Posted on May 12th, 2008
by
Kay
The Square Mile is a deeply conservative place. Black or navy suits, chalk stripes and oxford knot ties abound – a charcoal grey suit will raise eyebrows here, and sock choice is generally limited to boring black and normal navy (even if they are a silk cashmere mix that costs more than the average person’s mortgage a pair!). Hooray Henrys were considered a monstrous development by the rest of the finance world, and while their manners were technicolour, their dress sense never went wilder then red braces, giving some idea just how tightly reined in the business community can be. But recession can drive some unexpected changes, even in the stuffy City. And this year, the couturiers have the City in their sights.
Yes, it’s raised hemline time – usually a sign of economic boom, while long skirts denote recession, but its not the ladies who are wearing the shorts – nope, it’s the men! In 1961, Hardy Amies produced the first shorts suit for men, after a holiday in Australia. Did it catch on? No, not exactly.
But this year, designers from Balenciaga to Thom Browne are all reviving the idea, and the Hardy Amies house is honouring its deceased founder by putting out a 2008 version.
Shorts suit courtesy Balenciaga
May 12th, 2008
Posted on May 8th, 2008
by
Kay
Canadian politicians are fuming – they’ve discovered that Canada’s Olympic uniforms are being made in China! But Tu Ly, one of the designers who created them, is unapologetic about the situation. In an interview he made a robust defence of the decision to manufacture in China, ‘I would like to challenge these politicians to give up their cell phones made in China or their TVs, then maybe they’d really be on an even plane,’ he said. Ly added that his company has a code of vendor conduct to ensure its suppliers operate under fair working law and respect the environment.
But New Democrat MP Paul Dewar isn’t happy. ‘This is our Olympic team. We should be ensuring that all of our Olympic athletes are … wearing Canadian-made textiles and all of their uniforms should be made in Canada.’ The decision has sparked such controversy because the Canadian clothing manufacture market is in something of a decline at present.
The Hudson Bay Company, for whom Ly works, said that Asia is the only readily-available source for the specialist fabrics featured in the eco-friendly designs, which are specifically mandated to help athletes cope with Beijing’s heat and humidity. These innovative fabrics include bamboo, cocona and organic cotton. But the line of Olympic Supporters apparel is being made in China too, and that may be a more difficult case to fight, as souvenir buyers probably won’t be travelling to China!
For the last summer Olympics, Roots Canada made the athletes’ uniforms at home and outfitted Canada’s Olympic teams for every Olympics from 1998 to 2004.
Canadian Olympic team modelling their uniforms courtesy of JP Moculski, The Canadian Press
May 8th, 2008
Posted on May 5th, 2008
by
Kay
Well, to start with, sportswear should not be designed by a committee! But after the last Olympics, when a fuss was kicked up about the Kiwi Olympic team being kitted out by a non-NZ manufacturer, this time around things have changed – but has it been for the better? The New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC) and clothing consortium DesignTex got together in a partnership to produce uniforms for the opening ceremony as well as non-competition wear. The uniform, designed by this hybrid company, which is called Kapinua, includes a track suit, short and long sleeved T-shirts, casual shorts, a polo-shirt, a blazer with either trousers or a skirt, sports tops, cap and sports socks … and Crocs! Yes, black, clog-like footwear will feature in the NZ team suitcases. So they are going to look like those wallies one sees scuffing their way along the High Street with their little bags of Sunday morning recycling, aren’t they?
But it does get worse. While their T-shirts and polo-shirts are made from high-performance micro-fibre, which is designed to manage moisture, and New Zealand merino wool has been used in some garments, they made the classic mistake of including three Chinese characters on the clothing which, they say, mean New Zealand. Do they really? Does nobody learn anything from experience? Didn’t David Beckham once have a tattoo that he thought said Victoria in Hindi but actually reads Vichtoria? And I wonder what the ‘three characters’ actually say – possibly it reads ‘they didn’t pay me enough to translate this properly’!
Sportswear should be designed by sports designers, not committees, and while NZ should be applauded by wanting to make their clothing at home, they may regret not having hired a top class designer to give their team some confidence.
Kapinua polo-shirt courtesy of Kapinua
May 5th, 2008
Posted on May 1st, 2008
by
Kay
Internet shopping has always suited men: it’s solitary, it involves technology, you can do it with food, drink or a cigarette in your hand and you don’t have to hang around outside waiting rooms while your girlfriend fights her way into something she’s going to ask your opinion on. And this happiness to shop from a computer has led to men outshopping women online for the first time, in the first quarter of 2008.
Internet clothing sales are booming: 36% of consumers who have internet access purchased clothes, footwear or accessories online in the last quarter of 2007, almost double the figure two years ago – making fashion second only to books as the most popular internet purchase. Shopping online works for men, because they get to play with technology: mouse and screen etc, and can do price comparison processes which are a large part of any male purchase. It’s only good, in the male mind, if you pay the most, or the least, for something, and never good if you actually have to traipse around the shops to find the cheapest!
Also, as every fashion-conscious wife knows, once a man finds a clothing item he really likes, he will tend to buy it over and over again and the internet is the perfect tool for that – he knows the size, he knows the colour and he knows he wants it delivered so there’s nothing left to do but click the mouse! But where is the new growth in garment retailing online coming from? Well, it’s the men who are interested in fashion, or at least in looking good, but who don’t live in a major city. Designer brands, unusual sizes and personalised clothing like monograms or tailoring the cut have all made internet fashion into a great resource for men.
Male fashion courtesy of defrost.ca
May 1st, 2008
Posted on April 28th, 2008
by
Kay
Auctions come and auctions go, but this auction featured a polo shirt that has taken its former owner to the stars. Bidding for the pink polo shirt once owned by NASA astronaut Eileen Collins opened on 1 April at just $10. A week later and more than a day before its auction was set to close, collectors had pushed its price up to $300 and the final winning bid was $520.
“I can’t say it was easy for me to donate such an important part of my past,” Collins said. She wore the shirt while training for her four space shuttle missions and her career was a glittering one indeed. In 1995 she was the first female U.S. astronaut to pilot a spacecraft and just four years later, she was the first woman to command a space shuttle mission. Most recently, and humblingly, it was Collins who led the shuttle fleet’s 2005 return to flight after the loss of Columbia and its crew in 2003.
This shirt was important to her because Collins has only a few mementos from her time in space. “Astronauts can keep very little. [I have] only the personal items, such as my wedding ring, old toothbrushes, and some shirts!” she said. She donated the shirt, which is embroidered with her name and her astronaut class’ nickname, “The Hairballs,” on its front to be part of an annual auction run by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF). Founded by the Mercury astronauts in 1984, the ASF supports college students who are excelling in their pursuit of science and engineering degrees to give them the best chance of doing what Collins did – saying The Sky’s The Limit.
Polo-shirt image courtesy of austronaut scholarship foundation
April 28th, 2008
Posted on April 25th, 2008
by
Kay
Bruce Oldfield, the British fashion designer who is more accustomed to swathing Catherine Zeta Jones in stylish gowns, has launched his latest line - McDonald’s uniforms!
They appeared in the UK outlets (all 1,200 of them) this week and hare proving very popular with staff. The new clothes, which include a black suit for male managers, a ‘mocha’ skirt and blouse with airhostess-style scarf for female managers (we’ll see how well that fares when its been dipped in a few fryers!) and a polo shirt for the burger-flippers, had to be redesigned once because, apparently, the fabric used in the first set of apparel chafed the nipples of the McWorkers!
The driving forces behind the redesign seem to be two-fold, the company is trying to reframe its image so that increasingly health-conscious and style-aware consumers and older ones, who tend to leave the McLunch behind as they enter their thirties, can see their style reflected in the golden arches – in the UK this has included ripping out the plastic seats and putting in wifi, and adding deli sandwiches, reducing the amount of waste and litter that accompanies a McDonalds meal and putting more upmarket hot beverages to its menu. But the others side of the equation is a resurgent self-confidence in the company, which thinks that the recession could serve it well as people ‘trade down’ to cheaper meal options. McDonald’s first-quarter results on Tuesday revealed rising sales, albeit not in the United States, and confirmed the group’s relatively strong position, suggesting that McRebrand, at least in the UK, may indeed be helping revitalise the sixty-four year old company.
McDonald’s meal courtesy of Taekwonweirdo
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