"indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design. " - dieter rams

"reading [about dieter rams] was never as powerful as simply using his products.

He defined how it was supposed to be: how industy could responsibily bring useful, well-considered products to many.

His was not an academic experience in modernism. He lived every day with the realities and consequences pf what he and his team designed.

He reamins utterly alone in producing a body of work so consistently beautiful, so right, and so accessible."

- jonathan ive

ralph's book

1967 - Ralph Lauren started his company when he was 28!

In his first year, he sells $500,000 of ties.

1968 - a full line of polo menswear

" I wanted something that got me excited."

1969- polo by ralph lauren shop in Bloomngdales

What he was trying to do was bring a European sense of quality and tradition into an American style and spirit.

I write through my clothes.

clothes were about living

the advertising campaigns became movies in print. It wasn't about seeing a man or woman posing against an anonymous backdrop, but seeing him or her in a life doing something you could relate to or dream about.

tonne men's styling

Our Cover Girls: Stories from the creation of Ms. Magazine

When we put a woman on the cover—a real person—she had to be a worthy real person, not a Hollywood beauty. We had Helen Gahagan Douglas [congresswoman, 1945–51], Shirley ­Chisholm [first black woman in Congress], Bella Abzug [congresswoman, 1971–77]. These were our cover girls.

In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, Ms.’s popularity waned as women’s legal and professional statuses improved and a crop of new magazines were launched, often co-optingMs.’s message and readership. In a 1990 Mother Jones cover story, Ms. Fights for Its Life,” Peggy Orenstein wrote, “Magazines such as Working Woman, Savvy, New York Woman, and Mirabellamay have poached some of the Ms. terrain, but they’ve manipulated the message, reflecting change but not inciting it.”

Men are better at celebrating successes. They have parades and trophies. But there was a transformation in those early Ms. years—in terms of family structures, the workplace, and our language. It would still be decades before the New York Times would come onboard to use the term “Ms.” [It was in 1986.]

I still meet women who say they had to hide their Ms. magazines from their husbands. It woke women up and spurred them to go out and do something.

“Ms. Is Magazine for a Whole Woman,”
By Lineta Pritchard
“For the first time you can read a publication that expresses total female sentiment, not sentiment based on some male publisher’s assumption that all women like to read about recipes, beauty tricks, wardrobe wizardry and entertaining.”

Ms. was being removed from public libraries as unsuitable reading material.

Cathie Black (advertising director, 1972–77): I remember having lunch with Clay and saying, “I’m going to go to Ms.” He said, “I think this is going to be a big professional mistake.” And I told him, “I think it will be the best move I ever made.” I thought, I want to get on this boat. I don’t want to be left behind.

Gloria, Pat, and their team would go to Detroit, and the car companies would say, “Oh, now, women don’t buy cars,” and the Ms. team would pull out their research and say, “Yes, actually they do,” but the car executives would still dodge and weave and ultimately turn them down.

Black: I had an ad-agency guy grab our research report out of my hands, throw it on the floor, and make a gesture as though he were going to spit on it.

Steinem: You know, I have made lots of mistakes all on my own, and I have done all kinds of things that I would like to change, but most of all, I would like to take back all the time I spent trying to sell advertising

http://nymag.com/news/features/ms-magazine-2011-11/index3.html

calvin

If you don't see it through I think you will be unhappy all your life.

I always had this sense that I wouldn't be understood, and that I had to do it myself.

I just decided I could make samples at night and on weekends. And buyers agreed to buy them.
And I thought I'll just figure it out.

... American film and music have always been at the forefront of inspiration for people around the world. Fashion, too. Because so many of us are really Inspired by the way modern women live and work-- That's an American thing. And I think we have great influence.

I was sitting in my tiny little showroom
with 3 coats and 4 dresses
In walks the GMM of bonwit teller...
I didn't want the clothes to wrinkle so I wheeled a rack to bonwit teller.

more steve

''It was like the first adult love of your life,'' [Jobs] confesses, ''something that is always special to you, no matter how it turns out.'' ''It's very romantic going back to your first love,'' observes the industry analyst Esther Dyson, ''but it rarely works out.''

Jobs would be offered the chance to return to his first love. And he jumped, setting off a frenzy of late-night meetings, negotiations and soul-searching throughout Silicon Valley.

Apple would make a good living off the Macintosh technology for years, but as an innovator, the company all but stood still.

While the personal computer industry has become a global $150-billion-a-year business, it remains a remarkably tiny community in some respects, ruled by a few hundred people who came of age together.

a textbook study of Steve Jobs in action, part hustling opportunist and part technology visionary.

Jobs paced the room and scribbled with a black marker on a white board, tracing the evolution of computer operating systems and prescribing their future.

spellbinding salesman of technology

He sees business as a passion, the pursuit of something worthy; his friends talk of his ''need to do something big.''

Jobs, whose genius for infecting others with his enthusiasm is known, by critics and admirers alike, as the ''reality distortion field.''

Esthetically, Jobs is a modernist, a believer in simple elegance.

Jobs's return to Apple marks an opportunity to reintroduce certain standards into an industry that, in his eyes, has grown

'The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. 'I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their products. I have no problem with their success -- they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem

with the fact that they

just make really third-rate products.''

ugly.

Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

Steven Levy remembers Jobs telling him once that he hoped to create "a $10 billion company that didn’t lose its soul."

He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world

Mr. Jobs met Mr. Wozniak while attending Homestead High School in neighboring Cupertino. The two took an introductory electronics class there.

I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

Mr. Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew. It was Mr. Jobs who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product.

In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300; they later gained the backing of a former Intel executive, A. C. Markkula, who lent them $250,000.

In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It created a sensation.

Sales skyrocketed, from $2 million in 1977 to $600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly.

A year earlier Mr. Jobs had lured Mr. Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive. A former Pepsi-Cola chief executive, Mr. Sculley was impressed by Mr. Jobs’s pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

the Lisa failed commercially and early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued, and Mr. Jobs lost control. 1,200 Apple employees were laid off.

he was increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.