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Thursday, July 19th, 2007
For the first few years of my teenage life I kept my fingers crossed that my Russian second cousin-in-law once removed would turn up her toes and leave me her collection of fur coats.
She did both things in time for my 16th birthday. A box arrived, big enough to hold Damien Hirst’s shark. It entirely blocked our narrow Victorian entrance hall. It reeked of naphthalene, for which I should really be grateful: it had done its aspic-work, preserving some beautiful thick fur coats, which I proceeded to wear very thin for the next five years.
My favourites were the astrakhan coats, a grey one and a black one. Astrakhan is one of the most evocative furs around. It brings to mind central Asia, where people have been wearing it for hundreds of years. If you go to the Uxbridge Road tomorrow, you will see many a dignified Pakistani gentleman in his shalwar-kameez and astrakhan hat shuffling contemplatively along. And it provokes, too. Three years ago astrakhan shot to fame when Stella McCartney attacked Madonna for wearing it. Quite rightly, it is perceived to be the most un-PC, non-big game fur around: it is made from unborn lambs. The debate over whether those lambs are stillborn or aborted keeps temperatures in the pro- and anti-fur camps high.
Is fur really necessary? As necessary as Handel’s Messiah or the ha-ha — in other words, not really; but life would undoubtedly be poorer without it. There is no other material that combines warmth and beauty in the way fur does. Of course there are plenty of sophisticated natural and synthetic fibres that have been developed to keep us warm, but not all of us want to look like Canadian skiing champions; not all of us like luminous, futuristic garb. A glorified macintosh will never replace the unique markings of a racoon or lynx pelt or, importantly, the feel of it: we just can’t compete with nature.
Even in Russia, where last winter Muscovites endured temperatures of minus 35infinityC, fur-wearing is not an entirely practical exercise. Even there it is an expression of femininity, sexiness, luxury. Fur was reviled by the Bolsheviks, who erased it from the revolutionary aesthetic — the new utilitarian look as invented by Lyubov Popova had no hint of fur anywhere (Lenin, however, couldn’t quite resist and often sported a jaunty astrakhan hat). The backlash against that communist puritanism after perestroika was huge, and Russia is now one of the world’s biggest importers of fur. However, Russia still holds one export trump card: the Russian sable — still the most desirable fur around and a fittingly chic partner to Russia’s other trump card, oil. Sable at auction costs between £200 and £500 per pelt and you need about 40 pelts to make a coat. Today the sight of a Masha or Natasha with her inimitable stormy pout and sable coat tantalisingly disguising two miles of perfect leg is simply a magnificent thing. I know many men who have lost their hearts, minds and wallets over it.
People often ask me if it is safe to wear fur again in this country. And my answer is:
yes, though to some extent it depends on who you are. In their heyday the anti-fur protesters tended to target rich middleaged-to-elderly women. They didn’t attack young men in sheepskin coats or sexy rappers like Puff Daddy. That is because the war against the fur trade is, at least in part, as much a class war as an animal rights war.
Rather like the war on hunting, it is a statement against aesthetic elitism. It was, in the late Eighties, a violent war and it still has a strong hold on the imaginations of those who remember it. Quite understandably, too: the Animal Liberation Front’s logo of a terrorist in a balaclava clutching a puppy must rank as one of the 20th century’s most frightening and perverse images.
Of course not everyone who has doubts about fur is aligned with the extremist paramilitary wings of animal liberation groups.
It is as natural to worry about the living conditions of a mink as it is to feel twinges of conscience over battery hens. The poor treatment of animals, whether those bred for meat or for fur, is never acceptable. Nor is it, in fact, in the fur trade’s interest: badly fed, badly treated animals do not have beautiful fur. The fur trade is highly regulated and animals bred for fur are generally better treated than those bred for meat.
Countries like China, where animal rights, like human rights, fall well below our standards, are being lobbied by organisations like the British Fur Trade Association to review and eventually improve the conditions on their fur farms, though it is, inevitably, a slow process.
The anti-fur movement has, moreover, lost much of its momentum because the profile of an average fur buyer has changed so dramatically in the past two decades. In real terms, fur has dropped massively in value compared with other luxury goods, to become something accessible to the averagely wealthy fashion consumer. Forty years ago a mink coat cost the same as a Jaguar; now the Jag outflanks the average mink coat by a factor of five — a mink coat will set you back between £3,000-£7,000. A sable coat, however, can cost up to £40,000. A bigger market has meant that the fur trade in 2003 was worth $11.3 billion. Many top designers now use fur in their collections and these days you can buy something with a fur trim on it almost by accident. But more significantly, the fur coat itself has undergone a metamorphosis in the past 15 years that can be summed up in one phrase: No More Shoulder Pads
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Thursday, July 19th, 2007
In 1863, Charles Baudelaire located a set of markers for modernity in the fugitive aspects of fashion and urged the modern artist “to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distill the eternal from the transitory.” (1) Since that date, Baudelaire’s modernity has been subjected to relentless critical rethinking as discussion about modernity, modernism, and their relationship to a recognizably “modern” art in the 19th and 20th centuries has been profoundly reshaped by ideological struggles within, and without, academic institutions, particularly after World War II. (2) Although the concept of modernism, at least since the 1960s, has provided a (sometimes controlling) framework through which to evaluate and assess certain aspects of 20th-century cultural production, its exclusions, as Peter Wollen and others have remarked, have become legendary. (3) Notable among those exclusions is fashion, displaced from the central position Baudelaire assigned it and typically dismissed in dominant accounts of early-20th-century art as, in Nancy Troy’s words, “superficial, fleeting and feminized” (p. 2). Marginalized in histories of modern art, when not ignored altogether, the study of fashion has largely been left to costume historians (except where artists took up its design and/or production), costume institutes, and museum exhibitions that often reinforce a narrow linking of art and fashion around “garments designed by artists or clothing that qualifies as art” (p. 3). (4)
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Since the 1970s, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and gender studies have contributed important models for exploring fashion as a cultural and performative expression of the female subject, as well as a site for renegotiations of gender and sexual identity. The publication in 1993 of historian Mary Louise Roberts’s groundbreaking essay “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France” exposed the profound ideological and political effects of social debates that implicated modern fashion in representations of gender, sexuality, and nationalism. Roberts’s essay, part of a larger study of gender in post-World War I France, has informed a number of art historical investigations into relationships between fashion, gender, sexuality, and modernity in Europe and in Russia during the interwar period, including recent work by Tag Gronberg, Maria Makela, Christina Kiaer, myself, and others. (5) Much of that work on the post-World War I period has focused on the 1920s, when modern art and modern design shared a distinct and discernible stylistic vocabulary and the so-called new woman emerged to stake out a territory that included the representation of the modern lesbian. This emphasis has tended to deflect attention away from the historical significance of the French clothing industry and its commercial interests in shaping discourses of modernity in the period before and during World War I, the subject of Nancy Troy’s new book.
Troy’s book is not about gender per se, though gender is everywhere inscribed in the objects of her investigation. Instead, Troy maps a set of previously unexplored parallel structures that existed between modern fashion and modern art in the years before and during World War I. The result is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature that addresses the discursive role of modern fashion in shaping the cultural landscape of modernity in early-20th-century Europe and North America. (6) More than that, in shifting the emphasis away from the more easily recognizable tropes of modernity embedded in a wide range of artistic and design practices in the 1920s, it represents a pioneering attempt to expose a deeper structural relationship between modern art and modern fashion during a formative period in the consolidation of vanguard culture.
The title of Troy’s book, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, situates her investigation of an alternative conceptual model linking the domains of art and fashion (one not necessarily accessible through even a rigorous formal analysis). Setting aside the conventional linking of artists and couturiers (Salvador Dali and Elsa Schiaparelli, for example), she instead concentrates on the commercial practices of Paul Poiret, the most successful leader in the field of innovative fashion design before World War I, and the artistic practices of Marcel Duchamp, the “father” of the readymade. Her intention is to unveil a logic shared by both modern fashion and modern art: the tension between reverence for the unique original and a growing need for mass-produced copies. The contradiction that emerges at the heart of the fashion system when the “(supposedly) unique and auratic object … is subjected to the conditions of mass consumption in an industrialized economy” finds a parallel in the problem faced by the modern artist who embraces uniqueness and originality but whose market depends on establishing the work in relation to others like it, and distinct from everything else (p. 334). For Troy, both fashion and fine art in the modern period require “an audience, a discourse, a profile in the public sphere,” and her interest lies in their formation and elaboration across a range of cultural practices (p. 335). In her quest to locate and explicate the sources of these defining structures, her intellectual journey ranges widely as she investigates relations between elite and popular cultures, the professional theater and the fashion show, the couture house and the art gallery, the fashion industry’s mass-produced patterns and the artist’s reproductive copies.
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Thursday, July 19th, 2007
aBrice: Despite the diminishing gap between the conventional trend setting countries of the world and North America, a time lag still remains. Subsequently, our London and Paris offices have been invaluable to the success of our North American marketing effort. Depending on the retailer and their positioning, we’ll typically release new programs and/or merchandising concepts in Europe first, and if they’re successful, only then will we launch in North America. Thus far, we’ve found this process remarkably beneficial as we endeavor to optimize the productivity of our North American retail partners’ programs.
Drug Store News: What is the greatest misconception about the cosmetics bag category in general?
Brice: [That] quality and function are unimportant. Unlike other fashion-driven categories, cosmetic bags are particularly utilitarian. If the product does not possess the correct organizational elements, if it features inappropriate/impractical embellishments or if it is too large or too small, it will simply not sell. While fashion is important, we can’t lose sight of the fact that cosmetics bags have to be user-friendly and reliable. The positioning of a zipper or a gusset can make a dramatic difference to the bag’s overall usefulness.
Drug Store News: What is key to making the category a success at retail?
Brice: Understanding the retail environment is perhaps the most critical element. While similarities will inevitably exist within certain sectors, it would be inappropriate to suggest a standardized planogram and/or promotional approach to all retailers due to varying factors, such as demographic make-up, regional variations and market positioning.
For example, in certain environments it can be both inefficient and ineffective for our retail partners to planogram high-fashion merchandise, while in others the trend is the driving force behind the business. It’s important to note that many of our customer’s programs are the culmination of up to 10 years of POS analysis and constant improvement.
s retailers prepare for 2007, cosmetic storage bags is one segment not to let fall by the wayside. Consumers’ taste and expectations continue to grow increasingly sophisticated–paving the way for higher sales of those bags with on-trend designs. According to PJ Brice, vice president of sales for Allegro Manufacturing, determining which trends are around the corner is just the first step. Under standing how that trend should be interpreted, at what price it should be marketed and at what date it should be launched at store level are critical to a program’s success.In North America, Allegro possesses more than 80 percent market share in the soft sided cosmetic storage category.
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
The art of haute couture is gloriously captured in the Paris 2002/2003 couture collections. As is its tradition, couture is extravagant, intricate and expensive, and this season’s creative masterpieces do not disappoint on either level. While some dresses and ensembles easily cost more than $20,000, just gazing at these fashion wonders delivers a megadose of inspiration, adrenaline and beauty. There are Givenchy’s sexy-funky ensembles fashioned of leather strips and buckled belts, Ungaro’s luscious velvets, Balmain’s elegant taffetas and brocades, and Gaultier’s sensuously chic garments. Sable and other furs are not only used as trims, but also as fabrics for garments. On close inspection, the fashion maven finds the most exquisite workmanship in the industry; it is not unusual for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours to be devoted to hand-stitching and other fine details. Be inspired and appreciate the art inherent in the Parisian haute couture collection. Red velvet suit with gathered palazzo pants, full jacket and sheer bodice is accessorized with oversized multistrand turquoise necklace and handpainted cummerbund with complementary colors. By Emanuel Ungaro.
Right: Gaultier offers knitted glam in ensemble of beaded burgundy column gown covered with bright orange heavy sweater coat with oversized sleeves and long train. Note: Unusual hat with extended feather.
Left: Gaultier designs pullover top of graduated bands of mink and chiffon, with large cowl neck and bell sleeves, worn over chocolate brown knee-length skirt, accessorized with brown shoulder bag.
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Colorful blue, green and yellow ensemble features bandeau dress of leather bands with buckles down one side. Opulent feather coat is lined in blue marabou feathers. By Julien Macdonald for Givenchy. Note: Laceup high heeled sandals.
Above: Ralph Rucci designs unusual hand-painted ensemble of black and orange paint splotches on tan background. He is the first American designer to be invited to show his creations at the Paris couture show since before World War II.
Left: The Victorian period was inspiration for elegant couture ensemble from Balmain. Ruffle-edged, floor-length, empire opera coat dress with long sleeves accented with ruffled layers, worn over gold brocade slacks.
Elegant Balmain jeweled-brocade pant ensemble features long collarless jacket with sleeves and hem trimmed in mink. Accessorized with multiple necklaces of turquoise and other gems.
Rock star chic is captured in Givenchy’s blue/black/purple top of scaled palettes with silver cowl neck, worn over miniskirt of black leather strips with buckles down one side. Accessorized with knee-high black leather Roman boot sandals, large black bag and black feather headband.
Gaultier spices up the couture scene with this sexy, funky ensemble with jacket blouse of black linked rosettes on chiffon, with extended chiffon bell sleeves over wrists.
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
Cheerful, free-spirited and fun is the way to live and the way to look. And EBONY Fashion Fair is giving the world a life lesson for the 2004-2005 fashion season with Living It Up, a vivacious collection of cutting-edge creations from the world’s hottest designers.
Mrs. Eunice W. Johnson, EBONY Fashion Fair producer-director for a 47th year, has culled the boldest, brightest, most glamorous offerings from top fashion houses around the globe. These designs are guaranteed to boost your mood and revitalize your style.
Living It Up debuts September 8 in Tinley Park, IL. Proceeds from the kickoff show, sponsored by the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., will benefit the Profit Through Knowledge Scholarship Fund.
Since its inception in 1958, EBONY Fashion Fair has raised $51.8 million for charities and scholarship funds such as UNCF. And it has remained-for an unprecedented 47 years–the world’s largest traveling fashion show.
Eleven female models and two male models will glam up runways coast to coast for Living It Up. This season’s talented ensemble includes Alicyn Chappelle (Elk Grove, CA), Noelle Carter (Freehold, NJ), Alexandria Hepburn (Oklahoma City, OK), Keitha Higgs (Los Angeles), Raquel Atkins (Chicago), Andrea Keesee (Clinton, MD), Channon Monroe (Penllyn, PA), Joy Jones (Bonita, CA), Joslyn Pennywell (Lucky, LA), Erica Ward (Jackson, MS), Wendy Wiltz (New Orleans), James Furlow (Sunnyvale, CA), Obon Jones (Arlington, TX).
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
African Americans have long been associated with influencing fashion and its trends. It’s also no secret that we are big consumers of style. According to Target Market News, African Americans spent $22.9 billion on clothing in 2002. What we don’t often hear about are the people behind the scenes–those who ignite, interpret, and cover the trends–all in a business that has never welcomed black creative talent with open arms. There are some trailblazers, however, who have weathered the fashion storm to become leaders in this transient industry.History: White has worked as a fashion reporter, editor, and director for several leading publications including Elle, The New York Times, British Vogue, and Talk.
Pulse: “I relate to high fashion as well as accessible fashion. For the Web, you really have to grab people with information and articulate it in a timely manner.”
Fashion Changes: “The way people look at buying fashion, the way fashion information is delivered to the consumer has changed, eBay is the runway for the real world.”
TRACY REESE
Distinction: Designer of signature lines TR and the moderately priced Plenty, which is available at Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom’s, Saks Fifth Ave., and Macy’s West.
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
One of the little-remarked side effects of 9/11 was the eclipse of the anti-globalisation movement. It is not easy to remember that in the summer of 2001, the year in which protestor Carlo Giuliani died during rioting at the G8 summit in Genoa, the growing venom of anti-capitalism protestors was seen as such a threat to society that, briefly, on the afternoon of 11 September commentators on the live radio and television coverage discussed the possibility that the attacks could have been carried out by enemies of globalisation. After 9/11, however, the movement suffered a precipitous decline. The Mayday riots which had shaken London in 2000 and 2001 were not repeated. With the war on terror swinging into action, taunting the police in street battles seemed a rather less good idea. With security services twitching with the threat of suicide bombers, suddenly there was the possibility that water cannons might be replaced with semi-automatic weapons.
In Rostock this week, however, the antiglobalisers wanted us to know that they are back in business. A rally involving 25,000 protestors quickly erupted into violence, leaving a reported 400 police officers and 520 demonstrators injured. The violence followed protests in Hamburg the previous week. And that was even before a single G8 delegate had touched down in Germany.
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It is no accident that the revival of antiglobalisation protest coincided with the visit of the G8 summit to Germany. It is in the German Autonome — anarchist groups of the 1960s and 1970s — that the anti-globalisation movement has its origins. It was Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist turned terrorist who lent her name to the BaaderMeinhof Gang, whose justification of vandalism as a political tool still rings in the ears of German anarchists: ‘If I set a car on fire that is a criminal offence. If I set hundreds of cars on fire that is political action.’ The difference is that whereas the Autonome were underground organisations, today’s anarchists are increasingly open about their methods. You didn’t exactly need to be a spy to find out what protest groups were planning for the G8 summit: anyone with an internet connection would have been able to read the detailed plans of where and how protestors were planning to strike — such as outside the Rostock-Lichtenhagen branch of the budget supermarket Lidl, where on Monday 4 June at 10 p. m. a group called the Dissent Network, along with the Andalusian union of agricultural workers, were planning to gather in protest against Lidl’s ‘lousy working conditions’ and its ‘ruinous price dictates’.
Anyone who imagines what happened in Rostock was caused by a small rabble disrupting a larger peaceful protest and being picked upon by over-reacting police, should have a look at the Dissent Network’s website. For a self-professed anarchist group, it is remarkably well-organised. Long before the G8 summit it had set up two camps, one in Rostock and one outside, for a total of 11,000 protestors, complete with soup kitchens and medical tents. Prospective protestors were told that the object was to close all entry points to the G8 summit and were given detailed advice as to the most effective way of doing it: you might consider, for example, linking arms with the aid of metal pipes set into concrete blocks which you prepared earlier, and then lying down in the street. ‘There is little you can do against armoured police vehicles, ‘ it goes on to advise, ‘but they do for example hate paint on their windscreens.’ At Heiligendamm, too, eager members of the ‘Black Bloc’ were expected — another German-born-and-bred anarchist outfit which was active in Genoa five years ago and which has its roots in the BaaderMeinhof/Red Army Faction era. Unlike the Dissent Network, the Black Bloc doesn’t have a website proclaiming what trouble it intends to cause at G8. Neither does it have a press spokesman. But to give us a flavour of its ideology, one of its top brass, calling herself ‘Mary Black’, posted the following on the internet:
It is not just that police abuse their power, we believe that the existence of the police is an abuse of power . . . many of us believe in revolution and within that context, attacking the cops doesn’t seem out of place.
In other words, not much point in sending Commander Brian Paddock out to Heiligendamm to advise on community policing techniques: as far as the Black Bloc is concerned, cops are there to be beaten up and that is that. It isn’t just the cops, either.
Mary Black goes on to offer her thoughts on capitalist enterprise:
‘I believe that using the word violent to describe breaking the window of a Nike store takes meaning away from the word. . . . It is true that some underpaid Nike employee will have to clean up the mess, which is unfortunate, but a local glass installer will get a little extra income.’
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
Sharia chic has come to London. During London Fashion Week last week. Fashion East designer Louise Goldin sent a model down the catwalk wearing an outfit that obscured the model’s entire face, all except her eyes, and covered her head entirely. This was not the only such outfit Goldin featured during London Fashion Week. The outfits were clearly modeled after Islamic dress, particularly the niqab, the full-face veil.
London is not the only place Sharia chic has appeared. In December, Marie Claire magazine ran a photo shoot featuring three glamorous women, all wearing hijabs and black dresses down to their shoetops-and sporting ipods, designer handbags and other evidence of their modernity and sophistication.Meanwhile, Urban Outfitters is selling the Palestinian kufiya. worn by murderous jihad terrorists for decades, as a “Skull Desert Scarf.”
Obviously, there is no reason for the fashion world to be immune to the fashionable contempt for Western culture and values that pervades most creative fields these days, but it is one thing to hold that contempt and quite another to proffer it to the musses as the vanguard of contemporary culture.
Contrast the Urhan Outfitters item with the fact that in the 1930s, the British considered banning the kufiya, as it had become a symbol of Arab nationalist resistance to their rule. In the 1930s, the British were unafraid to do what they had to do to protect their own interests. In 2007, the U.S. pledged to give $86 million to the government of Mahmoud Abbas just as a former official of Abbas’ Fatah party appeared on Palestinian Authority television saying to aJ Qaeda: “Do to Bush whatever you want, and we wish you success. … We are fighting the Americans and hate the Americans more than you!” The official, Abu AIi Shahin, was of course wearing a kufiya.
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Likewise, was Louise Goldin or anyone else connected with the pseudo-niqab fashions displayed in London this week aware of the nature of the culture they were aping? Those who are likely to prefer that women never venture outside without covering everything except their eyes are also likely to believe that women are essentially the possessions of men. The Islamic holy book, the Koran, declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282). Likewise, this is also a culture that allows men to marry up to four wives and have sex with slave girls: “If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly [with them), then only one, or [a captive] that your right hands possess. .. ” (4:3).
The same book rules that a son’s inheritance should he twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah [thus] directs you as regards your children’s [inheritance]: to the male, a portion equal to that of two females” (4:11).
Worst of all, the Koran tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property [for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them” (4:34).
And it is the culture of those who revere the Koran as the supreme authority for human behavior that has produced the niqab. Is that the culture Louise Goldin wishes to bring to Britain? Or does she perhaps think its presence there is a fait accompli, since Muslims who clearly believe in Islamic supremacism have become such a prominent feature of the British landscape? Does she regard her fashion creations as a necessary attempl at inclusion and accommodation?
More accurately, they manifest the cultural weariness that has allowed those Islamic supremacists to become quite vocal in Britain, as the recent “Dispatches” documentary revealed. One may hope that the British will before too longer remember that they were once made of sterner stuff.
Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad (both from Regnery-a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
Be the belle of the beach this summer with fashionable and technical surf-and-turf wear in striking shapes and catchy colors. From a moisture-wicking tunic to colorful, comfortable flip flops or a sleek swimsuit, fill your beach bag with these sport-ready essentials.
1. Material’s polyester/Lycra “Beach” tunic ($100; material usa.com) is the perfect solution when it’s cool enough for an extra layer.
2. Girls4Sport’s low-rise polyester microfiber board shorts ($45; girls4sport.com) are perfect for any beach sport. The Velcro closure ensures a stay-put fit–and they are reversible, so you get two pairs in one.. Keep track of time with Swiss Army’s “Base Camp” watch ($150; swissarmy.com). It’s water-resistant and has a sweatproof rubber strap and precision Swiss analog quartz movement.
4. Sporty meets sexy with Billabong’s “Comp Series” nylon/spandex performance suit ($64; billabonggirls.com), featuring contrast piping, a flattering camisole-strap bra top and low-rider bottom.
5. Dry off fast with L.L.Bean’s oversize superabsorbent terry towel ($18; 800-809-7057).
6. Pack your personals into a shore-savvy bag like Kenneth Cole Reaction’s “Turn Pipe” large tote ($65; 877-REACTION). The nylon material is resistant to sand and water and it has an internal zip pocket.
7. Keep feet and Mother Nature happy with Earth’s lightweight “Miami” sandal ($39; earth.us), featuring ultracomfy Negative Heel technology and made from nonleather materials.
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8. Block out the sun’s strong summer rays with Kaenon Polarized “Variant V4″ sunglasses ($275; kaenon.com). These cool shades combine 100 percent UVA/UVB technology with high-fashion style and are available in seven lens colors.
9. Finish off any cute beach outfit with a stylish topper like Puma’s Candy Striper Bucket Hat ($24; 888-565-PUMA), with a contoured silhouette.
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
Not long ago in Shark Bay, off the coast of western Australia, a female bottlenose dolphin broke a chunk of sponge off the seafloor and wore it as a mask over her snout while she probed the sediment for fish. Today “sponging” is a foraging fad among dolphins in Shark Bay–but, with one exception, exclusively among females. Moreover, though the Shark Bay dolphins adopt a dozen foraging tactics, sponging is the only one that involves a tool.Biologists have resisted giving the label “culture” to the perpetuation of the practice of sponging. But Michael Krutzen, a molecular ecologist formerly at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues maintain that the term fits, and they’ve ruled out alternative explanations. Both spongers and nonspongers forage in deep water, so sponging is not a response to habitat. And samples of nuclear DNA from adult spongers rule out the possibility that a propensity for sponging is a genetic trait.
The only remaining explanation, Krutzen and his colleagues argue, is that sponging is socially learned–the first established example of the cultural transmission of tool use in marine mammals. But if it’s social learning, it remains (almost) all in the family: according to an analysis of the spongers’ mitochondrial DNA, all but one of them are descended from a single matriarch. Thus they most likely learned the practice from a female relative, probably Mom. The single sponging male examined by the investigators is kin, and would have spent the same amount of time with his mother as a daughter would have. So why don’t other males sponge? That’s still a puzzle. (PNAS 102: 8939-43, 2005)
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