COLLECTIONS

People still get injured over sports footwear and it’s a baffling thing. As somebody who kind of works in footwear retail, to see rows of tents outside stores is a shock…after all, everybody was in Tricker’s about seven minutes ago, and it’s doubly odd to hear that “sneakers are dead” from people who might want to look out the window once in a while. Tents, riots, newspaper headlines…probably not the sign that anything’s on the wane. And the reseller’s the bogeyman again like he was with Dunks circa 2004. In caveman times those who missed out on getting sticks after the fire hype went viral on cave walls, because of their inter-tribe popularity probably declared fire to be “over” or the stick game to be “played out.” If you want to sleep rough for a few days to get something, do your thing and stay safe — I salute that level of dedication. I hope the contents of the box lives up to those sleep deprived expectations.

But people assaulting or killing for footwear might not be anything new — in fact it’s the darkest retro of our ’90’s preoccupation — but imagine spending decades behind bars over shoes. There must still be folks in jail who murdered kids over 8-ball jacket envy in 1990 — it must be odd to tell a new cellmate that. It’s hardly a crime of passion, rather a crime of fly-by-night fashion. And when the 8-ball killer is released in 2015, with a Mystikal-like lack of internet knowledge, it might be an ‘I’m Gonna Git You Sucka’ Antonio Fargas moment, or, at the current trajectory, as he emerges in his Starter hat, Champion sweat and Air Flights, the killer emerges penitentiary “on trend” looking like he’s a kid with a premature ageing condition. People need trend forecasting before they kill for clothing.

However, if I did have to slay another human being for a jacket, it would probably be for something akin to a Ten C one. On first electronic impressions it’s all drab olives, but having seen Mr. Gary Aspden’s Ten C coat in the flesh and felt the Japanese-made mix of 60% polyester and 40% nylon mix that makes up the shell and is clearly built to last, I was sold. One for the wishlist and a good compromise between innovation and stuck-in-the-mud icons from former Stoners Paul Harvey and Alessandro Pungetti. Shouts to Gary for the intro to that line. Anything built to last a lifetime is still going to end up accompanied by 100+ more pieces that are “the only” ones you’ll ever need, leaving you with a wardrobe of expensive immortals. The website (www.ten-c.it) copy doesn’t match the garment quality, but each piece of Harvey’s audio introduction to them is well worth paying attention to.

On that subject, what became of the Paul Harvey archive? Tantalising images of a progressive pile of technical jackets, shoes and fabrics went online in 2008 so I assume the warehouse’s contents went to a good home. You can’t tell Paul anything about fabrics, fit or construction, so that he stripped it down to necessities for the new project is interesting — superfluous aspects can be a life or death issue in military gear, so the lack of becomes an innovation in itself. On the Stone Island subject, the 30th anniversary book of jacket porn that was hinted at in the new year is apparently only available as part of a package with a 30th anniversary jacket reproduction according to Stone Island’s replies beneath a YouTube video of Carlo Rivetti talking outerwear from last month.

Paul Harvey’s archive was considerable, but there’s other admirable feats of information fanaticism out there too — few can collect like James Hyman has done. As a print disciple myself who has had to bounce back from multiple parental paper culls to start from scratch, bar the stray back issues that evaded the recycle bin, to see James’ collection on his blog a few years back was mind-boggling. ‘Vanity Fair,’ ‘Select,’ ‘The Face,’ rap ‘zines I’d never spotted in Tower, ‘Playboy,’ ‘Loaded’ (when it was good) and lots of ‘NME’s is my idea of a pulped tree paradise. It looked like a walk-in Google. Now he’s made it a “proper” archive and it looks spectacular. I guarantee that a fair proportion of what he has amassed has never been online. With stacks of magazines from a time when journalism had an earnestness that paid dividends, the ’80’s ‘NME’ pile is of particular interest to me and his unpolished phone video footage on YouTube extolling the cover-to-cover power of the era’s music journalism is infectious. Very, very infectious.



You want to see another collection? Check out the vintage Stussy on the newly revamped Hideout site’s blog, taken from the collection of Keith Wainwright. If you’d owned that leather in its day, a certain subsection of young males would have pretty much worshipped you as a god.

Marc Singer will always be a hero for that starring role in Don Coscarelli’s ‘The Beastmaster’ and its ‘Style Wars’ connection, but for playing Donovan in the mini-series ‘V’ and the subsequent series, he gets props (the incredible end theme to the miniseries was composed by Barry De Vorzon who composed the opening theme to ‘The Warriors’ and ‘Theme From S.W.A.T.’), but for wearing Nike Lava Domes with some serious regularity, Singer is pretty much immortal to me.