As the ultimate expressions of French savoir-faire and creativity, couture and high jewelry go hand in hand. More than a decade ago, high jewelry even helped save Couture Week. The fashion industry had been wondering whether couture could survive, given how few houses were staging runway shows. Then, in 2010, many of the most prominent…
“I am about to get laid off,” Folashade Ade-Banjo spoke to the camera while positioning her phone, “and you are about to see it.” In a five-minute TikTok video this month, Ms. Ade-Banjo, a 30-year-old Los Angeles marketing professional, was shown sitting quietly at her desk and staring at her computer, a pained look on…
When The Times recently invited five independent jewelry designers for a morning of conversation, they all arrived wearing their own creations. “We are our brands,” as Bernard James, one of the jewelers, put it. “We represent what we make.” The designer, 32, wore, among other pieces, rings from his namesake brand’s Flora collection, inspired by…
There are more than four million electric vehicles on American roads, but fewer than 1,000 of them are heavy-duty trucks. On Tuesday, the three largest truck makers plan to announce a push to remedy that deficit by calling on governments and utilities to help them build many more places to charge big rigs. Daimler Truck,…
What’s in a name? If you could ask the humble zircon, the answer might be mistaken identity and decades of undeserved obscurity. In the Victorian era, the peak of popularity for zircons, a mined mineral, colorless ones were regularly used as diamond alternatives and blue ones were particularly popular. “Zircon can come in a wide…
General Motors said on Tuesday that its profit in the final three months of 2023 was depressed by losses stemming from unsold electric vehicles and the cost of a 40-day strike at some of its U.S. plants. The automaker, which has been banking on a rapid rise in sales of battery-powered models, earned $2.1 billion…
Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston announced Tuesday that it had developed an experimental drug that relieves moderate to severe pain, blocking pain signals before they can get to the brain. It works only on peripheral nerves — those outside the brain and the spinal cord — making it unlike opioids. Vertex says its new drug is…
The brightly colored packaging is a slick mix of ombré pink and lime green. The nicotine inside comes wreathed in a “strawberry kiwi” flavor. Increasingly, plastic disposable vapes like this one are making their way into the hands of children, with one in five young people in Britain between the ages of 11 and 17…
Dr. Thomas Connelly has turned the cliché “million dollar smile” into reality. In 2021, the “Father of Diamond Dentistry” — as Rolling Stone named him — reconstructed Post Malone’s smile with 18 porcelain veneers, eight platinum crowns and two six-carat diamonds replacing the singer-songwriter’s upper canines. Just diamonds. The total cost: $1.6 million. “Posty needed…
Last year, Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 to be a “year of efficiency.” His company, Meta, soon laid off a third of its employees. Amazon, Google and Microsoft also cut tens of thousands of workers. Their worlds did not stop. Not only that, the companies were rewarded. Their stock prices soared. Some divisions were more productive….
