How To Spend It

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Print subscribers to the Financial Times have long enjoyed an advantage over more casual Web readers, and that is access to the FT’s magazine, “How to Spend It.” The luxury lifestyle weekly caters to that rarefied tax bracket likely to spend some of it on the FT. Those of us who restricted ourselves to a mere ten free articles a month (with registration) had to come up with our own ways to spend it, though increasing health care costs have simplified those decisions somewhat.

But as of today, you can access “How to Spend It” on the ’s Web site from any side of the income gap, and the slick site is worthy of its demographic. Lush rotating photos of expensive stuff, convenient navigation features (including the search engine, “How to find it”) cohabitate with standby print-mag features, like ”Eclectibles: Desirable Acquirables” and the reliably droll “Wry Society.” Text and photos bob placidly in a sea of Javascript offset in tasteful gray. A video takes you behind the scenes of an underwater fashion photo-shoot. (The photographer was a little nervous about how designers would react to his “putting these incredibly expensive dresses underwater… they’re worth thousands of pounds.”)

Your correspondent continues to scour the rest of the FT for ideas on “how to get it.”

Kathy Gilsinan is the associate editor at World Politics Review