Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

“The sophisticated consumer became a bit disappointed in luxury as it strove for ubiquity,”

“You can’t keep opening stores,” Mr. Hutchings said, “so you have to think about exactly how you are engaging with the consumer.” He added: “The new model is representing something a whole lot deeper and more meaningful to consumers.”

As a result, a new front has opened in the luxury wars, with the names stitched inside handbags now also chiseled on cultural institutions. In Italy alone, Tod’s, the Italian luxury group, is underwriting the restoration of the Colosseum for 25 million euros, or $31.7 million; LVMH’s Fendi is spending €2 million for restoration of the Trevi Fountain; Versace is helping to restore Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II; and Salvatore Ferragamo pitched in at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

“Consumers buy luxury goods products as a way to ennoble themselves; luxury goods companies and brands can earn more ‘nobility’ by associating their names to art and masterpieces,”

All of this halo-associating behavior is occurring as luxury has become more enticing as a sector. In the depths of the recession, the luxury market grew by 5 percent worldwide

Mr. Arnault sees his role as ensuring the future of brands, but not necessarily the designers behind them — a crucial distinction. As a result, whenever he makes a controversial play for a company, the predator image becomes part of the fight.

the question for a business being courted by several buyers is not so much “Can you afford us?” as “Who do we like best?” In that context, “linking to culture is a very powerful tool,” said Ms. D’Arpizio at Bain. “You are dealing largely with entrepreneurs who want their brand to survive them and last into the future, and culture is all about preserving that for the future.”

“Steve Jobs once asked me for some advice about retail, but I said, ‘I am not sure at all we are in the same business.’ I don’t know if we will still use Apple products in 25 years, but I am sure we will still be drinking Dom Pérignon.”Technology is predicated on change; luxury, however, is predicated on heritage and connection to tradition.

“France has a complicated relationship to success,” said Mr. Burke, who has worked with Mr. Arnault since that time. “Just think about the fact the expression ‘to make money’ does not exist in France. You ‘gagner l’argent’; you win money — the implication being either you are taking it away from someone by beating them, or you didn’t deserve it. And in France, Bernard Arnault epitomizes making money.”

Today, the company vies for brands and creative talent not just with peers like Kering and Richemont, but also with private equity firms like Yucaipa (which has stakes in Barneys and Zac Posen) and players from the Middle East and Asia. The Qatar Investment Authority owns Harrods as well as minority stakes in Tiffany and Porsche. And the Hong Kong-based Fung Group, through its private equity vehicle First Heritage Brands, owns Sonia Rykiel, Robert Clergerie and Delvaux.

The increased prominence of Antoine and Delphine Arnault has also helped promote an image of LVMH — despite being a huge public company with €29.1 billion in revenue — as a family affair.

“It will show everyone who he really is,” Mr. Claverie said, suggesting that the FLV would reveal Mr. Arnault as someone who makes creativity happen, as opposed to a man who merely exploits and commoditizes it.

“I told Mr. Arnault to be prepared for the fact that the French reaction, at least, will not be all positive,” Mr. Burke of Vuitton said. “I think we may get something along the lines of, ‘Who does he think he is to do this? It is not for business people to make these kinds of cultural statements!’ and so on.”

“At some point, though, France will adapt to it,” he continued. “Then they will accept it. And then they will love it.”

“It was frightening. I’d surrendered myself to these guerillas, men the Americans were hunting and I had found, not knowing if they were friends or if they were going to kill me. I guess I knew it was insane, but I couldn’t help myself,”

They also began filming beheadings on camera, a tactic that has become one of the signatures of Islamic State.

When al-Zarqawi wanted to declare his arrival on the global stage he released a video through Ware. Other insurgents also gave him videos filmed during their actions. This was before the rise of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

“But it was at this moment, where there’s two of them arguing about how to work my camera, that my insurgent escort finally piped up and stepped in and said that they could not kill me. He said that there will be a turf war between our two groups if you kill this man because he’s our guest, and it was only through gritted teeth that Zarqawi’s men literally pushed me back and I became the only Westerner who ever survives Zarqawi’s organisation.”

While the Iraqi Prime Minister has made comments this week that Islamic State did not start in Iraq, but in Syria, Ware said this was “absolutely wrong”.“We of the West removed the regime of Saddam Hussein, we presented a new platform for global jihad, right there in the Middle East. And the man who stepped into that breach was the founder of the Islamic State, a man called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”

He said that the only way to regain control of Ramadi was for the local population and the Sunni tribes to rise up again as they did in 2006 and 2007 but this was almost certainly not going to happen. “It’s not a battle that can be won,” he said.

“A soldier once wrote that there’s certain dark chambers of the heart that once opened can never be closed again. And when you’re living that human experience in war, which is stretched to its extreme, you start to find these places within your own self,” Ware told Lateline.

“In so many ways, the experience of going to war is humbling. It brings you a whole new perspective to life. I will never see the world the same way again, and in so many ways, that’s a privilege. That from now on, every day is a gift, for me and for so many of my friends. And I wouldn’t trade that. But it takes work to get there, as any soldier will tell you. Often, the homecoming is harder than the war itself.”

Daily Deals

In the wealthier districts across the state, the news is better: 72 percent of students in “low need” districts are graduating ready for college or careers. But even that is well under the 95 percent of students in those districts who are now graduating.

A common reaction, Dr. Tisch said, is shock and hesitancy. There are fears of plummeting real estate values, as well as disagreement, particularly in rural areas, with the idea that all students need to be prepared for college.

we have a rather extraordinary development. Even the attorney who famously said that it might be legal for the president to order an innocent child's testicles to be crushed thinks that some of what the CIA did was illegal. He's just a step away from acknowledging that the law compels a prosecution.

The shootings came amid heightened concern among Canadians about terrorist attacks

As the police locked down buildings in downtown Ottawa and asked stores to close, an eerie still, broken only by screaming emergency sirens, descended on the district.

The easy access to the grounds of Parliament Hill reflected the general Canadian view that an attack was unlikely. Mr. Harper and other members of his cabinet, however, have frequently warned that terrorist attacks might come to Canada.

“If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be

The prime minister favors a strong state role in the economy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Russia and is known for strong anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The party says NATO is a terrorist organization and keeps attacking the European Union and Europe's common currency, the euro, which Slovakia uses.

The ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party, Fico's potential partner, returned to Parliament after a four-year-absence with 8.6 percent while the traditional party in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of 5.4 million, the Christian Democrats, didn't get enough votes to be represented.

neo-Nazi People's Party — Our Slovakia — got 8 percent, or 14 seats.

The pro-business Freedom and Solidarity became the second strongest party with 12.1 percent, or 21 seats, ahead of another center-right party, the Ordinary People with 11.0 percent.

Fico said it is his duty as the winner to create a meaningful government. He said he will open a first round of informal consultations with other parties Sunday.

Mitt Romney jumps on #NeverTrump: Our view

Donald Trump's strong showing on Super Tuesday put prominent Republicans in a tight spot. They have three distinct choices: Jump on the Trump bandwagon. Stay silent, and try to save their own skins if they end up on the November ballot beneath Trump. Or denounce Trump as unfit for the GOP nomination or the presidency.

Only a few prominent Republicans have had the courage to take that third path, and on Thursday they were joined by Mitt Romney, the GOP's candidate in 2012

 Calling Trump "a phony" and "a fraud," Romney said the billionaire businessman is unsuited by temperament, character and judgment to occupy the Oval Office and represent America on the world stage.

Shortly before Romney spoke, dozens of Republican national security experts, including former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, added their voices to the emerging anti-Trump drive by the GOP establishmen

, bullying and bigotry is as familiar as it is appalling, and practically every day brings a new outrage. Early in the campaign, he denigrated Mexican immigrants and Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of the nation's iconic war heroes and the party's standard-bearer in 2008.

y, he talked about loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations, and on Sunday, two days before several primaries in the Deep South, he waffled over denouncing David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who had endorsed Trump.

Taking on a bully is much more unpleasant business, as Trump's rivals have discovered. After Romney's speech, Trump fired back with his usual fusillade of schoolyard insults, calling Romney a stiff, a choke artist, a lightweight, and a disaster as a candidate who ran a horrible campaign and begged for his endorsement in 2012.

But Americans can hope Romney's speech has the same effect as the confrontation that Army counsel Joseph Welch had in 1954 with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, another demagogue who took America down a dangerous and ugly road before a demand for decency stopped him.

it’s World War II, Vietnam, or Iraq that tend to be invoked more often—it remains a point of contention among academic

Six months after Wilson was reelected, he asked Congress to declare war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy.”

He Kept Us Out of War.” Two years after shooting began, the prevailing American sentiment was that the war was an uncivilized exercise conducted by savages

part of its mission was to stay free of such senseless carnage, which it did—until 1917.

American story of WWI may not always tell us much about the war itself, but offers an excellent window into the outlook of the nation at any given time.

The 1920s also saw the beginnings of a cultural revolution: flappers, bootleggers, and jazz. There was enough change at home

an emerging continental power with a new sense of its role in the world.

ith the aftermath of WWI would be an understatement. Immediately following the war, the Versailles Peace Treaty swiftly disintegrated

-turn, the idea behind it wasn’t. Europe was still barbaric—but instead of hiding from the old continent, America needed to redeem it

America returned to “normalcy,” a word Warren Harding coined in his successful presidential campaign.

From this, he drew many lessons, among them that simply showing up and winning isn’t enough:

He cultivated Republicans to ensure continued US engagement, acceded to the reality of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe

That’s what President Clinton meant when in 1995, making the case for intervening in the former Yugoslavia,

“The Guns of August.” A history of WWI’s origins, the book argued that none of the combatants wanted a war—

‘The Missiles of October,’” JFK told his brother.) Tuchman’s view would become the most popular one among an American public scarred by the futile-seeming war in Vietnam,

This wasn’t initially an American idea, however: It came from a 1961 book by the German historian Fritz Fischer, whose work blaming his own country rocked the nation.

Fischer’s argument found a sympathetic audience in America, reassuring doubters that US participation in the war, and its ultimate role in stopping Germany, hadn’t been futile after all.

In 2011 Sean McMeekin, an American historian who works at a Turkish university, released a book in which he pointed to a new culprit: Russia,

raming the war as an Eastern land grab that just happened to lead to the deaths of millions of Europeans might not ever become the standard narrative,

Democratic and Republican Parties looked a lot different in 1952, when the American National Election Studies—surveys of voters conducted before and after presidential elections—were in their infancy. The Republicans, to some extent, were still regarded as the party of Lincoln, even though they had shifted their focus to courting southern white voters, causing black people to leave the party. Meanwhile, the Democrats were the party of a coalition that pushed for social services—the party of the New Deal. There were far fewer college-educated Americans at the time, but the white Americans who did have degrees tended to vote Republican, and those who didn't sided with the Democrats by a significant margin.

“The shift in whites without a college degree away from the Democratic Party begins as the Democratic Party becomes identified as the party of civil rights,” starting in the 1960s, Robby P. Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. Disaffected white southern Democrats, in particular, fled in droves.

in 2008, the election of Barack Obama, a black man, signaled that the Democrats were becoming the party of progressive racial politics. “Obama’s presidency simplifies the politics of race,” Michael Tesler, an associate professor of political science at UC Irvine, says. “If you were a low-educated white, you were much more likely to know about the partisan differences on race [after Obama] than you were before.”

In the 2016 election, 48 percent of college-educated white voters voted for Trump, compared with 66 percent of non-college-educated white voters. A Marist poll in October of this year found that 55 percent of non-college-educated white voters approved of the job Trump was doing, compared with just 39 percent of college-educated white voters.

Every year, on its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks Americans whether they “think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?” Fifty percent of Americans say that it’s gotten better in this year’s poll, and 47 percent say that it has gotten worse.

for white voters, the answer to that question is split by education level. Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse

When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.

That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment

When researchers control for voter attitudes on race in addition to white voters’ education level, Tesler says, the diploma divide disappears. No other factor, he says, explains the education gap as well—not economic anxiety, ideology, income, or gender.

David N. Smith, a professor at the University of Kansas, came to a similar conclusion when he and Eric Hanley took a dive into the 2016 American National Election Survey. They found that demographic data such as education are important predictors of which party someone votes for. But “when you bring the attitudes variables into account as well, what emerges is that attitudes loom even larger than demographics,” he told me.

Here’s how he put it: If you look at white people who voted for Trump—both those with college degrees and those without—and identify everybody with a high level of resentment toward minorities, women, and Muslims, as well as those who want an arrogant, assertive leader, there’s almost no one left. The vast majority of Trump voters share those sentiments, the researchers found, regardless of education level

“Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party is complete, and the former ‘fringe’ has become so thoroughly intertwined with the ‘establishment’ that the two are virtually indistinguishable.”

The growing diploma divide is less a result of non-college-educated white voters becoming Republicans, and more of college-educated white voters finding that they can’t fully support the party anymore. “What's happened since 2016 is that the low-educated whites have kind of plateaued in their support for the Republicans,” Tesler says. “But you've seen this trend increase [of] high-educated whites [moving] towards the Democrats.”

Over time, those who supported Ted Cruz, who called Trump a “sniveling coward” during the campaign, and those who supported Marco Rubio, who called him a “con man,” tended to come around to Trump.

the voters that stand out, Smith said, are those who initially supported John Kasich. “They, in many instances, agree with Trump on policy issues, but the best data indicates that they are uncomfortable with him personally,” he said. “There are key aspects of his rhetorical style, of his governing style, that they don't like.”

Hidden in that gap is a threat to higher education itself. Last year, Pew issued a sobering survey. “Republicans have soured on higher education,” the survey declared, and it threw people into a frenzy.

Sixty-seven percent of Republicans, the survey found, had “some” to “little” confidence in colleges as institutions. A number of factors contribute to this distrust, the rising cost of tuition and the perception of a liberal bent at colleges among them. And if one major party believes that higher education is an engine of liberal indoctrination

Decades of funding cuts by state governments have already hit the institutions hard. And these cuts, in turn, have driven an increase in tuition costs and more animosity toward higher education. As Michael Grunwald recently wrote in Politico, “The next big Republican culture war will be a war on college.”

It took a series of developments to turn the public decisively against Nixon. It was the White House recordings that sealed the president’s fate — including the tape on which he said he could raise $1 million in hush money. It took the firing of the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox (whom Nixon later referred to as the “partisan viper we had planted in our bosom”). And the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew. And the allegations of tax evasion. And the missing 18½ minutes on the tapes. And “expletives deleted.” And “I am not a crook.” It was only in June 1974 that a majority of Americans thought Nixon should resign or be impeached.

Removing a president requires not a nasty legal storm, but a hurricane. And the president has a political base — fed on a Fox News diet — that may be impossible to uproot.

She does not trust those who’ve been around the president, calling them “liars, leakers and backstabbers.” I asked why he would have appointed bad men and women as aides. “He hired bad people in error,” she said. “They were bad actors, disloyal people. He was betrayed by them.”

She feels Mr. Trump has come through, from the courts to the economy. And when he got to Washington he didn’t go native—he still hates all the right people

he has also become protective of him. She sees him clobbered every day in every way throughout media. It has made him not only a sympathetic figure but an endearing one.

podcasts were new for him. He teamed up with his friends, the writer Malcolm Gladwell and former Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, whose fledgling podcast company is called Pushkin Industries.

When he was writing “The Big Short” (2010), Mr. Lewis says, he kept seeing failures of refereeing. “There was no referee at the interface between Wall Street and the consumers—consumer finance. I saw the birth of that, when Wall Street hit segments of society it had never touched, through subprime mortgages, for car loans, through asset-backed securities. There was no one saying, ‘That’s fair and that’s not.’”

Mr. Lewis also has harsh words for the ratings firms that endorsed shady securities—sold by the people who were paying them—before the big-bank meltdown. “I’d have thought for sure they’d reform it somehow, change the incentives. It’s so obvious, and [former Sen.] Al Franken tried, but all this Wall Street money flowed into the process to prevent him from doing that, and it drove him crazy.”

Mr. Lewis doesn’t blame Wall Street and deregulation for everything. He has also faulted home buyers for their role in the crash, for example. “To blame the people who lent the money for the real estate boom is like blaming the crack dealers for creating addicts,” he wrote in a 2008 article on the lure of home ownership.