Breathnaigh

White Mountaineering at Context.

Touring showrooms and shops in NY last winter with Simon and Hannes from tres chic Tres Bien Shop, one of the collections I was clamoring for them to carry was White Mountaineering. The themes of White Mountaineering gear--technically sophisticated, often weatherproof fabrics cut and sewn with a designer's eye--have been echoed (if not aped) by a number of lines since. Yosuke Aizawa's work at White Mountaineering has hints of his time with Junya Watanabe as well as the aesthetic of Takahiro Miyashita at Number (N)ine, and shares something with other Japanese lines like Factotum and N.Hoolywood, all hard-to-find in shops that ship globally. On my NY jaunt, the White Mountaineering team preferred I not shoot the collection, and I respected their wishes, but I couldn't keep my hands off the outerwear, knits, and accessories. This summer I did get a chance to cover a collection in advance for Styleforum, but fall/winter is really where the action is.  

Tres Bien Shop will indeed be carrying a selection of White Mountaineering this fall, and other shops, including Wisconsin's Context Clothing, have started getting their buys up. So far, so good. Warning: it's not for the faint of wallet.

The White Mountaineering dudes with Hannes and Simon.

Product shots from Context Clothing.

From the closet: color and texture for fall.

Tweed check from secondhand 1964 bespoke J. Hoare jacket.

White Mountaineering fair isle tie.

Taylor Supply hickory stripe jacket.

Engineered Garments knit Bedford jacket.

Anderson & Sheppard--a new coffee table book for #menswear nerds.

In October, Anderson & Sheppard is publishing a lengthy (297 pp.) tome on their history and that of their customers, circumscribing many of the reputed best-dressed men in the world in the last 100 years or so. The Savile Row firm has been a lightning rod for (online) criticism over the years, maybe mostly because the specialties of A+S are subtle, complex, and not necessarily in tune with the Browne-ian direction of tailoring in the last 10 years. I'll try not to communicate my own limited understanding here, because "drape" and "soft tailoring" do seem subjects more suited to a book, a few A&S lifers, and a good ghostwriter (Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter is helping out on this one). But I will say that A+S is more associated with movement, comfort, and three-dimensional shape than trimness or body-flattering cuts.

Scarves from the Hill-Side.

I haven't been as enamored of the Hill-Side's stuff as some other people I respect. The initial offerings of chambray skinny ties and pocket squares seemed accessories without occasions. Suitable for the beardrista crowd and few others. Not to mention the unorthodox hyphenation. But last spring's floral and cherry blossom accessories and this fall's new scarves show a line moving in the right direction, by my bearings. My need for blanket prints and tweedish fabrics is quickly overcoming my aversion to tired "artisanal" angle marketing. They're good lookin' scarves.

Product shots from Context.

Beauties of the common tool, 1955.

Walker Evans's portraits of Depression-era America get all the attention. His frank but deeply beautiful black and white images of poor sharecroppers in the deep South, and his work for the U.S. government via the Farm Security Administration, became part of the American visual shorthand for that era. The original photos for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were not a government documentary assignment, though; they were originally shot on assignment for Fortune magazine, where Evans worked as a staff photographer for 20 years, shooting a wide variety of subjects. "Vintage office furniture"--which at the time meant rolltop desks and archaic accounting equipment; industrial landscapes; and a set of common hand tools, pictured here, were among them. He wasn't a bad writer, either.

"Among low-priced, factory-produced goods, none is so appealing to the senses as the ordinary hand tool. Hence, a hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear "undesigned" forms. The Swedish steel pliers pictured above, with their somehow swanlike flow, and the objects on the following pages, in all their tough simplicity, illustrate this. Aside from their functions--though they are exclusively wedded to function--each of these tools lures the eye to follow its curves and angles, and invites the hand to test its balance.

Who would sully the lines of the tin-cutting shears on page 105 with a single added bend or whorl? Or clothe in any way the fine naked impression of heft and bite in the crescent wrench on page 107? To be sure, some design-happy manufacturers have tampered with certain tool classics; the beautiful plumb bob, which used to come naively and solemnly shaped like a child's top, now looks suspiciously like a toy space ship, and is no longer brassy. But not much can be done to spoil a crate opener, that nobly ferocious statement in black steel, as may be seen on page 104. In fact, almost all the basic small tools stand, aesthetically speaking, for elegance, candor, and purity." --Walker Evans, Fortune, 1955

 

Think Evans would dig Kaufmann Mercantile?

The pleasures of browsing.

It's not an original observation: record stores have become quaint. Even with vinyl sales on the rise over the last few years, and turntables appearing in Urban Outfitters catalogs, etc., buying analog music is an affectation, a choice made to be consciously different, rather than an option competing with stored digital music, or streaming. I don't own a turntable anymore (or even a real stereo--in fact, it's been years), but it's still a quiet thrill to spend an hour in a record store, with the pleasant thwack of plastic sheathed discs flipping against each other. Sublime, glossy album art slides in next to stuff that looks homemade. Crates and crates of subgenres in which you would never consider dabbling are reminders that, however democratic the music business is in the day of blogs and soundcloud, the universe of recorded music is nearly limitless and has been for a long time.

We were fortunate enough in my hood last year to be given a truly dusty rarity: a new record store. Actually, an import--Joe's Record Paradise has been a Maryland fixture for more than 30 years, and moved here from Rockville. The new space is almost absurdly large. It's no Amoeba, but the better record stores in DC are shoebox affairs in rowhouse basements, so it's appealing to have some room to move around. I can't say that, in Joe's approaching-infinite selection, you'll find even a tote bag full of stuff you genuinely want and haven't seen at your average thrift store, but there are gems, whether on vinyl or not. On my last visit I sifted through a stack of self-published local zines from the early 90s. On their xeroxed pages I found a review of Nirvana's "Molly's Lips" live split 7" (the reviewer calls Nirvana one of his "favorite retro-70's bands"), and an interview done with Beat Happening at a Silver Spring diner in 1991 (I may post this on tumblr if I get around to scanning; unfortunately it's insight-free).

Recently I've become a little self-conscious about my desire to visit Brimfield, and the mysterious pull roadside antique stands and flea markets have on my steering wheel. Why do things I used to dismiss as empty country kitsch appeal to me now? Why do I want to pick through America's junk drawer? Oh but I do! I want browse through the obscure subgenres of this ridiculous country. Call me affected.

Photos of Joe's Record Paradise, Silver Spring, MD.

These are not Fugazi tshirts.

Jeff Nelson, esteemed cofounder of Dischord Records and Minor Threat (and Teen Idles, and Three, and High-Back Chairs, and Egg Hunt!), still makes music, and still makes tshirts. His Pedestrian Press, run from not-very-hardcore-seeming Toledo, OH, sells one book, and at last count, 61 variations of shirt. Nelson was responsible for the art, design, and typography on a lot of early Dischord releases, design that was as big an influence on DIY design as Minor Threat was on hardcore. I'm sure Mr. Nelson would cringe on the "hardcore" word count here, as neither he nor Dischord have really been hardcore focused since the mid-1980s.

I recently received a Pedestrian Press-made shirt as a gift (thanks, KC), and I would buy another, and another. They print the old Dischord logo, the "new" Dischord logo, the Flex Your Head logotype, and, yes, Egg Hunt shirts. The shirt I received was on a Gildan 100% cotton shirt (as were many 90s HxC shirts), which are obviously bigger and beefier than your average American Apparel blank, so size accordingly. Nelson helpfully provides measurements on his site, but I find my size L was larger than indicated there.

 

Fort Reno snapshots.

The Evens
Laughing Man
Fort Reno Park
August 4, 2011
85 degrees, partly cloudy

Laughing Man.

The Evens.

Hardcore pride.

All guys of a certain age have a collection their mom threw out. The classic is baseball cards--"If only mom hadn't thrown out that mint Mantle rookie"--but at some point we all move out and leave a hastily packed, unmarked box in the crawlspace. Then in our 20s, you get drunk, talk about baseball/comics/Dairy Queen helmet sundaes and remember that pot of nostalgia gold you left behind. All too often mom gave it to the Purple Heart crew or just threw it out when she realized she had a room full of you memorabilia and narrowed it down to two vaguely Calder-esque macaroni sculptures and your best report card.

I had baseball cards, but I grieve for my tshirts and records. I had fickle music taste as a teen--I was all over the map, into Pavement, Bouncing Souls, Wire, whatever band was namechecked in the liner notes or got a rave review in MRR. My tshirt collection documented that fickleness in cotton jersey. I bought old out-of-print Dead Kennedys and Nirvana shirts in Germany in 1994. I had beefy Victory Records shirts, and H20 in heather gray. An Ignite "Call on My Brothers" tour shirt. When I went to college, I put most of them in a bin with piles of seven-inch records and tucked it away in the attic. At some point it got moved to the garage (more room needed for Christmas ornament storage?), and a slow roof leak turned it into a pot of nostalgia mold.

You'll never have that collection of Topps and Fleer again, but you can probably buy plastic sleeved versions of your favorites (consult Beckett's first). Likewise, you can still buy Ten Yard Fight shirts somewhere. Revelation Records still sells a lot of these shirts, which, looking back on it, are pretty sophisticated, designwise. I've had all of these in and out of my cart on revhq.com:

The Belli - Tenenbaum connection.

Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum.

Filmmaker Wes Anderson, whose films will eventually be primary sources in the syllabus for Millennial Hipster Studies 301, likes characters who write their own stories. Royal Tenenbaum, Max Fischer, and Steve Zissou are amiable liars, misleading others and themselves, and they get some of the best lines in their respective movies. Anderson is a curator of big personalities in real life, and harvests traits from these people to inform development of his characters, generating copy-of-a-copy facsimiles with the contrast turned up, so they're only superficially similar to the originals (e.g., Steve Zissou is not supposed to be Jacques Cousteau).

Reading an old GQ piece with Anderson, I found out that the model for Royal Tenenbaum was Melvin Belli, a legal legend who has faded from pop culture since his death in 1996. The patriarch of the Tenenbaum family, Royal had been a wildly successful lawyer, although in the movie's setting he's since been disgraced. The character has an unusual dress sense, most often seen in a 6x3 double breasted suit with a pale green shirt and striped tie (the suits were made by Anderson's tailor, Vahram, at Mr. Ned--I recently interviewed Vahram for Styleforum, although the piece isn't yet live). Royal's scoundrelly lack of political correctness and his sense of entitlement are oddly charming as he tries to win back his own family after years of, as the film has it, "betrayal, failure, and disaster."

Although he never fell to living on the streets, Belli was an early example of the publicity-hungry trial lawyer, and an early adopter of showmanship in the courtroom, often offering macabre exhibits into evidence. (Sidebar: before becoming a lawyer, Belli worked for WPA doing hobo research. Yes, he impersonated a hobo to do government reporting on the culture. Dream job!) Known as the King of Torts, Belli won landmark personal injury cases and represented Jack Ruby in the Lee Harvey Oswald case (that one was not a winner for Belli). When Belli won a case, he'd fly a jolly roger above his office building and fire a cannon from the roof. He also shared Royal's tendency toward wince-worthy language ("You heard me, Coltrane"), although even when his speech betrayed ugly thoughts, he had a certain style about it:

"The god damn Chinese won't give you a short noodle on a verdict. You've got to bounce them out of there. In the last case that I tried, I used all my challenges getting rid of those sons of the Celestial Empire." - Melvin Belli

Maybe as much as Atticus Finch, Belli contributed to the modern popular conception of courtroom lawyer. Maybe the Royal/Belli connection was obvious to legal audiences, but it wasn't to me.

Melvin Belli.

Jack Ruby with Melvin Belli. Ruby was convicted of LHO's murder and sentenced to death.

Belli, right.

Brian Cox playing Belli in Zodiac.

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