From the outset Coco Chanel’s celebrity depended on confounding the woman and the dress: her life and her clothing echoing each other’s meanings, evincing lifestyle fantasies for a world reborn.

Schiaparelli and Prada, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

One of the ensembles in the category of “Ugly Chic” is a three-piece Prada suit from 1996, with a wraparound skirt, a boxy jacket, and a shapeless, high-necked shell. The fabric is a stiff synthetic, digitally printed with a smudgy grid. Each piece is a different awful color (mustard, chartreuse, mold green). It was modelled on the runway by a young Kate Moss, and even she couldn’t pull it off.

It isn’t that Prada undervalues beauty’s power—both she and Schiaparelli have dozens of ravishing ensembles in the show. But the old radical, you suspect, resents it as an unearned asset of the one per cent, and the brainy feminist wants you to understand its pathos as a love charm doomed to expire. You shouldn’t need it if you love yourself.

Though Patagonia caters to dirt bags, the company’s success has for many years depended on a different kind of customer: the dog walker. The dog walker buys gear designed for the mountains and puts it to use in the canyons of midtown, the office park, the tree-lined streets of suburbia. The dog walker takes comfort in knowing his Super Pluma Jacket is designed for the harshest conditions, but he’ll never rely on its gusseted underarm panels or harness-compatible pockets. He does, however, think those things look cool.

It sounds incredibly simple, but after more than a decade of dead-serious conceptualism, postmodern irony and Galliano-type showmanship, the fashion industry feels stuck for ideas: designing from life for life — rather than returning to the ’60s, say, or drawing inspiration from the “warrior woman” or some other female fantasy — feels fresh and modern.

A profile of Uniqlo’s Tadashi Yanai:

It seemed at first like a strange Japanese version of Gap. Towers of denim bathed in LED light, sweaters saturated in every color, and armies of sales pixies flitting about like bees in flight. But then the clothes sold. And sold. And continued to sell (even through the recession, when sales actually increased).

Marc Newson, maybe the most influential industrial designer of his generation, is not a design evangelist. But he doesn’t like your cellphone.

The autonomous car of the future is here.

These days, the collars are often worn with a sort of twee, schoolgirl-ish sweater and skirt combo, and they seem like the perfect accessory for a generation of women afflicted with Peter Pan syndrome (think: writing in lower case letters, fetishizing kittens, and pretty much anything Zooey Deschanel might do). The feminist in me wants to hate them, but the fashion lover has to admit: The more I look at Peter Pan collars—particularly the detachable versions in unexpected fabrics, like leather—the more I’m beginning to like them. At least I’m in good company.

Can the Nokia N9 revive the Finnish phone giant?

The phone is an intimate device, not simply through its ubiquity and connectivity, its relationship with the body. While objects have long been cultural choices and symbolic goods, the mobile phone, being the most personal connection to the internet, is a device for generating symbolic goods, a vehicle for culture, a proxy for the owner’s identities. It is vast business and cultural phenomenon, all at once.

The thong brings up anxiety. Like all studies of fashion, that of the thong is intrinsically connected to the history of humanity. But certain areas of study wish they weren’t wrapped up in the thong’s basic shape, it seems. Although it lies beneath the thinking behind so many historical moments, it is underrepresented academically. As goes its popularity, the thong has suffered peaks and valleys, but however argued-for it is, the small piece of fabric will always be argued over. The very form of the garment, which relies on oppositional tugging to gain its preferred shape, even seems to suggest this.