Fashion & Shopping
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Apparel Sales Get Dressed Down For Holiday

Jaime E. Love

Changing styles in fashion are nothing new. But the style changes on display in 2020 are quite a bit different than previous years. Consumers are staying at home and as a result paying a lot less attention to their personal style. Mastercard’s holiday spend data effectively sums up the story. Consumers did their fair share of shopping this season — home furnishings, home decoration, and home improvement products all had a banner season as consumers set about more perfectly feathering their nests. But apparel sales dropped off 19 percent year on year, according to the data.

And, according to McKinsey’s The State of Fashion 2021 report, it was far more than a one-off tough season — it was a really bad year. In 2019, the industry’s overall sales went up about 4 percent worldwide. In 2020, according to

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Fashion & Shopping
Read Time : 1 Minutes

Make Juneteenth a Non-Shopping Holiday

Jaime E. Love

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Juneteenth has long been celebrated by Black people and across communities of color. The holiday references June 19, 1865, two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, when a document declaring the end of slavery was read publicly in Galveston, Tex., by a U.S. Army general. Now the day is getting broader recognition, as numerous American companies, including some in fashion, are making it a paid holiday. Congress will likely take up the issue as well, and Juneteenth could, and should, become a national holiday.

How great and long overdue for our country to formally celebrate the end of slavery, and by doing so, come face-to-face with the horrific devastation it wrought and that is ongoing. Not so great that this reckoning comes only after the killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and too many others, acts that have shaken American

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