As the Fall lookbooks begin to flood the blahgs, there have been a few that really standout. Two being cousin lines SOPHNET. and uniform experiment. SOPH may have gone a little heavy on the camo but there are some really great items and looks in the collection. I particularly like the rich mix of earthy tones and navy blues - those tones paired with the camo and plaids make for some great color and texture mixing.
And if the SOPHNET. collection is a guy’s weekend look then uniform experiment is surely his weekday source. U.E. has a definitively slick maritime aesthetic but it seems perfect for ‘city living’. It has a much stricter palette then SOPH - sticking more sternly with deep navy blues, black, and khaki - giving the line a clean and polished feel. Either way I don’t think you could go wrong mixing elements of both these collections this Fall.
“vobios asked: How do you take care of a suit when traveling? What’s the best way to pack it and not end up with a wrinkled mess? How do you keep it looking decent while on the road?
Reach through one of the sleeves, and pull it inside out. Tuck one shoulder into the other, so that the lining is on the outside, then fold in half lengthwise. Place your trousers flat on the bottom of your bag, with the ends flopping over the outside. Put your jacket, folded in quarters with the lining out, on top of the pants. Fold the top and bottom of the pants over the jacket.
Then, when you get to your destination, hang everything immediately.
This should be good enough for most trips. If you’re traveling for a long time, and are disinclined to use a laundry, consider bringing a portable steamer with you. I haven’t found this to be necessary, myself.”
“Sir Lucious Left Foot…The Son of Chico Dusty” is probably the first hip-hop album I’m really looking forward to in a long time. Sasha Frere-Jones did a nice write-up on the album for The New Yorker. Now if we could only get pre-2001 André 3000 back.
Don’t know much about these guys, but they are making short runs of hats manufacturing out of LA - they have the videos to prove it. Big surprise I’m feeling the floral print cap. Discovered on Hypebeast.
I’m sure J.Crew’s designers stood up and looked hard at this lookbook - get ready to see some of these looks at your local mall next year (I don’t mean that as a knock). Man, I miss Silas - those of you that live outside of Japan no what I mean.
The real star of the Stussy Deluxe x Reyn Spooner collab - the bandanna/pocket square. Not sure if I missed out on this already at the Stussy store, but will pick it up given the chance.
Last week the Supreme Court ruled five to four that “suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations,” according to the Associated Press. In other words, you do have the right to remain silent and to a lawyer, but only if you know any better and remember to announce your silence aloud. But maybe you haven’t heard that yet another of your civil liberties has been stripped away from you. Because after all this has gone virtually unreported by the “news”.
New Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor disagreed with the absurdity of the ruling, noting in her dissent, “Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent—which counterintuitively, requires them to speak.”
Sadly, according to The Los Angeles Times, the “ruling is in line with the position taken by the Obama administration and Supreme Court nominee U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan. In December, she filed a brief on the side of Michigan prosecutors and argued that ‘the government need not prove that a suspect expressly waived his rights.’”
It makes you wonder about Obama a bit, or maybe the presidency in general. Maybe in today’s world the personality behind the desk isn’t as important anymore. You definitely got a sense there was difference between the motivations and philosophies of the Bush and Clinton administrations, but other than the lack of born-again Christian crusading fervor that drove the Bush administration there hasn’t been much change on the civil liberties front.
I have to apologize for the sloooow pace of content on NewDandyism over the last week. I’ve been doing laps around China while Ninski shipped off to his homeland to see the F1 Grand Prix du Canada.
I have to tell you that I’m a bit exhausted. Here’s the list of my travels for the last week… NYC, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and know I’m getting set to go back down to Dongguan again.
There has been a noticeable lack of men’s style content on the site lately and that has to do with the fact that we are feeling a bit uninspired at the moment. I was hoping this trip would spark some excitement in me but it just hasn’t. I want to be surprised and I’m finding more and more there are no surprises. Hopefully it is just an issue of the moment and things will turn around.
Fortunately for Ninski, he was infinitely inspired by his trip to Montreal and I know he will share some thoughts with you on his experience at F1.
A magazine I always heard about but could never find much info on over the years, particularly when it comes to imagery of it’s covers and pages, is Ramparts. I admired it mostly based on its legend rather than any actual first-hand knowledge.
It was revolutionary magazine that lived from 1964-1970 and was deeply committed to the civil rights and antiwar movements, its contributors included Noam Chomsky, César Chávez, Seymour Hersh, Angela Davis, Christopher Hitchens, and Susan Sontag. It was in its pages that Che Guevara’s diaries and the prison diaries of Eldridge Cleaver (which became Soul on Ice) first appeared. It also takes claim many other firsts: it published the first conspiracy theory about JFK’s assassination, it was the first to reveal that the CIA had backed the National Student Association during the Cold War, and its article about the use of napalm on Vietnamese children (another first) caused Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out against the war for the first time.
Ramparts left an important journalistic legacy, but it also visually changed the image of what political magazines could be by being neither stodgy like its East Coast counterparts or gritty like its underground ones. Ramparts combined big stories on serious topics with a kind of whimsy or irony that audiences found compelling. And the magazine was visually cleaner and more sophisticated than other magazines of the era, using Times Roman exclusively for every bit of text from cover to cover.
Here are selection of some of the magazines most notable covers.
I’m not saying the show is bad, but wow, just wish it felt more authentic I guess. And Bryan Greenberg is a bigger herb than growing older has made me.
Watching this reminds me of how I felt when I watched Breakin’ as a little b-boy. The initial excitement of seeing something I loved so much was short-lived when the actual content revealed itself just to be a vehicle of exploitation. And that was obvious to the 6 year old me.
Chris Ware truly is a genius cartoonist/illustrator/social commentator. Ninski’s post last week about Ware’s rejected Fortune magazine cover reminded me of his string of stellar covers for the New Yorker.
I immediately thought of Chris Ware’s Halloween cover for the New Yorker you see here above - the children’s faces draped with masks, the parents faces draped with the light of their hand-helds. They’re so ‘connected’ their lives are simply passing them by. The message - pull your head out of your ass, er, gadget, and live. On your death bed you’ll regret not living more in the moment, not that you didn’t Tweet that you were ’sooo craving a cheeseburger’ more often.
The weather is beautiful in NYC today - I’m going outside.
There are few movies I have anticipated as much as Tamra Davis’ Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. Yet another screening was held at the MOMA NY last week which has created another wave of buzz and the release of a mini trailer by Nowness.com.
I remember the first time I saw a portion of Tamra Davis’ interviews at the MOCA Los Angeles back in 2005 where there was a touring exhibition of a retrospective of JMB’s work. On the opening night of the exhibition I was there to celebrate the launch of a Basquiat collab project I did for a certain lifestyle brand and to see the show for the first time. As a part of the show there was a short 20 minute film of an interview by Davis. The footage shows a young Basquiat speaking about his works and his life, and is one of the few instances the artist was on film. It was an amazing tease and left you wanting more. And, now we finally do get much more.
The film releases at the Film Forum in New York on July 21st, and will be shown through August 3rd. After which I am sure it will be more available.
As a part of the buzz of the film, Nowness also asked “Style Guy”, Glenn O’Brien, to explain why his good friend was not only a groundbreaking artist but should also be looked at as a style icon. There are a lot of great images of JMB, but the one that always gets me is the NYT Magazine cover photo pictured above (also the main collateral image used by the unmentioned lifestyle brand). If you told someone that photo was taken yesterday, not knowing who Basquiat was, they would wholeheartedly believe you. How many people can you say that about?
Stephen Bayley, an outspoken opponent of outsourced skill and manufacturing, has a lot to say about China being the largest exporter in the world and countries eliminating their ability to make even the simplest of things.
Anything that is made betrays the beliefs and preoccupations, the morals and manners, of the people who made it. So it’s been melancholy these past 30 or 40 years to note that Britain has successively, even systematically, abandoned key industrial technologies.
If the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, in his imminent Radio 4 series on the importance of products in civilisation, were to restrict his field to the UK since 1980, it would be a very strange and very short series of products he showed us: a hand-made Formula One car with a German engine, a Sunseeker yacht and a high by-pass turbo-fan. I’d need more time to think of anything else.
So while cautiously optimistic Business Page stories about a return of outsourced manufacturing have not (yet) caused outbreaks of mass national hysteria, they are welcome evidence of a change in mood and priorities. It would be nice to live in a country where we could make buckets. Certainly, reports of the death of manufacturing were not much exaggerated. It remains to be seen if it is as feasible as it is desirable to recover lost skills and actually manufacture the goods we want to consume.
Still, the change of mood is everywhere. The next book by economist John Kay is called Obliquity and it makes the case that commitment to products is the true source of wealth. Boeing, for example, became a great company not because it was pledged to a high rate of annual return, but because it was committed to making the best possible aircraft. This is certainly true, but, alas, economists much less able than Kay have burnt our ears off for half a century arguing all too successfully against the long-term investments in R&D that made the awesome 787 possible. And how we suffer for this false witness.
No one expects any sentimental return to the production of greasy, heavy things in soot-stained factories operated by sweating, under-paid artisans in leather aprons. (They have those in Asia.) This would be as absurdly anachronistic as William Morris addressing contemporary Victorian malaises encouraging the dressing-up in tabards and performing of medieval masques.
There are cleaner sorts of manufacturing today, but they bring similar benefits to those enjoyed when steam and coal and iron and enterprise made us rich. Manufacturing puts a company or a country in a virtuous circle: Toyota’s century and a half experience of making textile looms has made it a leader in carbon-fibre weaving, an important future skill. Italy makes great modern furniture not because of Milan’s great designers, but because of Milan’s metal-bending workshops where the great designers can get their ideas processed.
The trade benefits of manufacturing don’t require much emphasis in a country where we are all dragging around more than five times our own weight in mood-altering deficit, but there are even more important occult advantages. If you make things, you need to understand ideas, materials, markets, skills. If you make money, you just need the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master. And when you make things, you restore that essential practical and moral connection between effort and reward. Of course, this was a connection carelessly lost when we wanted the economy run like a casino rather than a workshop.
This was all beautifully explained in a regrettably obscure 1944 pamphlet by W. Julian King, a Californian engineer. King’s Unwritten Laws of Engineering was recently reissued by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, but should be made a part of the national curriculum and, if there is still time, incorporated into any electable government’s manifesto.
The Unwritten Laws are not about physics, but behaviour. As opposed to the insolent selfishness of the usurer or the recklessness of the gambler, manufacturing requires social cohesion, personal responsibility, teamwork, commitment and vision. It needs clarity and accuracy, not obfuscation and dissimulation. Long wave integrity is more valuable than short wave greed. The manufacturing process demands that individuals be decisive and share information. And this process is on an orderly progressive scale that positively stimulates personal human development: you start with an idea, it becomes a more elaborate specification that is in turn mass-produced, distributed, consumed, recycled. At each stage, additional cumulative skills are required and generated. And, as King explains, this process teaches it’s better to do a modest job well than an ambitious one badly.
Somehow, that last sentence makes me think of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Here was a decrepit monument to the godless and fractious manipulation of money, not the more humane and enduring task of making goods. And how might the disreputable behaviour of the bankers have been improved had they been required to understand that the laws of nature require deposit and withdrawal to be in some sort of hygienic balance? Something for nothing is fraudulent.
Yet, amazingly, you can hear Gordon — Safe Hands — Brown say that manufacturing is an irrelevance, that we can be sustained by our “creative economy”. Never mind the sinister semantic links between creative economy and creative accounting, this is a ruinously stupid opinion. The creative “industries” we so rightly admire cannot exist in isolation. They were in the first place stimulated by their relationship to manufacturing and can only be kept viable by continuous contact with the facts of industrial life.
To listen to the Prime Minister on manufacturing is as dismaying as hearing pot-bellied, lardy pub bores talking of footballers’ performance when they would rupture their colons jogging to the gents. Manufacturing, Mr Brown, calibrates the moral compass. People who make real things not only make real money, they behave better. The day I am writing this, China became the world’s biggest exporter.
It does not matter whether you call it engineering, technology, design, craft or even art. Whatever it is called, a system that gives priority to an engagement with products over a lust for quick returns is a more stable and wholesome one than a system where derivatives are a more reliable source of wealth than making a teapot.
And it is, ultimately, a system more likely in the long run to make profits. Yes, I know Keynes said that in the long run we are all dead, but I don’t want to end up in a Chinese coffin.
As I first began to watch this web series, Dirty Denim, on SundanceChannel.com I was immediately turned off by how huge douche bags Chip and Pepper of Chip & Pepper jeans were. But as a designer and someone who deals with manufacturing and finishing I kept watching out of curiosity of the LA denim business - and I’m glad I kept watching.
I think there is an amazing lesson to be learned from watching. The Naughties denim craze has many parallels with the current work wear craze we are seeing today. There is a lot of money being made off this trend, and yes it is a trend for most, at the moment and I think it’s only going to get bigger over the next year or so. But when it crashes, it will crash hard. It will be interesting to see who will be left standing as the masses move on to what’s next.
As we saw from former Obedient Sons creator Swaim Hutson’s quick additions to Generra’s Spring collection, color was going to be important to what he wanted to bring to the new, for him, label. When I got a chance to chat with Swaim this week he confirmed that notion saying “We went in to Fall 2010 with the idea that we would inject as much color, keeping things as open, loose and casual as possible.”
I got the sense from watching his first full collection walk down the runway that it was a softer more relaxed extension of what Swaim did with his Hutson label just after Obedient Sons was dissolved. But Swaim didn’t necessarily agree saying that any similarities were “not intentional. If anything perhaps it is just a carry over of our aesthetic. Obedient Sons was much more tailored and stiff than anything we have done for Generra. For this collection we went for a more casual boxy fit and used snap closures to keep things modern.”
I really feel there is a rejuvenation going on at Generra and that Swaim has brought in some vision and freshness to what has been a label lost in the shuffle. What has always been described as a basics-centric line now has some oomph and pop. And it also helps that their new website plays Sleigh Bells on loop.
One of my favorite looks from the show was also made up of some of my favorite pieces as well. I love the grey moto/bomber cut jacket made in a textured nubby wool with a removable faux fur collar. The collar and lining give the jacket a striking pop of color and a point of difference. And the pants - I would buy these today if I could - made of a light wool with a subtle polka dot.
Continuing with the Generra basics heritage all the crewneck sweatshirts are made of cotton terry sweatshirt but Swaim dresses it up a bit by throwing a sturdy wool jacket over it.
The materials and color mix between the open-neck button down shirt, again with a polka dot, and the jacket, cut from a heavy jersey wool, are a very nice combo.
Wood Wood and I sort of came to age together. As I grew out of my streetwear training wheels and starting dressing more like a grown man the label was kind of doing the same thing. That’s not to say they have completely grown-up, but it has matured and broadened it’s scope over the last 4 years. But at the core there are always the staple elements you can expect - structured shirting, drapey layers mixed with fitted pieces, some key graphic images, and always a bit whimsical.
