relevant, and to do that, it requires consistent practice. If you want to win, you need to be all in.” And winning can be collecting the most cash — pressing the excitement pedal over and over again, like so many exhausted rats in a cage.

Rich People Know Too Many Rich People

With the number of Americans making $1 million or more spiking by 40 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to the Internal Revenue Service, you may think that the rich are finally feeling flush enough to ease up, kick back, chill out.

They are not.

One recent Harvard survey of 4,000 millionaires found that people worth $8 million or more were scarcely happier than those worth $1 million.

In a widely cited 2006 study, rich people reported that they spend more time doing things they were required to do.

Why do they want to do this to themselves?

The fact that there are more rich people who are, in fact, richer than ever may be part of the reason.

Sociologists have long talked about “relative income hypothesis.” We tend to measure material satisfaction by those around us — not in absolute terms.

“For most people, enough is enough,” said Robert Frank, the wealth editor for CNBC and the author of the 2007 book “Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich,” who has interviewed many plutocrats. “But there is another group of people, no matter what they have, they have to keep going. I call them ‘scorekeepers.’ They’re truly driven by competitive zeal.”

Take Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle. Mr. Ellison always felt competitive with Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Mr. Frank said. “So when Paul Allen built his 400-foot boat, Larry Ellison waited until it was done and built a 450-foot boat. Larry Ellison would never be happy until he was No. 1.”

Among the very rich, it does not matter that all imaginable material needs have been met, said Edward Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University who studies wealth and disparity.

“Among the rarefied group of the extreme rich, social status depends on net worth,” Dr. Wolff wrote in an email. “Their enhanced wealth allows them to make substantial charitable contributions to institutions like museums and concert halls, that may lead to having a building or the like named after them. Think of the Koch brothers and the New York City Ballet. This is only possible if they can stay ahead of the pack and out-contribute their peers.”

Social sampling leads the rich toward a blinkered view that society as a whole is more well-off than it is, feeding their unending need — particularly as wealth becomes geographically dense. Nearly 20 percent of the world’s ultra-high-net-worth individuals — with assets of $30 million or more — live in just 10 cities around the globe, by one tally. Six of those cities are in the United States.

Money Is Like Alcohol but for Money

Living inside bubbles, the rich need greater excess just to feel the same high, said Steven Berglas, a psychologist, executive coach and author.

“If you’re an alcoholic,” he said, “you’re going to take one drink, two drinks, five drinks, six drinks to feel the buzz. Well, when you get a million dollars, you need 10 million dollars to feel like a king. Money is an addictive substance.”

Feeding the addiction becomes even more challenging in a top-heavy economy where the price tags of the status symbols keep adding zeros.

For the superrich looking to buy their way in to professional sports, it’s no longer enough to have courtside seats or a luxury box. You need a team. They’re pricey.

The Golden State Warriors, for example, sold in 2010 for an N.B.A. record $450 million to an ownership group headed by Joe Lacob, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. The team is now valued at $3.5 billion.

Even that is not enough. Now you have to build the biggest, flashiest arena. The Warriors owners recently put the finishing touches on a gleaming new waterfront arena in San Francisco called the Chase Center. It was financed largely by themselves for $1.4 billion.

Not to be left behind, Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft chief and owner of the rival Los Angeles Clippers, is seeking to build a $1 billion pleasure dome of his own in Inglewood, Calif.

Clustered courtside together at the sporting palaces, the celebrities, naturally, begin to envy the fortunes of the moguls near them.

Even at the pinnacle of success, entertainers like Mark Wahlberg and Lady Gaga find themselves “suddenly in the same world with billionaires and financiers who own private jets and have their own boats,” Mr. Frank said. “There’s only so much you can make in entertainment, so they look around and decide that they need to get to the next level that they’re encountering socially at the Met Ball and at charity functions.”

The opportunity appears endless. But what if it’s not?

The Rich Suspect the Roller Coaster Is About to Crash

As a hedge fund veteran, precious metals adviser and financial author, James Rickards is a rich guy who talks to a lot of other rich guys. They don’t always like what he has to say.

He believes that the current debt-fueled recovery may be a prelude for an economic collapse to dwarf the Great Recession. Until recently, he said, such theories were met with polite lack of interest by many wealthy people. Lately, something has changed.

“Literally, in a matter of weeks, certainly a couple of months, the phone calls have had a different tone to them,” Mr. Rickards said. “What I’m hearing is, ‘I’ve got the money. How do I hang on to it?’ ‘Are gold futures going to hold up or should I have bullion?’ ‘If I have bullion, should I put it in a bag in a private vault?’”

“It’s a level of concern that I’ve never heard from the superrich,” he said. “The tone of voice is, ‘I need an answer now!’”

It is not just the rockiness of the stock market. The fears of the wealthy seem to be of a more existential nature.

It is as if the very people who have profited most from these good times cannot believe that times are good — or that they will stay good, in the event of, say, a Bernie Sanders presidency.

Paul Singer, who oversees the behemoth Elliot Management fund, is reportedly tapping investors for billions as a war chest for a possible market implosion.

Among the tech zillionaire classes, a place to bug out in the event of an economic collapse, environmental disaster or violent uprising became the thing to have.

After he left Facebook, Mr. García Martínez himself bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest equipped with generators and solar panels, as The New Yorker reported in 2017.

When any part of the denial of rich people gets punctured, the boom reveals itself to be a very weird boom. The profits themselves are confusing. Even some who have ridden the wave to outsize fortunes see something amiss.

Marc Benioff, a chief executive of Salesforce.com, recently declared that “capitalism as we know it is dead.” Corporate earnings are often tepid, yet stocks in those same companies are soaring, thanks in part to stock buybacks that fatten executive compensation but do little to help the business.

Some even notice the rest of us out here. Ray Dalio, the hedge fund billionaire, recently wrote an essay on LinkedIn that capitalism “is not working well for the majority of Americans because it’s producing self-reinforcing spirals up for the haves and down for the have-nots.”

And for those who amass fortunes, the money is the only measure of success they have, said Jordan Belfort, the real-life inspiration for “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

As opposed to people who build businesses that make actual products, “a lot of Wall Street traders didn’t create anything — all they did was trade on the value and ingenuity of what other people created, so at the end of the day, what can they point to that’s tangible?” Mr. Belfort said. (He disavowed his former excess after a prison stint and became a motivational speaker.)

“All they have is money,” he said. “So they go out and buy a house and a fancy car, and that feels good for a short while, then they buy a second house and a fancier car. Because all they have is what they earn. They’re defined by it.”

The newly rich from normal backgrounds are the most anxious of all, said Jennifer Streaks, a personal finance commentator and CNBC contributor.

“Imagine growing up middle class or even poor and then amassing millions,” Ms. Streaks said. “This sounds like the American dream, but suddenly you have a $5 million apartment, a $200,000 car and a family that has these expectations.”

A panic ensues when those people believe “that they are one bad investment away from being broke.”

And the Rich Become Anxious and Isolated

It’s not like Jeff Bezos, the $110 billion man, is going to have to auction off his $65 million Gulfstream jet if he makes a bad bet on Amazon delivery drones (or goes through a $36 billion divorce).

Even so, the isolation that often accompanies extreme wealth can provide an emotional impulse to keep on earning, long after material comforts have been met, said T. Byram Karasu, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who said he has worked with numerous high earners in his private practice.

Apex entrepreneurs and financiers, after all, are often “adrenaline-fueled, transgressive people,” Dr. Karasu said. “They tend to have laser-focused digital brains, are always in transactional mode, and the bigger they get, the lonelier they are, because they do not belong.”

Dr. Berglas, a onetime member of the Harvard Medical School faculty in psychology, said: “If you can’t relate to people, you presume that the failure to have rewarding relationships is because of jealousy — your house is three-X your neighbors’, and they look at your brand-new Corvette and drool. It’s a compensatory mechanism — ‘I might not have a ton of friends, but I can do anything I want and I’m the most powerful S.O.B. there is.”

Limitless opportunity, extreme isolation. They already own the present. What else is left to buy but tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that? Suddenly, the fetish of the superrich for space tourism starts to make sense.

Sahred From Source link Technology

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dippedanddripped · 5 years ago

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In a 2017 interview with 032c, Highsnobiety founder David Fischer said, “I was meeting with a luxury brand recently, and they were talking about not being exclusive anymore—about being inclusive. And I thought that was pretty interesting, because I know they wouldn’t have said that a year ago.”

Fischer is entirely correct in his observation that luxury and exclusivity are, by and large, no longer synonymous. Today, goods from luxury houses are ubiquitous. On a recent visit with my daughter to American Eagle, I observed the store’s clientele. One girl had on plastic pool slides by Gucci, another had a thin Gucci buckle belt, and another had a small YSL bag. Needless to say, I recognized those items not by their recognizable designs, but by their prominent logos. The rest of these teens’ outfits didn’t particularly scream “luxury” or “designer,” but those small statement pieces telegraphed to the world that they knew what was up. The logo did all of the talking.

The omnipresence of so-called “luxury fashion” isn’t a new story, but this time it’s got a distinctly 2019 flavor. In the ’80s, luxury brands engaged in rampant licensing. The theory was that if you licensed your name to a different company, creating a different product category, you would be sitting pretty collecting royalties without having to manage the complexities of the manufacturing and distribution processes. That’s how you ended up with Givenchy and Pierre Cardin button-up shirts at T.J. Maxx. This worked for a while — until it didn’t. All of a sudden brand dilution (and the loss of the wealthy clientele) was on every luxury house’s mind. The licensing was reigned in.

In the ’90s, the approach shifted to diffusion brands such as Versus by Versace, D&G by Dolce & Gabbana, and Moschino Cheap & Chic. It was thought that by tweaking the name of a high-end label for its lower-priced offerings, you differentiate it enough to attract the middle class without risking a house’s appeal to wealthier clients. This also worked for a while, until the worries about brand dilution resurfaced, and a lot of diffusion lines were shuttered.

In Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, fashion journalist Dana Thomas scathingly summarized the state of the luxury market that in reality caters to mass taste while raking in record profits. Over the past couple of decades, luxury fashion, Thomas writes, “sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers.” The book was the swan song for luxury’s original purpose: making finely crafted goods in places where people get fair wages. That thesis went above most people’s heads and the book was roundly condemned as elitist.

On that note, nobody seems to care about brand dilution anymore. In 2011, Dolce & Gabbana folded D&G into its main brand, while Marc Jacobs discontinued his Marc by Marc Jacobs line in 2015. Both said that they would offer lower-priced goods under the main brand. Fast-forward to today and you can see the kind of “premium mediocre” stuff like headbands and plastic pool slides from virtually every luxury fashion brand. They are still incredibly expensive for what they are, but are a relatively inexpensive way to buy into a brand. Way more people can afford a $250 Balenciaga baseball hat than a $5,000 leather jacket. And the hat will have a prominent logo that will signal that you are a luxury consumer.

Why no one today seems to care about brand dilution is partly a matter of capitalist logic and partly because of new consumption patterns. Luxury fashion used to cater to the rich and still does to some degree. But even though the number of rich people is rapidly growing — according to The Economist, because of the tech explosion and the Chinese economic boom, millionaires are created at the rate of 250 per hour — the growth of the middle class, especially in China, has far outpaced it. And since the main luxury players like LVMH and Kering are now publicly listed conglomerates, they have to operate by the logic of capitalism, which demands ever-increasing profits in order to drive the prices of their stock upwards. Ergo, they have no choice but to sell premium mediocre stuff to the middle class under the guise of luxury.

This is especially obvious on the periphery. On a recent visit to the Saks Fifth Avenue men’s department in Atlanta, I was greeted by a parade of plastic pool slides from Fendi, Givenchy, Valentino, Versace, Gucci, and Balenciaga, which ranged in price from $200 to $300. Chances are they cost a couple of bucks to manufacture and are sold by the thousands. According to Lyst, a global fashion search platform, in the month of July, its users have searched for pool slides from the aforementioned brands 4,000 times.

That’s the supply side. On the demand side, the traditional wealthy customer that the luxury fashion market used to cater to no longer seems to be all that interested in it. This trend was exacerbated after the financial crash of 2008 when the rich thought that flaunting their wealth while the middle class was losing their homes was in bad taste. It’s not unlikely that this trend was never reversed.

When I brought up the topic of alienation of the rich to another fashion editor in a recent conversation, he shrugged his shoulders and retorted that the women on the Upper East Side switched to athleisure long ago. The comment was jolting but rang true, as any casual observer of Park Avenue can attest. And as far as the newly minted millionaires from the tech world are concerned, luxury fashion seems to be the last thing they want to spend their money on. The concept of “stealth wealth” seems to have taken over for these monied classes. Everyone knows that Mark Zuckerberg is rich; he doesn’t need to spend money on clothes, but he still sets the tone for the Silicon Valley uniform.

All of this points to the fact that in many respects, luxury is no longer special. What made luxury rarefied was quality, scarcity, and its high price. Few luxury fashion consumers today care about quality — they gladly buy $700 sneakers while cobblers everywhere are going out of business because most people no longer wear leather shoes. Pricing is now all over the place. While a lot of luxury is still prohibitively expensive, most houses make the bulk of their revenue from entry-level categories like footwear, fragrance, and small leather goods.

The only reliable marker of luxury left is scarcity. The new generation of the luxury consumer that grew up on limited-edition streetwear drops knows that territory all too well. It did not take savvy brands like Vetements to figure this out — if they could make their trendy product scarce, their margins would skyrocket. That’s how they’ve gotten away with selling $1,500 cotton hoodies.

Meanwhile, frustrated with such a landscape, much of the fashion cognoscenti kicked themselves into nostalgia mode, turning the market for vintage fashion into a big business. This makes sense, because, besides custom-made clothes, where else do you go for fashion that won’t make you look like everyone else? And while a lot of luxury fashion today can be had at a deep markdown or at an outlet mall if you are patient enough, the market for vintage Raf Simons and Helmut Lang on the men’s side, and Margiela and Ghesquiere-era Balenciaga on the women’s is red-hot.

“Our customers don’t want to be figured out in the way culture dictates today,” says Gil Linton, the founder and CEO of curated vintage fashion platform Byronesque. “To quote Marilyn Manson, people want what we sell because, ‘Everything’s been said before, nothing left to say anymore. When it’s all the same, you can ask for it by name.’”

Scarcity is a fascinating phenomenon because it flies in the face of traditional economics and its supply-and-demand paradigm. And while scarcity has traditionally been the provenance of luxury, clever streetwear brands like Supreme and Palace have figured out that it can work at any price point. If you add scarcity to an already-hyped product, its desirability goes through the roof, and so does your reputation for being the coolest brand around. And if you keep the prices low enough to make it affordable in theory, you don’t alienate people.

The conundrum that luxury brands face today is that democratization is automatically considered “good,” and elitism is automatically considered “bad.” For luxury this is a paradox, but for streetwear it’s not, and that’s one of the reasons why streetwear has been so successful. Arguably, Supreme is the most elitist brand out there, because its releases are so limited, but who would ever even consider calling it elitist? Meanwhile, in some circles, luxury is still a dirty word because of its connotations with exclusivity and classism.

Thomas’ book was the last lament for luxury as a product of human excellence — it was dedicated to the world of artisans who took pride in what they made and in designers who pushed fashion to the extremes of possibility for the sake of testing the limits of human creativity. That world is gone. Instead, we witness and partake in the long and relentless parade of logoed mediocrity that passes for luxury today.

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

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Mystery Mansion: Capitulation.

Alas, I am giving up on Mystery Mansion. I’m sure I could persevere with it, and eventually get a 999 point game, but to be honest I just want to move on. It stings a little, especially coming off of MUD1 which I also gave up on, but I need to keep moving. Persisting with games I’m not enjoying will be a sure-fire way to kill the blog dead.

When I left off last time, I had accomplished most of what I was capable of in the game. Now my goal was to put it all together into a single run. Doing that took some planning, as there are certain tasks that need to be done before others. Below I’ve outlined the order that I tackled things.

Gathering Items: The first essential item is the lantern, which hangs from the mansion’s front gate where the game begins. Second is the compass; dealing with relative directions is a real pain so I like to get this early. The third item I go for is the gauntlet to increase my carrying capacity, and then the door keys.

Killing the Vampire: Before going to release the Vampire, it’s important to grab the cross from the chapel for protection. After opening the Vampire’s coffin, it’s a simple matter to lure him upstairs and open a curtain to let in the sunlight. I also tried killing him with a wooden wedge, but the game told me “you have not figured out how to do that yet”.

Solving the Murder: To do this, you need to find and carry the murder weapon, then lure the murderer to the location of the dead body. I like to do this fairly early, because once the sun has set you can’t access the garden, and if anything you need is in there you’ll never solve the murder. The first thing I do here is listen to the radio in the Game Room; a news bulletin plays that tells you that the police are looking for the murderer, which reveals the murderer’s identity. If I know where the corpse is, the next thing I do is examine it, which can give clues to the murder weapon. In my last game, the body was doubled over as though clutching its stomach, which indicates that the poison was the murder weapon. If I don’t know the corpse’s location, I’ll just question people until they tell me. It doesn’t usually take too long to get all three requirements in the same location, unless one of them happens to be in the garden (which I only go into as a last resort).

Once the murder has been solved, you just have to call the police using the phone in the Entrance Hall. They show up immediately and arrest the murderer.

The Mole Maze: Before you can hit up the Treasure Trek maze, you need the amulet from the Mole Maze. As mentioned in a previous post the mole changes the maze occasionally, but ever since I switched to Bob Sorem’s port I’ve had no trouble navigating it using the map found here. Perhaps the changes aren’t implemented properly in Sorem’s port, or perhaps I’ve just been able to get through before the mole starts digging new tunnels.

Getting the Transmitter: If you enter the Bathroom and drop everything – including your clothes – you can go up into a secret lab where you’ll find a matter transmitter and receiver. These are very handy for navigating the mansion, and as far as I can tell essential to escaping the Treasure Trek maze. While leaving the lab through the Large Bedroom, you can fix a crooked mirror, where some jewelry is hidden.

The Treasure Trek Maze: To get through this maze you need the compass, gauntlet, keys, and transmitter. First you have to unlock the door and get through before being crushed by a moving wall. After heading down to the Treasure Room, you need to quickly move through the maze to the two Troll Traps and the Den of Death. Doing this run nets you some pearls, an emerald, some pirate treasure, a ruby necklace, some diamonds and a silver goblet. With that done, it’s a simple task to BEAM UP to the lab, then BEAM DOWN to wherever you stashed the matter receiver.

Finishing Up: With those tasks done, I collected the Vampire’s Ring then went to the Front Entrance to phone for a taxi. As far as I can tell you can’t do this until after 10pm. The mansion explodes at midnight, so I waited out front with my treasures. While I was waiting I killed the Warrior, because he’s an irritating NPC who will attack you on a whim. After the mansion blew up, I simply headed south and got the following “victory” screen:

All through this you need to monitor your lantern power, and head to the twisty maze to get some batteries when it starts to wear off. I spent a good portion of the game with my lantern turned off, and it was still running out of power near the end.

There are also the various noises that happen once every hour, for which you need to type SCORE POINTS in order to get the full 999. I tried to remember them when they came up, but I’m sure I missed a good number.

In the end, I got 781, which I’m going to have to consider good enough. I scored 90 points for the items I was carrying, most of which were treasures. My inventory was full, so I don’t think I could have earned much more here. Perhaps killing the werewolf would have done it; I can see in some walkthroughs that there is one, but I never did find it aside from getting killed in the dark by it one time. You can also kill the wolf in the garden, which I just figured out, by distracting it with food and shooting it. If those two don’t account for the 200+ points I missed, I’m stumped. Perhaps there’s something to do in the attic, which I accessed by standing on a chair in the closet and climbing through a door in the ceiling. I got up there and got down via the fire escape (which has to be oiled to use safely) but there didn’t seem to be any point to doing so.

I also confirmed that you can sleep with the male characters, which gives you the same message as the female ones (so the game isn’t assuming your gender or sexuality). You can’t do it with the Vampire though, because you have to drop everything, and without the cross he drains your blood real quick. The Elf can’t be lured inside, so he’s not an option either.

And so, on 781 points, I bid farewell to Mystery Mansion. I could keep trying, but with such an obtuse game as this one I might end up banging my head against it for months with no progress to show for it. It’s even worse with games of this vintage, because walkthroughs can be harder to come by. I found some, but none of them gave away everything.

Mostly though, my capitulation is the result of the fact that I just wasn’t enjoying the game very much. I was intrigued by it at first, but after solving the mystery portion of it I just couldn’t make any more progress. As I’ve said before, I just think the game is too obtuse for its own good. It’s also very disjointed, with a mystery plot grafted onto a treasure hunt. Not that you’d know it, because Mystery Mansion does very little to let you know that the game even has treasures to collect. With just a little more guidance it could have been enjoyable.

Before I do a Final Rating, I present to you the Wall of Shame. These are all of the puzzles for which I sought outside help:

THE WALL OF SHAME

Navigating the Mole Maze

Finding the gauntlet

Opening the Treasure Trek Maze with the amulet

Finding the pearls

Getting into the Laboratory

Calling the taxi on the phone

FINAL RATING: Story & Setting: The setting of a mysterious old mansion is a classic one, but this game doesn’t do anything new with it, and doesn’t do anything to tie any of its disparate tropes together. Why is there a matter transporter upstairs? Why is Dracula in the basement? I don’t know, and Mystery Mansion isn’t about to tell me. As for the story it’s one part murder mystery and one part Adventure-style treasure hunt. The mystery part, at least, is novel, so I’ll mark it up slightly for that. Rating: 2 out of 7. Characters: There are a lot of characters roaming around in this game, all of whom can be interacted with. You can question them, you can shoot them dead, and you can even have sex with some of them. Unfortunately, most of these characters are interchangeable, and their main purpose is mostly to act as murder suspects. It’s a step up from most of the adventure games of the era, though, where most of the characters are simply obstacles. Rating: 2 out of 7. Aesthetics: It’s a text adventure with pretty simple writing. The Bob Sorem port has some sound effects that play through the PC speaker occasionally, but those are more startling than pleasant. Rating: 1 out of 7. Mechanics: For all the frustrations I had with this game, it does things reasonably well. The parser is simple, but I didn’t find myself searching for the right verb too often. The relative directions when inside are annoying, but I was impressed that the room descriptions change depending on which way you’re facing. Rating: 4 out of 7. Challenge: For the mystery portion of the game, I think the difficulty was pitched pretty well. It took me a little while to figure out, but with various hints and clues I was able to solve it within a reasonable time. The treasure hunt is absurdly hard though. There are so many actions that could only be figured out through trial and error, or very lucky guesses, and the game gives you no help. And then there’s the changing mole maze, which is just cruel. Rating: 2 out of 7. Innovation and Influence: I don’t believe that this game was particularly influential; I’ve never heard of it, or seen it brought up by early game developers. But as possibly the first ever murder mystery adventure game I have to give it some props. Rating: 5 out of 7. Fun: I briefly enjoyed this game during the mystery portion, and the mapping phase, but after that it very quickly lost its shine. I think the Mole Maze drained my enthusiasm, and it never came back. Rating: 2 out of 7. Obviously, no bonus point for this game because I really don’t want to play it again. The above scores total 18, which doubles for a Final Rating of 36. That places it 13th out of 27 games overall, and 8th out of 17 adventure games. That seems a little high, but it does earn some extra points for doing some things that I’ve yet to see before during the course of this blog. It has more ambition than most of the games below it, which has to count for something.

NEXT: My next game is Devil’s Dungeon, a text-based Apple II RPG that promises an infinitely deep dungeon. Whoopee, just what I was asking for!

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/mystery-mansion-capitulation/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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alexander-mormont12 · 6 years ago

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TV shows that became unwatchable with age

Looper Staff

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, and sometimes, it turns out that the TV shows you used to love actually weren't worthy—and when we no longer see them through the warped lens of memory, it becomes clear that they don't stand up. Not all television is built to last, and here are a few old shows that have served their purpose and should never be rerun again.

Doctor Who

Before you get too upset, let's be clear: we're talking about the original, pre-modern version of Doctor Who. While much of the series' continuity and long-running themes were established during the days of Hartnell, Baker, and McCoy, it's difficult to sit through a three- or four-hour story arc with rubber monsters and a floundering Doctor. Sure, some of it has a bit of value for the ridiculous alien costumes alone, but for viewers accustomed to modern production values during an era in which television has risen to an art form, the camp and general plot-holery make the show hard to endure. Vintage Who barely stands up against Star Trek, and that's some serious camp. Just sit down and watch "Time and the Rani." If you make it out alive, you've probably used up one of your regenerations.

Daria

Many kids of the '90s look back on their grungy years of sarcastic indifference with a bit of regret, but at the time, nothing was cooler than casual nihilism. Emblematic of that attitude was Daria, the Beavis and Butthead spinoff that focused on the duo's smart, seemingly utterly indifferent classmate. At the time, it was relatable animation for people who were stuck between being kids and being adults. In retrospect, we know that Daria's unrelenting 'tude was an obstacle to valuable life experiences, and it can be hard to watch today—not to mention that every other character in the show is obviously a terribly broad caricature of high school stereotypes. And it seemed so real at the time.

Scrubs

At its best, Scrubs offered an entertaining comedy counterpoint to the glut of medical dramas on television. And there was even a time when Zach Braff's Dr. John Dorian was a sympathetic character whose everyday trials and heart of bronze was kinda worth watching… but as the show progressed, Dorian became less and less likable—and less insightful during his endless monologues. Finally, Braff left the show partway through the ninth season, leaving it to limp awkwardly to an anticlimactic conclusion.

Full House

If you were like most kids in the late '80s, you were probably parked in front of ABC's family-friendly TGIF block every Friday night. And your parents probably hated every second of it, because a little bit of Steve Urkel's insatiable lust for cheese goes a really, really long way—and Full House's saccharine morality and terrible puns were always hard to stomach. A hundred terrible catchphrases later, we're reminded just how awkward and unfunny the original show was, especially now that the series' continuation, Fuller House, has been given a second season on Netflix.

Married... with Children

Pushing against the borders of television decency was a pretty risky thing to do back in the days of Married… with Children, and no one pushed harder than Fox's original hit sitcom. That level of borderline-repulsive sass was something different in the '80s and '90s, but watching the exploits of Al Bundy now, it's clear that the program was pretty much an equal mix of embarrassingly easy fat jokes and sex jokes… and nothing else. Seeing what Ed O'Neill and Katey Sagal are truly capable of as actors just makes the broad, lowbrow junk of Married more embarrassing to watch. While it has a place in TV history, it should probably just stay there.

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys

It's really hard to imagine a time when Hercules was seriously considered a watchable TV show, but six seasons can't be wrong. While the sword-and-sorcery adventure was one of the more popular syndicated TV shows of its era, its villain-of-the-week formula, grating soundtrack, and widespread overacting haven't withstood the test of time. TV audiences have come to expect a sense of continuity in a multi-season TV show, but Hercules completely ignored the linear flow of time and just did whatever, whenever, including rewriting the characters' own stories multiple times without any regard for the past. Once you have Herc witnessing the birth of Jesus, you've gone too far. At least we had Xena…and who needs a plot when you have Lucy Lawless?

Rugrats

It may be sacrilege to disparage any classic Nicktoon, but a show that once seemed like a clever look at the world through the eyes of infants has lost a lot of its charm—not least because it's hard to look past the constant baby talk and the grossly negligent parents. Angela never gets the discipline she needs to straighten out, everyone just keeps on having more babies, and anyone could have guessed that Chuckie would still be just as awkward in the show's unnecessary continuation, All Grown Up! Until someone comes along to animate the characters as balding, overweight 30-somethings struggling with depression and mortgages, we should probably just stick with Doug.

How I Met Your Mother

It's a sitcom about a dad who keeps his kids on a couch for nine years while he tells them, in great detail, about all of his greatest sexual conquests. The show's titular question was barely even answered by the end of the series, and in retrospect, the circuitous non-conclusion to the story fatally undermines How I Met Your Mother's replay value. (The forced in-jokes and cloying humor don't help, either.) Now that the nine-year nightmare's spell has been broken, we can live our lives again. Avoid the reruns; go forth and be free.

Highlander: The Series

Although the production value of Highlander: The Series was widely praised by critics at the time, television fantasy has come a long way since the 1990s. In an age when HBO spends as much as $10 million per episode to create Game of Thrones and audiences are used to seeing big screen quality on their TVs, the CBS show based on the film of the same name now looks terribly dated—and its problems go deeper than aesthetics. What at that time seemed like a sprawling epic has revealed itself as little more than a series of formulaic hourlong confrontations, pitting Duncan MacLeod (clansman and pupil of his movie namesake Connor) against one disposable immortal after another. Worse still, British actor Adrian Paul's performance is nowhere near the bar established by Christopher Lambert in the 1986 movie, lacking the rough edges and cool wit of the original Highlander.

The A-Team

The dramatic increase in TV production budgets over recent years has led to audiences expecting a certain amount of realism, and this is especially true when it comes to violence. As series like The Walking Dead continue to push boundaries, shows made in the days before a man could reduce another man's head to bloody mush with a baseball bat on primetime television begin to look awfully tame. The A-Team falls under this umbrella, a show on which thousands of mags of ammo are used on a weekly basis and remarkably, nobody ever dies. The longer the show went, the more ridiculous it became, getting to the point that a helicopter crashing into a mountainside and falling to the ground in a fireball caused little more than a scratch. Re-watching The A-Team today is guaranteed to awaken a bloodlust that you probably didn't know you had.

Saved by the Bell

While '90s spinoffs Saved by the Bell: The College Years and Saved by the Bell: The New Class have always been nigh-on unwatchable, the original show was once considered essential children's television. Digging out the NBC high school sitcom for your kids to watch today isn't advisable, however, as many of the lessons are painfully dated. The episode "The Mamas and the Papas" makes for particularly cringeworthy viewing, pairing the kids up in an effort to teach them about married life. The tone of the episode is summed up by A.C. Slater's definition of a "women's movement" (when she puts on something cute and moves into the kitchen). It also becomes apparent over the course of the show's four seasons that Zack Morris has a severe gambling problem, with every other episode involving Preppy making some kind of bet at the expense of his friends.

Xena: Warrior Princess

New Zealand-made cult series Xena: Warrior Princess is mainly remembered for the way it challenged female stereotypes and the discussions that raged over its supposedly lesbian subtext, though two aspects of the campy classic that largely escaped criticism at the time were its questionable production values and clumsy directing. This was always a show that asked you to suspend your belief for its duration, but watching it now, it's hard not to notice the multitude of reused extras and recycled sets. The tonal shifts also take some readjusting, with moments of dark violence randomly giving way to full-on musical numbers that make less sense than the show's version of ancient Greece, which is inexplicably rife with American slang. While Aphrodite's Valley-girl persona used to feel like a welcome quirk in a show built around them, in reality it's just one of the many things about Xena that give it a distinctive B-movie feel.

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thelowartgloominati-blog1 · 6 years ago

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Hey I’m about to whine about how I’m a stupid 2D animation fanboy, you can probobly just... not read this, your life will be unchanged.

Okay, so for those of you who did not heed the warning; if you follow my stupid blog you already know I’m a vintage Disney nerd. I grew up in the 90′s and early 2000′s, I had all those big clam-shell VHS tapes of all the vintage and, at the time, contemporary Disney films, when my family got a DVD player one of the first things we did was get a few collections of 30s-40s MIckey Mouse Cartoons because I used to love those as well (still do), and wore out the few tapes I had. It also stands to reason that I’m a gigantic Disney World/Land fanatic as well, I’ve read whole books on how to maximize any given visit to either park, I know an embarrassing amount about the parks’ history, and I consider The Haunted Mansion essentially my favorite thing that exists in this and presumably any parallel universes.

All of that said, my infatuation with all the Disney properties is rooted in my fundamental love of 2D animation, and that’s where the crux of this wall of text comes in; of all the releases Disney has laid out for the next two fiscal years (and in this case I include all divisions of the Disney corporation, so Lucas Films, Marvel studios, Jim Henson’s studios, all of that jazz), there’s no 2D among them. Alot of you are probobly thinking “Well DUH, Indigo, Disney said several years ago that they weren’t interested in 2D anymore for the foreseeable future, this isn’t news,” and you’re right, this isn’t news. The focus of the company has been, for some time on their 3D animation studios (which, just so we’re clear, have produced some quality films; Tangled, Wreck It Ralph, Frozen, etc.), a series of live action/CGI remakes of many of their older, more well known films (with mixed results thus-far, in my opinion), and a continuation of the Star Wars/ Marvel licensing gravy train that I have no real opinion about (I like Star Wars fine, I respect the original films for how influential they were to film history, I just don’t consider myself a big time fan like some people are; and I don’t care for superhero films conceptually so... yeah).

Anyway, a lot of people seem to like this stuff, even removing the licensing stuff and just focusing on the in-house Disney productions they’ve announced, this new Lion King remake trailer that they put out yesterday went super viral, even though, if I’m gonna be blunt, there is literally no reason for it to exist. Infact, just for the hell of it, lets break down all the in-house Disney releases slated for Q4 2018 to 2019, shall we? So we’ve got the aforementioned Lion King, Live action/CG remakes of Aladdin and Dumbo in 2019, Mary Poppins Returns later this year, Ralph Breaks the Internet, which is just coming out at time of writing, and Toy Story 4, also next year. Okay, so of all of those the only one that I would say NEEDS to exist is Ralph 2, the first movie was very good, the sequel looks like a lot of fun, plus that series is the exception that I would say DOES need to be in 3D, as the whole video game character angle wouldn’t really fly in 2D, so that gets a pass. Mary Poppins Returns might also get a pass, as while I’d say the original film stands fine on it’s own, it could be interesting to see how some of P.L. Travers’ other Mary Poppins books (there were actually several she wrote) could translate to film, and it’s been over 50 years, so I’d say that’s a suitable amount of time to where the narrative of “X character is gone for a long time, comes back to see how things have changed” makes a reasonable degree of sense, it could work, I reserve judgement until I see it. Toy Story 4... Nah. I Don’t really see why this needs to exist, I didn’t even think Toy Story 3 NEEDED to exist until I saw it, and the ending to that film was, simply put, perfect. There is absolutely no need to continue that story, it’s perfect. Will it be good? Maybe, I was surprised before, I could be again, but I’m skeptical on that one. As for the remakes, I don’t think ANY of them need to happen. Lion King doesn’t make any sense, as the 2D visuals simply look better to me then the CG they seem to be going with, all the problems I had with the Jungle Book remake would seem to apply here. Aladdin is just a bad idea, because no matter how good the person they get to play Genie is, you can NEVER completely divorce the role from Robin Williams, as he made that character so intrinsically his own. Anyone else playing him will either have to play him completely different and essentially become a different character, or else come off as doing a Robin Williams impression. If they really thought they could put an original or creative spin on the story, they should have put this one on ice until later down the line, that said, I don’t think there is a creative spin to be done on it that hasn’t already been done. As for Dumbo, I really don’t understand what they intend to accomplish, there’s not a whole lot to do with that story that the original didn’t do, and again, THE CGI LOOKS WORSE THEN THE ORIGINAL 2D CELL ANIMATION FROM 1941.

See I’m a firm believer in the concept of: if you can’t remake it BETTER or bring an original take on the source material, then why remake it AT ALL? This is, by the way, why I really liked Maleficent, from 2014, which you’d think would be a no-no for me, as it was a live action/CG remake of a classic era 2D Disney film, but the reason I liked it was because it brought a very original spin to the source material, the idea of re-framing that story to more or less turn the “hero” and “villain” dichotomy on it’s head, and make you side completely with a character whom in the source material was a textbook example of an “evil because evil” character archetype. Also, that film had a very good reason to be live action, as the whole “everything you know is a lie” narrative gelled well with the contrast of the original vs. the remake, it’s as if the 2D original is some sort of historical account of what happened, but this film is what really happened, in that context I think it worked. I loved that movie, and if the rest of these remakes ended up doing similar things I’d be on-board with them too, but after seeing Jungle Book, and seeing Beauty and the Beast, I really don’t think that’s the angle they’re going for with these, I think it’s a case of “shine up older properties we haven't done anything with in a while, put them back into theatres, get paid, repeat.”

I also would argue that my fondness for 2D is not just nostalgic, but functional in a sense of future proofing these films. Can you say, without Googling, what year Disney’s original Alice in Wonderland came out based on how the movie looks? If you said 1951 you’d be right, but I doubt you’d know that that movie was over 67 years old by the way lit looks, because that’s the magic of 2D animation, and particularly cell animation. TIMELESS is the look that style of animation gives, it still looks colourful, and fluid, and smooth, even over half a century later. It has not aged a day, because the style in which it was made is age-proof. Compare that to the Tim Burton version from 2010, even only EIGHT YEARS after it came out, the CGI already looks dated, the effects were cutting edge at the time, but are quickly showing their age. I’m not saying Alice 2010 is necessarily a BAD movie, although I don’t particularly care for it, but it’s simply a fact that it has visually aged more in 8 years then the original did in 67.

I know at this point that I sound like a crotchety old man yelling from his porch, and I don’t want to take away anyone’s enjoyment of any of these new films, and if they all turn out to be good, than that’s great! But I just wanted to express WHY, I dislike the direction Disney has gone with their in-house productions, and why I think 2D needs to given another shot, if for no other reason then to shut up nerds like me.

Then we can focus on the real enemy: STAR WARS BRANDING IN DISNEY LAND! (get that “edge of the galaxy” crap out of here!)

#long post #Indigo Stuff #vintage disney #sorry I put you all through that

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kidsviral-blog · 6 years ago

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How Madewell Bought And Sold My Family's History

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/how-madewell-bought-and-sold-my-familys-history/

How Madewell Bought And Sold My Family's History

In 1937, my great-grandfather started a workwear company in New England called Madewell. In 2006, 17 years after the last factory shut down, J.Crew relaunched a women’s clothing company with the same name and logo, based on a 50-year history in which it had no part.

I stopped dead on Broadway, in the middle of the sidewalk, and stared, not up at the beautiful wrought-iron SoHo buildings, as would befit someone who’d moved to New York in the past month, but at an ordinary sign advertising a small clothing shop. The logo, a casual cursive scrawl with both E’s capitalized, jumped out at me like a beacon from a lighthouse somewhere deep in the back of my brain. That was the logo emblazoned on my baby clothes, the logo my great-grandfather created. It was, I thought, forgotten family history, the factories having shut down shortly after I was born in the ’80s. After a moment I took out my phone and called my mom and asked her what the hell was going on.

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The author sporting Madewell baby denim. Courtesy of the Nosowitz Family.

She’d heard something about this. Madewell was back, somehow, but she wasn’t sure exactly how or why. I wandered inside the store. It was all women’s clothing — expensive women’s clothing. I found a clerk and said, in some jumbled, excited, confused way, that this was my shop, that Madewell was my family’s business. I think she thought I was angling for a discount. After politely and professionally feigning interest while I struggled to explain a history I didn’t even really know, the clerk stopped me. “We don’t sell men’s clothes,” she said.

Over the next four years, I saw Madewell everywhere. Today there are three stores in Manhattan alone, and 77 throughout the country. On bags on the subway, on tags of clothes worn by friends, I am constantly bombarded with totems of my family history.

Asking my family yielded the basics: Madewell as it stands today began in 2004. That’s when Millard “Mickey” Drexler, now the CEO of J.Crew, acquired the logo and the trademark of the company my great-grandfather founded in 1937. Dhani Mau, a senior editor at Fashionista, said, “J.Crew considers it their younger sister brand,” though she said it’s not necessarily for younger sisters. Pressed to pick out a celebrity who might typify the Madewell girl, Mau chose Kate Bosworth and Rachel Bilson. This does not entirely jibe with my mental picture of my tough immigrant great-grandfather selling stiff denim overalls to New England dockworkers.

Still, Madewell will not let you forget the date 1937. The store could originally be found online at madewell1937.com, and the year is prominent on the site and on some of the clothing. The company’s Instagram and Twitter handles are both still @Madewell1937, and its LinkedIn page says, “Madewell was started in 1937 as a workwear company, and we’re always looking to the brand’s roots for inspiration.”

This is, to put it mildly, baloney. Madewell as it stands today has almost nothing at all to do with the company founded by my great-grandfather almost 80 years ago. How many vintage labels out there have similar stories? How many corporations are out there rifling through the defunct brands of America’s past like a bin of used records, looking for something, anything, that will give them that soft Edison-bulb glow of authenticity?

Madewell’s story — my story — leading up to that moment in SoHo began over a century ago, half a world away. It traces the evolution of how Americans shop, and how Americans shop heavily informs how Americans see themselves; we, as a country, are what we buy. Mickey Drexler, in creating J.Crew’s new womenswear stores, shrewdly read the market and realized that stocking nice clothes wouldn’t be enough: He’d have to tell a story along with them. Drexler didn’t have any stories, so he bought ours.

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A view from the Madewell store in NYC’s Soho. Flickr: Ludovic Bertron / Creative Commons (CC BY 2-0) / Via Flickr: 23912576@N05

Julius Kivowitz was born in Russia in 1889 or thereabouts. His name was not Julius Kivowitz at the time — it was Beham.

At the turn of the century, the Russian Empire required that all males, starting at age 20, serve in the army, and Julius seemed to be not very taken with this prospect. The Beham family was fairly well-off and managed to secure a sponsor for Julius in the U.S., in a prosperous Massachusetts port city near Providence called New Bedford. There was only one problem: Any attempt by Julius to leave under his own name would have exposed him as a draft dodger. (Some in my family, including his youngest daughter, referred to him as a “conscientious objector.” Whether he objected to war or merely his own participation in the war isn’t clear.) My cousin Judy told me that Julius invented his new last name by going to a cemetery and picking out the name of someone who, had he lived, would have been about the same age.

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A young Julius Kivowitz seated in the center. Courtesy of Ellen Horvitz

It was a good time for a Jew to leave Europe. By 1906, pogroms — huge, brutal, bloodthirsty, anti-Jewish riots — were commonplace in the Russian Empire. Mobs of Russians burned and sacked entire Jewish towns, murdering men, women, and children, with the implicit permission or even participation of police. Many Jews fled, the newly renamed Julius Kivowitz and his fiancée, Fannie, among them. (It was somewhat scandalous and also a bit romantic that the two fled together before they were married.) He landed at Ellis Island at age 19, stayed in New York for a few years, moved north to Connecticut, and then went further eastward up the Atlantic coast to New Bedford.

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Fannie Kivowitz Courtesy of Ellen Horvitz

When my great-grandfather arrived there some 90 years ago, New Bedford was just beginning the decline from its status as one of the country’s most bustling, wealthiest port cities. New Bedford had been the whaling capital of the world, one of the settings in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Hundreds of huge, magnificent schooners and clipper ships were built and launched from its port. By 1850, thanks mostly to profits from whale oil, New Bedford was the wealthiest city per capita in the country. But the whale oil industry collapsed, and by the time the wave of immigrants that included my great-grandfather and his young family settled there in the 1920s, the town had pretty much abandoned whaling and turned to fishing and manufacturing.

Julius, like so many of his generation of immigrant Eastern European Jews, was an entrepreneur with no particular passion besides financial success. First he opened a grocery store, earning enough money to, along with a partner from New York, move into textiles. It was a natural move for Julius, as it was for many other Jews, who brought a centuries-long tradition of textile manufacturing with them from Europe. Beginning around the 16th century in Eastern Europe, Russian and Polish Jews began working with wool. By the 1860s, heavily Jewish cities like Lodz and Bialystok were textile-manufacturing centers; more than half of the textile industry in Bialystock was Jewish-owned. This was pretty much stamped out by the 1930s, thanks to decades of violent anti-Semitism perpetrated by independent Poland. But Julius had already fled Eastern Europe and made his home in New Bedford.

In 1936, Julius filed for the Madewell trademark, and in 1937 he opened his first factory. No one seems to know why he picked — or if he himself even did pick — that name. But I don’t think his English was ever all that good, and there’s something very clean and utilitarian about it.

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The Kivowitz kids: (from Left) Barbara, Lillian, Beatrice and Haskell. Courtesy of Ellen Horvitz

There is nobody alive who remembers the earliest chapters of Madewell. The only one of Julius’ children still living is my great-aunt Barbara, the youngest of the Kivowitz brood by nine years. Her husband, Aaron, ran the shipping department of Madewell, but didn’t come on until 1951. Nobody knows much about that mysterious New York partner who oversaw the factory floor but vanished from the company within a few decades. Nobody knows how many workers — “stitchers,” they were called — were employed at first. Nobody, to be frank, seems to know much about Julius. The documents I could find from that era give the date of the company’s founding but not much else; whatever records Madewell kept from its early years are gone. After questioning damn near everybody still alive who ever met him, here are the facts I gathered about my great-grandfather:

1. He spoke mostly a mix of Yiddish, Russian, and English, with a thick accent.

2. He was rarely seen without a cigar.

3. He loved the card game pinochle, and played every week.

4. He didn’t talk much, and I can find exactly no one who can recall him saying a single word about his childhood in Russia.

5. He liked nice things. He built a big house and filled it with expensive appliances and Oriental rugs, which seems to have annoyed his wife Fannie, who did not care much for extravagance.

That’s it.

His employees at the time likely included the dominant immigrant groups of New Bedford: Portuguese speakers largely from the Azores and Cape Verde, French Canadians, and possibly some Jews. The company at the onset was designed smartly and specifically to cater to the substantial working class of the community: It made jeans, dungarees (which differ from jeans in that the threads are pre-dyed before weaving), and bib overalls. These were hardy work clothes, intended for use inside the factories and fisheries of New England.

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Courtesy of the Nosowitz Family

Madewell was a family operation. Julius’ son Haskell and his sons-in-law Aaron and Jerry ran departments (sales, shipping, and manufacturing, respectively) within the company. Various cousins and nephews and nieces and grandchildren worked there during summer vacations from school. Gradually, as Haskell took a larger role in the company, Madewell branched out into other clothes.

By the early 1960s, Haskell’s strategy to diversify Madewell’s offerings (and to sell to larger department and discount stores) had kicked into high gear, as it began to make children’s and women’s clothes. It’s sort of hard to get a sense of what Madewell really was at the time — my great-grandfather had to be cajoled and sometimes tricked into allowing his company to change, but the company seemed built to adapt pragmatically to each era.

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Keeping Up With the Kivowitzes Courtesy of the Nosowitz Family

The company didn’t have any particular aesthetic. Most of the clothes were contracted, made by any of several other factories and stamped with the Madewell name. Madewell had lots of partners at other factories — one in Georgia, one in Kentucky, among others — that would take care of the design and manufacturing. If Haskell or Jerry or Julius went to a local department store and saw that corduroy-lined denim jackets were selling well, they’d come back to the factory and tell one of the stitchers to make one. If the stitcher wasn’t sure how, they’d buy one of those jackets, tear it apart, and make a pattern out of it, then re-create it. Or if that seemed like too much trouble, they’d call one of their contacts at another factory, say, “Make us a corduroy-lined jacket,” stamp their logo on it, and sell that. Madewell’s logo didn’t necessarily indicate who physically created the garment, but simply who was selling it.

“We didn’t do too much of that designing bullshit,” my great-uncle Aaron told me. Aaron is a warm, tough, stocky man whose crushing handshake hasn’t lessened in strength even as he ages into his eighties. As we talked at his kitchen table, looking out on wild turkeys strutting through his backyard in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, he would occasionally sing what I think is a line from “Memory,” from the musical Cats. “The only stuff we did in-house was the rough stuff,” he said. “Denim, brown duck pants, carpenter stuff.” During Aaron’s tenure, there were only ever around 25 stitchers at Madewell who actually made clothes. I asked Aaron who designed that stuff. “You copy somebody else’s!” he laughed. “Come on, ‘design.’ It was not a fancy place, Dan. No such thing as ‘designing.’”

Aaron bristled when I asked if the Madewell clothes were high quality — “Oh, yes, they were very well made,” he said — but these weren’t exactly pioneering designers crafting original clothing out of a deep passion. They weren’t inventors or artists. They looked at what was selling and made some of that to sell. It was a business, and Madewell did what made sense from a business perspective. J.Crew’s Madewell is grasping to emulate some sepia-hued commitment to quality in the original company, some moral or ethical standard from better, more authentic times. But that’s not what motivated my great-grandfather at all — his motivation was profit, and quality was a means to an end.

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Dan Nosowitz / BuzzFeed

New Bedford is one of the last towns you pass through as you drive eastward out to Cape Cod, which hooks out from the East Coast like a flexed arm. It’s located on the coast of Buzzards Bay, which carves a messy notch into the underside of Massachusetts. It would be uncharitable, but not inaccurate, to say that New Bedford is the armpit of Massachusetts.

Despite a cute, gentrified waterfront area and a few museums, the city is today one of the poorest and most dangerous in the state. Big brick factories, either barely used or totally vacant, are everywhere; the unemployment rate hovers above 10%. In the 1990s, the city attempted to rename the area the “South Coast,” because merely the name of New Bedford signifies decay, depression, and loss.

And still, New Bedford looks like a port city in the way that only New England towns can. Trim three- and four-story houses, mostly in sea-weathered gray, line the streets. Every turn seemingly leads to the water, the smell of which is everywhere. Huge stone levees, looking like the organized results of avalanches, do their best to protect the city from the Atlantic’s wrath, and roads that cut through these levees are equipped with alarmingly heavy-duty iron gates, up to 20 feet high, that can close if water approaches.

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Vintage Madewell jeans at Circa Vintage Dan Nosowitz / BuzzFeed

Circa Vintage Wear on 73 Cove St. is airy and industrial, still chilly in the Massachusetts spring. The medium-size, mostly unmarked brick factory, just beside the ocean, smelled of old fabric and dust and wood shavings, a pleasant perfume that changes subtly as you move through the decades upon decades of vintage clothing and accessories. In one corner, a wall of nothing but circular hatboxes reached to the high ceiling. A twentysomething who would later buy a pair of shiny gold dress shoes examined an entire case of bow ties. Semi-broken old mannequins wearing everything from frilly white gowns to what looked like old high school marching band uniforms stood sentry in aisles of clothes from wildly disparate eras. In the racks, jammed up against what must have been dozens of other stories just as rich and as weird as mine, were a few pieces of original Madewell.

There were heavy-duty jumpsuits, which must have dated from the 1940s or 1950s. There was a denim jacket with a striped, sweater-like lining and a corduroy collar. There was a pair of Dickies-like blue chino work pants. There was a pair of bell-bottoms from the 1970s that could have been made by Levi’s or Wrangler or lots of other big international brands — but the bell-bottoms, the jumpsuits, the jacket, and the work pants all boasted that label, that great logo, that stopped me dead in my tracks in New York years before.

Chris Duval opened Circa in 1986 and has been pretty much its sole employee ever since. Wearing a pale denim jacket and tough denim work pants, Duval is short and slender and speaks with a thick South Coast accent, which is somewhere between Boston and cartoon pirate, and all of his statements sound like they should end with an exclamation point. He told me that he likes to sit down with the people from whom he buys his wares and learn about the history of each piece.

“When this whole thing came about with J.Crew, I was devastated,” he said, in the same tone that a fan of an indie band might have bemoaned signing to a major label in 1995. “When that happened, workwear was just coming back. So I thought, Oh, cool, they’re gonna do a workwear line inspired by Madewell. But it has nothing to do with that! It’s Chinese crap!”

Duval found the way J.Crew touted its connection to the original Madewell especially galling. “You go to the flagship store in New York and there’s a big thing about New Bedford and its heritage, and I’m like, Oh, god, this is so sad!” Duval told me that he liked to put pictures of his original Madewell goods on Instagram and taunt J.Crew about its “Madewell in name only” clothes. “They’re using the original brand to push something that has nothing to do with the original brand,” he said.

I looked more closely at the flannel-lined denim jacket. It was cool, and vintage, and, being that my great-grandfather’s company made it, I’d have a great story behind it. I tried it on and immediately took it off. I looked like I was wearing a costume. I hadn’t realized how reliant my taste in clothes is on modern shapes; I didn’t at all care for the boxy, un-tailored fit of the jacket, the baggy sleeves, or the too-smooth washed denim. The jacket may have been my birthright, but it wasn’t my style.

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Dan Nosowitz / BuzzFeed

By the time I left New Bedford, it was clear that I had a different reaction to the staged authenticity of J.Crew’s Madewell than Chris Duval did. I almost envied his clear-cut offense at the company, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t really share it.

The concept of authenticity in retail is a borderland where academics and marketers commingle. It is a philosophical chew toy that is also the key to fleecing consumers in new, exciting, and highly profitable ways. Jim Gilmore, the co-author (with B. Joseph Pine II) of Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, knows this better than most. His book doesn’t so much offer tips to marketers as it examines what authenticity means in a retail space, and how customers react to it.

According to Gilmore, the American consumer economy has moved through three distinct stages, from agrarian to industrial to service, to arrive at what he terms in his book the “experience” stage. To sell a product today, a company must also sell a story, a transformation. A new pickle company needing to differentiate itself can’t simply rely on people needing to eat (agrarian), or undercutting the competition on price (industrial) or convenience (service). The way to sell that jar of pickles is to tell consumers about how it’s an old-country recipe from the Romanian hills, using heirloom cucumbers grown upstate and fresh dill from the factory’s rooftop garden, and it was crafted only two miles from here in a facility that used to make No. 3 pencils.

“We define authenticity,” Gilmore told me over the phone, “as purchasing on the basis of conforming to self-image. ‘I like that, I am like that.’” Authenticity is about buying into a product that confirms what you already think, or want to think, about yourself. Of course things like quality and durability are all mixed up in that; the Romanian-Brooklyn pickles are, probably, pretty good, and the fact that the buyer wants to see himself as the type of person who buys cool weird pickles doesn’t negate the fact that the buyer may also recognize that the pickles are better than Claussen’s. In fact, that’s part of it: Self-awareness of the purchase is key to the purchase itself.

In his job as a marketing consultant, Gilmore sometimes takes clients on tours of stores he deems worthy of emulation. He remembers when he first saw Madewell: “It feels like a boutique store while surrounded by boutique stores in SoHo, but it’s not one,” he told me. “The place has got integrity; it all holds together.” He praised the choice of materials and fixtures (“industrial without being too raw,” he said). He also praised the choice to show a select line of clothes, with limited quantities of each. This is, of course, common in boutiques, which are able to produce only in smaller quantities for cost reasons. For Madewell, it’s an aesthetic choice. Madewell has 77 branches in the U.S. at the time of writing, including stores in the two largest malls in the country, the Mall of America in Minnesota and the King of Prussia Mall in suburban Philadelphia. Madewell doesn’t have any trouble stocking its shelves. It’s telling a story about itself, that it’s a small, lovingly curated boutique. This isn’t true at all, but the customers don’t much care. Madewell’s unlikely rebirth, however, began with a man who had no interest in blurring these lines.

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Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed

“I had always been a big fan of Madewell and was trying to buy or license the name,” David Mullen, a clothing designer who now runs a few shops called Save Khaki, told me over the phone. “I would find the label at vintage stores and I loved the way that it looked, and the name itself, what it represented.” Mullen made trips up to New Bedford to learn more about Madewell, making some of the same stops I made, and for some of the same reasons: What was this company? What did it make and why?

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Save Khaki designer David Mullen Andrew H. Walker / Getty Images for GQ

But Mullen had a larger idea: He wanted to relaunch Madewell. “I wanted to do a modern take on workwear, and I wanted it to be kind of androgynous,” he told me. In his consulting work, he’d become friends with Millard “Mickey” Drexler, and he brought this idea to him. Together, the two began figuring out how to resurrect Madewell from the dead.

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Mickey Drexler Fernando Leon / Getty Images for Martha Stewart

Drexler is a huge name in the retail world; he has been the subject of numerous stories and television segments that harp on his uncanny knack for selling things to Americans. He led Gap through its 1990s boom, taking the company from, as a 2010 New Yorker profile by Nick Paumgarten put it, “a shaggy little jeans chain to a gigantic but fairly nimble purveyor of the stuff everyone wears.” Called by some in the industry “the Merchant Prince,” Drexler was ousted in 2002 during a downturn in Gap’s earnings, and the following year ended up as the chairman and CEO of J.Crew Group Inc. (Madewell declined my request for an interview with Drexler.)

During those few months, he and Mullen tried to work together on Madewell, but it didn’t quite work out. “We kind of made the Madewell thing together, then he put it on hold because he’d just taken the J.Crew job, and that was a pretty big job,” said Mullen. “So I helped him a bit with that and then decided to go off on my own.” Mullen now has no part in Madewell at all, but he says there’s no ill will, and speaks highly of Drexler. “It was more of a timing issue. I was anxious to start something, and it was easier to start something on my own.”

Mullen, according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office paperwork, paid $125,000 for that logo and trademark, and nothing else, signing the papers on Jan. 31, 2003; the factories had been closed for nearly 15 years at that point, so there wasn’t really much to sell. (For the sake of disclosure, neither I nor anyone in my immediate family received any of that money.) According to Mullen, my great-uncle Haskell’s son Jay Kivowitz set up the sale and kept the earnings, as Haskell died shortly afterward. Jay refused to tell me anything specific about the sale. It’s a sore spot within the family, though certainly he had the legal right to keep it; he was the sole owner of the company at that point.

On April 14, 2004, Mullen transferred the trademark he’d gotten from my family over to Drexler. Curiously, the document shows no money trading hands. Mullen, when pressed, said only, “Mickey’s a very fair guy,” but would not tell me anything further about their agreement besides that he now has no stake whatsoever in Madewell. By then, Drexler was established as the chairman and CEO of J.Crew, and leased the Madewell trademark (as Millard S. Drexler Inc.) to J.Crew Group Inc. for a dollar a year.

Mullen’s current operation, Save Khaki has only three small boutiques, all in New York City, and sells only a few products, very carefully designed and chosen. Mullen gushed when talking about his design process; he tried repeatedly to get access to Madewell’s old factory just to look at whatever detritus was left there since it shut down in the 1980s. “I thought there must be all old kinds of patterns in there, ribbons and buttons and … to me that would be priceless,” he said. Save Khaki’s clothes, too, are all made in the U.S. — some even come from factories in New England, including one in Fall River, the sister town to New Bedford where my mom grew up. The modern Madewell isn’t run in quite the same way — much of the clothing is manufactured overseas, although some of the denim is sourced and produced in the U.S.

“A merchant is someone who figures out how to select, how to smell, how to identify, how to feel, how to time, how to buy, how to sell, and how to hopefully have two plus two equal six,” Drexler told the New Yorker. As presented there, he is a fluid and reactive figure whose personal tastes and interests and philosophies are irrelevant. This is evidenced by his success with both Gap, a company that unapologetically boomed during the prosperous Clinton era with enormous stores full of casual, affordable clothes, and Madewell, which sells, for example, this insane JNCO-looking pair of Rachel Comey-designed pants for $426.

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Madewell denim on display at their NYC Soho store. Flickr: momo & her bffs / Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) / Via Flickr: duoduomollie

Somsack Sikhounmuong, the current head of design for Madewell, is mild-mannered with soft eyes and a trim beard. I asked him what he knew about the original Madewell besides the fact that it made jeans. He told me he knew it was a New England-based workwear company, but that was about it. I asked how, if at all, the J.Crew Madewell connects to the original. He hesitated, stumbled over his words a bit, and said that J.Crew isn’t trying to reproduce the original Madewell’s style, that the connection is more broad.

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Madewell fashion designer Somsack Sikhounmuong Splash News

“There’s a heritage to it, a real appreciation for the past and for real things,” he said. He sees this in its design aesthetic, but only in a thematic, rather than specific, way: “Not too trendy, not too fast fashion.” Trendy, to Sikhounmuong, means “colors are very bright, patterns are really crazy.” Madewell is certainly not that; it runs to jeans, boyish button-down shirts, A-line dresses, that kind of thing. Nothing is neon, hardly anything has visible logos or words or pictures, and where there are patterns, they are classics: stripes or polka dots or plaid. To Sikhounmuong, these elements are outside of trends; they are the standards.

“I don’t want this stuff to be disposable,” he said. “I want this piece to be relevant five years from now, that you can still pull it out of your closet.” Part of that intended timelessness, reflected from the name and logo, appears in the price of the clothing.

A lot of the products and shops that have come out of the capitalist embrace of authenticity and vintage are silly and fake, but the thing is, if you’re really going to ape a cultural movement, you have to go all in. Part of the cultural change that spawned Madewell is that being older and more honest and taking the time and making a better product is, well, better. There is much to be scornful of in this world of Mason-jar salads and twirly mustaches, but a major, and admirable, tenet of this specific modern twist on consumer culture is the idea that it is better to do things the right way. It is better to make fewer things than more things, because you can concentrate on those fewer things. This is why Americans of a certain age and class are more impressed by a pizza place that serves nothing but margherita pizza than by Domino’s, which sells a million combinations of cheese and sauce and bread and meat and will deliver to your door in 30 minutes or less.

This is not exactly what Madewell is doing, of course, but it is certainly what it is attempting to appear to do. Any veneer of authenticity or oldness is necessarily diffused, not specific, but we’re OK with that, in part because we like the aesthetic and in part because the stuff really is pretty high quality.

Most of my interview with Sikhounmuong, which was conducted in a conference room accompanied by two public relations people, was friendly. But eventually I had to ask: Didn’t he think it was, somehow and in some way, wrong to insinuate that Madewell today has any connection to my family’s company? Wasn’t that misleading and just a little bit gross? Sikhounmuong hesitated and looked to the PR person sitting next to him. This wasn’t really his game: He doesn’t craft slogans; he designs clothes. Eventually he said, “I think it’s an aspirational slogan. It says we know this name is a great name and we know this brand is a great brand. That’s what I take from it.”

That’s not what I take from it. What I’ve taken from it is that my family’s company probably gave even less of a shit than Madewell does about quality and design and passion. Its clothes were as high quality as they could afford because it was in their best interest to make clothes people were satisfied with. They manufactured in the U.S. because at the time it was cheaper to do so, and because it was easier. They weren’t noble; companies back then didn’t construct a facade of nobility and purpose. This was a company founded by a Russian immigrant who was probably an identity thief, a company that regularly stole the intellectual property of competitors if it thought it would sell. Both of the companies named Madewell adhere to the way things were done in their respective times. We look at the past through glasses that bring into focus only what we want, and need, to see; they distort everything else.

My great-uncle Aaron didn’t recognize anything on the Madewell website. And I think he would probably look at the exposed brick in a Madewell store and wonder why they didn’t finish putting up the walls. If Julius were alive, I think he’d be very impressed that a company called Madewell posted revenue of over $180 million in the fiscal year 2013. He would care not at all about whether it was authentic, or what the word “authentic” even means.

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#j crew #manufacturing #millard drexler #new bedford #retail

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raystart · 7 years ago

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Step Back in Time with Ebbets Field Flannels’ Vintage Jerseys

More than any other major league sport, the history of baseball is intimately connected to graphic design. Think Yankee pinstripes, Dodger blue, and the Tigers’ Old English D. As a young boy growing up in 1960s Brooklyn, Jerry Cohen was well aware of that connection: While most of his friends were tearing open new packs of baseball cards in search of their favorite players, Cohen was focused on the uniforms, the logos, and the colors.

Fast forward to Seattle, 1987. Cohen is searching for an original wool baseball uniform to wear onstage while performing with his rock-and-roll band. When he finally realizes he’ll need to make it himself, he discovers a warehouse in Rockport, New York, with yards of baseball flannel dating back to the 1940s. Cohen made a few of his own jerseys, and before too long, people were asking to buy the shirts off his back. And Ebbets Field Flannels was born.

Three years later, Sports Illustrated highlighted the company, which quickly led to celebrity commissions from Spike Lee and David Letterman. Ebbets Field Flannels provided jerseys for 42 (the Jackie Robinson biopic), and outfitted Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and other Hall of Famers at the closing ceremonies for Yankee Stadium in 2008. A die-hard Mets fan who now oversees 22 employees, Cohen recently added football and hockey jerseys to EFF’s collection, but vintage minor-league and Negro-League uniforms will always form the heart of the lineup, along with those from the historic international baseball hubs of Japan and Cuba.

When you decide to create a “new” product, where do you start?

I’m not like most clothing designers who think, “What will people like next season?” I follow history. It’s my job to be a curator and accurately take a two-dimensional form—often a black and white photo—and turn it into a three-dimensional form, which is a living, breathing piece of clothing. If I have any talent, that’s what it is.

I’m a little cagey on the subject of research; I don’t like to tell people about my methods because I have a lot of competition, and I’m not going to make it easy for anyone else. But I’ve collected a lot of reference materials over the years, and sometimes it’s very serendipitous—stuff comes across my desk and I follow leads, like any good detective.

What’s the most difficult thing about recreating these uniforms?

In many ways, it’s harder to do a simple thing than a complicated thing. Today’s graphic designers go their entire lives using Photoshop or Illustrator and many of them don’t understand the elegance and simplicity [of doing things by hand]. If you look at baseball graphics or athletic uniforms of today, the general approach is more—more colors, more layers, more of everything crammed into a very small space. But back in 1915 or 1945, it was the opposite; design literally meant someone drawing with a pencil in a sporting goods store, then someone else rendering that illustration into dies that were used to cut felt lettering.

Describe your typical customer.

When we started, there were still plenty of old timers who went to the games of the San Francisco Seals, let’s say, so that was our original market. Five or six years ago, we discovered a new market—much younger people who are driven by the craftsmanship of the products as much as they are by the history and the teams.

Now, our audience is much more diverse—we’re working with ACE Hotel and other contemporary brands [including Jack White’s Third Man Records], who seem to like our vintage approach. With so much cynicism in marketing—particularly in sports-related products—everything is so “of the moment,” but when the moment changes, all that stuff really seems obsolete. We try to sell timelessness.

Designers are always trying to connect people to brands, but it’s hard to think of a brand more powerful than baseball—simple letters and numbers and the words “New York” seem to add up to a lot more. True?

That’s where the history comes in—putting the letters and the colors in the context of history, finding those touchstones, and even bringing a story to people that they may not be aware of. If you could describe the Ebbets approach, it’s not, “Here’s a Yankees hat like they wore in the World Series,” because that’s been done. From the beginning, back in 1988, it was, “Do you know about the Negro Leagues? Did you know this whole other universe existed and it was wonderful and rich, full of all these amazing characters?”

As historians, we’re always trying to find those little stories, so that every product we make has some emotional connection or historical resonance. It’s not always possible to discover all the details about some of the more obscure teams, but I always try to find one or two things, even if it’s just a couple of interesting statistics from an old class B minor-league team from the ’30s. Because you have to give people something to sink their teeth into, beyond a black hat with a white “A” on it.

In one interview, you point out how much you love design from the ’30s to the ’60s, and although you’ve considered creating uniforms from the ’80s or ’90s, you’re not in any hurry. What was it about that earlier era?

I’m sure there are people who would respond to something from the ’80s or ’90s just as powerfully as I respond to something from the ’50s. But to me, the ’80s is when designs became dispensable and transient, with polyester materials and logos changing constantly, so I tend to lose interest.

Right around the ’70s is when you see regional domestic manufacturers get phased out of athletic garments, and big guys like Nike take over and it becomes more about marketing opportunities. Then the computer programs kicked in and everyone had to have their own Pantone color; it wasn’t just red anymore. We’ve recently started making more vintage collegiate uniforms and we have to explain to the schools that back in the day, there were really just seven or eight colors that everyone used; they didn’t make felt out of Harvard’s burgundy Pantone—those specs just didn’t exist. And there’s something I like about that.

It’s like playing music: Today you can have 64 digital tracks on top of one another, and the ability to make any sound you want, or you could hand someone an acoustic guitar and say, “You have to do it with this.” For me, it’s more interesting to work with a limited set of tools.

Today, no new professional sports team would choose to do something as simple as what the Yankees still wear: a one-color interlocking monogram. And yet, you can’t measure the value of that Yankees logo because it has 70 or 80 years of history behind it and it hasn’t really changed. I don’t mean to sound like everything was better “back in the day,” because that’s not true, but there’s something about American style from 1935-1972 that, for my taste, represents something really special.

You’ve been at this 30 years. Have there been any special moments when you were struck by the impact that your company has had?

The kind of people who buy our stuff are the kind of people I’d like to hang out with—experts in other fields. Early on, Spike Lee adopted us, before the Sports Illustrated article even came out—you’d open a magazine and see him wearing one of our Negro League jerseys. I remember opening up a copy of the Sunday New York Times, and seeing documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney in the section where they ask notable people what they’re watching and listening to, and under “What I’m Wearing” it says “Ebbets Fields Flannels”; I had no idea we’d be in the New York Times when I woke up that morning. I’m a huge Beatles fan, and 20 years ago Michael Lindsay, the director of the Beatles documentary “Let it Be,” called us out of the blue and asked to be put on our mailing list—and we still still talk to him. I love it when that sort of thing happens.

And of course, working on uniforms for 42 was a great experience for me personally. Jackie Robinson is part of the DNA of our company: Growing up in Brooklyn, my dad would tell me stories of Jackie Robinson and from there I learned about the Negro Leagues; it’s a springboard to everything we do. So getting to work on that movie, taking my dad to the premier, and seeing our work up on the screen—that was really special.

#startups #text #startup #advice #busieness #howto #news #tech #love

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anavoliselenu · 8 years ago

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Stepping stone chapter 9

I climbed inside Justin’s Tesla at five o’clock. After I buckled in, I leaned my head back against the seat and looked to him as he sat down in the drivers seat.

“I can’t believe how relatively easy you changed that deal for me,” I told him.

“I can be reasonable, Selena. You should have given me a chance before deciding to ignore me for a day and half. Don’t do that again,” he warned.

I threw my hands up in mock surrender.

“Sorry, but I thought I was going to have to fight in order to get you to agree to it. The research took some time and I wanted to make sure that I had all of my ducks in a row first.”

“Honestly, I would have preferred if you just took the company free and clear. But in hindsight, I should have known that you would have never accepted it. I can understand your reasoning, as well as appreciate it. Besides, your way of thinking sat much better with Stephen and Bryan.”

I thought about the meeting with Justin’s accountant and lawyer that began two hours earlier. Initially, they seemed more than just a little bit hesitant. It was as if they were sizing up the woman that Justin wanted to hand a portion of his company over to. If I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t trust me either. We ended our meeting on a more positive note, but I still had some reservations.

“Do you think that they approved?”

“It doesn’t matter if they approve or not. That’s not what I pay them for. This is a business arrangement between the two of us. They were just there to work out the figures and the legalities.”

Justin assumed that I was talking about the deal, but I was more concerned over whether they approved of me or not. After watching the three men together, it was apparent that they were more than just business associates. Their casual banter was too friendly at times. If they were truly his friends, their approval meant significantly more to me for some odd reason.

Why do I care if they approve of me or not?

I stayed quiet, choosing to not clarify what I meant or voice my concerns.

Justin flipped on the car stereo and backed out of the parking space. Green Day’s latest release pumped through the speakers as we made our way to the costume shop in Chelsea. I began to wonder what sort of outfit I should buy. Having never been to an upscale costume ball of sorts, I didn’t know how elaborately dressed people would be.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Justin said after a time.

“I was just thinking about how decked out people may or may not be. I don’t want to look stupid.”

Justin laughed.

“Angel, you could never look stupid.”

“That’s debatable,” I said dryly.

Apprehension crept into my veins. I still didn’t know if I was ready for this extravaganza.

When we pulled up to the front of the shop, I looked out the window. A red awning hung over the entrance with the name 25th Street Vintage written across it. There were mannequins in the storefront windows; each one dressed in 1920’s styled long and flowing gowns that were a kaleidoscope of colors. The jewel tones of them were simply breathtaking.

Justin came around to my side of the car and opened the passenger door for me. He took my hand as I climbed out.

“Ready to have some fun?” he asked, his eyes full of mischief. I was still eyeing up the dresses in the windows. Each one looked as if it might weigh fifty pounds.

“Ready as I’ll ever be I guess. Let’s go.”

We entered the boutique and bells chimed on the door. Almost instantly, we were face to face with a young, cheery faced girl. She didn’t look to be a day over seventeen years old.

“Hello and welcome! My name is Brielle. What can I help you with today?”

“Thank you. We are in looking for –,” Justin began. He was cut off by a woman that exited from a curtained off room.

“You must be Justin Stone,” she announced. I looked to Justin. He appeared to be taken aback by the woman.

“Why, yes I am. And you might be?”

“I am Dejah,” she said in an accent that I couldn’t quite place. As she came nearer to us, she began to chuckle. “Don’t look so surprised, dear. I’m not a psychic. Your sister telephoned me to tell me that you would be in this evening.”

“Ah, Justine. I can only imagine what she said to you. She can be a bit overzealous at times,” Justin said lightly.

“Oh, not at all monsieur! She said that I should be on the look out for a tall, dark haired man, most likely wearing a suit. However, she failed to tell me how handsome you were,” Dejah added with a wink.

Justin afforded her compliment a small smile. I may have been jealous, but the thick streaks of gray that flowed through her long black hair told me that she was easily twenty or thirty years his senior. Between that and her oversized jewelry, she reminded me of a carnival gypsy.

“Dejah, this is Selena Cole. Both her and I are in need of specific attire for a function that we will be attending together. Did Justine explain to you what we are here for?” Justin asked.

“Yes, of course. She told me all about the event. It sounds like it’s going to be a marvelous occasion.”

“Yes, it will be,” he replied.

“If I might add, I’m rather envious over missing it. I can just see it now – the costumes, the setting, the air of a French cabaret come to life,” Dejah rambled on wistfully.

Justin cleared his throat, albeit somewhat impatiently.

“About the costumes,” he began.

“Yes, yes. I talk too much. Your sister did say that your time is precious. Come with me and we will start going over everything that you will need. You’ve come to the right place!”

She spun on her heel and began walking away from us. I looked to Justin, but he just shook his head and motioned for me to follow the eccentric woman.

She took us past long rows of clothing from eras gone past. Everything seemed to be organized according to decade, starting with Gucci trends of the 90’s all the way back to treasures from the turn of the century. I expected our shopping to take place in this area of the store, but the woman motioned for us to follow her up a set of wooden stairs.

“This way, please. The second floor is what you need.”

When we reached the top of the stairs, I gasped at the archival collection before me. It was literally a living museum of burlesque fashion. From the frills and ruffles of the can-can dress, to the beaded corselets of some long ago courtesan; Dejah’s collection was astoundingly authentic.

“This piece here,” she said as she ran her hand along the lacey lines of an ivory colored gown. “It is rumored that it was worn by Mistinguett at the Moulin Rouge. However, I have been unable to verify the truth of that rumor, as many photographs and records were lost after the Second World War.”

My eyes widened in surprise.

“Are you saying that this clothing is the real thing? Not just costume replicas?” I asked incredulously.

“Of course, my dear. My shop is not called 25th Street Vintage for nothing,” she proudly stated. “Now, I’ll leave you two to look around for a bit. When you are ready to try something on, give me a holler and I will assist you.”

I looked at the displays that surrounded me. I walked slowly over to a rose colored silk dress. It was a beautiful gown, but not as ornate as the others in the room. I peeked at the price tag. Not surprisingly, it had a four-figure dollar amount attached to it.

I moved over to a different dress, one that was a breathtaking emerald green with black lace. Rhinestone buttons secured the front of the bodice, while crisscross ties laced up the back. I fingered the satin material as my eyes traveled down the long train and over the beaded detail. The dress was exquisite, and I could picture myself wearing it. However, it came with a five-figure price tag.

Yeah, there’s no way can I buy anything from here.

I turned to Justin.

“That green dress would look stunning on you,” he remarked.

“Justin, this is a little out of my price range.”

“Who said that you were paying?”

“These dresses are outrageously priced. You’d be a fool to pay that much for something that I’ll most likely only wear once. I’m sure that we could find someplace cheaper.”

“It’s only money, Selena. And I have plenty of it.”

“Well, now that’s arrogance for you,” I said sarcastically. He frowned.

“This is not about money. It’s about you being my date. And as my date, you will need to dress appropriately for the occasion.”

“This is asinine. I mean, these costumes are beautiful, but I highly doubt that the other women in attendance will be dressed so extravagantly.”

He ignored my comment and walked over to the stairway.

“Dejah,” he called down. “Miss Cole would like to try on the green dress that you have on display up here.”

“Justin! I do not!” I hissed.

“Yes you do. I could tell by the way you were looking at it. Now be quiet. Dejah is on her way back up. I’ll not have an argument with you in front of her.”

I half wanted to stomp my foot like a child, but refrained when Dejah reached the top of the stairs.

“Lovely choice, dear,” she said as she began to remove the dress from the mannequin. “We do alterations on premise, but you may not need them. This looks to be about your size.”

She held the dress up against me.

“The color will suit her,” Justin commented. I scowled at him.

“Yes, yes it will,” Dejah mused. “Fitting area is just this way. Once you have it on, I will help you tie up the back.”

I begrudgingly went behind the curtain that she pushed aside for me and took the dress from her hands. I expected it to be heavy, but it wasn’t too bad considering my assumption about the dresses in the storefront.

As I stripped out of my clothing, I could hear Dejah and Justin talking. She was explaining the various items that he could wear, pointing out which would go best with my dress.

My dress.

I scoffed to myself as I stepped into said dress. I slipped my arms into position and arranged the sleeves until they felt comfortable. There was not a mirror in the cordoned off fitting area, so I could only assume that I put it on correctly.

“Dejah,” I called out to her. “I think I’m ready to be laced up.”

She came behind the curtain, spun me around, and began to roughly tie up the laces. From the base of my spine to the middle of my back, the higher she went the tighter she pulled. All I could envision was that scene from Gone With The Wind, where Scarlett O’Hara was yelling at Mammy to tie it tighter.

Women from back then had to be out of their minds. If she pulls any tighter, I won’t be able to breathe!

When Dejah finished, she spun me around.

“Come out here so that I can look at you properly, dear.” I followed her out of the fitting area to where Justin was looking at a display of suit coats with tails. Dejah stepped in front of me and gave me a slow look over. “Oh, monsieur. She is stunning. Absolutely stunning.”

Justin turned at her words, and took in my appearance for the first time. His eyes lit up with appreciation.

“Is it okay?” I asked him. “There wasn’t a mirror in the fitting room so I couldn’t see.”

“Oh, how mindless of me!” Dejah exclaimed and motioned to her left. “The mirror is right over there.”

I stepped over to the full-length mirror and slowly turned in a circle. The front of the dress was shorter than the back, leaving the tail of the train to barely brush the floor as I turned. Black beads were woven into the lace detail, sparkling as they caught the light. Sprigs of glittery feathers were used to accent the bust and waistline, giving the dress a luminous appeal.

I truly loved everything about it. Not only did it look astonishingly elegant on me, but it also made me feel mysterious – like I could be anyone I wanted to be when wearing it. However, I was still silently fretting over the extravagant price Justin would have to pay for it.

“It fits well. Perfect actually,” I said hesitantly and ran my hands over the bodice.

Justin stepped up behind me and placed a simple headdress of rhinestones with green and black feathers upon my head. He ran his hands down my arms as he took in our reflections.

“Selena, it’s more than perfect. Dejah, we’ll take the dress.”

“I still think it was a ridiculous amount of money to spend,” I insisted as we entered the kitchen of Justin’s penthouse. I dropped my purse onto the breakfast bar and bent over to take off my shoes. I sat on one of the bar stools and began to rub the balls of my feet. After a ten-hour workday and four hours of shopping, my feet were killing me. I resigned myself to the fact that shoes and I would always have a love-hate relationship going on.

“Forget about it. You’re going to look fabulous, and that’s all that matters,” he insisted for what may have been the ninety-ninth time.

“Are you sure that I won’t be too overdone?”

“Selena,” he said in a warning tone. “I thought we settled this in the car.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll let it go,” I conceded, even if I still thought that the expenditure was beyond insensible. He came over to where I was sitting and placed his hands on my shoulders.

“I want to buy you things. I enjoy spending money on you. Why can’t you accept that?”

“I don’t know. I just…” I trailed off, unable to find a suitable argument. He could spend money on whatever and whomever he wanted. I should be grateful that he was choosing to spend it on me. However, the independent side of me always wanted to resist.

“We’ve talked about this before. I’ve explained what it means to me to be a Dominant, even if you fight over every aspect of it. Please, allow me this much,” he said and placed a soft kiss on my lips.

“About that,” I murmured against him.

“What about it?” he asked and pulled back to look at me.

I contemplated how I should broach the subject of his kinkiness without seeming like I was dwelling on past issues. I looked up into his sapphire eyes, so intense that it felt like he could see right through me. I couldn’t think when he looked at me that way, so I stood up and began pacing the kitchen.

“Well, I was thinking about that night at Club O, at least the part before everything went bad.”

“Yes,” he said cautiously.

“I’ve been thinking about how far you’d like to take things. Don't get me wrong; things have been great between us. Perfect actually. But I feel like we have a lot of unfinished business there.”

His blue eyes flashed as he narrowed his gaze on me. I stopped pacing and tried to get a read on what he was thinking. However, before I could explain further, I found myself pinned up against the wall with Justin’s hard torso pressed against mine.

“You’re impossible. Do you know that?” he growled.

“I don’t mean to –.”

“Stop. Now,” he demanded.

“This is important to me, Justin. I can’t just let it drop. You’ve done stuff with other women, a lot of stuff that I can’t even begin to imagine. I’m not very well versed on these sorts of things and I don’t know what to think about it. I don’t know what my limitations are.”

“Kristina, listen to me. Yes, I have done things that many consider taboo in the past. I have been with countless women and have pushed their boundaries. I’ve shown them pain and I’ve given them pleasure, but never once did I give them a second thought afterwards. Now it’s all about you. I only want what you can give me. Nothing more. We have spent the majority of our time together talking about what was or what could be, but that isn’t going to happen anymore. Going forward, we will be living in the present.”

“I won’t argue with that, but there are –.”

“Have you enjoyed everything that we’ve done so far?”

“Yes, of course,” I told him, taken aback that he might think otherwise.

“Do you feel secure enough to use your safe word if needed?”

“Yes, Justin. But, again, there is –.”

“End of discussion,” he said, completely cutting me off for a third time.

“You’re not being reasonable,” I pointed out.

“Actually, I’m making perfect sense,” he said, his voice noticeably lowering an octave. He gripped my hair into a ponytail and gave it a slight tug. “You need to trust me. I’ve already sacrificed and given up so much of who I am for you, Selena. I won’t let you take this from me, too. Your body will always be mine to do with as I please. I will own it and you won’t question it.”

The command in his voice sent a delicate shiver of delight down my spine. I looked into his eyes. They swirled with a dark primal need, but there was also a challenge in them. It was almost as if he were daring me to push back, like this was a test.

He will own me. I am not allowed to question it. Can I do that?

He tightened his grip on my hair and yanked a bit harder. Pulling my head back, he placed his mouth on the shell of my ear and grazed his teeth over the delicate skin. I shivered again when I felt the hardness of his erection that strained through his pants and pressed up against me. A familiar tingle began to form in my belly, rapidly intensifying until I was astoundingly aroused.

“Tell me, Selena. Say you’ll fully submit to me. Give me the words that I need to hear,” he said gruffly as he tightened his hold.

There was an edge to his voice that was an aphrodisiac to my senses. I found that I didn’t want to challenge him on this. I wanted Justin to take complete and total control over my body. I wanted to feel like that woman on the stage at Club O and let go of my inhibitions. She trusted her Dominant to take complete and total control of her body. Her Dom was her entire universe and nothing else mattered.

I wanted to surrender myself to Justin, and not just in the physical sense. I had finally reached the point where I trusted him enough to give my full emotional surrender as well. He was just waiting for my consent.

I looked deep into his eyes. I saw a yearning that I could no longer deny him of. This is what he needed.

“I’m yours,” I said.

A slow and satisfied smile spread over his features, before turning into something darker and full of promise.

“I’m going to be hard on you, angel. You will be completely at my mercy. You don’t need to be concerned about my limits anymore. Tonight will be about learning your own. I won’t stop unless you use your safe word.”

I closed my eyes and let his words wash over me.

Will I enjoy what he does to me? Or will he push me too far?

“What happens if I use my safe word?” I asked hesitantly.

“Don’t sound as if that’s something you should be ashamed of. You have a safe word for a reason, and I will stop if it’s used. Repeat it to me so I know that you’ll call on it if needed.”

“Sapphire.”

“Good girl,” he appreciated. “Without that word, neither one of us will know how high we can go. You need to let go and trust yourself. But more importantly, you need to trust me. Now, go to the bedroom and take off your clothes. I want you kneeling on the floor in the submissive position.”

He released his grip on my hair and took a step back. Without hesitation, I hurried to the bedroom, my heated pulse hammering through my veins.

I was wildly aroused, almost to the point of being dizzy. Now that I had openly agreed, the idea of exploring was unexpectedly exhilarating. My little devil friend was back and he was rocking out to Madonna’s “Erotica” on my shoulder. I wanted to do this more than anything.

As I quickly undressed, I began to wonder about the limits in which he would push me to. I was slightly apprehensive because I didn’t want to chicken out and disappoint him. However, I shook off the worry almost immediately. He had already shown me so many things that I never thought that I’d be open to. I felt confident that Justin was the master of giving both pain and pleasure. I might not know what my limits were, but I knew that he would find the balance.

I had already assumed the proper position when he came into the room. He was shirtless and carrying two glasses of wine. He raked his eyes over me, and I saw the desire in them flash hot.

He stepped up to me and placed a glass at my lips.

“Drink,” he told me.

I parted my lips so that he could tip some of the crisp white wine into my mouth. When he pulled the glass away, a small amount dribbled out of the corner of my mouth. I ran my tongue over my lips to catch it.

He set the glasses on the dresser, and then turned back to grasp my chin in his hand. He tilted my face up towards his.

“Do that again,” he told me.

“Do what?”

“Your tongue. Run your tongue over your lips and look into my eyes when you do it.” I felt somewhat foolish, but did as instructed. My eyes locked on his. The carnal need that I saw in them sent a rush of heat between my legs, as I slowly slid my tongue over my bottom lip.

He groaned and pulled me to my feet.

“God, what you fucking do to me,” he growled and crushed his mouth to mine.

I moaned against his mouth, my body moving against his as the kiss deepened. Justin cupped the back of my neck with his hand and gripped firmly as he pressed his hard body along my entire length. My hand ran over the span of his broad chest, digging into the muscles as I searched for his sensitive nipples with my fingertips.

He gave a sharp slap to my bare behind.

“Slow, angel. You're too greedy.”

He abandoned my lips, leaving a trail of fire down my neck. I tilted my head down and nipped at his ear. Satisfaction filled me when I sensed the shiver that ran through his body after my teeth dug into his lobe.

Justin ran his hands up and down my sides, past my breasts without making any real contact. He was torturing me on purpose. I released a moan of frustration. I pressed my body to his, brushing my taut nipples against his chest. I needed to feel his hot skin against mine. I clung tight, trying to will him with my mind to quicken his pace, but he would have none of it.

“Take off my pants, Selena. Slowly.”

Moving back to my knees, I positioned myself in front of him. I could see his erection prominent beneath his pants. On impulse, I leaned forward and pressed my face against the bulge of material. He hissed in surprise and I smiled with satisfaction.

He said slowly. Two can play at this game.

Using my teeth, I deliberately bit down, exerting enough pressure to make him tremble. He hissed again and pulled away.

“I said to take off my pants! I never gave another direction. You need to follow my instructions.”

“My apologies,” I lied. I wasn’t sorry at all. I suppressed a grin, knowing that I’d likely be chastised again for being disobedient.

I looked up at him only to find that his eyes were narrow with suspicion.

“You’re a terrible liar. Get up.”

“I thought you wanted me to take off –.”

“Get up!”

I scrambled to my feet at his command. He took hold of my arm and ushered me over to the corner of the bedroom. He grabbed the edge of the settee and spun it around.

Oh, crap. The spanking horse.

Before I could even process what was about to happen, I found myself bent over the horse, watching as Justin secured leather cuffs to my wrists. Locking me in place, he stood up and ran his hand lightly over the line of my jaw. He disappeared from my line of sight and I felt leather straps circle my ankles. Spreading my legs apart, he secured them to the posts on the bench.

Stretched over the bench, with my ass high in the air, I was completely vulnerable. I tugged lightly at the restraints, but found that there was no give. I was rendered immobile and helpless to his whim.

I could hear Justin moving about the room, but I couldn’t see what he was doing. I heard the jingling of keys, then a door opening and closing.

The toy closet.

Music suddenly filled my ears. It started off quiet, but Justin increased the volume until it was bordering on loud. The electric pulses from the music mixed with the singer’s soul searching lyrics reeked havoc on my senses and sent my desire into overdrive. It made me desperate for whatever it was he planned to do to me.

The soft feel of leather trailed down the middle of my back. I immediately recognized it as the flogger. A chill raced down my spine in anticipation, wanting to feel the fiery sensation of the leather against my skin.

Justin leaned down and whispered into my ear.

“I’m going to mark your skin. And I mean it when I say that. It won’t be like the last time. I will raise welts that you will feel tomorrow and be reminded of how they got there,” he said in a husky voice. “Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I told him and nodded my consent. For some strange reason, I had little concern over what he said he was going to do. A part of me knew that he only needed me to acknowledge the intensity of what was to come.

His hand slid over my backside, massaging my cheeks before slipping down between my legs. I gasped when he came in contact with my opening. He slid his fingers around the rim, spreading the moisture over the folds to my tingling clit.

“Oh, angel. I love that you’re always ready for me.”

He pinched and held the pulsing nub between his fingers. I quivered with need, as the painful ache grew until I was desperate for release. I tried to push against him but was prevented by the restraints. I was right there, already so close to the threshold of amazing bliss.

Just as the familiar build up began, he pulled his hand away.

“Ah!” I cried out in frustration.

“Not yet. I want you on edge while I flog you. I’m going to make you mindless. Your ass will burn. You’ll be begging for relief, desperate for the release that only I can give you. But even then, I won’t let you come,” he said. His hand slid over my backside and pushed against my puckered rear hole. “I won’t let you come until I’ve taken you in a place that no other man has been before.”

I couldn’t even form a coherent response. His words were like silk in my ears, clouding the reality around me. His statement brought my arousal to a new height, the darkness of his promise an aphrodisiac like no other.

I sucked in a sharp breath as a loud snap of leather jolted me back to awareness. It didn’t fall on my flesh, but was just made to let me know that the first blow was coming. I braced myself for the first lash of fire.

CRACK!

Pain blew over my skin like a rushing inferno and I jumped, unable to stop my reaction to the first blow. I waited for the next, knowing that the pain would eventually move to an incredible and pleasurable height. The second one came, but in a different place from the last. I breathed through the burn until it passed. On the third blow, a different kind of burn began to overtake me, one that pulsed and throbbed in my core.

He continued to pepper my backside, one lash after another. After every other whip of the leather, he would reach down and massage by burning clit until I was wild with desperation. I craved the orgasm that was so near, and I didn’t think that I could take much more of his torment.

“Justin, please!” I shamelessly begged.

He didn’t give in, but stayed relentless with his assault.

“You will not come until I let you,” he reminded me.

He picked up his speed, each blow coming closer and harder than the last. Everything started to get hazy and a feeling of euphoria settled over me. It was as if time ceased to exist, and the only thing that mattered was holding onto the pleasure within the pain.

All at once, he stopped. His palms glided softly over the curvature of my ass, a sharp contrast to the previous sensations.

“Your ass is beautifully red from my marks. It looks fucking magnificent,” he murmured. His voice was thick and heavy with desire. I closed my eyes and tried to envision what he was seeing.

He pressed a kiss to one cheek and then the other, the tender action almost worshipful as he spread them a part. I vaguely heard a click sound before being shocked by a cool liquid sliding down my crack. When he began to smear it over the entrance to my seam, probing against the tight hole, I was instantly ripped out of my clouded state and jolted back to reality.

Lube.

When he mentioned taking me where no man had ever been before, I thought that he was speaking metaphorically. I didn’t think that he would actually do it.

“Justin, wait –.”

“Shh. Trust yourself, Selena. You can do this.”

Oh, yeah sure. I can do this. No sweat.

I rolled my eyes, thinking that I just may be out of my damn mind. Tonight was supposed to be about finding my limits, and I was hard pressed to think of a truer test. I lay there, all but dangling helpless, very conflicted over whether or not I should use my safe word.

The music changed to a more edgy tune, the female singer’s voice chillingly raw, as Justin continued to lubricate my backside. Every so often, he would reach through my tender folds to massage my swollen clit. I moaned every time he did it, as I was still dying for the release that I had been deprived of for what seemed like eons. His deft fingers moved up, over, and in, stretching and preparing me for his invasion.

When I felt his erection press against me, I tensed.

“Relax. If you don’t, this will hurt. I don’t want to hurt you, angel.”

Moment of truth, Cole. Safe word or no safe word?

He reached around under my belly and moved his fingers over my pulsing nub, exerting just enough pressure to get me closer to the edge that I so desperately wanted to fall over. Taking advantage of my distraction, he pushed himself forward, nudging against my tight ring. My body protested the slight penetration, but he persisted. I gasped when he finally broke through, the painful intrusion overriding any magic that he was working on my clit.

“Breathe through it,” he instructed. “Don’t hold your breath. The pain will pass if you relax your body. Allow yourself to embrace the sensation.”

I did what he told me to do and took a few deep breaths. Justin didn’t move, but ran his hands up and down my back to help relax me further. Eventually, the tension began to dissipate and he pushed forward once more. Inch by inch, he made his way in, stretching me impossibly wide.

With one final thrust, he was all the way in. I cried out and tried to move away instinctively, but the bonds held me firmly in place. Justin stilled his body and waited for me to adjust to his massive girth, yet never once ceased the stroking motion of his fingers on my clit.

“I’m going to move now, angel. Are you ready?”

I was panting and gasping for breath, trying to absorb the foreign sensation that was both painful and pleasurable. It was an odd sort of feeling and I didn’t know which one out weighed the other.

“I’m ready,” I whispered, trying to keep my body relaxed.

He pulled back ever so slightly, and I was shocked to discover that I wanted him to stay put. It was as if his backwards motion left a vacancy that I needed to have filled. Just as I was about to moan a complaint, Justin thrust forward once again.

“Fuck, Selena,” he said in a rasping tone. “You’re sucking me in like a greedy fist.”

A dark and edgy sensation began to creep through my veins, propelling me back into the state of euphoria that I was in before as he continued to drive forward. Deep and hard, he savagely thrust into me. He said that he was going to go hard and that he would show me no mercy. He promised to push me to my limits, and that’s exactly what he was doing. Justin was showing me what it meant to be truly dominated.

This was a demonstration of his power – forceful and utterly alpha. I was helpless to his every desire, yet I relished the vulnerable state that he put me in. He was giving me a taste of his complete domination, and I was like an addict. I would never get enough of his power and control. It would forever be like a drug, calling to the deepest and darkest parts of my soul.

I was close to the breaking point, my orgasm just within my reach. The room began to blur around me. I wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer.

“Justin, I’m too close!” I cried out.

He slowed his pace and leaned down so that his torso was pressed against my back. He smoothed away the hair that had fallen over my face.

“I want you to come, angel. You’ve earned it.”

Returning to a standing position, he reared back before slamming into me. He brought his hand back to my clit, rolling the sensitive nub between his fingers. Over and over again, he pumped his hips forward, the power of his possession overwhelming. But just as I thought it would be too much, pleasure rocketed through me, up and over until it exploded like a firework. I shook uncontrollably, buzzing from a high that I had never before experienced.

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