juan0505

garlic & onion 1.Combine chili powder, garlic powder, onion powder, pepper,salt, cumin and red pepper in bowl. 2.Turkey: Arrange turkey cutlets in large, shallow baking dish; coatwith 2 teaspoons oil. Sprinkle both sides with rub, patting intomeat. Marinate turkey in refrigerator 1 hour. Add lime juice; coatcutlets and marinate for another 30 minutes in refrigerator. 3.Prepare outdoor grill with hot coals, or heat gas grill to hot, orheat oven broiler. 4.Combine poblano, red pepper, yellow pepper, onion, scallions andremaining tablespoon oil in bowl. 5.Grill or broil vegetables about 3 minutes per side or until nicelycharred and cooked through. Arrange on large platter. Grill turkeycutlets until cooked through, 4 to 5 minutes per side. Thinly sliceturkey across grain on diagonal. Arrange on platter with grilledvegetables. 6.Warm tortillas on grill or under broiler, following packagedirections, until soft and warm. Place in cloth-lined basket andcover to keep warm. 7.To serve, have each guest roll up turkey and vegetables withgarnishes in tortillas. Makes 10 servings.
2008-06-04 10:15:34

Tag: Gossip Girl fashion When actress Leighton Meester dons a new headband or colored tights — with contrasting fishnets on top, no less — she can set off a virtual race to the cash register. The same goes for her Gossip Girl co-stars, whose fashions can be found on The CW cable channel's website, which typically enjoys a big post-show uptick in visitors. The Gossip Girl phenomenon — which mirrors the impact Sex and the City had on high-end footwear sales — shows how retailers can capitalize on trends in popular culture. It also illustrates how vital it is for them to quickly seize on the hottest clothes and accessories, given today's impressionable young shoppers, and to closely track sales to avoid shortages of the latest fashion passion. Trend watchers at retailers including Target and J.C. Penney monitor fashion-forward people in cities around the globe. Increasingly, though, retailers also need to watch a lot of TV and movies and read stacks of celebrity magazines, lest they miss out on the Next Big Thing. As recently as a couple of years ago, trend spotting often had to be done a year in advance — for next summer's seasons, say, even before the current summer's merchandise had been sold. Penney and other retailers were forced to make "educated guesses," as President Ken Hicks calls them, based more on speculation than hard data. Now, thanks to advanced software and computer systems, months have been shaved off the time needed to achieve "concept to cash," as Steve & Barry's calls it. Stores can closely monitor what styles are selling, at what rate and in which sizes. Department stores and the larger specialty chains can better compete with boutiques. They're also better positioned to take on such retailers as H&M, Zara and Forever 21, which specialize in moving the latest styles into, and out of, stores with sizzling speed. "It tells the retailer what's selling and what's not selling, so they get higher inventory turns," says retail analyst Jennifer Black of Jennifer Black & Associates. "If you want to be more productive, you have to turn (merchandise) faster." Especially if you want to attract trend-conscious young shoppers. "Younger people of this generation are more much interested in fashion than they were when I was in high school," says 29-year-old Meredith Barnett, founder of StoreAdore.com, a guide to retail boutiques. "Most of the reason they are so interested is they are so much more exposed to it. They are highly influenced by what they see on TV and what they see celebrities wear." If they watch Gossip Girl and see a lot of "girly headbands," Barnett says, it isn't long before you see them on young women everywhere. Her website, which features top boutiques in several cities, is helping accelerate the trend. Earlier this month, it touted its picks for the best headbands. Celebrity-inspired fashion has "definitely been amped up," says Gossip Girl costume designer Eric Daman. A former assistant designer on that über-trend-conscious show Sex and the City, Daman says he's been amazed by how much faster buzz flies about Gossip Girl's fashions in today's social-network-dominated era than it did in the heyday of Sex and the City. There's even been talk at stores in New York, including Barney's, of displaying clothes in a way that helps shoppers achieve the Serena or Blair look, Damon says. (Serena is Lively's character; Leighton Meester plays Blair.) "The girls' names are becoming like labels, " Daman says. "It's almost kind of crazy to see how great the reaction is to it." When Hicks saw a photo of Angelina Jolie at the Cannes Film Festival wearing a batik dress, he knew the batik trend would be hot. Penney is stocking a hefty selection of the Indian-inspired print this summer. And its improved inventory systems mean it can get more such apparel into stores quickly if the trend really has legs. That's the importance of what retailers call "cycle time" — how long it takes to turn a sketch into something hanging on a store rack. It's being "able to react to what the trends are in season," Hicks says. Penney will carry more pink, Hicks says, in part because of the color's prevalence in the new Sex and the City movie, along with such celebrity favorites as aviator glasses, white jeans and ombre prints. Even some shoppers who aren't trying to emulate celebrities seem to be attracted to "fast fashion." Avery Jaffe, 22, says she likes Forever 21 and H&M because they help her stay current on fashions, even if, she says, the clothes don't always last as long as she'd like. "They both bounce back the trends rapidly," says Jaffe of Atlanta. "We post on Facebook what we wore out the last night and have to have different outfits (and) looks each time." Celebrity-driven style is hardly limited to teens or twenty-somethings. Jaye Hersh, owner of Los Angeles boutique Intuition, says that just as young shoppers in her store will want a purse they see Miley Cyrus buying; older shoppers will do the same for celebrities closer to their own ages. "It crosses the ages," says Hersh, who says her boutique is a favorite of the Desperate Housewives and of such stars as Jessica Simpson. If women buy something a celebrity is wearing, "They can pretend they have a piece of some shiny life and feel like theirs is a little more exciting."
2008-06-02 17:20:37

On a Saturday afternoon, a group of teenage girls leaf through glossy fashion magazines at a New Jersey outlet mall. Shopping bags brimming with new purchases lay at their feet while they talk excitedly about what's in style to wear this summer. Far away in Tanzania, a young man proudly wears a basketball shirt imprinted with the logo of an NBA team while shopping at the local mitumba market for pants that will fit his slender figure. Although seemingly disparate, these two scenes are connected through the surprising life cycle of clothing. How does a T-shirt originally sold in a U.S. shopping mall to promote an American sports team end up being worn by an African teen? Globalization, consumerism, and recycling all converge to connect these scenes. Globalization has made it possible to produce clothing at increasingly lower prices, prices so low that many consumers consider this clothing to be disposable. Some call it "fast fashion," the clothing equivalent of fast food. Fast fashion provides the marketplace with affordable apparel aimed mostly at young women. Fueling the demand are fashion magazines that help create the desire for new "must-haves" for each season. "Girls especially are insatiable when it comes to fashion. They have to have the latest thing, always. And since it is cheap, you buy more of it. Our closets are full," says Mayra Diaz, mother of a 10-year-old girl and a buyer in the fashion district of New York City. Disposable couture appears in shopping mall after shopping mall in America and Europe at prices that make the purchase tempting and the disposal painless. Yet fast fashion leaves a pollution footprint, with each step of the clothing life cycle generating potential environmental and occupational hazards. For example, polyester, the most widely used manufactured fiber, is made from petroleum. With the rise in production in the fashion industry, demand for man-made fibers, especially polyester, has nearly doubled in the last 15 years, according to figures from the Technical Textile Markets. The manufacture of polyester and other synthetic fabrics is an energy-intensive process requiring large amounts of crude oil and releasing emissions including volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and acid gases such as hydrogen chloride, all of which can cause or aggravate respiratory disease. Volatile monomers, solvents, and other by-products of polyester production are emitted in the wastewater from polyester manufacturing plants. The EPA, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, considers many textile manufacturing facilities to be hazardous waste generators. Issues of environmental health and safety do not apply only to the production of man-made fabrics. Cotton, one of the most popular and versatile fibers used in clothing manufacture, also has a significant environmental footprint. This crop accounts for a quarter of all the pesticides used in the United States, the largest exporter of cotton in the world, according to the USDA. The U.S. cotton crop benefits from subsidies that keep prices low and production high. The high production of cotton at subsidized low prices is one of the first spokes in the wheel that drives the globalization of fashion. Bringing Clothes to Market Fast, the Global Way Much of the cotton produced in the United States is exported to China and other countries with low labor costs, where the material is milled, woven into fabrics, cut, and assembled according to the fashion industry's specifications. China has emerged as the largest exporter of fast fashion, accounting for 30% of world apparel exports, according to the UN Commodity Trade Statistics database. In her 2005 book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Pietra Rivoli, a professor of international business at the McDonough School of Business of Georgetown University, writes that each year Americans purchase approximately 1 billion garments made in China, the equivalent of four pieces of clothing for every U.S. citizen. According to figures from the U.S. National Labor Committee, some Chinese workers make as little as 12–18 cents per hour working in poor conditions. And with the fierce global competition that demands ever lower production costs, many emerging economies are aiming to get their share of the world's apparel markets, even if it means lower wages and poor conditions for workers. Increasingly, clothing being imported to the United States comes from countries as diverse as Honduras and Bangladesh.
2008-06-02 17:15:13