Archive for the ‘Community’ Category
The Most Tweet-able of Halloweens
November 3, 2009
Halloween costumes now tend to come in two strains: the timely and the timeless. The timely ones try to recreate snapshots of the then-current personalities and time; think Bill Clinton or SpongeBob SquarePants. The timeless ones embrace the traditional figures associated with the holiday such as Dracula or the Wicked Witch.
This Halloween, timeliness certainly took the spotlight, capturing our observations and emotions of the past few months as precisely as possible. Didn’t it seem every costume was conceived as the potential topic of a tweet—a momentary display of wit for a passerby? If your costume wasn’t based on a Twitter trending topic, then the boos you heard had no association with ghosts. It was incumbent upon you to go back to the drawing board and rethink what you wore.
Even the once timeless costumes could no longer be. If you chose to dress as a witch in pointed hat, then you were an ironic witch. If you chose to be a witch with a wink, you were nothing more than a quaint reminder of the past.
In hindsight, this gravitation towards timely costumes is inevitable. Our society is becoming ever more entranced with the consumption of the here and now—instant messaging, frequently updated status messages, Twittering, feeds on what your colleagues, friends, and virtual friends are doing and the like. We’ve become gluttons of the instantaneous. We want more of “it” faster since what is brilliant one minute becomes completely irrelevant the next.
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Some More Wisdom on Crowds:
The Euro Couture Crowd
October 16, 2009
Dior. Dolce and Gabbana. Lanvin. Just saying the euphonic names of these labels out loud feels indulgent. If you’re going to wear something from one of these design powerhouses, you better be ready to turn heads. What these labels lack in subtlety they more than make up for in shock value.
There’s a particular crowd that’s drawn to the ethereal glow of these clothing lines. They’re the people who like their blazers sharp, their heels high, and their service V.I.P. The Dolce and Gabbana crowd usually accessorizes with martinis and cosmos. The bars, lounges, and clubs they inhabit are like the clothes they wear—either trendy and fashion forward or classic and elegant. Read More »
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Fashion Sees an Increase in Asian Names, But What About Asian Faces?
October 14, 2009
The Wall Street Journal recently announced the arrival of a rising generation of fashion designers – namely, the new Asian-American designers. With 25 designers of Asian descent sending their designs down the runways at last month’s New York Fashion Week, the prominence of Asian-Americans in the world of fashion design couldn’t go unnoticed by the mainstream media for much longer.
Names like Peter Som, Phillip Lim, Doo Ri Chung, Thakoon, and Jason Wu, have elicited warm praise from the critics with their cutting edge designs and knack for skillful tailoring. These designers are also meant to represent a triumph for a group that, until recently, was underrepresented in the creative realm of fashion design. Consequently, they’re used as symbol of progress in an industry that is often criticized for its lack of racial and ethnic inclusiveness.
Yet, as the fashion industry gets comfortable with more Asian names appearing on the labels of clothes, it hasn’t fully embraced the idea of putting more Asian faces on the covers of magazines. With all the designers of Asian descent working behind the scenes, Asian and Asian-American models still struggle to get on the runways and in advertisements.
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A Toast to Sublime Taste
October 6, 2009
Since today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of Ubi Ubi, we’d like to thank you – our readers, Twitter followers, subscribers, and business partners for your loyalty, fearlessness, and openness. You are all pioneers – for exploring the new media space that we are building, for following the tech chic lifestyle trends that we uncover, and for embracing a mobile mentality that we believe will define the future of both technology and cultural interactions. Read More »
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Some Wisdom on Crowds
September 28, 2009
It’s not unusual for someone to say that a bar is “full of hipsters,” to note that a friend is “part of that whole Dolce and Gabbana crowd,” or to describe someone as a “techie.” These kinds of statements are ways of describing different crowds, and crowd descriptors are convenient ways to broadly and concisely characterize large groups. Essentially, they’re stereotypes, but they’re generally less offensive because they’re based mostly on the ways people choose to present themselves, rather than on gender, race, class, or age. While the term “techie,” for example, may carry certain connotations, it’s based on something external – an interest in technology – and doesn’t technically target any one demographic.
What’s peculiar about conversations regarding crowds is that they tend to exclude self-reference. Simply put, crowds are eternally viewed as the other rather than the self. It’s common to say “The bar was full of hipsters;” it’s less common to say “I’m a hipster because I was at that bar.” Why are crowds so easy to identify, yet it’s so difficult to associate ourselves with them?
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Posted in Community, Crowds, Dining Culture, Lifestyle | No Comments »
Follow the Tweeter: Kogi Introduces a New Mobile Restaurant
August 25, 2009
One of the fastest-expanding gourmet food truck empires on L.A.’s blossoming mobile restaurant scene is Kogi (pronounced with a hard “g”). This Twittering L.A. Korean-BBQ-on-wheels was created by media-savvy owner Mark Manguera and chef Roy Choi (formerly of NYC’s Le Bernardin). It’s a concept that’s Web 2.0 to the core: Tweet location changes for your food truck every couple of hours, wait for the lines to form, then serve up creative combinations of spicy Korean BBQ-style chicken, tofu, pork, or ribs on corn tortillas, topped with sesame-chili salsa roja, Korean chili-soy vinaigrette slaw, cilantro-green onion-lime relish, and crushed sesame seeds.
Manguera and Choi have deftly pinpointed a crossroad between modern fusion food culture and the latest in mobile technology, but it’s not just the relative novelty of a Twitter-centric food service that tickles us; it’s the community that the creators are building around their mobile establishment. The lines at Kogi are gaining a reputation as indie meeting grounds where Twitterers engage in a less modern practice known as face-to-face conversation. Check out Kogi’s endearingly enthusiastic blog for a glimpse of the Kogi dining experience.
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Posted in Community, Gourmet food trucks, Innovation, L.A. | No Comments »
