Jardigans and zebra pants: Welcome to the new office dress code

June 14, 2021

Casual Friday may have gone the way of the power suit. Office workers are rushing to refresh their wardrobes as companies start calling employees back to their cubicles. But after months at home in pajamas, the back-to-workers are looking to trade in traditional business attire for more comfortable clothing, NBC News reports.

Pencil skirts, suit pants, and classic black are out. Today’s office worker is brightly dressed—focusing on wide, loose-fitting clothing and softer fabrics, according to major U.S. retailers.

“We as a business evolved our merchandising to talk more about ‘power casual,’” Sarah LaFleur, CEO of the women’s work wear company M.M.LaFleur, told NBC News. “Formality wise, it’s one step down from business casual. There is definitely something below that, that is still a dress code similar to how women who work in media or in the tech space might dress.”

The company’s new line, which includes a “jardigan,” or blazer made out of soft cardigan material, has been booming. Before the country went into lockdown last spring, casual work wear made up about 25% of M.M.LaFleur sales; now, it’s 60%.

Retailers were among the first to be hammered by the pandemic, with dozens of retailers filing for bankruptcy, including iconic brands such as Lord & Taylor, J.Cr ew, and Neiman Ma rcus. Other stores were forced to shutter thousands of locations.

But as vaccination rates increase and federal public health agencies relax masking rules, shoppers and workers are eager to get back to living life in person — and with that comes the urge to wear something new and bright, according to retail analysts and brands.

“We believe the world is back,” Morris Goldfarb, CEO of G-III Apparel, which owns brands such as DKN Y, told investors this week. “People are going out, people are partying. They’re not just wearing their fleece leisure wear. They’re wearing denim, and they’re wearing jeans, they’re wearing stretch fabrics, and they’re wearing sculptured products.”

Employed shoppers plan to spend more across all categories, including casual and dress wear in both men and women’s clothing, compared to last year, according to data from the retail analytics company Prosper Insights & Analytics. But consumers say they also plan to spend more on comfort style brands such as Levi’s rather than luxury brands such as Calvin Klein or Coach, according to the data.

“The ‘work-from-home’ consumer still has a preference for the ‘comfort’ brands versus the ‘dress to impress’ brands,” Phil Rist, executive vice president of Prosper Insights & Analytics, told NBC News in an email.

Retailers and brands are betting that comfort fits across the board are likely here to stay. Shea Jensen, Nordstrom’s executive vice president and general merchandising manager, said that some of its brand partners have adjusted their products to be more comfortable.

“Loungewear and comfort is still important to the customer. Some of the season’s new pants have incorporated an elastic waist or looser leg.”

“Loungewear and comfort is still important to the customer,” she said in an email. “Some of the season’s new pants have incorporated an elastic waist, a looser leg or very soft materials without sacrificing fashion and newness.”

But shoppers aren’t just looking for comfort in their clothes. After a year in grey sweatpants, colors and prints are an opportunity to change up their attire. Gen Z is largely driving this maximalism trend, bucking the minimalism of their millennial counterparts.

Indeed, an April report from Pinterest found Gen Z led a 14-fold increase in searches for “zebra pants,” a 12-fold increase in “plaid pleated skirt” and a 133-fold increase in “’60s and ’70s fashion” between the first quarter of last year and the same time this year.

“We’re back to school, back to work, going out to restaurants and traveling — and what will that mean to retailers?” said Brian Dodge, president of the retail trade group Retail Industry Leaders Association. “The answer is, it’s a great opportunity, because maybe your clothing doesn’t fit anymore or your style changed, and retailers are in a great position to help customers to return to life.”

Research contact: @NBCNews

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast

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