posted: 20 April, 2019

Welcome to the eighth edition of Dispatches, our hand-picked smorgabord of the most interesting ideas, innovations, and insight from the global retail, fashion, tech industry news.

For those of you who’ve been paying close attention, we recently decided to also meld in a sprinkling art & design, music, culture, architecture, economics, and geopolitics into the mix to help feed your cerebral hunger.

It’s a short one this week, where, following the near-destruction of Notre-Dame, we look at the cathedral’s role as one of the poles by which the fashion world orients itself, and learn of the transformational power of a new railway connecting Addis Ababa and Djibouti City (this one’s worth checking out for the beautiful photography alone!).

• Woven into the fabrics of France
  For the Paris fashion world, Notre-Dame and all it represents was a gravitational pole.
  [NY Times Style]

• A remarkable rail journey into the Horn of Africa’s past, and future
  A new train from the Ethiopian capital to the Djibouti coast offers a desert journey into parts of East Africa that have been off the tourist track.
  [NY Times]

• The cult Japanese retailer making Billions breaking all the rules
  The first target is Asia for Don Quijote, which sells everything from humidifiers to sex toys.
  [Bloomberg]

• Fashion has become ‘survival of the fittest’
  Andrew Rosen just stepped down as the chief executive of Theory, the brand he founded more than 20 years ago. He learned a few things along the way.
  [NY Times Style]

• The age of robot farmers
  Picking strawberries takes speed, stamina, and skill. Can a robot do it?
  [New Yorker]

And if you’re still hungry for more, join us @ThisIsRetail on twitter, instagram, and pinterest.

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