The Sunday Best

435. Everyday Objects | Travel Voltage Converter

434. Spare Change | $78 | The Perfect Shoe?

I am 100% in support of the no flip flops all boat shoes revival going on. Call it hipster, call it trendy, call it banana cream pie. I don't care. Boat shoes are what should be on your feet this summer. I just bought a blue leather pair by Sebago but wish I'd held off for these. And I thought grey Converse were sharp...

Also available in off-white. 

 

Sperry Washed Canvas Boat Shoe - $78

433. Outlier | Summer Shorts

Between the claims to enhance me and the always riveting Burberry store opening announcements, that are the bane of any blog email address, come the occasional press releases I actually enjoy.

And so it is with this one from cycling outfitter Outlier, they of the athletic apparel designed not to look like athletic apparel. They've made shorts, "summer" shorts, that cleverly double as swim trunks without making it seem like you're always just coming back from a beach volleyball game.

 

Here some gentlemen demonstrate what life would be like if you owned these shorts.

 

And in black for good measure.

432. On Taste | Quotidian or Godly?

When we like the way someone dresses we generally say he has good taste, or she has a good sense of style. "Sense of style" is a funny turn of phrase. It makes it sound like her nose is adept not only at picking up scents but also at ferreting out the proper outfit to wear.

 
This man has taste.

This woman smells style like pancakes.
(Images from Jak&Jil.)

What is taste or the sense of style (SOS) really? In a season where blue was the colour of choice, anyone who was naturally inclined towards the azure side of the spectrum would automatically have a leg up. But whether I like blue or not is largely not something within my control - a series of accidents and chemicals conspired to give me sky eyes. I could just as easily found myself enslaved to fuchsia. Similarly, to either praise or condemn me for enjoying the way silk slides against tweed would be to condemn god and nature, or at least my parents' genetic code.

Of course there is a lot at stake with being able to say that both style and taste are "choices." Magazines trade largely on the idea, and a slew of recent books all but shout, "Hey, don't worry! Your lack of style and taste can be rectified with some easy tips!" Hidden in all this, and sometimes not that well, is the sentiment that your lack of taste is just ignorance, and nothing that a few months in New York couldn't fix.

Obviously if I'm putting up pictures of musicians and praising their style I think there's something about style that's praiseworthy. But at some point all this talk about people's taste has left me a little oversaturated. Yeah, I get it. Kanye can afford really nice things. You think he has to pay for all that LV crap? And since when does having a monogrammed camouflage, ridiculously called monoflage, bag a sign of anything but a slavish obsession with luxury items?

431. On Trend | The Exhaustion of Watching

I don't know if you know this, but Apple is very trendy right now. It's true. People, and by this I mean consumers and the like, are flocking to Apple stores in droves and snatching up iPhones and shiny new Macbooks because they are the trendiest bits of trend to wander down the trendpipe in the early part of this century.

Also trendy? Rolling up your pants. Seems some men in certain parts of New York (read: Brooklyn) have taken to rolling their pant legs up much further than mere convenience or hatchet hem job would dictate. No, these men are rollin' fools and they don't care who knows it! It's a trend of rice farmer proportions and it won't stop till we see people arduously folding fabric past the knees, and subsequently cutting off all circulation.

Roll to the skies, pilgrim!

Back in the early nineties when I was but a young and foolish lad I used to roll my jeans like our girl Katie. God knows why. Maybe I had seen someone else do it; maybe I just hated my ankles. Either way, for an entire year I pin-rolled my jeans with obsessive consistency, because not to do so felt terribly wrong.

Now teenagers didn't invent tribes, they merely perfected them through distillation - clothes, phrases, music choice. It was just that simple. I was terrible at being a teenager. I didn't know what trend I was following or when or why. I just did things in this random pattern which on the surface sounds rebellious but was, in actuality, just an advanced form of cluelessness. If I had known...but I couldn't know.

Is every trend a trend? A few years ago I took up rock climbing, right when rock climbing was grabbing the de facto yuppie sport crown from rollerblading. You could say I was following a trend. But how else would I have discovered rock climbing if it hadn't exploded, and where would I have climbed if a thousand gyms hadn't sprouted up, and what would I have worn if Chris Sharma hadn't told me? Er...

It's pointless to speculate as to why someone does something, yet inevitably that's almost all the internet is about. If someone wears a smoking jacket because smoking jackets are suddenly trendy, is that really a criticism of their style or simply a statement of fact about how humans work? American Apparel is incredibly trendy, but they're also just a really successful company with a total tool of a founder.

All I really know is this - everything this guy says sounds ridiculous these days.

430. Universal Truths No.1

There is no such thing as a casual dress shoe. There are only dress shoes, casual shoes, and ugly shoes.

Exhibit A: The Clarks "Koval"

 

Exhibit B: The Sketchers Whatchamacallit

 

Things to look for: leather + manmade fabric hybrids, the words "denim-friendly," eccentric stitching, the words "comfort" and "easy".

429. In Praise of Good Writing | Web Edition

The best of what I read on the web this week.

Excerpts from the Diary of an App Store Reviewer (daringfireball.net):

Wednesday May 20

Began examining new Flickr client app. Ends up it is surprisingly difficult to find pornographic content on Flickr. Entire day wasted.

Easy Solutions #1 - Getting a girl to sleep with you (via kottke.org):

Step Eleven: Pause for ten seconds to allow the incrediblness of the situation to sink in. There will be no reason for her to doubt your claim, because your beard will make you appear many years older and your cuts would add weight to the idea that you've come from a post-apocalyptic future where a war is currently taking place.

The Case for Working with Your Hands (nytimes.com):

Now, it is probably true that every job entails some kind of mutilation. I used to work as an electrician and had my own business doing it for a while. As an electrician you breathe a lot of unknown dust in crawl spaces, your knees get bruised, your neck gets strained from looking up at the ceiling while installing lights or ceiling fans and you get shocked regularly, sometimes while on a ladder. Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.

From Product to Process (storybird.com):

But now that my cost of experimentation is zilch—and networks enable me to be in constant communication with people who share my interests—the diagram can just as easily be flipped and start at the “back end.” I can talk about and share my ideas with you, and once we have a collective vision of the “thing,” I can produce it (to then have you consume it).

 

428. The Most Stylish Musical Artists of All Time | Chet Baker

Putting a string of jazz artists up on this list is probably cheating in some way (or just obvious), but let's give credit where credit is due. The five ways Chet Baker killed it:

1. He tucked in his t-shirts and made it look right.

2. He knew the power of a beautiful woman.

3. His look aged with him.

4. He knew how and when to pull off the white sock.

5. He knew love songs are the saddest songs.

427. Roden Gray x h(y)r collective

I won't be there for this, but if you're in Vancouver all the cool kids will be there:

 

[ Roden Gray x h(y)r collective ]

426. The Most Stylish Musical Artists of All Time | Nat King Cole

Top ten lists are, let's be honest, a waste of time. Sure, you can put Citizen Kane ahead of Godfather II, but what exactly does that indicate in terms of "worth"? I love Radiohead as much as the next maladjusted audiophile, but those lists proclaiming OK Computer the best album of all time look a little...dated right now, don't they.

GQ recently released their picks for the 10 most stylish men in America, a list that included their own style columnist but somehow managed to leave out this guy:

Waris Ahluwalia showing T.I. and JT how it's done.

Once you get any list down to a top ten--ten best restaurants serving quail eggs, ten greatest speeches by people named Gerald--it's pretty much a crap shoot. Here and in the following posts, presented in no particular order, are the ten most stylish musical artists of all time (that I can remember).

Nat King Cole

The story in Hollywood, so the apocryphal tale goes, is that the only reason we haven't seen what would be the surefire smash hit/Oscar winning biopic of Nat King Cole is that there isn't an actor working today who can reasonably duplicate his impeccable smoothness. Cole was smooth personified, both in his velvet voice and his perfect style.

 

I picked up a similar hat in New York, but have discovered, to my dismay, that I am not Nat King Cole-esque.

Ahead of his time in a double-breasted, notch-lapeled cardigan.

It's hard to advocate the cigarette considering how quickly his life ended, but it absolutely makes this picture (as does the length of shirt sleeves).