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Thursday, January 17, 2008

NFL to return Britain for game in 2008


League to return to Britain for game in 2008
The National Football League announced on Thursday it would stage another regular season game in Britain this year following the success of last October's inaugural game in London.

More than 81,000 fans saw the New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins 13-10 at Wembley Stadium in the first ever regular season game played outside North America.

The NFL received requests for more than half a million tickets within 72 hours of announcing the event.

"The game in London was undoubtedly one of the highlights of the entire 2007 season," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement on Thursday.

"The fan interest was tremendous. The passion they demonstrated for our sport that day continued throughout the season, as television viewership in the UK has grown by 40 percent since the game.

"We had an overwhelmingly positive response to the event from all involved -- the teams, our sponsors and business partners and of course the fans themselves. We look forward to another spectacular event in 2008."

The only drawback to the day was the weather as it rained heavily.

The Wembley pitch had not fully recovered by the time England played their final Euro 2008 qualifying match against Croatia three weeks later.

Details about this year's game, including the venue and the competing teams, are expected to be announced before Super Bowl XLII in Phoenix, Arizona on Feb 3.
The NFL's UK Managing Director Alistair Kirkwood added: "In the build-up to the Wembley game last October I said that it was an audition for future games.

"Clearly, the fans, with their passion and enthusiasm, have convinced the NFL that the UK should be rewarded with another game in 2008."

Putting a Guy in His Place



AMONG the many practical elements missing from Miuccia Prada’s latest collection of men’s wear for winter 2008 were coats, scarves, hats or much of anything else to keep out the cold. This was not the only thing to suggest Ms. Prada has some complex sexual issues to work through.

Speaking after Sunday’s show to Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic for The International Herald Tribune, Ms. Prada quipped that the collection was revenge on men for the social and sartorial contortions they impose on women. She laughed when she said it, but she clearly wasn’t kidding around.

It is no stretch to suggest that the Prada collection read like the manifesto of a gender revanchist. The man in Ms. Prada’s current vision was domesticated and so passive as to be a neuter. One notes this not merely because the models looked abnormally robotic and were given nothing to wear outside the house.

Like a flipped version of the Unwomen in Margaret Atwood’s feminist parable “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Prada Unman was gotten up in humiliating tutu belts, severe high-collar shirts that buttoned up the back and odd cummerbunds that disappeared in a chevron down the front of trousers conspicuously lacking a fly.

As usual with this designer, there were things to admire: a lean clerical silhouette, the severity of a nearly monochrome palette, the way color and its absence were used to mark out the torso in floating zones. But when designers stop conceding to biological function, they move away from the realm of fashion and into that of social engineering. It is one thing to nudge men toward exploring their girly sides and quite another to suggest they sit to urinate.

Still, points to the woman who is without question the most intellectually alert designer to show here for exploiting an idea while most of the competition is content to rummage through a grab bag of shopworn cultural references, slack attitudes and clichés.

There are, in other words, days in the life of a fashion observer when having a nail driven into one’s skull seems preferable to sitting through another evocation of the so-called rock ’n’ roll style. True, there was a time when rock stars dressed with offhand brio and loony extravagance and actually wore leather pants. But Jim Morrison, for the record, died in 1971. Except for style hounds like Rufus Wainwright and Amy Winehouse, most musicians these days dress for the stage in more or less the same crumpled Levi’s corduroy jeans they wear to compose their songs, sitting in a bedroom at a computer screen.

So it seems willfully dated when designers like Frida Giannini at Gucci haul out the paisley scarves, the velvets, the eyeliner, the grommet boots and wraparound Gypsy belts. Her collection was informed by a narrative she titled “Russian Rock.” It was styled after a singer from the group Gogol Bordello named Eugene Hutz.

If you happen to have visited Moscow lately, you are aware that Russian rockers are no more likely to dress this way than are their Western counterparts, at least not without a self-conscious wink. Subdued chic is Russia’s new order of the day, and this extends even to musicians. The coolest, and in some sense the most fashionable, person I saw on a recent visit was a musician walking in Red Square with his head shaved except for a cascade of dreadlocks and with a wide belt cinching blue workman coveralls.

A look like that might be pushing things at Gucci, a multinational whose challenge is to “model” markets — that is, standardize taste and expectation among luxury goods consumers in markets both established and new.

Yet it would be a lot more credible and refreshing than a Gucci collection that seemed like a momentary pause on a style loop that included, as it often does, other rock-inspired designers like Ennio Capasa at Costume National (Pete Doherty still holds sway at this label), or Roberto Cavalli, whose surprisingly subdued show of suits with peaked shoulders, nipped waists and wide-leg trousers also included his more signature ostentations, like outerwear made of snakeskin or patterned to look like leopard or giraffe or even (this closed the show) a PETA-defiant coat that resembled the pelt of King Kong.

“Designing a collection is like producing a record,” the rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z said at a private dinner Donatella Versace gave after her show. Wearing a Versace suit, with a tie held in place by an emerald Cartier tie bar (a gift from his girlfriend, Beyoncé Knowles), he scooped a bite of creamy lemon mousse from a tuile.

“It’s about telling your story, telling your truth,” said the musician who remains one of the most novelistic artists hip-hop has produced.

He was correct. Narrative drives fashion. Ms. Versace’s is a tale of survival, and in the years since she quit a formidable cocaine habit and dedicated herself to reviving the flagging label, she has moved the company’s story forward shrewdly and with intelligence. The hiring of Alexandre Plokhov, the award-winning designer of Cloak, to assist with Versace’s men’s wear business resulted in a collection that not only looked East for design cues but also seemed to take seriously the idea that the future may be chilling in all kinds of ways.

This was made clear not so much by the snug suits as by the somber long coats that looked suitable for a stroll through Gorky Park. Wearing one, a man might experience a feeling opposite that evoked by the Prada collection. He might feel empowered, as Ms. Versace claimed she is whenever she slips on a 31-carat diamond ring given to her by her late brother, Gianni. At any rate, he might feel fortified against the winds of winter and a rapidly cooling economy.

DESPITE an occasional obligatory reference to the failure of the subprime mortgage market, there was little about the shows here to suggest that anyone was suffering the financial jitters. Yet perhaps the sobriety of the Armani show, whose keyword was “regal,” was a cue.

Design surprises were few in an Armani collection built on caution and control. Those are values that made the designer one of Italy’s wealthiest citizens and his brand among the most recognizable in the world. Those are his creative defaults. Thus his show read as the sartorial equivalent of a stop-loss order. The message was risk-averse.

What every guy needs most in his wardrobe in economic times like these, Mr. Armani seemed to be saying, is a solid interview suit. The fellow wearing the clothes Raf Simons presented at Jil Sander, by contrast, had better have a private income, since it is far from likely that anyone wearing one of Mr. Simons’s ingenious suits or coats, needle-punched and printed in a marble pattern with inkjet technology, will ever find a job.

In general, it is considered unchic to bring up gainful employment when the subject is fashion; real-world concerns are not supposed to penetrate this sphere. And while it is exciting to track designers with the kind of scope Mr. Simons has shown in reinventing the Jil Sander brand, sometimes all that ingenuity becomes an end in itself, and the vision goes flat.

And sometimes it seems finely resolved, as in Tomas Maier’s show for Bottega Veneta, perhaps the week’s most satisfying, in which he recast ordinary work gear for the label’s clientele of putative gazillionaires. It is never clear to this observer who the client is for Mr. Maier’s phenomenally costly clothing, but he certainly makes one wish one could afford to join their ranks.

“We were looking at functionality,” the designer explained, as well as the connection between what a man does and what he wears. From the boxy trousers, the taut jackets, the heavy denims and the so-called chore coats, one deduces that Mr. Maier is dressing garage mechanics, albeit those who have hit it big in the lottery.

Mr. Maier’s was a beautiful show and as direct as Alexander McQueen’s was vagrant, and also lyrical. Inspired by a pilgrimage to India, Mr. McQueen said the show was originally intended to have an Argentine pampas theme. Then he decided to embark on a monthlong journey through Kerala and Rajasthan and the remote and lawless state of Bihar — where Mr. McQueen, a Buddhist, visited the place in which Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment — ending up in the isolated mountain kingdom of Bhutan.

The enormous last-minute changes resulted in a collection that wed masterful tailoring to subtle effects created with safety pins and wirework embroidery and that also featured a coat that looked like yeti fur and another that was Mr. McQueen’s rendition of the Bhutanese national costume, the go.

“The design assistants were not too thrilled, I can tell you,” the designer remarked backstage last Saturday evening.

The Grammy Awards on Feb. 10



Music World Braces for a Low-Wattage Grammy Night ..
The Grammy Awards on Feb. 10 were supposed to be a balm to the ailing music industry, a 50th-anniversary celebration of artistry and longevity at a time of mass layoffs and sharply declining sales. Instead the music world began bracing for the latest havoc from the continuing strike by Hollywood writers, as a stalemate with the Writers Guild of America threatened to force record labels and organizers of the Grammy Awards to proceed with a show with severely diminished star wattage.


As the Writers Guild maintained on Monday that it was unlikely to grant a request from Grammy producers for an interim agreement that would allow writers and other unionized Hollywood personnel to take part in the show, talent managers, label executives and even record shops worried over prospects of a gala drained of major stars, particularly musicians who are also members of the Screen Actors Guild, which has lined up with the writers.


Lackluster turnout by the stars, executives say, could embarrass the industry and waste a much-needed opportunity to publicize artists and gin up sales. (Even if there's an agreement, one much-nominated star, the British soul singer Amy Winehouse, might not appear because of visa troubles.)


Heading toward the planned Feb. 10 broadcast, industry executives say, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which organizes the Grammy telecast, has more at stake than the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which lost out on its annual moment in the spotlight last week when the strike effectively wrecked the Golden Globes gala, which was reduced to a news conference. For instance, the recording academy already has marketed a series of Grammy-branded CDs and had planned a particularly splashy show to honor the awards' 50th anniversary and build on last year's 18 percent rating jump. Grammy organizers said the show would proceed even if striking writers picket the ceremony, held at the Staples Center arena here. But that could mean a long list of no-shows, from sympathetic artists to marquee Grammy nominees who double as television or film actors, including Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé and Alicia Keys.


Ms. Keys performed at a rally for striking writers last November and is widely expected to perform on the academy's program. The Foo Fighters, who are involved with a Grammy contest in which fans audition to perform with the band at the ceremony, are still scheduled to appear, according to a spokesman for the band.


Though a relatively small number of musicians might come under pressure from the Screen Actors Guild to picket or avoid the ceremony, "you could have enough where you get a critical mass, and those who wouldn't really worry about it feel awkward" about attending, said a label executive with long involvement in planning Grammy performances, who requested anonymity for fear of affecting negotiations with the writers. "I would never rule out the artists' sensibilities toward these kinds of issues."


But the writers' stance could expose new fissures in the front presented by Hollywood's labor force in its continuing standoff with major movie and television companies. In a statement late Tuesday two other entertainment unions, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians, urged their members to participate in the Grammy program - potentially pitting them against the Writers Guild and sparking an intra-labor skirmish that might cost the writers leverage in their battle with Hollywood's movie studios.


For their part recording academy officials appeared to bristle at the intrusion of the Writers Guild into what they advertise as "music's biggest night," saying that the two music unions that support the Grammy program as planned "have long been the only ones with jurisdiction and representation of the musical talent on the show."


Fewer appearances by big artists would also lead to widespread disappointment for record-label accountants, given the typical jump in sales in the weeks after a performance on the show, which last year was watched by an estimated 20 million people. Such a moment is seen as all the more valuable in light of last year's 15 percent drop in album sales.


Last year's big winner, the Dixie Chicks, sold roughly 103,000 copies of the album "Taking the Long Way" in the first week after winning the trophy for album of the year, which represented a weekly increase of more than 700 percent, and the album rose from No. 72 to No. 8 on the Billboard chart. It was the biggest post-Grammy jump into the Top 10 in the history of the chart.


"While it's unfortunate that the record industry relies on bad TV to keep sales going, this happens to be a very important promotional event," said Jeff Rabhan, a talent manager for artists including Jermaine Dupri and Elliot Yamin. "To not be able to capitalize on that, due to events beyond the music industry's control, would be yet another blow to the already sinking balloon."


And a scaled-back Grammy show could also contribute to the troubles of record shops, which have long suffered eroding sales amid the industry's struggles with piracy and its attempted transition to digital sales.


"Not getting music on television or out in front of people is criminal," said Joe Nardone Jr., an owner of Gallery of Sound, an eight-store chain in Pennsylvania. " "It's going to be a problem. The writers' strike has already hurt a lot of artists who didn't get to be on the talk-show circuit during the holidays to talk about their records and promote themselves. Less exposure is not what we need right now."




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