James Franco Told Frida Giannini He’s Making A Gucci Film
The March issue of Harper’s Bazaar just won’t quit…and it hasn’t even hit newsstands yet. In addition to pieces on Kim and Liz, Prabal and DVF, Daphne and Hillary, the magazine also features an interview James Franco conducted with his friend Frida Giannini.
The Gucci creative director dished on all sorts of things with the actor/director/soap star/student/overachiever who had this to say about the designer: ”Frida and I have been in sync since we met. I love her work, and she supports mine. Creatively, I know we will always be in line with each other.” (Also, Franco joked that his next project is “making a documentary about you and Gucci.” But we just don’t know if he’s kidding.)
On Gucci’s pragmatism:
JF: When you see the clothes at a fashion show, sometimes they’re more extreme than what you see in the store, right?
FG: Well, not always at Gucci. I believe what we are showing on the catwalk needs to be in the stores. The big stores like in New York or London or Paris, the main flagships, they always have the entire collection–even the extreme pieces. There are people who are waiting for the extreme pieces from the fashion show. We are not the kind of company that thinks, Okay, I’ll do something for the runway, and I’ll make an entire new collection to sell.
FG: Chanel is always doing incredible sets, and they change it every time. We’d rather spend money on other things than make a big, spectacular thing you would see for 10 minutes because we are working for six months on a collection.
On fashion globalism:
JF: So then, because Gucci is all over the world and you’re thinking about people actually wearing these clothes, do you have to think slightly differently for each part of the world?
FG: I never think about it because I think people in the world, from the U.S. to Asia, love Gucci because it’s about aspiration. I don’t think if I made a speciic collection for a Chinese woman, she would be happy. They don’t want something speciic for them. I did a collection that was very Russian, inspired by the artists in Russia in the ’20s and ’30s who left and went to Paris. It performed very well all over the world–except in Russia.
JF: And why, do you think?
FG: I talked to the managers in Russia, and they said they didn’t like the reference to them. So this is an example that was quite strange. Maybe if I make a collection inspired by India, with the colors of India, people in India won’t like it.
On criticism:
JF: I know Harper’s Bazaar is here listening to us, but if you’re criticized heavily in a big fashion magazine, does that have any real effect on sales or what people like?
FG: The first couple of seasons, I was in shock sometimes because I had very mixed reviews, especially because it was right after Tom Ford. Can you imagine the pressure? I am a woman; he is a man. I am Italian; he is American. Very, very different. Now I am much more relaxed; sometimes I receive very bad criticism and read between the lines of the bad reviews.
Sometimes I have thought it was a good suggestion for me because I know that the journalist has a great mind and has much more experience than me. Generally speaking, I’m very open to criticism. I will never say, “I had a bad review from you; I don’t want to meet you anymore.” I believe in what I am doing, and I believe in my ideas, but I think it is very constructive to be open to understanding other thoughts.
[Harper's Bazaar]
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Of all the interesting new tech that seems poised to garner a lot of buzz in 2011, near field communication (NFC), is probably the most exciting. If it takes off, it will transform the ways we communicate, share, and make payments with digital devices. This will likely take years to happen, but the groundwork is being laid right now. And RFinity is one of those companies at the forefront.
While Google and Apple are responsible for generating much of the buzz about NFC at the moment, the technology goes far beyond simply having the right type of chip in your mobile device. For example, how do you handle different types of data transfers being made from one device to another? And how to you ensure that they happen as quickly as possible? And most importantly, how do you ensure that they happen securely? Those are the things that RFinity is thinking about.
The company has just raised $4 million from Horizons Ventures in Hong Kong. And the space has gotten so red hot, in fact, that we hear they’re already out raising another round.
And it’s an easy bet for investors to make not only because of the space, but because of where the project originated: The U.S. Department of Energy. Specifically, RFinity was born when a bunch of infrastructure security experts working for the government were assigned to find all the vulnerabilities in cell phones. Through software they came up with, they were able to quite easily eavesdrop, manipulate SMS messages, and even compromise LAN security. Then they set out to figure out a way to stop people from doing those very things. That work led directly to RFinity.
Work originally began in the person-to-person and person-to-vendor sales space by way of mobile applications that route transactions through RFinity’s own secure servers. But now that NFC appears ready, RFinity is making sure they’re ready for it. The idea is that their technology could cut out the middle man here: themselves.
Obviously, the company isn’t going to share all the details on how they secure NFC transfers. But the basic overview is that they verify an incoming NFC signal and ask for a user’s permission before taking any action. Further, if the action is a transaction, it requires a PIN, just as you might do an ATM withdrawal. That’s all pretty standard. But the key is one-time-use transaction codes that RFinity creates on the fly along with complex cryptographic signatures. These ensure that an transaction is secure since it means that every transaction can only happen once. Even if those numbers were intercepted by a hacker, they would be useless beyond the one-time payment.
And even if your phone is lost or stolen, a thief couldn’t do anything without your PIN. And you can remotely shut down your NFC capabilities via RFinity. It’s enough to make me wish I could throw out all my credit cards right now. “Today’s identification and transaction systems are based on what? A magnetic strip on the back of a card, based on a 1950’s technology that relies on a base station to read the information embedded as a series of simple magnetic markers in plastic tape,” writes Josh Jones-Dilworth, who is working with the company to bring them to market.
Again, NFC as a technology is great and potentially game-changing. But the software is still needed to make it actually work. And some of the big guys began realizing that early on as companies like PayPal, Bank of America, and even Subway have been testing out different things with RFinity for some time. In fact, RFinity has actually been doing field tests of the software end of their technology since 2009 in places like Idaho, well before most people in the U.S. had ever thought about NFC.
But now people are starting to care. And soon, they could be caring a lot more. NFC is already built-in to Google’s new Nexus S device — and the company has put out a call for developers to start using the tech. Rumors have the next iteration of the iPhone gaining the technology as well. In other words, I suspect we may be seeing acquisition rumors starting to fly around RFinity in about six months or so. Provided their technology proves up to the NFC challenge, of course.
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