i apologize in advance for sending out so many bicycle obsessed links, but i really like how thoughtful these new cycling jeans are. There are so many design decisions made here which advance the cyclist’s sensibilities into actual clothing. Please have a look at the link below, and you will see the various good ideas put into a beautiful pair of cycling jeans. I have not looked up the price, but i’m guessing expensive.

Osloh Jeans | gBlog.

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be homeless and sleep in the cool night air under a cardboard box? No? I never have, but if you have a weird sense of humor and a yearning to get closer to your grungy roots, or you feel like you need to practice sleeping under the stars because your 401K is worth 15 cents, then you might want to look into the Snurkengoed Bedding.

Bloesem: Snurkengoed

I’ve been meaning to write about this small Finnish company for quite some time. You need a fabric for your design that incorporates a kind of 80s collage DIY aesthetic? This might very well be the designers to look at. Their fabric work suggests industrial wastelands, flowers juxtaposed with grainy penwork of enlarged Maurice Sendak children’s books, and gritty abstract lines.

Within this past year several people I know including my wife had a baby. And for some strange reason 2 of the babies that I saw born this year (including my boy Lawrence) were photographed at one point in a tote bag. So it was some sort of fate that I was sent an email to this product which is a tote bag made for carrying a baby. The product is called Do Baby and it’s designed by Gabriele Pezzini. The reason we put our kid in a tote bag is because we thought it was cute. Do Baby, on the other hand feels somewhat different. The baby feels a bit more like a commodity as if you were able to pick one up at any grocery store. Still, it’s nice to have a carrier such as this available to give another option for carrying a baby. As any parent knows, carrying a child is never easy, and a variety of positions with which to hold the baby makes life just a little simpler.

Mixko, as their namesake indicates, is a  company that mixes multiple unlike things together to come up with completely new meanings. They look at an object like a whistle, for instance, and say, “Hey, if the scale of that whistle were multiplied in size by, like four hundred times, then that whistle would make a mighty comfortable lounge chair.” Of course, their mixing does not stop there.  They mix cartoon bubbles with plates, candles with joysticks, and my personal favorite: dog shit with jewelry. The one item informs the other in such refreshing and revealing ways. But the thing that makes Mixko extra special is that they are so young yet so prolific as to beg the question: what will Mixko be in thirty years when the design mashup matures? My answer is that Mixko may rule the earth at that point.

I’m one of those guys who wishes that Paul Smith was my best friend. Paul and I would hang out walking the streets of London looking for affected youth to star in his advertising campaigns. Every once in a while I would look over at Paul and say, ” Hey Paul, would it be possible for you to make a collection for middle aged fat men at a price that could allow the pieces to be sold in Wal-Mart?” (this request would satiate the intense thirst of my socio-economic situation). Paul would look over at me and utter “Shite!”. End of conversation.

We can all dream… Speaking of dreams. Am I dreaming, or is Paul Smith somehow related to the movies of Wes Anderson? The suits featured on the actors in the Darjeeling Limited are impeccably crafted.

I’ve made it a point to cover big, chunky fantastically fashionable brands over the next few weeks, and today is one of my favorites: Armani Casa. Armani Casa is like the stage set for a highly stylized 1940s noir film with a good budget. Each piece evokes one of two feelings in me. Armani Casa is the ultimate in off the shelf luxury hotel dressings, or Armani Casa makes me want to wear expensive suits and lose 40 pounds so I can have my picture take with this furniture in a respectable manner.

I’ve included three pieces by Armani Casa that I love: the Omega Bed, the Essen Vase, and the Talvin 1 Desk Set. Each piece has it’s own individual character, but together exude extreme brand clarity and synchronicity. All three pieces, as the hundreds of others, just seem to work well with each other. Each piece also has this modernist yet hand hewn historicist quality creating one of the most consistent collections of products I know of. Job well done.

Normally when I think of ASCII I’m immediately thinking of a geeky programmer spending his or her spare time making a portait of Elvis only using the letters E,L,V,I, and S. But this curtain is true art. I love it. Now if only I had a room to put it in…

If you did not know, my wife and I just had a child 8 days ago. This child has been out of the house for his pediatrician’s appointment among other journey’s, but his real inaugural first day out I’ve decided to take him to the new Barneys in San Francisco. And what might I find at Barneys but the awesome collection by Balenciaga.

1918 saw the founding of Cristobal Balenciaga’s first haute couture house in San Sébastian, Spain. Local admiration for his designs was so strong that a second haute couture house was opened in Madrid and a third in Barcelona. In 1937, 10, Avenue George V became the Parisian home of Cristobal Balenciaga’s creative influence. Balenciaga’s Paris flagship store is still located at this address.

This fall / winter collection is what I would consider an over-the-top, erotic triumph of a collection. All the dresses in the collection combine a number of elements that would not normally work well together, I would think, except that Balenciaga’s vision has made it so. The satiny fabric is reminiscent of a Chinese silk or the fabric of a kimono, but the fabric is pulled tight a around a peticoat-like structure to create a voluptuous hourglass form. To pile on style over style doesn’t stop there for Balenciaga. For instance, all the dresses in the collection have large shoulders creating an erotic puffiness exaggerating the 1940s style shoulder pad look. The final detail that caught my eye was the enlarged baseball seam along the sides of the dress emphasizing the curve of the miniskirt. I’m in love yet again.

I included G-STAR RAW to the Crack List simply because I’ve never seen denim treated so expertly. Where I live in San Francisco there are only two ways recognized as fashionable for denim: there is the teenage hip-hop style of wearing jeans around your ankles (how can you run from police with your jeans like that?!), and there is the pencil thin ’80s style of wearing denim where each pair of jeans sold comes complete with a fixed gear bicycle. Now, there is a third fashionable way to wear denim thanks to G-STAR RAW. This company allows me to wear the most comfortable of fabrics as if you were an extra in a 1940’s noir film. The styles for this recent collection are no less than phenomenal. Complex jackets are mixed with fedoras and elbow length gloves all styles that would normally smack of Cory Feldman circa 1989, and fortunately for G-STAR RAW that’s not at all what it looks like. In fact this collection feels a bit more like The Raf Simmons collection I pondered a while back except this one’s in Denim.