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D) The New York Times/The Ethicist: ON HOLIDAY

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2) Yahoo UK: Cartoon fans start Spongebob church [Les amateurs de Bob l'Eponge ont créé une nouvelle religion en son honneur.]
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040718/344/ey8wv.html

Cartoon fans start Spongebob church

Fans of the hit nautical cartoon Spongebob Squarepants have set up their own church. The cartoon features a kitchen sponge who lives with his friends in a place called Bikini Bottom in the Pacific Ocean. The cartoon is designed for children under four but has already won star fans like Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Kelly Osbourne and Mike Myers.

Now it has its own officially registered church, in the US, which teaches its own spiritual way of life. Members of the Church of Spongebob meet up for services everywhere from New York and California to Texas. The 700-strong membership have taken an official conversion sacrament to pledge their loyalty to the church.

There is also an intense study course for the church based on the Spongebob scriptures. The church's manifesto says it promotes "simple things like having fun and using your imagination".

Recently 5000 people applied to watch the cartoon, which is broadcast on Nickelodeon and being turned into a movie, to work out why it is so funny. Nickelodeon spokesperson Reeta Bhatiani said: "Spongebob's appeal is extraordinary."

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Fashion: Street scene
Mar 4th 2004

A catwalk wherever you look

FASHION people of every sort and all ages spend a lot of their time clubbing and partying. When Bloomingdale's Kal Ruttenstein is in Paris, he goes to the Marais, a district famous for its artists, exotic boutiques and its hundreds of trendy, often gay, bars. When Karl Lagerfeld was in New York in January, he made a point of checking out what diners were wearing at Schiller's, a new restaurant opened by the restaurateur of the moment, Keith McNally. The purpose is not entirely frivolous: Messrs Ruttenstein and Lagerfeld, neither of whom is in the first flush of youth, are keeping in touch with “the street”, that informal nexus of music, art, culture and fashion where wealth and social background are irrelevant. They know that what happens in the bars, clubs and restaurants of the Marais or New York's Lower East Side will serve as a better guide than any number of focus groups.

Not that it will have an immediate commercial application. “Street fashion” is usually too extreme for a mass retailer such as the Gap, and perhaps too cheap-looking to be copied as it stands by the high-fashion labels. Yet its influence will prove irresistible. How else did disco-flared suits and camouflage pants become the rage? The length of a skirt, the width of a tie, the cut of a jacket will all take their cue from what young people in Europe's and America's big cities choose to buy from a myriad of tiny cheap clothes shops that will never be advertised in Vogue.

There was a time when “street fashion” hardly existed: only the well-to-do could afford tailors and dressmakers, or shop in posh department stores. The working class was condemned to drab uniformity. But the political and economic upheavals of the 20th century led to huge social changes that, among other things, affected music, sexual mores and fashion. In the 1950s, rock and roll came to America, with Elvis Presley jiggling his pelvis in drainpipe trousers and James Dean looking moody in blue jeans. In the 1960s the interest switched to Britain: there were Teddy boys with velvet-collared long jackets and crepe-soled shoes; Mods in immaculate blazers and fur-trimmed parkas; and Rockers in motorbike leathers. Above all, there were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a whole new energy to popular music.

London was ready to become the fount of innovative fashion. There were bell-bottom trousers, Afghan jackets, psychedelic dresses, Mary Quant and the miniskirt, Barbara Hulanicki's Biba boutique and designers such as Zandra Rhodes. As François Baudot, one of France's most acute observers of fashion, writes: “In the mid-sixties, because of the strength of the English music scene, a trip to London became the more or less obligatory rite of passage for the young foreigner.”

Fast-forward to the 1970s, and it was the turn of Vivienne Westwood and her lover of the time, Malcolm McLaren, the manager of a band called the Sex Pistols. They introduced punk fashion, sold from a shop in Chelsea variously called Let it Rock; Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; Sex; and finally, by the end of the 70s, Seditionaries. It was Vivienne Westwood who introduced external seams, sado-masochistic chains, graffiti and pornographic imagery on clothes. Ironically, Miss Westwood is now part of the fashion establishment, honoured by the queen and designing exquisite formal dresses.

By the 1990s, the street fashion that counted was American “grunge”, a rumpled, deliberately ugly look to match the music of Seattle bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam. André Leon Talley, Vogue's editor-at-large, predicted that grunge would mean the end of fashion. He was, of course, wrong. Just like every other wave of street fashion, grunge flowed into the mainstream, with designers such as Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld offering their very un-grungy customers dresses that pretended to be ill-kempt and dishevelled. Grunge was, mercifully, a short-lived fad, but the message is clear: music, youth and fashion are intimately connected.

All of which helps to explain the arrival on the fashion scene of Sean Combs, better known as either Puff Daddy or P. Diddy or, to some of his friends, “Puffy”, a nickname from his high-school football days when he would puff out his chest to look bigger than he was. Mr Combs has the kind of “street cred” that cannot be bought: he is black, grew up in Harlem and was arrested after an incident at a Manhattan night-club in 1999 in which three people were shot (he was later acquitted of wrongdoing). He has his own music company, Bad Boy Records; he has a string of hit rap songs to his name; he produces hit records; and he was once engaged to Jennifer Lopez.

No doubt his background is part of the reason why his Sean John fashion line is a huge success. Almost any celebrity can turn fame into a stake in the market for fashion and luxury goods. Jennifer Lopez has a fashion line, her own perfume and a contract with Bernard Arnault to advertise Louis Vuitton handbags. Beyoncé Knowles is yet another popular singer who intends to lend her name to a line of garments.

But by all accounts Puffy is not just trading on his name. Kal Ruttenstein, who says that at many Bloomingdale's stores Sean John comes second in sales only to Ralph Lauren, declares himself a fan: “Puffy has great taste and is a great marketer. I only wear Sean John pants. They're very comfortable, and I wear them with an Armani jacket.” Puffy has clearly made the transition to fashion insider: he is seated centre-row at the Versace collections, is on first-name terms with Anna Wintour, and gets invited to Karl Lagerfeld's Paris home.

Yet Sean John is not in Barneys or Bergdorf Goodman. Nor is Phat Farm, the fashion line founded by another hip-hop impresario, Russell Simmons, who in January sold Phat Farm to Kellwood, a giant clothing company, for $140m. Nor, for that matter, are Fubu (“For Us, By Us”), Rocawear (founded by rappers Jay-Z and Damon Dash) and Wu Wear (founded by the Wu Tang Clan rappers). In fact no upmarket store, either in America or in Europe, sells any label that originates in rap music and hip-hop.

Undesirable friends

The reason is never stated, nor does it need to be: it does not make commercial sense for top stores, with their rich, overwhelmingly white clientele, to be linked even indirectly with America's black ghettos, and especially not with rap artists who, both in music and in real life, are associated with drugs and murder.

So pity Tommy Hilfiger, an American designer who has always wanted to be bracketed with Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. He is not in the very best stores either, almost certainly because in the 1990s his boldly coloured, logo-heavy menswear was enthusiastically snapped up by young African-Americans. That diminished the appeal of both his men's and his women's lines to white Americans who dress in Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein.

In an attempt to broaden his customer base, Mr Hilfiger, who is white, has shrunk his distinctive logo and introduced a more expensive “H” label. He has also turned away from the hip-hop world by sponsoring mainstream white artistes such as Britney Spears and the Rolling Stones. So far, the strategy has failed to work: four years ago the company was forced to close its flagship stores in Beverly Hills and London, and last year it plunged into a loss of $514m, after a profit of $135m in 2002. Mr Hilfiger has fallen between two stools: having had to deny baseless rumours of racism, he is in danger of losing black customers without getting white ones.

But put Mr Hilfiger's problems to one side. The fact is that hip-hop, like every street fashion before it, has fed into the mainstream. That is why you can now buy Dior sports shoes (a kind of sneaker that is fortunately much more elegant than the over-large confections of the hip-hop world) and baggy Versace jeans. But hip-hop, like grunge, disco and psychedelic before it, is sure to fade, to make room for the next street fashion.

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MAGAZINE advertising is in its worst slump for decades. Ad pages are down, rate cards are under pressure and editorial content is being trimmed. So why does the September issue of American Vogue run to a staggering 750 pages and weigh over 1.6 kilos? Pick up four such brick-heavy titles to while away a plane journey and you could exceed your hand-baggage allowance with magazines alone.

Vogue is not the only doorstopper among the women's glossies this autumn, but it is the most arm-aching. Such is the inch-thick wedge of advertising pages inside this Condé Nast fashion bible that the first article does not appear until page 206. Its handbag-sized sister title, Glamour, runs to 326 pages in October, up by 17% from last year. The boom is not limited to America. The number of advertising pages in the October issue of Glamour's British version is up by 77% from the same month last year. British Marie Claire, from the AOL Time Warner stable, crows on its October cover that this is its biggest issue ever. Its November issue will be 7% longer again.

Contrast this with the once-fat news and business magazines, including (to a degree) The Economist, but above all the technology titles. In the first eight months of 2002, the number of ad pages fell by 72% compared with the same period of 2001 at Red Herring, and by 46% at Wired.

What is going on? Part of the boom is seasonal. September and October, along with March and April, are always the fattest issues for the fashion magazines. They coincide with the autumn and spring catwalk shows, when the big fashion houses get the chance to display their wares not only through paid advertising but in gushing editorial copy. The New York shows began on September 18th, as soon as London's fashion week ended. A September issue, says Peter Kreisky, a media consultant, serves as a “directory of the fashion industry: nobody wants to be left out.”

Some advertisers may be switching from business and news titles to the women's magazines out of fear that their products will be contaminated by association with bad news, which those publications now have in abundance. “I've got a number of advertisers who have told me: don't put me next to negative coverage of the economy,” says Jeff Piper, who places ads in the American press for Carat, a media-buying agency. Plainly, not all products transfer neatly from business to fashion titles. But certain items, such as luxury watches, cars or mobile telephones, seem to be as content nestling next to articles entitled “I'm a monster in bed” or “The truth behind the Britney backlash” as they once were amid stories on corporate strategy.

Perhaps the most important reason, however, is the robustness of retail spending amid the general economic downturn. In particular, women seem to be spending as never before—even the circulation figures at Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Glamour and their sisters are racing ahead. Flick through the glossies and it is not just the luxury-goods houses—which have traditionally supplied the fashion magazines' aspirational allure—that are splashing out. GAP, for instance, a middle-market retailer, occupies 15 full advertising pages in the September issue of American Vogue.

For now, the retail-led boom shows no signs of abating. “There are so many huge new temples to fashion being opened, and they need to be promoted,” comments Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast UK. Earlier this year, Prada, an Italian fashion house, opened swish new stores in London and New York. Giorgio Armani plans to open 18 new stores this autumn. Until the retail bubble bursts, the more new stores that open, the longer the magazines that flatter them will stay fat. The only trouble for fashionistas will be finding the muscle to carry both the bulging shopping bags and the bulky magazines that inspire their contents.

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