DAMAGE

This is a pretty unfocused bout of blogging that would be better off on Tumblr, but it can stay on WordPress for the time being. I wasn’t aware of the ads above and below — 1984’s duck camo Chuck Taylors from an Olympic year when a pattern on an All Star got its own advertisement and the 1971 ad for their camo duck hunting parka (I never knew they made hunting gear), complete with some J Peterman style writing (“Your quarry’s doomed. You see it, but it won’t see much of you”) from a time when camo was for hunters, soldiers and crazed loners rather than aspiring blog-dandies.

Just when you worry that graffiti has become a carefully placed bunch of stencils depicting David Cameron bumming Bin Laden or something or a hapless Coca-Cola mural for the Olympics, it’s refreshing to see a different kind of Olympic runner out there competing in the 91 mile Bedford-Brighton race. I haven’t seen this much damage on trains stopping in my town and I’m assuming that it’s a mission to get some extra fame while First Capital Connect (or Thameslink to people that still call Snickers bars “Marathons”) is full of imbeciles with picnic bags, dithering at the ticket barriers and clogging the left side of escalators across London. Salutes to SLANG and company for their work and the KCRUSH tributes. I haven’t seen a train like this in a few years, but then again, I don’t get out much.

Greece’s Giorgos Lanthimos makes gloriously odd films with amazing posters. ‘Dogtooth’s was a masterpiece and ‘Alps’s eccentric look at the grieving process has an equally beautiful promotional design too.

The Trilogy Tapes keeps on bringing it — the R Kelly Devo design by Nick Relph for Hot Chip they sold last year was one of the best t-shirts ever, they recently linked to a Gherkin Records t-shirt — a superior piece of house-related merchandise — and the ‘2012’ design they just upped on the blog looks good too. Still willfully obtuse in their taped output, Will Bankhead is a don.

Like some curious crossover of the kind of thing I up here and something a lot more professional, my friends at Nike Basketball and Nike Sportswear let me work with them (salutes to Leo, Nate and Chad) to amass some content to celebrate the last 20 years of shoe designs. I think there seems to be a hunger for content that might have been confined to a handful of nerds (like me) a few years ago these days — possibly down to a volume of content aggregation/unnecessary middleman sites. So far there’s been Force 180 Lows, Huarache Flights and Raids. Raids are a shoe dear to my heart and the shoe originally known as the Air Jack was accompanied by some amazing 1991 questionnaires with inner city kids (“FAVOURITE GROUP: BRAND NUBIAN”) and the original VHS pitch tape somewhere. For the oddballs who stress out over these things, there’s no Jordans in the official top 20 because they’re a brand of their own nowadays and suddenly stopping including them post-1998 would be odd. Check them out here. Wilson Smith, Tinker Hatfield, Aaron Cooper, Mark Smith, Tracy Teague and Eric Avar had stories for days.

DEADLY DADWEAR

Sorry for the belated blog update. Blame MMG and their pointless press conference for the hold up. I got distracted, but Omarion? That was the most pointless gathering since a group of people revealed that there was football in the Olympics the other week. Neither the former B2K or a poor-man’s Euro 2012 were worth more than a poorly worded Tweet. Me? I’m more interested in Woolrich’s Elite line and its Concealed Carry products, as analysed in this New York Times piece. Visually, as deadly and deliberately beautiful objects (look at the sheer level of gun fetishism on Tumblr for proof), guns are appealing — but that’s written from a country where they’re hardly commonplace, despite media hyperbole. It’s a privileged position. The reality is that the George Zimmermans of this world are based in states like Virginia, where a person can legally carry a concealed firearm.

Still, that doesn’t stop the Woolrich Elite brand being fascinating and if you’re wowed by camo and mil-spec this stuff shares that obsessive functionality. There’s a kind of everyman tech to their output — the quality of Woolrich product is without question, but there’s a sense that the kind of characters who make socks a focal point and carry shopping bags have emasculated manly staples like buffalo checks and the neutral ease of the chino. The solution? Give them swift deployment properties for firearms. If Woolrich Woolen Mills opted for Ted Nugent over Mark McNairy, this would probably be the outcome. The ads (see above) at least hint at heritage, but feature plenty of guns and a sense of impending action. Each Elite piece is the kind of thing you might see twinned with a size 12 white and navy New Balance tennis shoe on an internal flight Stateside, bur somebody’s really put the thought into each design to make them potentially lethal.

A nondescript-looking navy chino has a dual-chambered structured set of pockets, with a zippered, ripstop gun pocket — it’s like a deadly spin on dad wear. A twill jacket has elasticated loops, hidden pockets near the neck can hold plastic cuffs and there’s left and right inner pockets that conceal a big blue prop gun (see the videos below) pretty discreetly. Shirts with magnetic fake buttons rip-away side panels and concealed cartridge holders behind chest pockets indicate extensive thought behind each piece. Even if you’re unlikely to ever let off a shot, there’s proof here that you don’t need to dress like some kind of lithe moon man in space age garments to sport innovation. Remember the days when the style press would feature a jacket with built in Minidisc that cost a bomb and bricked commercially? There’s some of that in these more homely looking innovations — rustic stealth.







The opposite of anything rustic, these Olympic-themed Air Max 2012s are more interesting to me than the games themselves. Obnoxious in the extreme, the 360 on those soles is Antonio Fargas ‘I’m Gonna Git You Sucka’ fish tank status and the yellow should tip things over the edge enough to instigate a few “clown shoe” allegations, but those overlays are crazy. Carnival footwear contenders. The 2009 is the best recent Air Max, but these are insane enough to bring back the rich tradition of the crazy TNs from around the time of the Sydney festivities. Like those Woolrich gun garments, these are significantly more exciting than the prospect of Olympic football.

Shouts to the ever-reliable Our Legacy on channeling the sprit of two-tone outerwear and old ladies’ animal fleeces for the Serengeti Artisan Jacket design in the Splash collection. There’s been jungle prints this season, but to create a pattern out the jungle’s denizens is always entertaining. Givenchy seemed to fuse the power of lurid MMA affiliated clothing with the kind of canine-based gear that usually shifts on QVC to winning effect and triumphed. This goes even further and is the kind of thing that my inner-idiot would gladly be buried in.