Even at the Barneys launch party for his own T-shirt collection with Archive 1887, Iggy Pop was as close to shirtless as possible. “I don't have great taste in clothes, so I don't wear much of them,” he said, cocking his head toward his top, which was slashed all the way down to his chiseled abdomen. “When I get up in the morning, I stay nude for three or four hours. And if I really feel like getting formal, I'll put on board shorts. I own about a dozen pairs of Quiksilver board shorts. That's my mainstay.”
What does he do if he has to leave his house to buy, say, toilet paper, or put gas in his Ferrari? “If I have to actually go out somewhere, then I make a big decision: Am I going to wear something besides the board shorts? I almost never do. But if I'm going to go out to dinner, I favor Brioni.” Really? “Yes, I dress like Donald Trump. I wear very nice Italian things. Brioni, Cerruti, and some Versace and some Dolce & Gabbana, but classic, old-school shit. And I like some nice Brioni polo shirts, things like that. They make me look like a perfect gentleman.”
The irony of the chronically bare-chested Pop doing a T-shirt line was apparently an ongoing joke among the design team. “We were like, 'Wow, Iggy will never wear one of these shirts,'” said Grieg Bennett, the collaborating creative director of Thread Shop. “I don’t recall ever really seeing him in a shirt.” Barneys creative director Simon Doonan, who has known Pop since the early eighties, agreed: “There's a fabulous irony about Iggy being associated with a T-shirt line, because one associates him with no clothes. Or maybe with gold lamé tights.”
The T-shirts are printed with vintage photographs of Pop, including one from the early eighties where he's missing a front tooth and staring slack-jawed into the camera lens. Pop has some trouble remembering when and how the image came to be, but he assured us that the gap tooth was actually just black paint. “That's from '81 or '82, and that's as far out as I ever went in my uh, explorations,” he said. “Musically, at that time — well, for instance, I had to open for Flock of Seagulls, and it was the hair gel, and the long hairdo, and the rigidity of the skinny early eighties ties, fake drum machine, faux-irony vocals, and I hated it. So with the tooth out, I was trying to show my kinship to thieving gypsies, drunk itinerant bluesmen, pirates — stuff that had fluidity and humanity. That was the idea.”
Pop also supplied the design team with a full-frontal nude photograph of himself, which Bennett really liked and may decide to feature on a shirt in one of their future collections. “We were thinking about using it. We might still. it was a little much for the first go-round,” he said.
So what does Pop actually think of the Archive 1887 shirts? “I asked that the cuts and the fabric be a step up from schmatta at a merch stand at a concert, and they definitely are.”
Even at the Barneys launch party for his own T-shirt collection with Archive 1887, Iggy Pop was as close to shirtless as possible. “I don't have great taste in clothes, so I don't wear much of them,” he said, cocking his head toward his top, which was slashed all the way down to his chiseled abdomen. “When I get up in the morning, I stay nude for three or four hours. And if I really feel like getting formal, I'll put on board shorts. I own about a dozen pairs of Quiksilver board shorts. That's my mainstay.”
What does he do if he has to leave his house to buy, say, toilet paper, or put gas in his Ferrari? “If I have to actually go out somewhere, then I make a big decision: Am I going to wear something besides the board shorts? I almost never do. But if I'm going to go out to dinner, I favor Brioni.” Really? “Yes, I dress like Donald Trump. I wear very nice Italian things. Brioni, Cerruti, and some Versace and some Dolce & Gabbana, but classic, old-school shit. And I like some nice Brioni polo shirts, things like that. They make me look like a perfect gentleman.”
The irony of the chronically bare-chested Pop doing a T-shirt line was apparently an ongoing joke among the design team. “We were like, 'Wow, Iggy will never wear one of these shirts,'” said Grieg Bennett, the collaborating creative director of Thread Shop. “I don’t recall ever really seeing him in a shirt.” Barneys creative director Simon Doonan, who has known Pop since the early eighties, agreed: “There's a fabulous irony about Iggy being associated with a T-shirt line, because one associates him with no clothes. Or maybe with gold lamé tights.”
The T-shirts are printed with vintage photographs of Pop, including one from the early eighties where he's missing a front tooth and staring slack-jawed into the camera lens. Pop has some trouble remembering when and how the image came to be, but he assured us that the gap tooth was actually just black paint. “That's from '81 or '82, and that's as far out as I ever went in my uh, explorations,” he said. “Musically, at that time — well, for instance, I had to open for Flock of Seagulls, and it was the hair gel, and the long hairdo, and the rigidity of the skinny early eighties ties, fake drum machine, faux-irony vocals, and I hated it. So with the tooth out, I was trying to show my kinship to thieving gypsies, drunk itinerant bluesmen, pirates — stuff that had fluidity and humanity. That was the idea.”
Pop also supplied the design team with a full-frontal nude photograph of himself, which Bennett really liked and may decide to feature on a shirt in one of their future collections. “We were thinking about using it. We might still. it was a little much for the first go-round,” he said.
So what does Pop actually think of the Archive 1887 shirts? “I asked that the cuts and the fabric be a step up from schmatta at a merch stand at a concert, and they definitely are.”
Despite launching four new games, video game publisher Activision Blizzard Inc. continued to see a pair of older titles account for most of its business in its most recent quarter.
Digital downloads and subscriptions for military action series Call of Duty and online fantasy game World of Warcraft provided some of the best news for the Santa Monica-based video game publisher, which saw its revenue decline 7% to $967 million and its net income grow 12% to $219 million.
The new racing title Blur, which launched in May, and action game Singularity, which debuted in late June, were both disappointments for the publisher. They sold 110,000 and 31,000 copies, respectively, in the U.S. through the end of June, according to the NPD Group. June's video game based on "Shrek Forever After" was also a flop, selling just 54,000 units. A new Transformers game title, War for Cybertron, debuted in June to a decent 219,000 units.
At the same time, Activision sold more than 5 million downloads of new content for last November's blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for $15 each. Chief Operating Officer Thomas Tippl said on a conference call with analysts that revenue from Call of Duty downloadable content in the U.S. and Europe was high enough to rank it among the top five titles sold at retail, which has traditionally been a much more lucrative outlet for video games than the Internet.
"These products not only drive meaningful levels of high margin revenue, they maintain the franchise's stickiness and keep consumers from selling their games in the used market," Tippl said.
Digital platforms generated the majority of Activision Blizzard's revenue for the first time last quarter, demonstrating the growth of the market and also the weakness of the company's new titles released in retail stores.
Following the firing of two key creators of Call of Duty — who along with 45 current and former former developers are now enmeshed in litigation with Activision — the publisher has been reorganizing its resources to maintain and grow the franchise.
On the call, Activision Blizzard Chief Executive Bobby Kotick said that this November's Call of Duty: Black Ops, created by Santa Monica-based developer Treyarch, will receive "the biggest investment we have ever made in the launch of a title."
Activision moved the planned release of True Crime: Hong Kong from later this year into 2011, but maintained its guidance of $4.2 billion in revenue and 49 cents per share in net income for the year based on growing expectations for Black Ops.
Blizzard Entertainment, which focuses on online games, launched its first title in nine years that was not related to World of Warcraft last week with Starcraft II, a sequel to the 1999 game that has proved particularly popular in South Korea. The strategy game sold 1.5 million units worldwide in its first two days alone and has yet to launch in Korea, where it is currently being offered for free during a trial period.
Activision Blizzard shares were down 6% in after-hours trading Thursday as the company's results and guidance fell short of investors' high expectations. Before its financial results were released, the company's stock closed at $11.75, off less than 1%.
–Ben Fritz
Photo: A scene from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
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Activision's modern warfare
Activision lands next game from Halo development studio
Activision sued for up to $125 million by current, former Infinity Ward employees
Activision quietly restructures senior management and internal organization
World of Warcraft has been around for a very long time. Way back in 2004, the designers at Blizzard learned from its MMOG predecessors and offered millions of players a world unlike one they had adventured in before. To celebrate the history of World of Warcraft and the imminent destruction of Azeroth in Cataclysm, The Escapist has compiled a visual history to highlight the important milestones and events to date, from the servers opening to the Real ID fiasco last month. Check out this week's issue of The Escapist Magazine which is devoted to exploring how Blizzard is changing the game with Cataclysm. For this visual history, we concentrated on WoW's mainstream impact. If you'd like a more detailed retrospective of nearly every patch, policy change and news story regarding all these things Azeroth, please take a look at our interactive timeline here. You might even be able to earn yourself an Epic Mount badge in the process. Massive amounts of kudos to Jon Hayter for making this history so wonderfully visual. Enjoy the Escapist's visual history of World of Warcraft!
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