It was great to hear that Reading based Chateau Roux had got around to selling some hoodies, because it give me another chance to tell you what so many Farmers Associations in the UK have been telling us for years. Buy British.

CR create fantastic clothes, they have an attention to detail that is pretty much unmatched by any store reviewed. As a testament to this, when CR gave me a tee review, I gave it to my brother (because I’m ever so nice and he gets jealous of all the stuff I get in the mail…. and it didn’t fit me) and he’ll only wear it when he’s going somewhere posh.

The hoodies are no less special, when I was looking at the pics first time around I figured they were pretty standard, with CRs typical print style. But I later found out that each hoodie has been shot with a 12 bore shotgun. They claim this is “something not seen before in the industry”, and whilst I’ve never seen a hoodie or sweatshirt that’s been given the treatment that only a shotgun can provide, I certainly have seen it done to tees before. Dubious originality aside, its a pretty novel technique for giving a vintage look, and providing a used shotgun shell with every item certainly does add something to the already superb buying experience that CR provide.

Considering their tees are around the £40 mark, I was pleasantly surprised to see that hoodies were a very reasonable £60, with sweatshirts coming in slightly lower.

Chateau Roux

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I couldn’t really think of a clever title for this post, despite the scope that the term ‘naive’ gives me, and I was gonna drop the F-bomb but I don’t know whether I would be offending anyone (there’s an idea for an obscure poll!), so I just laid it out simply. The new releases from Naive are great.

The new stuff is very detailed, with lots of large artistic prints. There also seems to be some vintage Wild West flavour in many of the designs, or maybe I just think that because I’ve started watching Deadwood recently. It’s strong across the board, for both guys and girls, it’s quite a big departure from their old style, but I still like it and I can’t see their fanbase having too much of a problem with the changes.

One big change that I’m sure everyone will love is the new website. It looks great, the colour pallette reflects their new style (and is rather timely in its autmnal-ness), whilst still maintaining some of the visual flair which was exhibited in previous incarnations. Their store is now run by Downtown Rivals, a switch from their previous host, Merchline. Whilst I am a fan of the uncomplicated an intuitive system provided by Merchline I must say that Downtown Rivals are providing a very slick service, marrying functionality with style (and yes, it is quite web 2.0).

To fit in with the Naive ethos, they have changed to American Apparel tees and hoodies, and I know there are some people out there that will say that there are ethical reasons for not using AA, but in my opinion they’re doing a lot of good work, and their tees are pretty dang soft. Since we all know AA costs a bit more than your average tee it’s a real surprise to see that Naive have managed to keep their prices down, hoodies are $30 and tees are $15, you can even get some sale items for the wallet pleasing price $9.

Hopefully a little present from Naive will be arriving before Christmas and I’ll be able to give you a hands-on review.

Naive Clothing (or just go straight to the store)

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One of my frustrations with internet-based clothes shopping is that there isn’t a big site that rates and ranks stores, and I was going to make one myself until I realised I had no idea what I was doing (no, really, I even made a sub-domain for it), but then along comes Streetwear-websites to beat me to the punch. Here’s some background blurb and a short explanation of the site:

Streetwear-Websites.com is the big brother of Sneaker-websites.com and is out there to collect the best streetwear related websites and resources. If you really want to know what’s up and what’s online check streetwear-websites.com. We constantly add new sites if you have any suggestions just fill out the suggestion form and fire it up.

There’s a fairly sizeable amount of brands (and blogs) on there already, including many that have graced these hallowed pages. Whilst I know peoples’ views on streetwear is largely subjective and highly opinionated, I think that rating stores and blogs is quite a good idea, it lets consumers know what’s ‘good’ out there. Just so we’re clear, I am in no way asking you to go and rank me as a perfect 5, you could, but my ego can handle the truth, we all know this blog is a 4.95 at its very best!

You can also leave comments about each of the stores/blogs which could provide a valuable tool for people researching whether they can trust a brand, and what others think of the style.

You may well notice that Streetwear-websites very much has the look and feel of a blog, this is probably because it is running on Wordpress, I do wonder what this will mean for future expansion of the site since Wordpress is more blog software than CMS software. Apologies for such a tech-oriented sentence, I know it isn’t really HYAs domain to comment on software.

That small concern aside, I’m really glad that there is a site like SW out there, and I encourage you all to check it out and submit your details if you own a streetwear related site and haven’t got in on the action yet.

Streetwear-websites

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News you can use!

Oddica: I haven’t mentioned Oddica for a while, so you could say that I haven’t been ODing on ODdica (but that would be stupid). They’ve just had their biggest release of 2006 since their launch in May, including another great tee by Troy Paiva (the guy that takes electronics apart and gives you ‘exploded’ views of them). Oh, and they’ve got a sale on at the moment too.

False: I got an e-mail from Singapore based False saying “The new FALSE ish has dropped online.” Ish? Does that mean it’s kinda new, or that it’s kinda made by False? Anyway, it’s a fairly small collection that seems to be inspired by horror movies, and everything is black/white.

Resist Today (formerly Iron on Resistance): They’ve kept up their own ridiculously high standards with their latest releases, the mediums of which are more varied than most labels, tees, wallets, prints, pillows and… a painted spray paint can!

My way or the Hemingway: This is a kinda funny t-shirt, although I’m not really impressed by the text style (capitalised + non-capitalised = a little bit messy). Oh, and the testimonials for the shirt are ridiculous.

All-Mighty: You know I love the AM, so even though this is tiny piece of news I’m still posting it. They’re doing free gift wrap on orders over $100 (or you can just pay $3.50 for it. Anyway, lots of cute items to pick up for girls there, and I think that their shop might have been redesigned too.

CIOOMOYOKO: Crazy name, brilliant t-shirts.

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I hadn’t heard of Junkfunk (a UK tee label based in the fashion hotspot of Brick Lane) until I got an e-mail from them asking if I wanted to review a tee. So I looked at their designs and decided that yes, yes I would like to review one of their fine tees.

And yesterday morning it arrived, along with a lovely hand written note and a promo sheet of their goods. The tee itself is the red version of ‘Shooting T.V.s‘, it is also available in grey but I’d say that the design would pop out more on the red.

The design wouldn’t feel too out of place on a site like Fullbleed, despite the very English looking gent taking aim at the defenceless TVs. The two visual styles (the photo style of the person and the 50s-inspired illustration of the TVs) are quite an interesting choice, perhaps its to emphasise oddness of the image, or maybe its a comment on how some people believe that television (especially American imports, which I love) has eroded a sense of traditional Britishness, which the shooter clearly represents. Ok, social theorizing over, let’s talk quality.

The tee is soft and flatteringly elastic, it might be American Apparel (as they proclaim that “we source our blank T-shirts from ethical non sweatshop suppliers”) but it’s fairly hard to tell since they’ve replaced the tag with a custom one.

At £22-26 for a tee the strength of the pound against the dollar may put off US visitors from making a purchase, which is a shame because Junkfunk are easily competing with the more well-known American labels in terms of design and quality. Though they are still cheaper than some of the mainstream UK labels that are producing designs of a similar style.

Costiness=£22 URL

Lots of pictures (and a special homage I whipped up in Photoshop) after the jump:

(more…)

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I just noticed a few minutes ago that there are problems with the header if you were viewing the site with Internet Explorer. Firstly, that you got the title twice (which is now fixed), and secondly that the links in the top bar weren’t on top of the blue line (which I think I’ve fixed). Since I never use Internet Explorer I can only assume that it has been this way for weeks if not months, so I’m sorry about that, my ability to tinker with the layout of the site is pretty limited and it usually takes a lot of trial and error for me when playing around with the pages.

If you spot any more problems (or you think you can fix any existing ones) then please get in touch and I’d be very appreciative.

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Invicid are offering free shipping on all their products up until December 18th to their North American customers, and a reduced rate of $6 for us foreigners.

I think this ‘Tanks on Broadway‘ hoodie of theirs has been around for a while, but there’s no denying that it’s still a good design, even though I don’t quite understand why there’s a hear with a cross through it. It would have been quite nice if there were colours on the traffic lights, but I guess you can’t have everything. The tank has some great detail on it too, it looks kinda like a blueprint, so instead of the usual solid blob that looks like a tank you can actually tell which parts are which, and the boy in me that used to glue bits of plastic together in the hope of making something that looked like a car really likes that kind of approach.

Costiness=$58 (on American Apparel) URL

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No 2 year old picture of me, that promotional map from NATO simply isn’t detailed enough to help us in The Hunt! Although I am actually quite close to 2 of the locations…..

Wondering what on earth I’m talking about? Read on…

Essentially, ‘The Hunt‘ is geocaching, except with tee’s instead of the usual little packages that you find at sites. I must admit that the two times I’ve attempted to find a geocache I’ve failed miserably (even though one of them was at a waterfall that was about half a mile from my house, I blame it on using a car sat nav for my coordinates). When you find the cache you’re meant to take the tee that’s there and leave another tee, which is a cool idea, except people aren’t all the same size, so a guy in Munich found a cache he left a gift certificate for his tee store (not exactly in the spirit, but a good gesture).

Unless you live in a major city then you probably won’t be able to go hunting, but I guess you’ll just have to console yourself that you don’t live in smog!

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that this promo from Spreadshirt hasn’t really had much, ummmm, promo-ing from the blog community (though Josh Spear picked it up yesterday), which is really surprising because it’s one of those weird things that can only happen with the internet.

Join the Hunt

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So I’m lying here in bed trying to think up a creative description for this hoodie from EIO, and I’ve got nothing, which is funny because I watched Scary Movie 4 earlier this evening and the writers of that film couldn’t think of anything creative either!

Basically, this is a womens hoodie with a floral print on it, a cool little design feature is that the print seems to wrap around the body a little. There’s also the EIO logo emobroidered onto the ribbing at the bottom. It seems to channel the spirit of loads of surfing brands, since flowers seem to be ubiquitous in the surfwear world.

Costiness=£33 URL

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This hoodie isn’t actually on sale yet, but you can get your orders in on the presale if you really like it.

This hoodie is another of those stealth hoodies that I seem to be so fond of, y’know the ones that seem really pedestrian till something pops out at you. Like if I was wearing this hoodie and it was zipped up, you’d think “dang, what’s Andy doing in something so plain, him and interesting hoodies are BFFs”

And then KAPOW! I unzip and you get lost in magic that is the Andy Warhol pink banana print in the silk(ish) lining on the inside of the hoodie. I mean take a look at it, it just screams quality, and silk(-esque polyester lining? That just screams class, not that classy things scream. You should also check out the rest of Roarin’ Euphony’s collection, I can honestly say that I would buy almost everything they offer if my wallet miraculously became stuffed with $50s.

Costiness=$125 (shipping included) URL

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