Hello, Open Thread. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Today is Black Friday, a date that was once the ready-steady-go for holiday shopping but has become more of an abstract idea than any sort of real starting pistol. Emails about Black Friday sales have been filling my inbox for more than a week now, and according to a report from Circana, a market research firm, half of the shoppers it surveyed planned to do their gift-buying before Thanksgiving. (In one particularly confusing email I received, a company announced that its Black Friday sale “ends tonight” — on the Tuesday before Black Friday.) The old days of stores opening early and offering crazy steep, one-day-only discounts ($10 TVs! They were a thing!) have disappeared as online shopping became the norm and Cyber Monday stole the spotlight. For many people, at this point, I bet Black Friday means pretty much nothing at all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, given that crazed FOMO-driven purchasing was part of what drove our current culture of disposability. But I do wonder if maybe it’s time to retire the term. What do you think? A new generation of luxury nepo babies has joined the fold. Forget Hollywood; fashion gives new meaning to “family business.” Consider, for example, the five Arnault heirs who now work at the luxury behemoth LVMH: Delphine, chief executive of Dior; Antoine, group head of communications and image; Alexandre, deputy C.E.O. of Moët Hennessy; Frédéric, C.E.O. of Loro Piana; and Jean, director of marketing for Louis Vuitton watches. Then there’s Lorenzo Bertelli, the second son of Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. Lorenzo is Prada’s chief marketing officer and is widely expected to take the reins one day. And now comes … the Zegna boys! This week, the brothers Edoardo and Angelo Zegna — the sons of Gildo Zegna, the Zegna Group’s chief executive (who is moving up to the group’s executive chairman) — were named co-C.E.O.s of Zegna, the brand. They will be the fourth generation of the Zegna family to run the men’s wear house. Finally, on the subject of female politicians discussing the role of image, a conversation started by Michelle Obama in her book “The Look,” I give you Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. She had a lot to say about her curly hair on the podcast “We Are Spiraling,” and it’s worth a listen. Before you roll your eyes, consider what Ms. Wasserman reveals. “When I first thought about running for the state House of Representatives, I was 25 years old,” she said, “and every older woman I met with for advice counseled me that I had to do something about my hair.” Indeed, she said, there was pressure on her throughout her career over her curly hair because it was seen as messy and unprofessional. Anyway, I would argue that it is our beauty standards, even more than fashion, that puts an unfair burden on women running for higher office. This interview is a case in point. Think about that. Then consider the recent advice coming — just in time for holiday travel! — on dressing for the plane from the transportation secretary, get a load of what my colleague Jacob Gallagher calls “the potato shoe”, and take a peek inside the closet of a famous French fashion muse. And have a good, safe weekend. Remember, next Tuesday is Giving Tuesday. That’s one day name I can get behind.
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Your Style Questions, AnsweredEvery week on Open Thread, Vanessa will answer a reader’s fashion-related question, which you can send to her anytime via email or X. Questions are edited and condensed.
Please clear something up for me: I keep reading about brands and stores that no longer use or sell fur, but they do use and sell shearling. Isn’t that the same thing? Is wearing shearling actually just a workaround? — Alexa, BostonDuring the Milan women’s wear shows earlier this year, I was struck by the amount of fur on the runway — hairy, shaggy, fluffy fur that, if I were guessing, I would have pegged as fox or mink. But when I went backstage and asked, almost every designer looked very smug and said: “Oh, it’s not fur. It’s shearling!" For example, Maximilian Davis of Ferragamo told me, “Fur is something that we can’t use today, and we shouldn’t use today.” But he was just fine using shearling. So are magazines like Vogue and Elle, which have committed to not photographing new fur, and stores like Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom and Saks, which do not sell new furs. Shearling has become, in other words, the non-fur fur of fashion, and it is now being made to look like fur, even as fur itself has fallen out of favor. Most people looking at someone wearing these shearlings would assume that person was wearing fur. Which, in fact, they are. Shearling is the skin, with wool attached, of a young sheep. (Sheepskin is the skin without the wool.) That sounds like fur to me. Though animal activists like PETA condemn the wearing of shearling, the reason it is widely considered acceptable is that, at least theoretically, it is a byproduct of another industry. Unlike fox or mink, sheep are not killed just for their skins. They are killed for food, and the skins are leftovers, which fashion is using rather than letting them go to waste. That’s a good thing. Ugg, which is known for its sheepskin boots and slippers, has an official “Ethical Sourcing and Animal Welfare Policy” (or its owner, Deckers, does) that states that it “does not accept hides from animals that have been slaughtered exclusively for their pelts or skinned alive” and uses only tanneries that it has vetted as compliant. That’s not a foolproof solution, as revealed by the various crises in fashion’s supply chain involving, for example, cotton and leather certifications, but it’s about as good as it gets now. Still, I wonder if the headlong rush to embrace shearling and make it look like old-timey fur is actually a sign that we are not nearly as fur-free as we may like to think. The net effect of shearling that resembles mink is to get the eye used to the idea that mink and similar pelts are desirable again. That’s especially so when twinned with the fact that vintage fur is coming back into fashion. (To be fair, it is more environmentally friendly to keep a garment in circulation, especially one made of natural materials that will ultimately biodegrade, than to resort to new synthetics — i.e., faux fur. So there is a valid argument for embracing your grandmother’s old raccoon coat.) Ultimately, the shearling situation is just another example of consumers wanting to have their cake (feel virtuous about not harming animals in the name of fashion) and wear it, too. That’s a very human situation, if not one that makes a lot of sense.
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