shops, FNO, URBN and more

Philly is known for the same things it’s always been known for: cheesesteaks, Rocky, history, loud and proud sports fans – the list could continue. I’m sick of hearing these words. Unless I want to eat a cheesesteak or am about to or am currently eating a cheesesteak, I don’t want to say or hear the word “cheesesteak.” Call me a pessimist, but I’m just tired of hearing about them and how we have them. (I do love cheesesteaks, but I’ve never understood the people who’re crazed over them. While delicious, they’re not the only food in the world, or the city, that’s delicious.) Plus, Philly’s got more to offer. I want to talk about or hear about something new that we’re known for, I want to hear an updated version of what Philly’s got.

From my perspective, we have opportunity here. The cost of living is low, we have two major industries (medicine and education), plenty of high education establishments to attend, a kickin’ food and beer scene, an expanding mileage of running and biking trails and greenspace. There’s so much that’s booming or about to boom here, why not talk about it with people not from our city to give them a little taste of what Philly has up its sleeve?

Something I didn’t include in the list above is the growing retail and fashion scene here. Philly has been named the ugliest city multiple years in a row, but that doesn’t mean ugly people can’t dress themselves. Philadelphia’s main retail corridor has been Walnut and Chestnut streets west of Broad Street. Four-block stretches of both streets are getting makeovers, between renovating stores who have called Rittenhouse “home” for years, and bringing in big names like Michael Kors, Nordstrom (Rack) and the increasingly popular Japanese brand, Uniqlo.

What does this mean for Philly and its people? Money and growth – two things a place needs to thrive longer and harder than before. And maybe these ugly people can mask their faces with fashionable Phantom of the Opera-esque masks to make us look a little better.

Philly also has its own Fashion Week and Fashion’s Night Out, two staple events in the fashion capitals of the world. (Philly’s not one of them.) Philly Fashion Week happens in February, when all the other major weeks happen in New York City, London, Paris and Milan. Philly’s Fashion Week showcases small and large designers based here in traditional and non venues around town. Fashion’s Night Out started in 2009 and came to Philly in 2012. It’s an event celebrated around the city, not just in Rittenhouse Square at the stores on Walnut and Chestnut, but in other spots south, east and west of City Hall.

I think that having both of these events in Philly annually shows that Philly’s got style and people are starting to notice it. It’s also the home of URBN, the massive company that’s the parent to Urban Outfitters, Free People, Terrain, Anthropologie and its bridal brand BLDG.

Being home to URBN’s HQ brings people here to work and having this growing corridor and fashion scene brings others here to play.

anti-fur

I've always been a fan of fur. It's soft and luxurious looking, it's fun and cozy. But before recently, I never really gave thought of real vs. faux fur. I've watched movies and TV shows that have characters that are either are against it or wear it and don't talk about it or wear it and get shamed (an episode from Sex and the City where a PETA-like advocate throws either red paint or blood onto Samantha's real fur comes to mind). But not until around a year ago did I give this issue any thought.

Animals are living things. That's really what it comes down to, for me. Killing, skinning and wearing a beautiful living thing only for the purpose of aesthetic and style does not make sense. We aren't cavemen, we aren't living in a society that requires us to wear the skin of others for warmth and survival. So why wear fur? Why support it?

Some headline's on the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA's, website force me to look away.

little things: a blog is (re)born

My first post has been an embarrassment of rambles since I clicked “Publish.” I had no concrete idea of my blog’s focus or direction. Where did I want this thing to go? I find that it has changed with each post, although few. Talking about fashion was the game at first, but I found little momentum from myself, a college senior in her last semester, who can barely make it out of the house in anything but cropped yoga pants. I’m quite guilty of cropped yoga pants.

My first post was a pool of digressions, things that zip through my mind as I type. I thought that since this was my blog, why not just write and post them as they come? (Cue the next few posts.) Now is the time, as a graduating college student and as a girl with a blog, that I need to figure out my direction. Where should I go? For the the sake of my personal writing, where should my blog go? I need a purpose.

Away with longer pieces, here to stay are short “little things.” I’m finding it impossible to write anything but randomness. My days move too fast so I can’t catch enough of these little things to examine them. Alas, the varying subject matter remains.
 

Writing the posts previous to this one allowed me to learn things about topics and subjects that I was curious about, but never curious enough to do something about. This blog will be a compilation of “little things” that I want to know more about. It’ll be a daily (weekly, for now) destination for a little piece of something. Not the whole cake, but just a bite. Maybe I should practice this in my physical consumption of cake, too. Both I will work on.

grey vs gray

Mid-post of what was originally going to be my second official blog post, I came across the word gray. Then I thought, grey or gray? It’s something I’ve wondered most of my life, but never at a time that seemed convenient to look into it further. It’s my favorite color, all 50 shades and more of it. (That joke seems to pop up a lot when I say that grey/gray is my favorite color.)

So I thought that tonight would be a great opportunity to finally look into a question that has been burning my grey/gray-loving, “I’m a writer I should know this one” soul. How the hell is gray/grey spelt? To answer my question, I turned to the ever-available Google. “Grey vs gray” is typed into the search bar, and no I wasn’t Feeling Lucky, so my page reloads to show the first handful out of what Google said was around 112,000,000 results for my search.

My first choice is to visit greyorgray.com. It gets my inner struggle. Apparently, according to the site, the pair of fraternal word twins are interchangeable, however “gray” is more commonly used in America and “grey” in England. A noticeable difference the site points out is the actual hex codes for each color. Grey is a lighter shade, while gray is much darker. Cloford.com provides a long, long list of over 500 colors and includes a swatch of the color, its name and hex code. As you can see below, Cloford calls all but one of the hues gray. The one lonely grey is a much lighter shade.

It’s 100 percent cliche to reference Merriam-Webster when defining something in longer-form, whether it’s during a graduation speech or on a blog post like this one. But I also feel like it’s necessary. Sorry. MW defines gray as “of the color gray,” “tending toward gray [as in blue-gray eyes],” and “dull in color.” Okay, those make sense, seem reasonable. When MW defines grey, it references multiple names of people and that it’s a “variant of gray.” That, in a way, explains why Fifty Shades of Grey uses “Grey” and not “Gray.” I’m not sure why I’ve already referenced this book twice already...I’ve never even read it and I don’t plan to pay a $12 to see it in theaters. $12 is a lot these days, I could buy a whole pizza with that kind of money. I digress, for neither the first nor last time on this blog.

I’m confident in saying that after looking at these few sources, I can comfortably settle on using “gray” over “grey.” Unless I move to the UK, I’ll stick to this notion and not feel self conscious and unsure next time I have to write the name of the hue down on paper.

I’m thinking that this blog may become a compilation of posts like this one. Thinks that I wonder about in the everyday, but never think to spend time looking into it. I’m hoping this will make me generally more inquisitive. That wouldn’t be a bad thing.

the Super Bowl is BIG but i don't know why

I can’t stop thinking about life and its reason or purpose lately. This thought of mine stemmed from watching a football game a few months ago. I can’t remember what teams were playing or exactly when, but I was watching an NFL game on TV when this it popped on my radar. It suddenly seemed crazy to me that so many humans care to watch other humans play a game. How is this so important and how is this such a big business/market and how do these players make so much freaking money? No I don’t live under a rock, I can answer these questions literally. But when you really think about it, why does all of this matter? And the Super Bowl is the holy grail of football games, obviously. But why? How is a game such a big deal? This string of questions is the root of me questioning my existence. Thanks, football.

Let’s dig in a little bit. Tell me, Google, give me answers! (Search engines make my life too easy. I should pick up a physical book soon.)

The first pro-football game was in 1892, for which player William “Pudge” Heffelfinger received $500 for playing. Today, that amount would be around $13,000. That’s really nothing today, especially considering that some professional American football players earn more than $20 million a game. What?! But my boyfriend, who I consider a living sports encyclopedia, just told me that comparing these two figures is like “comparing apples to oranges [because] nowadays [players] would get paid more because of exposure. More people come to watch the games, people buy uniforms. Stuff like that never happened in 1896 so the players didn’t bring in as much money so they wouldn’t be paid as much.” Makes total sense and seems totally obvious now. Why didn’t I think of that this way?

His excited response to my comparison makes me ask why and how did all of this exposure come to be? Why do people care so much about football? Answering how the Super Bowl became as popular as it is today will hopefully fill in some blanks.

After reading one source that seemed promising, I found that the writer didn’t provide any concrete reason or evidence explaining how or why the game’s popularity is what it is today. He references the commercials and partying that take place and attract viewers and fans. But that’s not telling me how or why!

After further research, I found that I and the Times blogger weren’t the only ones who asked this question and found little concrete explanation. A big part of why the Super Bowl is as big as it is is because it’s just big and continues to get bigger. From the beginning, the Super Bowl advertised itself as big and important to watch, so people did. I did find, after asking Google in different ways, some tangible reasons for the game’s popularity.

NBCSports writer Joe Posnanski asked my same question and broke down five events that aided in making the Super Bowl larger than life, or as he put it, “crazy and over the top, and that’s the point.” Summaries of a couple of his reasons are below:

1. The third annual world championship game (not yet called the Super Bowl) was in 1969. Competition was high between the two leagues since the Green Bay Packers from the NFL won the first two championship games. New York Jets Quarterback Joe Nameth guaranteed the public that the AFL team would beat its opponent that year. After the AFL team won, people started paying more attention to football. Football couldn’t offer any history or tradition, unlike older American sports, so it made sure to give people something to talk about.

2. In 1978, Commissioner Pete Rozelle moved the game to 6pm Eastern Time. Previously, he moved the game to mid-afternoon so that East Coast reporters would have time to write about the game in the next day’s newspapers. To have the second half of the game in prime time television to get more viewers, but still give reporters time to talk about the game the next day, Rozelle changed the official kick off time to 6:17pm that year.

Posnanski’s 3, 4 and 5 are all events or commercials that happened during different Super Bowls and can be read about here.

Since its start, the Super Bowl has made noise, and I think the first two events above show that. The Super Bowl, I’ve now realized, is so big because it made sure it got that big. American football called itself king and everyone in America shook their heads, agreed and followed their ruler. That really, I’ve found, is the best way to explain it.

first post ... gulp

What is, who is, where is fashionable? Asking that question to myself is like asking an acquaintance how their day was; they're probably going to tell you it was "good." Someone could tell me their day was good when really they felt two handfuls of different emotions. There are so many answers to what makes something, someone or someplace fashionable. I’m still trying to figure out what my answer would be; I’ve changed my style, look, likes around five times since starting college three and a half years ago.

I go through such intense phases with things. Some last longer than others. In fifth grade it was wearing the jewelry from game Pretty Pretty Princess to school. My idea, it was. My friends, they did the same thing. I was a trendsetter back then. I’d like to think I still am, and I have solid evidence that I have continued to be since those middle school days. While we’re on the subject, I was the first person in high school (tenth grade) to wear gray UGG boots. Short classics in grey, size 8 for me. For Christmas that year, guess who got grey UGG boots? Fucking everyone. I thought I was the best person on the planet for having grey UGGs before the 1,000 other girls in my Pennsylvania public school. I guess I felt a sense of entitlement back then, but I think, hopefully, that I let my modesty hide that well enough. I sit in grey sweatpants two sizes too big and six year old L.L. Bean not-so-furry-anymore moccasins pretending to know what I’m talking about. Fashion is such an opinionated conversation that it’s hard to keep up with. You don’t want to say something other people think is wrong because you don’t want to be wrong about fashion. It is a place where it encourages people to take risks but is literally being judged by those judged to be important enough to do the judging. It’s scary because the conversation is always changing and everyone is following a new leader or a design is going in a new direction. I’m definitely fan-girling on fashion but I figure I better be shameless if I want to end up in New York City with my best friend and my boyfriend and work in fashion. It is so attractive and diverse and keeps everyone on their toes, and I want to be apart of it.

I have this blog because I keep too much in my head. I like talking about fashion with people who enjoy it as much as I do and with people who are intrigued by it. But I think I’m afraid that people look down on people who like fashion and follow fashion and are apart of the fashion world because people who like expensive clothes are materialistic and therefore stupid and mean. This is certainly true for many, many people, unfortunately. But I respect those who work in fashion and those who like fashion and follow fashion when they do so for the right reasons.

I have this blog because apparently I have all of these 200-miles-per-hour-fast thoughts going through my mind about one word: fashion. It’s something I want to immerse myself in to see if I can try to understand it better.

I have my own style, although it changes regularly. Right now it’s “comfort >>>>>>>>.” Literally “>>>>>>:” more important than anything else. I’m not even sure if that’s a style but either way I’m running out of the allotted time to be allowed to wear some type of comfortable pant that isn’t denim before it becomes questioned and frowned upon by those regularly around. A plus is that I’m killing the sneaker game since sneakers = comfort; Nikes and Vans fer days.

Warning: I ramble a fuck ton. And a I curse a lot. But I’m hoping to fill this space with not only words but photos and, if I find time, videos, or at least an Instagram widget that will update its feed every time I post to Instagram, which is usually every 3 weeks. I also practice bad habits. I forget easily, bite my nails, commit to too much and agree with too much. I hope that this blog breaks more than one of these habits. Hopefully I’ll remember to post regularly, stop biting my nails because I’m too busy typing, slow down during the busiest semester of my time as a student and voice my opinion in a way that’s fresh and relatable.

I think it’s more realistic to say that along the way I will gain cohesiveness in the content on my blog, but for now, I have no idea what direction I will take it in. Hopefully I will take it all the way to NYC, but for now I’ll take it back to my couch, in Philadelphia, where I sit with my two roommates, one of who’s brother’s dog we’ve been illegally babysitting for a week. His ear keeps twitching as I type this.

I’m a journalism student in Philadelphia. I’m the youngest of three girls. I love ice cream. I don’t smoke cigarettes and I recently switched from massive amounts of coffee to green tea, so I don’t even know if I'll be allowed to exist in fashion.