MENSWEAR

I made it. I’m officially a menswear blog. Shouts to Complex for spotlighting my nonsense though. It’s a highlight of this week, like finding out that Michael Cimino came up with the story for Heaven’s Gate while, “…researching the history of barbed wire in the West” (cattle barons used barbed wire to block off grazing land, but settlers cut it in retaliation), or R Kelly’s ‘Soulacoaster’ revealing that Kells watches ‘Avatar’ frequently (Aziz Ansari wasn’t too far off the mark), hits up McDonald’s for a coffee with 6-sugars when he’s feeling sad and had rose petals dropped from a helicopter as a romantic gesture (in fact, the WSHH of Kelly singing an unruly member out the crowd is proof that he may be the most interesting person to walk the earth).

It’s easy to sit from a distance and fetishise the gun posing and scowls of LA gang photography, but hard living makes for great portraits. While all eyes were on South Central, the ‘Rolling Stone’ piece on V-13 in Venice Beach’s Oakwood area from early 1988 (‘Death in Venice’) had some of the best photography I’d ever seen back when I was 10 years old. To accompany the story by Mike Sager (one of the greatest journalists ever), Merrick Morton’s black and white snapshots looked like the coolest thing ever — needles, hand ink (back when tattoos on your hand were a sign you probably weren’t to be messed with, unlike hand tattoos in 2012, which are pretty fucking menswear) and weapons. 24 years later, they seem futile and grim, underpinned by the assumption that everyone in them’s probably dead by now. This was reality, but Merrick Morton also acted as a still photographer for ‘Colors’ and ‘Blood In, Blood Out.’ Everyone loves the fancy cars, the fully buttoned Pendletons, the hand gestures and the locs, but take them to the barrio and they’d stain their Dickies. Strange to think how gentrified the area got in the decades that followed, even though gangs remained operational.

‘Pretty Sweet’s Gino quotient, all the Supreme AF1 hype this year and Julien at Nike reminded me of the perfect supplement to the skating in Timberland piece I upped here a few years ago. Skating in wheat workboots is defiantly anti-boardfeel, but Gino Iannucci rocking canvas AF1 Mids in his 1996 ‘Big Brother’ interview (around the time ‘Trilogy’ was released) photos is classic. I actually meant to make this a whole blog entry about skating in Uptowns, but I stumbled and flopped. I still love the quintessentially east coast act of deliberately handicapping yourself in an act of one-upmanship to prove you can.

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.