 | | | | Did you know this week marks the start of New York Fashion Week? Probably not. NYFW's profile has receded in recent years. Designers have fled to other cities, or gone off-calendar, or decided not to have runway shows at all. The street style bubble has burst. Most importantly, fashion week just doesn't reflect how we buy clothes now. Rebecca Jennings explains this all in a great piece on NYFW's decline. Fashion week is something I've covered both as a writer and as an editor for my entire career. I should feel sad about its slow death, but honestly? I'm indifferent at best. A good fashion show, and the collection it contains, can be transcendent, moving, impossibly beautiful. But those kinds of shows are in the minority. So much of NYFW is noise — and expensive noise, at that. It's an event that no longer feels fun or fresh or, as Rebecca says, relevant. That's okay! Times change, and we shouldn't be afraid to do away with things that no longer work. I will miss the joy that now seems largely gone from NYFW — it used to be so joyful! — but I won't miss running around in the cold from show to show this week. I won't miss the peacocking editors and bloggers (though I guess they're all Instagrammers now?). I won't even miss the weird free food passed out at official NYFW venues. Probiotic yogurt was a true low point. —Julia Rubin, editor of The Goods | | | | | | | | | | | The decline of fashion week, explained | | | |  | | Bryan Bedder/Getty Images | | Fashion week is dead. Haven't you heard? It was dying, and then it was dying some more, and kept on dying, and now it's dead. Or is it? Perhaps fashion week is coming back from the dead, or maybe fashion week was never really dead at all. Despite the fact that fashion week still very much exists, people have been arguing about its death for years. The concept of fashion week — which, in the US, usually refers to the New York Fashion Week that takes place in February and again in September — is relatively simple: designers presenting collections for the following season to a room full of their peers in the fashion industry. Its genesis can be traced back more than 75 years, but over the past decade, NYFW has become something else. Depending on whom you ask, it's turned into a bloated and outdated trade show for an industry that has evolved beyond it, or a parade of influencer narcissism, or an overcommercialized slog where nobody has any original ideas anymore. It's possible it peaked in the late 1990s, after Sex and the City brought the glamour of New York fashion parties into living rooms countrywide, or maybe it was in the excesses of the mid-2000s, when fashion became an increasingly common business venture for celebrities, just before the recession devastated the economy. Still, each time fashion week rolls around now, the same debates have to be litigated: Should fashion week still exist? Who is it for? These questions aren't really about whether the parties are fun or the trends are cool. It's about whether the structure of fashion week is relevant to the way people buy clothes today. | | Read the rest of the story >> | | | | | | Websites need to be more accessible for disabled people | | | |  | | Getty Images/EyeEm | | Beyoncé got an unwelcome New Year's present in January: a lawsuit from a blind woman who says her website is inaccessible because it's presented as a "purely visual interface" that makes it impossible for blind and low-vision people to use. According to the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), these kinds of barriers to access are a violation of civil rights, limiting communication and participation in society. Instead of abating over time thanks to increased documentation on web accessibility and pressure from the disability community, this problem is only getting worse. The increasing domination of the digital space is also coming with heavier expectations around access and literacy; not being able to use the internet can be a barrier to finding, applying for, and retaining jobs, accessing government benefits, doing schoolwork, looking for love, and shopping for basic essentials. The ADA and the internet came of age in the 1990s, both with promises of an egalitarian future — open and free access for all. What went wrong? "The idea behind the ADA was full inclusion of disabled people in all aspects of public and private life," explains Lainey Feingold, a civil rights attorney with extensive experience in accessibility issues. Feingold advocates an approach called structured negotiation, which aims to keep people out of court with a collaborative process. But despite legal mandates, inclusion is not yet the reality for many disabled people. Disabled people are about half as likely to be online overall, are less likely to have high-speed internet, and are more likely to have only one device for accessing the internet. The disability digital divide is stark, and it's not surprising that in recent years, ADA lawsuits involving web access have been on the rise. Seyfarth Shaw, which tracks such suits, has seen an explosion since 2015 of lawsuits targeting web accessibility. Companies like Target, Toys R Us, Netflix, and TD Ameritrade have faced suits over inaccessibility, with the blind and deaf communities particularly active in this space, though web access can also be an issue for people with developmental, intellectual, and cognitive disabilities, among many others. Coverage of such suits often positions the plaintiffs as whiners looking for a payout, drawing on rhetoric about "drive-by lawsuits" that has been used to undermine litigation over physical accessibility. Disabled people are demonized in these conversations as monsters trying to hurt mom-and-pop businesses, or mocked for wanting equal access to the internet, despite the fact that the integral nature of the internet makes it increasingly critical to be able to get online. | | Read the rest of the story >> | | | | | | More good stuff to read today | | | | | | |
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