I’m always curious about Japanese writing on clothing, curious because we all know it can look pretty cool, but also pretty scared, scared because I cannot read kanji (right? its been a while since I even looked at my ‘learn japanese’ book) and wouldn’t want to wear something where the text might be something crazy like ‘Super Homosexual‘ and I’d have no idea. Even though Super Superficial say that the text reads “Spring chanson show by new singers” I get the feeling that it might say “this guy has no idea what this design says”.

Obviously, its a pretty simple design, but I do like the baby blue/white/black colourway.

Costiness=£35 (with UK P+P) Link

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Tags » blue • hoodie • Japanese • kanji • super superficial

Just a month (and a week) after the event actually occurred, I’m finally treating you to some reports on brands that I found at Margin. As most of the vendors at Margin didn’t want photos being taken of their goods (and a few at The Park were pretty rude over the whole photo situation), and I can understand why, the clothes world can be pretty cut throat, I won’t be using any personally taken photos of the brands I met, but I think that I was able to get a much better insight into what all the brands were about, so there should be a bit more authority to these posts than my regular ‘hey, that looks cool’ offerings.


Terratag were the first brand I chatted too, so I thought it would be appropriate that I profiled them first. It’s hardly surprising that Terratag made a big impression on me, they love robots, perhaps even more than I do (they’re putting together a book with more than 200 robot t-shirts in it), and the way that their designs seamlessly mix British and Japanese pop culture really pushes my buttons (in a good way). They employ lots of strong images, often inspired by the extremely popular Gundam series, which helps to explain why Japan is one of their biggest sources of international orders. They also have no fear in using metallic inks, something that I’m happy to see. But to make it seem as if Terratag are robot obsesses is pretty unfair, their designs run a fairly wide gamut of subject matter, they like to dabble in graffiti style and vivid, neon colourways (some of which actually glow under UV light!) that are bound to get a lot of attention.

Overall, a very impressive line, who had a friendly guy working their booth that didn’t appear to mind answering my annoying newbie-journo questions.

Terratag links: Main Site/MySpace/Photos on Flickr

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Tags » Day Glo • graffiti • japan • Japanese • margin2008 • marginreports • robot • robots • street art • t-shirt • terratag • UV