I’m happier about my friends than I am about my work. I still have a long way to go with work. My friends, that’s the one thing I’m sure about. | | | | Model wearing Bonnie Cashin. Vogue 1952.
(Henry Clarke/Condé Nast Collection/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I’m happier about my friends than I am about my work. I still have a long way to go with work. My friends, that’s the one thing I’m sure about.”
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| | rantnrave:// "Influence" was a pervasive term in 2017, often associated with social media and advertising. For this special edition, I've taken a different approach, picking stories that explore influence more broadly in terms of authenticity, labor, design, and style. The stories' subjects may not have social media or advertising reach, but they exert influence at pivotal places in the world: a university professor, a novel's translator, government workers who forge everyday policy in WASHINGTON, D.C., online communities of streetwear fans, a writer on his connection to style through G.I. JOE action figures, and a whole lot more. Below are 20 of my favorites. Have a safe and happy new year. Bonus reads: an influential patternmaker, a veteran runway pit photographer, GUY TREBAY on overalls, and the entire series, "A Decade in Digital" from the team at FASHIONISTA.
| | | - HK Mindy Meissen, curator |
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 | Racked |
| Our months-long accounting of free stuff. | | |
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 | ShortList |
| "Each doll had multiple dope mission-specific outfits and their uniforms and gear were like extensions of their personalities..." | | |
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 | GQ |
| What kind of difference can a great suit make? According to the folks at Career Gear, a nonprofit that helps men in need suit up for job interviews, a mighty big one. | | |
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 | Highsnobiety |
| Facebook is fostering some of the most close-knit communities in sneaker & streetwear culture today. We spoke with the admins behind the biggest groups. | | |
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 | The Paris Review |
| Though an inevitable gap exists between a novel in its original language and its translation, the texture of the culture, its cool, has to transcend this. | | |
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 | R / D |
| Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been returning to Detroit annually for 40 years. He documents the destruction and the ruins but he has also been recording the signs and murals of the city, the visual legacy of African American culture. Vergara proposes these images could be used to create an alternative to the luxury Shinola brand, a locally-produced range of goods inspired by Detroit's folk art. | | |
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 | The Washington Monthly |
| Forget the fancy suits. Washington, DC is run by an army of underpaid schlubs. | | |
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 | The Chronicle of Higher Education |
| In higher ed, threadbare is the new black. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| Will you pay more for those shoes before 7 p.m.? Would the price tag be different if you lived in the suburbs? Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer. | | |
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 | The Business of Fashion |
| The technology soothsayer has released her annual report, with plenty of fashion industry implications embedded within. | | |
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 | Texte zur Kunst |
| New York/Berlin artist, brand-consultant, and cofounder of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE, Emily Segal gives her take on the new memoir by the ex-Condé Nast, ex-XoJane, New York beauty-blogger Cat Marnell, finding, in this TMI-account of post-millennial (post-digital, post-Gawker) media culture, a new proposition as to who and what we might take to be feminist now. | | |
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| Racked |
| Long absent from discussions about employment, workers from Walmart to Bloomingdale’s are taking matters into their own hands. | | |
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 | Vestoj |
| "Fashion weeks are peculiar rituals stretched over ever expanding slices of the annual calendar in which fashion professionals prove their worth. They are like the Olympic Games of glamour: designers show off their ability to catch and direct the Zeitgeist, stylists their editing skills, writers and critics their wit in making all this colourful blurb comprehensible for the general public, even when the actual message is little less than the emperor’s new clothes." | | |
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 | The New York Review of Books |
| What kind of artist is Rei Kawakubo? Let's call her a combinatory formalist. She is unusually adept at combining the many disparate influences that course through her designs into unlikely, arresting, contrapuntal compositions. | | |
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| R / D |
| "The concept of ‘the model’ differs between fine art, design, architecture, fashion, photography and new media, and offers an intriguing mix of things: it can be a rudimentary sketch, an ideal, a miniature, a set of instructions, a maquette or a prototype... But only in fashion is the model a living, breathing human being; and only in fashion does this creature have an inert counterpart, in the form of the dress she wears, also known as the model." | | |
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 | T Magazine |
| For all of the designer’s enigmatic influence over fashion, one person was by his side the entire time. This is Jenny Meirens’s story. | | |
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 | SSENSE |
| Exploring the influence of streetwear and logo-flipping on the British Election and politics in general. | | |
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 | Vocativ |
| It's not just about bringing fashion to Iraq. For these Kurdish peacocks it's also about promoting a positive image of their homeland to the world. | | |
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| Racked |
| The faces on your TV may have been surgically altered for a distraction-free experience. | | |
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 | Collectors Weekly |
| Today, a man's pride in his Scottish heritage is often asserted by wearing a kilt made of his clan tartan-a fabric woven with the specific plaid pattern... | | |
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 | YouTube |
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