My granddad used to look after his garden. He also used to dress up to tend it (I’m sure I’ve mentioned his gardening tie here before) so it seems right to put on a suit to work — I favour a complete sweatsuit for any freelance duties. It’s getting to the point where I feel I can cure writer’s block with fleece. I’ve worked on a few projects lately and as a result, I’ve got sweatsuits on the mind. After the shellsuit and Fuct yard suit talk on here during the last week, it makes sense to keep talking neck-to-ankle sportswear. I was a little confused by the Tenderloin split and who still works with whom and who’s at TIMEWORN ATLAST&CO, but as I understand, Toru Nishiura still holds down Tenderloin while Kei Hemmi is at TIMEWORN.
The recent Tenderloin range preview in SENSE contained the usual leather jackets and horse hide accessories that I can only gaze at after running the Yen/Pound price through xe.com (and that’s before postage, taxes and the outright theft of Royal Mail’s “handling charge”). I also know that I lack the beard and neck tattoos to pull off the Suede Hunting Vest. The scale of this line is always staggering and last season’s dressing gown is complemented in the casual stakes by this season’s Sweat Suit and Sweat Pant combos in green, navy or brown marl, with draw string, contrast waist and cuffs. The whole T-Sweat collection is always solid, even though I have yet to meet anyone who rocks this stuff over the revivalist denim stiffness, petrol station swagger and checks. A £385 Japanese-made romper suit? I’m in.
Shouts to the excellent Nagoya Yom for scanning those pages. I’m always fascinated at the grand scale of Japanese brands every season — especially when brands that barely exit their motherland have catalogues this dense with premium materials, basics and patterned garments. Nobody seems to do anything by half. no matter how many personnel changes Tenderloin experiences, I’ll always ride for it because it reminds me of Bond International’s final years on Newburgh Street and a time when Soho was scattered with retail refuges to avoid being in the office. Like Costanza in velvet (and contrary to Seinfeld’s dismissal of sweatpants as an act of resignation), I would happily drape myself in loopback cotton. It’s not an act of self-defeat — it’s a statement of excellence and a minimum of fucks given.
On the Tenderloin topic, how long before everyone’s dressing like an old world train driver again? You know something you liked is in tailspin when somebody writes a price guide on it. Jordan mania has even shoes that we Brits have traditionally never cared much for selling quickly (XIIIs used to hang around for a long, long time). Any market that’s filled with half-baked speculators is destined to implode soon and The Air Jordan Price Guide 2013 actually exists. I thought the Rareairshoes Sneaker Freaker guide would lead to entire books of shoe prices, but it never seemed to happen (a lot of hype goods became worthless in the years that followed). I don’t hate resellers (they’re marginally less annoying than “sneakerheads”), but when athletic footwear is treated like Pogs or Pokemon and becomes the subject of conventions, you know something’s going to give soon.
Idea Books’ recent talk of the ‘Impresario: Malcolm McLaren and the British New Wave’ exhibition at the New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in winter 1988 is a good time to look at imagery of the Malcolm McLaren show in the NMOCA Digital Archive. Always the master re-appropriator, whatever your opinion of Malcolm, he almost certainly brought something amazing to your life in one way or the other. Whether the artists got paid properly is another thing. That his create-a-craze vision and Vivienne Westwood’s Buffalo Girls and Nostalgia of Mud collections brought Peruvian Indian and b-boy style together is something remarkable. He might have been a sub-cultural magpie but at least he took plenty of risks along the way and seemed willing to occasionally make himself look like a tit whenever it was required. By the end of the 1980s, everybody seemed to be robbing everybody — Malcolm took inspiration from NYC’s ball culture after seeing Paris is Burning and barely paid some vocalists before Madonna took the sound and made it go global. Surely Takahiro Miyashita’s Soloist vision owes a fair bit to the future hobo of Westwood’s Blade Runner backdropped and Duck Rock soundtracked Punkature show from 1982?
GWARIZM 
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