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📰 'QUEER FASHION' IN PARIS: FRENCH FASHION DESIGNERS BREAK WITH OLYMPIC TRADITION | KEY TAKEAWAYS 07.30.2024

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'QUEER FASHION' IN PARIS: FRENCH FASHION DESIGNERS BREAK WITH OLYMPIC TRADITION | [FASHION SYSTEM]

FashionUnited

👾 The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris demonstrated courage in terms of fashion. And it was not just designs from the houses of the luxury group and official Olympic partner LVMH were in the spotlight, but also young talents.

🏇 With the selection of costumes and designers, those responsible for artistic direction and costumes, Thomas Jolly and Daphné Bürki, made a statement. Thanks to their efforts, the unconventional designs of the French designers Jeanne Friot, Charles de Vilmorin, Kevin Germanier, Alphonse Maitrepierre, Weinsanto and Gilles Asquin were shown during the ceremony last Friday in the French capital. The enthusiasm for this queer event, which stood for values ​​such as inclusion, love and freedom, was felt both in the stands and in the bar Chez Mylène on the banks of the Seine at the Bastille, where a "Drag Race Party" is regularly held.

👘 Prominent names from the French fashion scene, but not necessarily known to a wider audience, took part in the fashion show: Designer Kevin Germanier is known for his penchant for drag queens. Parisian fashion designer Victor Weinsanto showed a pink Alsatian headdress made of printed organza, inspired by Kelsh fabrics - linen, cotton or mixed fabrics made in Alsace - and worn by model Ildjima aka Queen Toïdé. Other designers who presented their work included Alphonse Maitre Pierre and Gilles Asquin, who has designed numerous looks for the TV show "Drag Race France". The event was accompanied by music from DJ and LGBT icon Barbara Butch.

👑 The sequence with dancers on the Seine, sitting on stilts and appearing to float in the air, was created by French designer Charles de Vilmorin, known for his colorful prints.

WHY RETAILERS SHOULD STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE GEN-Z VERSUS MILLENNIAL DIVIDE | [FASHION SYSTEM]

The Business of Fashion

🦄 According to the memes, Millennials cannot resist stubbornly defending their no-show socks against an onslaught of mockery from Gen-Z, who prefer longer socks. But at the fashion-forward retailer, employees of both generations agreed that socks that hit the ankle or higher are indeed superior.

🕶 As Gen-Zers hit their mid-20s, the style gap between that generation and their slightly older peers is rapidly widening. The battle over skinny jeans — a Millennial mainstay — is largely over, with baggy fits now the norm. But fighting still rages over high-waisted bottoms versus low waist, a Y2K trend embraced mostly by those too young to have watched Paris Hilton on TV. Plenty of Millennials are still holding onto floral prints, ankle boots and contouring makeup, eliciting gentle ridicule from their younger siblings and colleagues.

📈 Given the undeniable spending prowess of Millennials today, Millennial preferences define the most popular styles on the market right now. But Gen-Z is well on its way to shaping the future. For instance, while Millennial-approved high-waist jeans continue to be the most popular rise among retailers, accounting for 29 percent of all styles, the selection of low-rise jeans is increasing 30 percent year-on-year while the number of new high-rise options hitting the market has actually dipped 1 percent in the same period, according to market analysis data from EDITED, a retail intelligence firm.

💥 The matter of age and correlating behaviour may be more relevant to how a consumer shops rather than what they buy. For instance, beauty brand Glossier found its first set of customers a decade ago in coming-of-age Millennials who embraced the direct-to-consumer model that was disrupting the retail landscape at that time. Today, its younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha shoppers are discovering the brand through TikTok and Sephora, which began stocking Glossier last year.

SILICON VALLEY’S TRILLION-DOLLAR LEAP OF FAITH | [SINGULARITY]

The Atlantic

🦄 Tech companies like to make two grand pronouncements about the future of artificial intelligence. First, the technology is going to usher in a revolution akin to the advent of fire, nuclear weapons, and the internet. And second, it is going to cost almost unfathomable sums of money.

💰 Silicon Valley has already triggered tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on AI, and companies only want to spend more. Their reasoning is straightforward: These companies have decided that the best way to make generative AI better is to build bigger AI models. And that is really, really expensive, requiring resources on the scale of moon missions and the interstate-highway system to fund the data centers and related infrastructure that generative AI depends on. For a product as important as fire, they say, any spending is worth it. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has described his firm as “the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history.” Dario Amodei the CEO of the rival start-up Anthropic, has predicted that a single AI model (such as, say, GPT-6) could cost $100 billion to train by 2027. The global data-center buildup over the next few years could require trillions of dollars from tech companies, utilities, and other industries, according to a July report from Moody’s Ratings.

📉 Now a number of voices in the finance world are beginning to ask whether all of this investment can pay off. OpenAI, for its part, may lose up to $5 billion this year, almost 10 times more than what the company lost in 2022, according to The Information. Over the past few weeks, analysts and investors at some of the world’s most influential financial institutions—including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, Moody’s, and Barclays—have issued reports that raise doubts about whether the enormous investments in generative AI will be profitable.

📢 Amid the hype, it’s important to remember that this future is not guaranteed. Many of the productivity gains expected from AI could be both greatly overestimated and very premature, Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, has found. AI products’ key flaws, such as a tendency to invent false information, could make them unusable, or deployable only under strict human oversight, in certain settings—courts, hospitals, government agencies, schools. A lot of human labor is manual, which software isn’t close to replacing. Whether scaling up AI models will continue to yield significantly better results is highly contested.

APPLE INTELLIGENCE AI FEATURES WILL WAIT FOR IOS 18.1 [SINGULARITY]

The Verge

⏱ Apple’s new AI features for the iPhone may not arrive with the initial rollout of iOS 18 and the expected launch of the iPhone 16 in September, according to a report from Bloomberg. Instead, the company reportedly plans on launching Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 in October as it works to get the rollout right.

🦄 Apple took the wraps off its first AI features during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, showing off a new and improved Siri, AI-powered image generation, and an integration with ChatGPT. These features may not be available with a new iPhone 16 purchased at launch, but Apple could roll out the update later to new devices in store with its in-the-box updating machine called Presto.

📱 While Apple doesn’t usually launch the betas for its follow-up software updates ahead of the public release of the initial version, Bloomberg reports that some of these AI features will still arrive with the launch of the iOS 18.1 and iPad 18.1 developer betas as soon as this week.

ℹ The early rollout could allow developers to test Apple’s AI features and spot bugs before they arrive for everyone and stretch across other platforms like the Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.However, not all of the AI features Apple previewed during WWDC will be available within 18.1. We may have to wait until the spring of 2025 to see a Siri that can perform actions within apps and gain onscreen awareness.

THE METAVERSE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR NEW OFFICE. YOU'RE STILL ON ZOOM | [METAPHYSICS]

Wired

🌍 When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, he estimated the metaverse could reach a billion people over a decade. Not long after, Bill Gates predicted that within two or three years “most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me—to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.”

🦄 In fall 2022, Microsoft announced a partnership with Meta that would bring Mesh, a platform for collaboration in mixed reality, and its set of Microsoft 365 applications to Meta’s Quest products. Meta has launched Horizon Workrooms for meeting purposes. IT company Accenture purchased 60,000 Oculus headsets to train new workers in October 2021 and built its own metaverse, called Nth floor, which included digital twins of some of its offices, complete with cafés and legless avatars.

🏢 Still, nearly three years later, the average office worker isn’t strapping a headset to their face to meet with their colleagues. While nine out of 10 companies can identify use cases for extended reality in their organization, only one in five have invested in the tech, according to research surveying 400 large companies across multiple industries published by Omdia in February.

👯 The metaverse must be built in a way that centers the needs of real people, says Anand van Zelderen, a researcher in organizational behavior and virtual reality at the University of Zurich. That means evaluating how workers feel in the metaverse and taking steps to combat loneliness that some experience as they enter virtual spaces that can’t match physical meetups. The current technology “takes people too much out of their reality, and people don’t want that for long periods of time,” van Zelderen says.

Daily news and stories covering everything from the Fashion System, Investment, and AI to WEB3 and Crypto that truly matter in Metaverse Fashion.