Is This the World’s Cheapest Dress? - New York Times

IF rock purists were unsettled last month by the opening of a designer boutique on the site of what once was CBGB, the hard-core Bowery nightclub, imagine how they will feel reading the next sentence: The old Tower Records space a few blocks away on Broadway, for two decades the spot for adolescent reveries of dance, pop and punk, has been leased by Steve & Barry’s, a clothing chain where everything costs less than $10.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

A dress designed (and worn) by Sarah Jessica Parker and sold at Steve & Barry’s for $8.98.

Steve & Barry’s, for the uninitiated, is to fashion what Tower once was to music. Steve & Barry’s is manna, a store that sells stylish celebrity-branded clothes at prices that are absurdly inexpensive, lower than those at Old Navy, H & M or Forever 21, undercutting even Wal-Mart by as much as half.

At its 264 barnlike stores in malls across the country, including the perpetually mobbed one at the Manhattan Mall in Midtown, Steve & Barry’s offers an assortment of flowery sundresses designed by Sarah Jessica Parker ($8.98), heart-printed hoodies by the Nickelodeon alumna Amanda Bynes ($8.98) and basketball shoes by the New York Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury ($8.98). Lines at the registers are often 20 deep.

The question on everyone’s lips: How do they make a decent dress or a jacket, with sleeves, or a pair of functioning shoes for $8.98?

The answer is complicated, but for those who can remember what it was like to wile away an evening browsing the exhilaratingly chaotic downtown Tower store, its coming transformation into a temple of cheap denim short-shorts, cargo pants and walls of novelty T-shirts makes some sort of sense in the arc of cultural evolution.

Fashion, as it has become more accessible to a generation that is obsessed with the mass emulation of celebrity style, has surpassed music (and the increasingly archaic concept of the record store) as the retail touchstone of youth. And cheap fashion has become infinitely more respectable, even cool, given the current economic climate.

“It seems like there is some justice in that, doesn’t it?” said Ms. Parker, who last week attended a movie premiere wearing a bitty blue sundress with a print of hothouse foliage, $8.98, from Bitten, her year-old Steve & Barry’s collection. “For a lot of people — young women, middle-age women, regular women — there is this idea about wanting fashion in an affordable way. They are living in a less rarefied world.”

The significance of planning a store on Broadway — by the time it opens this fall, it will be around the 300th Steve & Barry’s in the country and the largest in New York — is not lost on Steve Shore and Barry Prevor, childhood friends from Long Island who founded the company in 1985.

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Fashion

Megan Fox tops FHM's sexiest 100

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Megan Fox (Click to see photos of the top ten in FHM's Sexiest Women in the World for 2008.)

The blue-eyed beauty from "Transformers" has landed at the top of FHM's sexy list.

Megan Fox, 21, beat out the likes of Scarlett Johansson and Angelina Jolie to get the No. 1 spot in FHM's 100 Sexiest Women in the World for 2008.

"Megan is the deserving winner of this year's FHM title," said FHM Online U.S. Editor JR Futrell. "She's young, she's hot, she's a rising star and her sex appeal has definitely transformed this year's list. She's got a great future ahead of her."

Fox has slowly worked her way up the list in the last two years. She originally premiered on it in 2006 at No. 68. In 2007, she crawled up three spots to 65.

Her sudden leap to the top came largely because of her sexy turn in Michael Bay's robot-smashing "Transformers," as the love interest to Shia LaBeouf. It was a far cry from her more wholesome role as the older daughter on the ABC family sitcom, "Hope & Faith," starring Faith Ford and Kelly Ripa.

Joining Fox on the list's top ten are Jessica Biel, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Duff and "Battlestar Galactica" star Tricia Helfer. Last year's topper, Jessica Alba, fell to No. 3 on the list.

Britney Spears came in at No. 100.

According to FHM, nearly 9 million votes were cast by readers in this, their 14th annual top 100. Other actresses considered "sexy" by voters were Lindsay Lohan (16), Cameron Diaz (18), Beyonce Knowles (20), Jennifer Aniston (42), Eva Longoria Parker (59), Fergie (60), Katie Holmes (65), and Paris Hilton (77).

For the full list, go to www.fhmonline.com/100sexiest.

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Vista SP1 Released to Automatic Update

Windows Vista customers can now receive the first service pack for the operating system via the Microsoft Automatic Update service, Microsoft said Wednesday.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will download automatically to PCs that have the automatic update feature of the OS turned on, the company said. Previously, Vista was available to customers via Windows Update, but people had to specifically download it.

Not all customers will receive SP1 immediately via Automatic Update, however. The company is distributing it in phases to "ensure a seamless download experience," Microsoft said. A timeline for when all customers would receive Vista SP1 via Automatic Update was not immediately available.

SP1 is a rollout of software updates that fix bugs and glitches in Vista and is seen as a milestone that will inspire many customers -- especially those in the business market -- to adopt the OS. In fact, in a recent report, "Building the Business Case for Windows Vista," Forrester Research said more business customers plan to upgrade to Vista now that SP1 is available. This comes as no surprise, considering companies often wait for the first service pack after a major Windows release to update corporate desktops.

However, even SP1 will not guarantee that enterprises and business customers currently running XP or an earlier version of Windows will upgrade, as some have said they would skip the OS altogether. The same Forrester report said as much, although the research firm is recommending that companies don't skip Vista because they would not be well-positioned for future versions of Windows if they do.

Microsoft has acknowledged problems with application compatibility and lack of driver support, among others, that customers have had with Vista. It says SP1 and other updates that the company continues to make should remedy these problems. What the company hasn't said is why there were so many problems with the OS when the company had more than five years between the releases of Windows XP and Vista to ensure a smooth transition.

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