Sometimes You Get What You Pay For

The year Uniqlo first opened its flagship in Soho, New York they released a collaborative t-shirt collection. It was very well received for the humor, and also understated graphic patterns. Uniqlo in New York has gotten a bit better in terms of supplying a better variety of cuts and interesting pieces as they realized the market was welcoming to them, but the later tee collections have strangely never matched the first.

Maybe print design is something the company is just not good at editing. But most of the shirts look like they could be found at Urban Outfitters (though for three times the price).



The only one that stood out to me was, naturally, this women's zebra print shirt.





I wouldn't pay 15 dollars for any of these. Why bother Uniqlo? There are screenprinting guys with folding tables on Broadway with better designs than these. Hire one of them. That gripe aside Steven Alan's capsule line and the rumored Opening Ceremony fling are both firmly on my radar.

Designer DNA

I first got wind of Yang Li in an interview on Dazed Digital and now Fashion 156 has serveral images to mull over. Li warps the structure of basics beyond their essence with a short sleeved jacket with micro lapels, and a shirt with wide front pouches that function as another layer.

Like in evolution all it takes is a couple of flipped chromosomes to lead to disorder or the next step in species future. Tinkering with proportion and composition, Li is clearly looking forward but he is not beyond making wearable clothes. The operation revolves around change and erasure. What is a jacket? Does that definition include the term long sleeve? Change in meaning over garment components leads to the erasure of preconceptions. The intended endgame: "creation of forms with no limits". The images reveal a promising effort from someone so young.

Follow Li here @ www.clothlabel.com.au/yang

Looking Forward: Lone Costume SS09

The Korean designer Juun J bases his line Lone Costume around structural transformations and novelty. Veering off the familiar path of men's tailoring Juun pushes the forms into new silhouettes. The SS09 collection displayed earlier this year saw a departure from his past trench coat obsession with reproductions of the iconic motorcycle jacket, the cardigan, and oxford shirt with stunningly irreverent results.



The jackets were extended and wrapped around into cloaks. Cardigans were sewn into the waistlines of pants. It's hard to pick a favorite, but several of these pieces stood out as covetable as a double breasted jumpsuit in gray.



A few accents of color were present in a two button blazer with an extended back panel produced in coral and sky blue.




The jackets were layered and extended like a fruit being unpeeled but there was an edge to it too. Juun believes that Fashion is both an art and a business. Looking back on his collection its easy to see his attempt to bring his vision to life while also creating desirable clothes. Lone Costume is unisex but skews towards masculinity. The clothes are playful, relaxed, and progressive yet essentially examples of good tailoring.

His recent collection will be available for sale at Seven in the spring. Watch out, Costume tends to sell quickly. Some recent additions to Seven's stock already sold out like this hi-top collaboration with Reebok.

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Composite Sex: Highlights from Prada Linea Rossa lookbook S/S 09

Even from a collection which includes numerous feminized pieces such as scoop neck shirts that cropped just at the waistline and cropped jackets which suspended from from the model's shoulders, Prada's Linea Rossa line contains a number of covetable luxury sportswear items. The bronze woven hooded jacket is both modern and elegant, visually simply wonderful to look at. In this earth toned world shirts are fastened with zippers. While Miuccia Prada seems incapable of boring, her collections of late rely on applying delicate vulnerable shapes attributed to womenswear to the opposite sex. The range of bronze, beiges, and militant greens supply some contrast however many of the pieces propel the androgynous male into further, perhaps extreme, depths. The materials are light, often synthetic, much like the deployed concepts.