I wouldn’t describe myself as being really into sneaker culture, I know what I like and I buy what I want, I don’t consider trends or what is the hot new shoe, but I reckon that there is probably a decent overlap between the sneaker community and the tee community, so I thought it wouldn’t be too much of a diversion to mention Sneaker Freaker’s mid-year report showing us the top 20 sneakers of the year so far. Some of them I hate, some of them I love, and a large part of me wishes that the feature wasn’t split into 21 pages.
by Andy on January 25, 2011
Looking at this you probably think that this tee refers to the (decimated) motor industry in Detroit, and the makers probably want you to think that too, but ‘Burn Rubber’ in this case actually refers to a sneaker store in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Costiness=$32 Buy it at Burn Rubber (I wrote this before I realised that they only had a damned 300 pixel wide photo)
Are any of you guys out there sneaker fans, if you are then I might have some news coming up for you in the next few weeks, that’s all that I’m going to tease you with for the moment because even I don’t know what it is that I’ll be showing you, but I know it’ll be cool, it’ll be about sneakers, and it’ll be a collaboration. For now, keep your sneaker addiction in check with this rather nice one-colour print for Stupid Hurts Us, a t-shirt design competitions that has almost inexplicably never been featured on HYA before considering their prices are so low for a company printing on organic AA tees.
Costiness=$13 Buy it at Stupid Hurts Us
I know that €20 doesn’t seem like a particularly great sale, but if I told you it was a 1/3rd off sale then it would look a lot lot more attractive. Most of their designs are a bit ‘tits on a tee’ for my liking, but anything that makes the Air Druks tee above more affordable is a good thing to me.
Druks
by Andy on February 17, 2010
Really love the use of negative space in this design. I guess it would be nice if it wasn’t quite so expensive, but living in France ain’t exactly cheap so I’m sure Druks have their reasons. If I were being critical, and as a tee blogger I probably should be, I think I’d like this more if they dropped that ‘Air Druks’ tag from the shirt, it feels to me as if it not only does it not add anything, it takes something away from the simplicity of the design, when the simplicity is what draws me to it.
Costiness=€29.99 Buy it at Druks
by Andy on January 10, 2009
I know that there are lots of places out there that can give you a lot more information and authority when it comes to sneakers, but I thought that since design competitions get covered frequently on HYA that a sneaker design competition could be of interest to the designers in the audience.
I found out about RYZ through a post by J3concepts on the laFraise blog in which he introduced a load of cool new links to their blogroll (J3 is also a winner on the site). Coincidentally (I’m sure), LaFraise are also partnering with RYZ for a tee/shoe combo print competition. The format runs like most design competitions; download a template, put your design on it, upload the template, it gets voted on, and if you’re a winner then you’ll get $500 plus “$1 per shoe,” which may or may not mean that you get $2 for each pair sold. One really cool aspect is that artists can also print onto the sole, I always like it when sneakers have something interesting on the sole (that isn’t an unusual flavour of chewing gum), it’s very rare that people get to see the sole other than the wearer, which makes the extra effort seem unnecessary, which is why it’s so special.
I’m not a hi-top fan, so I won’t be making a purchase, but I do really like the idea of a sneaker design competition, if it works for tees, why should it work for shoes?
