Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite

Bedbugs, shown here under a paint chip, leave dark excrement spots on linens.

We have to admit that after reading about the recent bedbug outbreak at New York City retailers Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch and hearing a few secondhand tales of infestations, we’ve been suspiciously eying every scrap of fabric that enters our home. The more we learn, the more we wish the blood-sucking creatures existed only in the nursery rhyme of yore.

In the interest of possibly sleeping tight once more, we spoke to bedbug expert Jeff White, research entomologist with Bed Bug Central for some tips about bedbug avoidance, detection and control.

“One of the biggest battles with bedbugs we face is the lack of public awareness,” White says. The first step is to understand the tiny, vampire-like creatures, who feed on the blood of sleeping hosts and seem hard to kill. While bedbugs are mobile and will travel up to hundreds of feet, they cannot hop or fly, says White. “In terms of getting around, they typically travel on people’s personal belongings or occasionally in the clothes themselves.” However, he adds, “They don’t live on you.” Reports of them in public spaces — such as movie theaters, office buildings and, of course, those aforementioned NYC retail establishments seem to be steadily increasing. But, White notes, beds are still the bugs’ preferred residence. The good news: Bedbugs don’t transmit disease.

During peak vacation season, when people often bring bedbugs home from traveling, it’s a good idea to inspect hotel beds along the visible edge of the mattresses and the bottom edge of the box springs. Also check the back of the headboard if possible, and look for obvious signs — the bugs themselves and their waste matter, which appears as little black spots.

To deter hitchhiking bedbugs, use luggage stands instead of placing suitcases on the floor or under a bed. A variety of anti-bug travel products are available as well — including suitcase encasements, luggage spray and a free downloadable travel guide. Remember, bedbugs don’t discriminate. “Anybody can stay in a five-star hotel tonight and pick up a bedbug infestation,” White says.

At home, periodic inspections could catch infestations fairly early; check out “How to Inspect a Bed for Bed Bugs” on Bed Bug TV for White’s tips on checking beds. Bites in rows or clusters on exposed body parts (arms, legs and face) in the morning are also a warning sign, though research has shown that not everyone reacts to the bites. Mattress and box spring encasements give bedbugs fewer places to hide, promoting earlier detection. However, White says that bedbugs can go months without feeding, so he recommends keeping the encasement closed for at least a year. Because bedbugs can fast for so long, immediately leaving upon the discovery or after the treatment is not always effective. “The bugs will just sit and wait, and when you return, they’ll just come back out to feed,” he says.

Bed Bug Central has a list of companies that take a proactive approach to bedbug treatment, which typically includes mattress encasements, climb-up devices (trays placed under the legs of beds and other upholstered items that trap bed bugs), steam treatment of infested areas and pesticide treatment. Cost varies by area; in New York City, for example, prices are about $800 to $1,200.

The cost to your mental well-being is another issue altogether; according to this New York Magazine article, the stigma forces embarrassed residents of NYC’s tony Upper East Side to hire bedbug companies for covert missions. In reality, “Bedbugs have nothing to do with sanitation,” White says. “I’ve been in ultra-clean apartments and completely filthy apartments, and they can all have bedbugs.”

Now that we have our facts straight thanks to Bed Bug Central, we think we can quite literally rest easier. What are your thoughts on the growing bedbug epidemic?

Photo credit: Courtesy BedBugCentral.com

Pringle set for success, Aurora returns to profit, Digital control, Valentino wins case, Hat fit for a Queen

Tilda Swinton for Pringle | Source: Pringle

Pringle boss reveals blueprint (Daily Record)

“Pringle boss Mary-Adair Macaire has revealed her plans to turn the knitwear brand into Scotland’s answer to Chanel… she’s confident that Pringle… will soon win a place among luxury brands from around the world.”

Beleaguered fashion chain returns to profit (Guardian)

“The fashion chains Oasis, Karen Millen, Coast and Warehouse, which became entangled in the failure of Icelandic group Baugur, have reported improving sales under their new owner.”

Does Digital Mean the End of Control? (Fashion’s Collective)

“With now 500 million people on Facebook, and the number of internet users growing exponentially across the world, brands need to figure out how to participate in online communication, but does this mean losing control?”

Valentino Wins 16-Year Trademark Case (Fashionista)

“For the past sixteen years, Valentino has been engaged in litigation with a company called Florence Fashions over the use of the Valentino trademark.”

A Hat Fit for a Queen (WSJ)

“In Via Dei Piatti, a narrow one-way street in the rabbit’s warren of roads around the Duomo in downtown Milan… master hat maker Lorenzo Borghi has labored for almost 60 years.”

Fashion 2.0 | What Fashion Brands Can Learn from Nike

NEW YORK, United States — Fashion brands are finally getting serious about digital media. But so far, their strategies have mostly focused on marketing and communications initiatives like interactive advertising campaigns, fashion films and live-streamed runway shows. Integrating digital technology into the core product offering remains a largely unexploited area of opportunity. Here, fashion companies can learn a lot from one of the world’s most digitally innovative brands: global sportswear giant Nike.

Last month, to coincide with the start of the FIFA World Cup, Nike launched a three-minute film called “Write the Future”, featuring football superstars like Wayne Rooney and Didier Drogba. According to web video analytics company Visible Measures “Write the Future” clocked a record 7.8 million online views in its debut week, underscoring the power of creating compelling digital content that consumers will voluntarily seek out and share with others.

Luxury fashion brands like Chanel have followed a similar strategy, creating their own digital content to earn attention and free media, and learning to think more like publishers in the process. But for all the recent buzz around “Write the Future,” Nike’s long-term digital strategy has focused less on marketing and communications initiatives and more on developing digital product and service platforms.

“Integrated digital technology will become what people expect,” said Mark Parker, President and Chief Executive Officer of Nike, in a highly insightful and wide-ranging interview with Berlin-based magazine 032c. Indeed, with online running platform Nike+ (which uses digital sensors integrated into running shoes to measure, analyse and share performance data) executives at the sportswear brand have moved decisively to make digital media an integral part of their core product offering.

Since launch, Nike+ has had a meaningful impact on the company’s bottom line. So far, more than 2.5 million Nike+ kits have been sold, many to people who also purchase new Nike shoes that have a special recess to house the digital sensor. But importantly, Nike+ has done more than drive sales; it’s helped Nike fundamentally recast the relationship between brand and consumer.

“The Nike+ story is about much more than the revenues generated from product and accessory sales. What is fascinating is how the new offering catapulted Nike from being relevant to just one aspect of the runner’s exercise regime to being at the very centre of it. For a Nike+ customer, the Nike brand is no longer about just the product attached to his or her feet; it’s about the total exercise experience,” writes Harvard Business School professor Elie Ofek in a recent article entitled “Are You Ignoring Trends That Could Shake Up Your Business?”

Significantly, at the start of the recent World Cup, alongside “Write the Future,” Nike launched a new football boot called the Mercurial Vapor SuperFly II. With techie-sounding product innovations like “Nike Flywire” and “Adaptive Traction Technology,” the shoes are designed to enhance player performance. But each pair of boots also comes with a code that unlocks access to Nike Soccer+, a digital coaching program — available via web, mobile internet or iPhone app — that helps players improve their skills with insights and instruction from world-class players and coaches.

“We are creating the best performance boots available today,” said Nike Soccer general manager Bert Hoyt. “But combining this technology with the Nike Soccer+ digital coaching program means you are not just buying a boot, you are buying a total game improvement package.”

In the fashion industry, Louis Vuitton made an interesting move into digital products, back in 2008, with Louis Vuitton Soundwalk, a unique experience that activated the brand’s heritage and dedication to “the art of travel.” Designed to be played on Apple’s popular iPod and launched just before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Vuitton’s Soundwalk was a perfectly synchronised audio journey through the physical streets of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, narrated by three icons of Chinese cinema.

But while Nike’s digital platforms endure over time and complement the brand’s primary revenue driver — shoes — Louis Vuitton Soundwalk was a more tactical initiative that was never integrated into Vuitton’s primary product: their bags.

Louis Vuitton’s on-going “Journeys” campaign — which currently features football greats Zidane, Maradona and Pele alongside Vuitton’s monogrammed luggage — suggests that travel can be an emotional and personal journey of discovery. But what if Louis Vuitton was able to integrate digital technology into its travel bags to actually make this promise a reality, enabling frequent travelers who own Vuitton to turn routine business trips into meaningful journeys through luxury digital services?

In the market for luxury fashion, the dream is most important. But today’s affluent consumers live active and digitally-enabled lives. Increasingly, there is an important opportunity for forward-thinking luxury brands to leverage integrated digital technology to help their clients experience things, not just dream them.

Vikram Alexei Kansara is Managing Editor of The Business of Fashion

"Best $2k I Ever Spent!" Everybody At This Party Wants To Kill You, Take 2

Something about Monday mornings makes us want to kill everyone, and thus we begin to see this same impulse in everyone. Are we projecting? Possibly. But it really does look like everyone who attended Girls & Boys at Webster Hall last Friday wanted to kill somebody.-

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We've noticed this disturbing pattern before. Is it being out with a bunch of drunk, grabby New Yorkers that makes everyone so unmistakably murderous?

I think we can all agree that this girl looks like she will CUT a bitch.

The girl on the left is contemplating a thousand deaths…for her friend.

I'm sorry, did you want to START something?

A hooded executioner.

Going for the jugular.

Picking a fight with YOU.

He's definitely going to kill her.

They want you dead. So they can suck your blood.

No.

On the prowl. For human flesh.

Oh look, someone's actually killed someone.

[All photos via NickyDigital]

Previously: Everyone At This Party Wants To Kill You. Or Is Possessed.

Daily Style Phile: Cody Ross

Meet Cody Ross. The West Village colorful cartoon of everything that New York isn't, but would be so much more fun if it was! He juggles shopping bags, a lively dog, pattern supplies, stock market reports and a fanny pack slung low around his waist. This can mean one of two things, this guy is seriously behind the times, or some kind of awesome.

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Once a young suit-clad financier, Cody took part time courses in pattern making and construction while breaking into the New York economic sector. Then, being the adventurer that he is, he flitted abroad to Shanghai – returning with a whole new style and the launch of a fashion label: Priestess NYC.

His label is an underground radical take on street style and urban Japanese funk. If those aren’t enough abstract categorizations for you – most of the Priestess collection is Unisex. Finally, you and your significant other can totally share an entire wardrobe.

Cody embodies an adoringly bizarre and loveable eighties action figure, complete with a Jared Leto-like blonde cockatiel poof and an ever changing array of quirky prints, stripes and patterns. And when we say quirky – we mean supertotallywackyamazing – like some seriously abstract anatomy, infant skeletons and blood and guts on all over silk organza prints. And we always wonder what he keeps in that fanny pack – is it like a first aid kit? A mini bar? Dog cookies for his shaggy pooch, Hanzo? A murse for the more active man? Or just a throwback to remind us that times really were better in the days of Fresh Prince of Bel Air?

Cody’s like this ultimate east meets west, uptown meets downtown, crazy meets artistic kind of character. A pretty young thing in oversized sunglasses and the epitome of the blondes have more fun mentality, an electric human being – he the best of both worlds, a financier who uses fashion as a creative outlet to teach us inept New Yorkers that it absolutely not a fashion faux pas to party (and dress) like its 1989.

[Photos via Cody's Facebook]

The GofG Pop-Up Party: Galway Hooker

Go HERE for more photos by Sunny Norton and tag yourself and your friends!

Last Friday night, we took our Pop-Up Party to Galway Hooker Pub Downtown. The low-key setting with charming sailboat paintings covering the walls allowed guests to (figuratively) sail away to a land where slamming back shots, playing pool and lounging with a fabulously eclectic crowd is all the rage. -

Good thing the hooker (traditional sail boat of Ireland) was built for strong winds, because the GofG crowd brought a strong storm of non-stop partying!

Wanna know more? Here's how to join us for our next pop-up party…

How it works:

How it works:

1. Read our Newsletter to find out where the Pop-Up Party is that night/week.


2. Go to the party and get snapped by one of our friendly photographers.


3. Visit the site the next day and tag yourself in the photo gallery.


4. Build up your directory page!

Everyone knows it's the people not the place that makes a party stand out. Here is your chance to meet other GofG readers with the same sensibilities as you!

No need to email us anymore for help on how to get invited to the parties and events featured on the site. Now, anyone can head to our Pop Up Parties and get caught by one of our friendly photographers, and then tag themselves for their chance to make it into our Directory Pages.

Do you want your Bar/Restaurant as our next featured Pop Up Party? Email Rachelle@guestofaguest.com to get started!

We will be announcing the location of Wednesday night's Pop Up Party in tomorrow's Newsletter. Make sure you sign up NOW so you will know where are going to POP UP next!

Goin' Hard At Hardfest NY

Go HERE for more photos by Stephanie Ketty and tag yourself and your friends!

This past Saturday, music appreciators of the electronica genre trekked over on the ferry to Governors Island to check out Hard NY. Performers included Die Antwoord, Rye Rye, Sleigh Bells, Ninjasonik, M.I.A. and more.. The eight-hour non stop dance party was filled with blinding neon lights, awkward dance moves, bold outfit choices and an uncomfortably disastrous performance by M.I.A.-

Hard provided a music experience for those New Yorkers who love to rave, get down and dirty with thousands of strangers and weren't afraid to show some skin. (Looks like some attendees took notes from our Summer Music Fest trend report!)

Also, depending on how much you felt like raging, you could choose the "Hard" stage or "Harder" stage. (Which to me, is almost as character defining as choosing between "fire" and "ice" on the Dueling Dragons ride at Universal Studios.) Guests who didn't want to be bothered with making such a life-altering decision set up camp where ever and proceeded with their very own impromptu dance party.

The culmination of the evening came with M.I.A.'s much anticipated performance. Unfortunately, she wasn't properly miked, her voice was drowned out by her mashed up beats, and the only time she was heard was when she was yelling at the sound team…Thankfully mother nature was on her side, and it began to downpour, cutting her set short. At the end of the day the only press she received was spitting in a photographer's face, but all wasn't lost! She brought the noise, and really, isn't that what music festivals are all about?