Monday, October 13, 2008

How fitting that in the week when I, an Englishman, travel down to the South of France, I’m kicking off the week (well, the week’s reviews) with a brand that have a French name and a distinctly British nature. This particular tee is a little bit special (although most of the Chateau Roux experience is pretty special), seeing as it has taken a blast from a shotgun, and thus the SinS range, standing for ‘Shotguns in Soho’. Have no fear, the Chateau Roux crew aren’t running around back alleys in London with shotguns just firing off cartridges at will, there’s a process to this stuff, it’s not quite as crazy. The tees are actually shot in a field, which is located “somewhere…”, presumably somewhere that is a whole lot advisable to shoot t-shirts than central London, and they had to shoot quite a few tees before they got a look that they were happy with.

The design is fairly classic Chateau Roux. The image and its style really reminds me of Aha’s ‘Take On Me’ video, which I guess means I could say that style reminds me of pretty much any design which is done in a quick pencil-sketch style. The design isn’t actually the most interesting part of this tee for me, since I’ve never had a shotgun-blasted tee before, and the effect is actually more subtle than I would have expected, which is easily preferable to having a massive hole blasted through the middle of the tee, creating a bold but largely unwearable garment, this way you get the effect without it taking too much focus away from the design.

As you can probably tell from the picture above, Chateau Roux actually include the cartridge from the shot which wreaked havoc upon your tee on the hang tags (it can be removed, obviously). Okay, I can’t guarantee its the same cartridge, but its a cartridge nevertheless, and I think that it’s a great touch to further drive home the message about the range, someone hasn’t been stabbing away at the tee with a knitting needle to create a shotgun blast look, they’ve actually taken aim with a 12-bore. In terms of quality, I know that Chateau Roux have spent a long time having exactly the right tee made for them, and they’ve come up with something that feels pretty wonderful. I would warn you that the sizes run pretty small, I’d say that with a Chateau Roux tee that size extra large is pretty much equal to an American Apparel size large, and we all know that AA run thinner than regular tees, so you’ll probably want to be ordering a size up unless you’ve got the body of an Olympian. Print quality is impressive too, I can imagine it gaining a nice vintage look to it over time.

The amazing packaging that the reviews came in will be getting their own packaging, so look out for that in the near future.

Costiness=£35 Buy it at Chateau Roux

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