Reference Page: June 2010

Retail Gold
Marcelo Rosenbaum, one of the designers of the Jalapa collection, is a star in Brazil. People stop him on the street to get his autograph. (How many designers can say that?) But it’s not his chairs or sofas that have turned him into a celebrity. It’s a TV show called Lar Doce Lar (Home Sweet Home)—the Brazilian version of Extreme Makeover—in which Rosenbaum and the host, Luciano Huck, go around the country redecorating poor families’ homes. See one of his radical transformations here.

America
Working with your hands has become faddish. Brooklynites especially seem to love it, and small manufacturing companies have settled all over the borough. The faux-blue-collar style of plaid shirt, khakis, and work boots has become a fashion trend—what New York magazine calls the Urban Woodsman look. And on weekends, scruffy dilettantes attend classes to learn butchery, woodworking, and home brewing. But those are just hobbies. For the real deal, there’s Matthew B. Crawford, a philosophy Ph.D. who quit a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop in Virginia … and of course wrote about the experience.

Broadway Opening
“College Girls are Healthy, Normal American Girls,” the New York Times concluded in 1912, reporting on Barnard College. That headline made the perfect joke for Hillary Clinton’s commencement speech at the college last year. Nearly a century after the Times’s helpful article, Barnard girls have a new student center—and a healthy sense of humor. The Diana Center, named after the trustee Diana Vagelos, has been dubbed “the Vag” by students. This is actually the second building on campus to be named for Vagelos, but the Diana’s triangular shape and red interior made an easy target for punning bloggers.