Rue de Bretonvilliers is a short street on the Île Saint-Louis, the smaller of the two islands in the Seine at the center of Paris. In 1927 a man named Edouard Beerens opened a workshop at number 3 to make clothes for factory hands and manual laborers. His mother had given him her apron and overalls atelier as a wedding present. He called the business Vetra, a contraction of vêtements de travail, and drew a red label with the outline of a factory on it.

Vetra is still a family company, and the jacket it cut for men who worked with their hands now sells in menswear shops to men who mostly type. That jacket goes by a few names. The French one is the most useful.

Work blues

In France it is the bleu de travail, work blue, and the name describes the color as much as the garment. As Permanent Style tells it, the blue was first a military color, and by the nineteenth century the dye had become cheap enough that manufacturers used a lighter version on workers' clothing. Mechanics, carpenters, farmhands and railwaymen all wore some version of it.

The design hardly varies from maker to maker. The jacket is cut straight and roomy so a man can swing a hammer, falls to the hip, and has a plain collar with patch pockets at the chest and hips. There is no shoulder padding and no tailoring trickery. Some workers kept a black one with a collar for church on Sunday, the same jacket in its going-out color.

Chore coat is the American name for the same idea, a term from the early twentieth century and the big US workwear houses like Carhartt and Dickies. If the American side interests you, our history of Carhartt WIP's jump from workwear to streetwear picks up that thread. The French version is lighter and plainer, which is exactly why menswear prefers it.

Two French makers still at it

Vetra lasted because it never stopped serving the job. Its jackets went first to specialist stores and to industrial companies buying for their staff, and in 1939 the workshop was turning out uniforms for the French army. Some of the sewing was done at home by workers who took cut cloth away from the shop. Fashion buyers arrived much later. Today the range runs in cotton drill and a washed dungaree twill, in blue of course, plus pearl, red and anthracite versions for people who want the cut without the reference.

Le Laboureur, which translates as the ploughman, was founded in 1956 in Digoin, a small town in Burgundy. It started with clothing for agricultural workers and later moved into gear for the building trades. Its founder, Primo Zelanti, was an Italian immigrant who started out selling work clothes at markets in southern Burgundy. His son Jean-Charles runs the business now, still from Digoin, and in 2020 the company made a capsule of canvas work jackets with Junya Watanabe. That last name tells you how far the ploughman's jacket has traveled. Watanabe came up under Rei Kawakubo, and our profile of Comme des Garçons explains why that house treats a farm jacket as seriously as a gown.

Why did menswear fall for it?

Because it solved a problem. Through the 2010s men were looking for a jacket that sat between a blazer and a hoodie, something with structure that didn't read as office wear. The chore coat has a collar and buttons, so it looks deliberate. It has no canvas, no lining and no pretense, so it looks relaxed. It costs a fraction of good tailoring and it does most of the same work.

It also ages in public. Blue cotton fades first at the elbows, the pocket edges and the collar points, and after a few years of washing a cheap jacket looks better than an expensive new one. That's the same instinct behind raw selvedge denim, the pleasure of a garment that records how you live. One reader in the comments under that Permanent Style piece said heavy linen is lovely but cotton ages better, and anyone who owns both will probably agree.

How it should fit

Buy it as a layer. The jacket should button over an oxford cloth button-down or a medium crewneck sweater without the fabric pulling between buttons. If it only closes over a T-shirt, it's a size too small.

Boxy is correct. These jackets were cut big for range of movement, and sizing down to make one look slim ruins the drape and strains the shoulders. If the body is genuinely too wide, a tailor can take in the side seams a little. Leave the shoulders alone.

Length should land at the hip, roughly halfway down the seat. Vintage pieces often run short on tall men, and a good alteration shop can let down the hem a couple of centimeters if there is fabric turned under. Sleeves should reach the wrist bone with the arms relaxed. Longer is fine, since the cuffs look good rolled once.

Then wash it. A work jacket that has never been through a machine looks like a costume. Cold water, line dry, repeat for a few years.

What to wear it with

The easiest version is the one French workers would recognize. Blue jacket, a plain white T-shirt, olive fatigues or gray work trousers, and a pair of beaten-up boots or Converse Chuck Taylors. Wearing a different shade of blue denim underneath works too, as long as the two blues don't try to match.

To dress it up, borrow from tailoring. Gray flannel trousers, a knit tie or an open collar, and penny loafers turn a work jacket into something you can wear to dinner in a city that doesn't care about blazers. The pale and charcoal versions handle this even better. A full bleu de travail set, jacket and matching trousers, is a commitment. Walk around the Marais in one and people will assume you either repair bicycles or design furniture. Our Le Marais style guide covers the neighborhood where both kinds of men shop.

More work clothing lives on our workwear hub and across the Style section.

Plenty of French workwear labels of that era were printed in red, often read as a nod to the working-class emblem. Check the label on a new Vetra jacket. Beerens's little red factory is still there.

On December 18, 2020, ASICS put a running shoe from 2008 back on its website for $140. It had a white mesh upper, metallic silver leather and metallic gold plastic overlays, sitting on the original GEL sole unit in grey, gold and white. It looked like something pulled off the wall of a 2008 sporting goods store, and that was the whole idea. Hypebeast covered the drop the week before.

Less than two years later, the Gel-Kayano 14 was the shoe JJJJound picked for its first ASICS collaboration. Both colorways sold out.

Fourteen Editions In

The Kayano line began in 1993 with the GEL-Kayano Trainer, named for the ASICS designer Toshikazu Kayano. He kept drawing the shoe through 2007. The 14th model, released in 2008, was the first one somebody else designed. Hidenori Yamashita took it over and built it around a single word, flash. He linked the idea to the moment a runner's heel hits the ground and the toe pushes off, and it shows in the sharp streaks that run through the overlays.

Under the styling sat standard Kayano engineering. GEL cushioning went into the forefoot and the rearfoot, with as much as possible packed into the front, and a Trusstic piece in the midfoot kept the shoe stable. This was a stability trainer for people who logged serious miles, and it was sold to them in running stores. In 2009 the Gel-Kayano 15 replaced it, the way every Kayano gets replaced, and the 14 went into the archive.

Why the 14 and Not the 13?

By 2020 the shoes people had run in during the 2000s were turning up again as fashion. ASICS wanted an archive model to relaunch and first looked at the Gel-Kayano 13, the last of Toshikazu Kayano's own designs. Kiko Kostadinov, the Bulgarian-born, London-based designer who had been working with ASICS since the late 2010s, argued for the 14 instead. The 14 looked faster, he reasoned.

He was right. Put the two side by side and the 14 has more going on. The layering is busier and the metal louder. The whole upper seems to lean forward. Kostadinov also oversaw the UB1-S Gel-Kayano 14, an ASICS SportStyle release rather than a collaboration with his own label, and his role there covered materials and color palettes.

The December reissue kept the archival layered look while reworking the upper's materials and fit. It was a lifestyle shoe now, made for pavement and not for a training plan.

JJJJound Gets There First

The real turn came on August 26, 2022, when Justin Saunders's Montreal studio JJJJound released two Gel-Kayano 14s. Both had a white mesh base, metallic silver overlays and cream laces, with small JJJJound branding on the lateral heel. One used black detailing with a full cream midsole and a black outsole. The other went with white detailing and a cream outsole. It was the studio's first ASICS project, following earlier work with New Balance and Vans. Saunders's taste for quiet, almost beige product is the subject of our profile of JJJJound, and these Kayanos fit it exactly. They sold out, and general release pairs got harder to find in the slipstream.

Kith followed on June 23, 2023, with its Vintage Tech pack. Ronnie Fieg's label released the Gel-Kayano 14 in Cream/Scarab and Cream/Antler, next to the GEL-1130, another archival ASICS runner. How Fieg turns a forgotten model into a line around the block is covered in our Kith and Ronnie Fieg story. JJJJound has since come back to the shoe for further rounds.

The Dad Runner, Rebranded

The Kayano 14 landed in the middle of a whole category. The New Balance 990 had already made grey commuter shoes desirable, and the New Balance 2002R and the Nike Vomero 5 were showing up in the same outfits. Some called it Y2K, others called it the dad runner. Either way, the look rewarded shoes that seemed engineered and slightly ugly on purpose. The same instinct took the Salomon XT-6 off mountain trails and into Paris boutiques.

What sets the Kayano 14 apart from most retro runners is how little it pretends. It is a 2008 stability shoe wearing the chrome finishes 2008 loved, and nobody buying it wants that hidden. The silver and gold reissue is still the version to own. The muted collaboration pairs got the headlines, but the metallic one explains why anyone looked twice at a 2008 trainer in the first place.

ASICS had pulled this trick before. In 2002 it revived its Onitsuka Tiger name and reissued the Mexico 66, another archive shoe that found a second audience. The basic record of the Kayano 14 is on Wikipedia, and there is more sneaker history and coverage of collaborations across the sneakers section.

On that 2020 pair, the model name is stamped in black on the gold heel structure, the number 14 sitting there in plain view.

On August 9, 1938, a Rochester, New York, man named Samuel N. Friedland was granted a patent for an athletic shirt built on an odd idea. Instead of cutting the knitted fabric with the grain running top to bottom, the maker would turn it 90 degrees and run it sideways. The cloth would still shrink in the wash. It would just shrink across the body instead of up the torso, so a shirt that fit a halfback in September still covered his stomach in November.

The company holding that patent was Champion, and the method was sold as Reverse Weave. It is the reason one particular gray sweatshirt feels heavier and squarer than the rest, and the reason vintage dealers flip a hoodie over and run a thumb down its sides before they quote a price.

A knitting mill in Rochester

Champion opened on May 6, 1919, as Knickerbocker Knitting Mills, run by members of the Feinbloom family. By 1922 the brothers Bill and Abe Feinbloom had control and renamed it Champion Knitwear Mills. The early customers were institutions, not shoppers. Wentworth Military Academy bought sweaters for its cadets and then asked for athletic uniforms as well, and by 1928 the company had stopped relying on stores and was selling straight to coaches.

That choice shaped the product. Coaches wanted warmth and durability, and they laundered uniforms in enormous batches, so shrinkage was a constant complaint. Champion also got into campus merchandise early. In 1934, after a trip to Michigan, Abe Feinbloom struck a deal with Moe's Sport Shop to sell University of Michigan apparel. The college sweatshirt as something you buy, rather than something you earn on the field, starts roughly there.

Why the hood?

Warmth on the bench, nothing more. Champion designed the hooded sweatshirt in the 1930s as a sideline layer, pulled on between drills or while a player waited out a cold upstate afternoon. Put a hood on heavy cotton fleece and you have a portable shelter.

Reverse Weave arrived with Friedland's patent in 1938. A second patent, granted on October 14, 1952, to Friedland and William Feinbloom, fixed the fit problem that sideways grain created. It added stretch side panels and a ribbed gusset, so an athlete could lift his arms without the whole body of the sweatshirt riding up. Those panels running down the flanks are the tell. Cheap copies skip them.

The payoff was a garment that survived years of hot washes. Champion's own heritage page sells Reverse Weave as heavyweight and shrink resistant, which is the honest pitch. New, it is stiff and boxy. After a few years it softens without losing its shape, which almost nothing else in a gym bag can claim.

Off the bench and onto the street

For decades the hoodie stayed near the gym. Champion added the mesh nylon jersey in 1967, and the embroidered C logo first showed up on a Notre Dame basketball uniform in 1978. That small C became the thing people went looking for.

Then the hoodie left campus. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Reverse Weave was claimed by hip-hop artists, West Coast skaters and the New York punk scene, three crowds that agreed on very little else. It was cheap in thrift stores, tough enough for a skate park and anonymous enough to wear anywhere. We trace how that era rewired men's clothing in our history of hip-hop and menswear, and the hoodie sits right in the middle of that story.

The pro game kept the brand in front of everyone. Champion was the NBA's official outfitter from 1989 to 2001 and made the uniforms for the 1992 Dream Team in Barcelona, which Textile World credits with building the label's name in Europe. Meanwhile Japanese secondhand shops were importing used American clothing by the bale, and buyers dug through it for Reverse Weave. The same reverence for old American basics drives the obsession in our guide to raw and selvedge denim.

From the museum to a $1.2 billion sale

By the late 2000s the hoodie was the default top for a whole generation, and the labels defining that moment went back to the source. Collaborations with Supreme, Vetements, Todd Snyder and Off-White reminded a new crowd where the good sweatshirts came from. The mechanics of turning a basic into a sellout are laid out in our piece on Supreme's drop model, and Abloh's wider influence gets its own treatment in our look at the Off-White legacy.

In 2017 a Reverse Weave hoodie appeared in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Items: Is Fashion Modern?, and in 2018 it entered the museum's permanent collection. A layer designed to keep a lineman warm on the sideline is now museum property.

The business moved too. Hanesbrands sold Champion to Authentic Brands Group in a deal valued at about $1.2 billion, finalized in the fall of 2024, with the core US and Canada business placed with a licensing partner. Collectors are watching the heavyweight line closely, and they have reason to.

How to buy a good one

Ignore the logo and check the build. A proper Reverse Weave sweatshirt has those side panels running from the armpit to the hem, a thick ribbed cuff and a hand closer to canvas than to the brushed fleece of a fashion hoodie. Pieces from the 1980s and 1990s have already softened in the places you want. If you buy new, take your normal size and expect it to feel wide at first. The cloth was cut that way on purpose.

The other piece of campus clothing those early customers wore is covered in our history of the varsity jacket, and there is more on our streetwear topic hub and across the Style section.

Run your fingers down the side of a good one and you'll find a separate strip of cloth set in along the ribs. It has been there since 1952.

On July 19, 1986, Run-DMC played Madison Square Garden, and when they got to My Adidas, the arena filled with sneakers held overhead. Most of them had a ribbed rubber cap over the toe. The group's co-manager, Lyor Cohen, had been working to get adidas people in front of exactly this kind of moment, and the endorsement that followed is usually reported at $1 million. That figure has been repeated for forty years. Nobody has published the contract.

The shoe in the air was the adidas Superstar. It had been built seventeen years earlier for a very different crowd.

A Leather Shoe in a Canvas League

In 1969 American basketball ran on canvas, and the canvas was mostly Converse. adidas wanted in. Its answer was a low-top version of its Pro Model basketball shoe, the first low-top basketball shoe with an all-leather upper, sitting on a sole that didn't mark the floor and capped with a molded rubber toe. The cap gave the shoe its nicknames, shell toe and shell top. It also gave adidas a sales pitch. Leather supported the foot better than canvas, and the shell protected toes that got stepped on in the post.

The selling was done team by team. adidas consultant Chris Severn took the shoe around the league, and the Superstar moved through college and pro locker rooms over the next few years. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wore it, and George Gervin is the other name that always comes up.

Then there is the number. adidas lore says that by 1973 roughly three quarters of NBA players wore Superstars. Some tellings push it to 85 percent. No one has produced a roster count to back either figure, so treat both as marketing folklore that happens to point in the right direction. The Superstar was plainly the dominant shoe in the league for a stretch of the early 1970s. Exactly how dominant is a guess.

How Did Hollis Steal It?

By the late 1970s newer designs had pushed the Superstar off the court, and it drifted onto the street, where it was tough, available and everywhere. In Hollis, Queens, Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels and Jason Mizell wore theirs with the laces pulled out and the tongues pushed forward, with tracksuits, leather jackets and black hats. The same clothes on stage and off. That was the whole idea, and our history of hip-hop menswear covers how radical it looked at the time.

My Adidas came out in 1986. The song is usually described as partly an answer to Felon Sneakers, an anti-sneaker track by Jerrald Deas. Run-DMC flipped the premise into a love song about a shoe, and the Garden did the rest. The deal is widely described as the first endorsement between a hip-hop act and a major sportswear company, and a Run-DMC clothing line followed. Whether it was truly the first is hard to prove. Nobody has made a convincing case for an earlier one.

Skaters, NIGO and Fifteen Million Pairs

The Superstar never really left after that. Skaters picked it up as the 1990s turned into the 2000s, with Mark Gonzales among the names tied to it, and adidas eventually built a proper skate version, the Superstar ADV, in 2015. In Tokyo, NIGO worked A Bathing Ape into the shoe's story through collaborations in the 2000s, part of the traffic between Japanese streetwear and American sportswear we trace in our Ura-Harajuku guide.

For the 35th anniversary in 2005, adidas released 35 models across five series, each built with names from music, fashion and art. It treated a single silhouette as a catalog of collaborations, a logic that would soon drive the Nike Dunk and the whole Supreme drop model.

The commercial peak came later than most people assume. adidas sold more than 15 million pairs in 2015, making the Superstar its best seller that year. It was the era of the clean white sneaker, and the shell toe shared shelf space with its football cousin, the adidas Samba, and with Nike's all-white staple, the Air Force 1.

The Shell Toe Now

The current lineup says a lot about how adidas sees the shoe. The Superstar XLG of 2023 inflated the sole and upper for the platform crowd. Then, in February 2025, adidas reverted the Superstar II to the plain Superstar name. The II had appeared mostly on collaborations and special releases, and dropping it put the original name back on the shoe most people actually buy.

What hasn't changed is the toe. Hold a new pair next to a photo from the early 1970s and the shell gives it away, the same ribbed rubber cap, the same three serrated stripes, the same flat, low profile. The release timeline is laid out on the Superstar Wikipedia page, and Mr Porter has a good account of how Run-DMC earned their stripes. Our adidas hub collects the rest of the three stripes, and the competition is in the sneaker history archive and the sneakers section.

Pull the laces out of a new pair today and the tongue still flops forward the way it did in Hollis in 1986.

On November 12, 1906, Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his 14-bis 220 meters in Paris, an officially verified powered flight that many in Europe treated as the first real airplane. There is a good chance he knew exactly how long it took. Two years earlier, his friend Louis Cartier had built him a watch he could read without letting go of the controls.

A coffee heir with a hangar

Santos-Dumont was Brazilian, the heir to a coffee fortune who decided he would rather build flying machines than run plantations. He settled in Paris in the 1890s, then the center of aviation science, and in 1898 he flew a balloon he called Brésil. Over the following years he built more than a dozen airships, and by 1901 he was steering them around the Eiffel Tower in full view of the city.

Paris gave him an audience and, eventually, a friend. Louis Cartier was the grandson of the jeweler who founded the house in 1847, and Santos-Dumont brought him a very specific problem.

The story Cartier tells is simple. Santos-Dumont complained that pulling a pocket watch out of his waistcoat in mid-flight was impractical when he needed both hands to fly. In 1904 Cartier answered with a flat wristwatch on a leather strap, its square case finished with visible fixings around the bezel. It is often called the first pilot's watch. Whether or not that title holds up, it was one of the first men's wristwatches designed with a specific job in mind, and it was square at a time when watches were round.

From one aviator to the public

For seven years the watch was essentially a private commission. Cartier put it into full production in 1911, with a movement supplied by Jaeger, the specialist that would later merge into Jaeger-LeCoultre. It sold under the Santos-Dumont name and it was expensive, bought by the kind of client who already had an account on the Rue de la Paix.

Meanwhile the man himself kept flying. After the 14-bis he built the Demoiselle, a tiny monoplane that was one of the first aircraft produced in series. His name stayed on the watch, which is more than most aviators of the period can say.

The Santos also did something for Cartier that is easy to miss. It taught the house that a watch could be a piece of architecture with a strap attached. In 1917 Louis Cartier stretched the same thinking into a rectangle, and the result was the Cartier Tank, the shape most people now picture when they hear the name.

Steel, gold and a gala at the air museum

The Santos most people know today comes from 1978. Alain-Dominique Perrin, the executive credited with the idea, wanted a sports watch that could sell to a wider buyer than Cartier's gold-watch regulars. The answer was the Santos de Cartier, in steel with gold, on a bracelet that ran straight out of the case. Gold screws sat on the bezel and ran down the bracelet links, picked out against the steel so the hardware became the decoration. Cartier launched it on October 20, 1978 with a gala at the Musée de l'Air, the French aviation museum that holds one of Santos-Dumont's Demoiselle aircraft.

It landed in the right decade. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak had made the integrated steel bracelet respectable in 1972, and the Patek Philippe Nautilus followed in 1976. The Santos was the jeweler's version of that idea, flatter and dressier, with gold doing the work that Genta's angles did at AP. An all-steel model followed soon after, and so did the copies. Revolution has called the classic Santos the most copied watch in the world for many years, which is a backhanded compliment Cartier probably did not mind.

The line kept shifting. In 1987 Cartier softened the case into the Santos Galbée, curved to sit closer to the wrist. In 2004 the Santos 100 marked a century since the original, with a larger case for the oversized watch years. By around 2016 the Galbée had quietly disappeared from Cartier's site and sold through at boutiques.

The 2018 reboot

Cartier brought the Santos back at SIHH 2018, forty years after the Perrin launch, in medium and large sizes. The large case measures 39.8 by 47.5 millimeters. Inside sits the in-house caliber 1847 MC, an automatic with a power reserve of about 42 hours.

The real news was in the hardware. QuickSwitch lets an owner swap the bracelet for a leather strap by pressing a tab between the lugs, no tools. SmartLink lets you size the bracelet yourself, with a push button hidden on the back of each link. For a watch whose whole personality lives in its bracelet, that is a serious upgrade, and it put the Santos back on the wrists of people who were born after the Galbée.

A year later the slimmer Santos-Dumont came back in steel with a quartz movement rated to run around six years, and a run of hand-wound limited editions followed in 2020. If you are weighing a vintage Galbée against a new one, our guide on how to buy your first mechanical watch covers papers, servicing and how to avoid the fakes this model attracted for decades.

For more, see watch history, heritage brands and the Quiet Menace watches section. The Wikipedia entry on Alberto Santos-Dumont is worth an hour on its own, and Revolution's brief history of the Cartier Santos goes deep on the Galbée years.

The detail that still gets collectors is the screw heads. Most luxury watches hide how they are held together. The Santos has kept its screws on show since 1978, set in gold against steel, on a square case first drawn for a man who needed both hands to fly.

On October 26, 1984, a running company with a basketball problem signed the third overall pick in the NBA draft. Nike did not slot Michael Jordan into an existing model. It gave a rookie his own signature line, and the following spring Peter Moore's Air Jordan 1 reached stores at $65 in Chicago Bulls red, black and white. Forty years, a league memo, one brilliant ad and countless retros later, it is still the shoe every collaboration wants to touch.

The One Adidas Let Walk

In 1984 Converse had the league's biggest stars, and adidas had the European cool that a young player from North Carolina found appealing. Jordan himself has said, in the documentary series The Last Dance, that adidas was the brand he wanted. Adidas, by most accounts, could not put together a shoe and a deal to match.

Nike could. Its offer, a line with his name on it, was almost unheard of for a rookie. The contract was rich by the standards of the day, but the real gamble was conceptual. Nike was betting that one player could carry a product line on personality alone.

That bet is the reason the sneaker history of the last four decades reads the way it does. It is also why adidas, a brand that would later define hip-hop style through Run-DMC (a story we tell in how hip-hop rewrote menswear), spent years answering questions about the one that got away.

Peter Moore's Drawing Board

The shoe came from Peter Moore, a Nike creative executive who worked with Jordan in the months after the draft. Jordan wanted to feel close to the floor, so the sole stayed relatively flat, with a Nike Air unit sealed in the heel for cushioning. The upper was full grain leather with a padded high collar, a perforated toe box and a generous Swoosh.

Moore also drew the Wings logo, a basketball with wings and the words Air Jordan arcing over the top. It sat on the collar like an aviator's badge, and it became the first emblem of what would grow into Jordan Brand.

Nobody in marketing invented the colors. Red, black and white were the Bulls' palette, and Moore built the original lineup around them. The $65 price was expensive for the time but not outlandish.

Banned, Sort Of

The legend needs care. The version most people know goes like this. Jordan wore black and red shoes, the league banned them, Nike paid a $5,000 fine every game, and the Air Jordan 1 became forbidden fruit. Almost every part of that is shakier than it sounds.

The paper trail is thinner and more interesting. The league did enforce a uniformity rule, and it objected to Jordan wearing a black and red Nike shoe early in his rookie season, including a preseason game at Madison Square Garden in October 1984. On February 25, 1985, NBA executive Russ Granik wrote to Nike's Rob Strasser about footwear that broke league rules. Sneaker historians who have studied the photographs and the timeline conclude that the shoe in question was most likely the Nike Air Ship, a model Jordan wore before his own signature shoe was ready.

Advertising did the rest. Nike ran a commercial built around the idea that the league had thrown the shoes out of the game, with a black bar censoring them on screen. The campaign made the Air Jordan 1 feel outlawed at the exact moment it went on sale. The ban was real enough to start a legend and vague enough to let marketing finish it. As for the per game fines, no evidence that the league actually issued or collected them has surfaced, even though the figure still gets repeated in retro marketing.

The honest version is better anyway. A league rule, a different shoe, a sharp ad agency and a rookie who played like nobody else added up to the most effective piece of sneaker marketing ever made.

Chicago, Bred, Royal

The 1985 range launched in several colorways, and the names collectors use now became shorthand for an entire design vocabulary. The Chicago is white with red overlays and a black Swoosh. The Bred, short for black and red, is the shoe the ban story attached itself to. The Royal swapped red for royal blue. Through 1985 and 1986 more versions followed, including canvas and low top variants.

When basketball moved on, the shoe found a second life on sale racks. Its flat sole and padded ankle made it a natural for skateboarders, and the Air Jordan 1 turned up in skate culture in the mid 1980s long before anyone called it a grail. Court to street to skatepark is the route every great streetwear sneaker has taken since.

After 1985

Moore left Nike in 1987 and co-founded the consultancy Sports Inc with Rob Strasser. Working with adidas, the pair launched the EQT line in 1991, Moore reshaped the three stripes into the mountain logo adidas still uses, and their firm later became adidas America. The man who drew the Wings logo ended up redrawing the rival's identity.

The Air Jordan 1, meanwhile, became the template for the modern reissue. A few dates trace the arc.

The 1994 retro is widely reported to have sold slowly, which is easy to forget now. Later reissues, especially once hype culture and limited releases took over, made every return of a 1985 colorway a calendar event. The same scarcity logic powers Supreme and the rise of the drop model.

The Air Jordan 1 was never the most advanced shoe of its era. Two years later Tinker Hatfield would cut a window into a midsole and change running shoes for good, a moment we unpack in the Nike Air Max 1 and its visible Air window. What Moore's shoe had was a hero, a rumor and a color story anyone could read from across a street. It proved a sneaker could be a story first and equipment second.

You can see its panels in the boutiques of Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku and in collaboration after collaboration. Our Nike hub, the rest of our sneaker coverage and the streetwear archive pick up the thread. The background on the line is collected in the Air Jordan entry on Wikipedia, and the player's own record lives on Michael Jordan's page.

By the late 1980s, skaters were pulling pairs off sale racks for less than the $65 they launched at. Try finding a 1985 Bred on a sale rack now.

Sometime in 1981, a Casio designer named Kikuo Ibe started throwing watches out of a third-floor bathroom window in Tokyo. Then he went downstairs, collected the pieces and did it again. Two years and more than 200 prototypes later, the thing that finally survived went on sale as the DW-5000C, the first G-Shock.

A broken gift and a one-line memo

The origin story is small and personal. Ibe handled exterior design for Casio's watches, and he owned a mechanical watch from his father that broke after it was knocked off his wrist. He was not shopping for a replacement. He was irritated that a watch could die from one bad second, and he turned that irritation into a proposal that ran a single line, for a watch that would keep going even after a fall.

Casio, a company founded in 1946 and better known then for calculators, approved it. Ibe got a team, and it was tiny. Casio's own history puts Project Team Tough at three people. Some later retellings put the number higher, which tells you how quickly the G-Shock story turned into folklore.

Ten meters, ten bar, ten years

The brief they wrote for themselves became known as Triple 10. The watch had to survive a 10 meter fall, resist water to 10 bar and run for 10 years on one battery. Water resistance and battery life were engineering problems Casio knew how to solve. The fall was the real fight.

Ibe's first instinct was padding. Wrap the module in rubber, then wrap the rubber in more rubber. It failed in a way that is almost funny in hindsight. The more cushioning the team added, the bigger the watch got, and one test piece swelled to roughly the size of a softball. That is not a watch. That is a toy you strap on.

He moved to a layered design, five stages of shock absorption built from five different materials. It kept breaking in a maddening pattern. Strengthen one part and the impact simply found the next weakest component. The early testing was about as primitive as product development gets. Prototypes went out of that third-floor bathroom and dropped about 10 meters to the ground, the Triple 10 spec acted out with nothing but gravity.

The ball in the park

The fix arrived on a day off. After a week with no progress and the project close to collapse, Ibe sat in a park near the office on a Sunday and watched children playing with a rubber ball. A ball takes a hit and spreads the force through itself. Whatever floats in the middle barely feels it.

That picture became the floating module. Instead of armoring the movement, the team suspended it inside a hollow case, touching the structure only at a few points, with urethane soaking up the shock. The outer resin case got raised edges that stand proud of the buttons and crystal, so a fall lands on the bezel first. Underneath sat a stainless steel case with a screw-down caseback, and the strap meets the case in a curve that keeps a direct hit away from the back.

The watch went on sale in April 1983 as the DW-5000C-1A, black with red accents. It was rated to 200 meters, well past the 10 bar target, with a stopwatch, countdown timer, alarm and a light. The price in Japan was ¥11,400, a lot of money for a plastic digital watch at the time.

Slapshots, skaters and a runaway bus

Japan mostly shrugged. Thin dress watches were the fashion, and retailers who earned good money on repairs had little reason to push a watch built to never need one. The turn came in the United States. In 1984 Casio ran a television spot in which a hockey player fired a G-Shock across the ice, using the follow-up DW-5200C. Viewers accused the company of false advertising. A TV news program ran its own test on air, and the watch survived. Casio could not have bought better marketing.

Skaters and surfers took it from there. The square case evolved into the DW-5600C in 1987, and in 1994 Keanu Reeves wore a DW-5600C-1V through Speed. Fans often repeat that it was his own watch rather than a supplied prop, a nice story that is hard to pin down. The 1990s added the Frogman DW-6300 in 1993, the line's first ISO certified dive watch, and the Mudman line in 1995. By September 2017 Casio was marking its 100 millionth G-Shock.

The brick that never left

The strange part is how little the original needed to change. The 5600 family on sale today keeps the octagonal face and the thick guarding bezel, with glass fiber reinforced resin replacing metal in the inner case on many versions and carbon fiber on newer ones. Casio's own timeline for the series reads like a list of every gadget trend since. EL backlight in 1996, solar power in 2002, radio time sync in 2005, smartphone link in 2012. For the 35th anniversary in 2018, the GMW-B5000 rebuilt the 1983 silhouette in full steel with a screw-back, Bluetooth, solar charging and radio reception.

It belongs on the same shelf as the Sony Walkman and the birth of personal audio and the Nintendo Game Boy, Japanese hardware that solved one problem so completely that the shape became the brand. It is also the opposite of the Rolex Submariner, a tool watch whose credibility comes from being cheap enough to abuse. If the Seiko SKX007 diver was the mechanical watch a generation learned on, the 5000 was the one they forgot they were wearing. The Swiss answer to the same decade lives in our Swatch and quartz crisis history, and there is more in watch history, our Japan coverage and the Quiet Menace watches section.

Casio's official 5000 and 5600 history tells the window story in the company's own words, and nippon.com's profile of Ibe follows him to his current role as a senior fellow at the Hamura R&D Center. Every G-Shock built since 1983 still carries the answer he found that Sunday, a module hanging in the middle of a hollow case like the air inside a child's ball.

Tretinoin was approved by the FDA in 1971 as a topical acne treatment. More than fifty years later, the vitamin A family it belongs to fills drugstore shelves in serums, night creams and eye creams, and plenty of men buy a bottle, use it every night for a week and quit with a red, flaking face. The ingredient was rarely the problem. The pace was.

What a retinoid actually is

Retinoid is the umbrella term. The American Academy of Dermatology describes retinoids as a group of vitamin A-based skin products, a family that runs from mild over-the-counter serums to prescription acne medication. They speed up the turnover of cells at the skin's surface and boost collagen, which is why they come up whenever dermatologists talk about acne, uneven tone, rough texture and fine lines.

Retinol is one member of that family, and the one you can buy without a prescription. It is commonly used for uneven tone, pigmentation and texture. There is a catch the AAD points out. No standard rule requires brands to disclose the percentage of retinol on the label, so two bottles with the same word on the front can behave very differently on your face. The AAD's advice is to look for the lowest formulation you can find.

That is worth remembering in the aisle. Aesop built a brand on sober amber glass and dense ingredient copy, a story told in our history of Aesop's apothecary design, and a handsome bottle is a fine thing to own. It still tells you nothing about strength. Read the back, not the front.

Retinol or tretinoin?

Prescription retinoids sit at the stronger end. The AAD lists tretinoin (sold under names including Retin-A and Renova), tazarotene and trifarotene as prescription topicals for acne. Adapalene lives in between, available both by prescription and over the counter, where it is sold as an acne treatment. Isotretinoin, the oral pill for severe acne, is a different animal entirely and belongs strictly to a dermatologist's office.

For mild concerns, the AAD considers retinoid products a good option. Mild acne, mild pigment irregularities and mild fine lines are the retinol lane. Moderate or severe acne scarring, or breakouts tied to hormonal changes, call for a board-certified dermatologist before you try anything. The same goes if you are curious about tretinoin, which needs a prescription anyway. A dermatologist picks the strength and tells you how to use it, and the AAD is clear that changes to the amount or frequency of a prescription retinoid should happen only with their guidance.

Some skin is better off skipping the category for now. The AAD flags people with skin allergies or dry skin as probably poor candidates, and says to avoid retinoids if there is significant redness or inflammation. If you suspect rosacea, ask a dermatologist about other therapies. The AAD also says retinoids should not be used during pregnancy, which is worth knowing if the bottle lives on a shared bathroom shelf.

How to start without wrecking your face

Patch test first. The AAD's method for trying a new product is to apply a small amount to the inner forearm twice a day for four to five days. No redness or itch, and it can graduate to your face.

Then go low and slow. Dermatologists quoted by the AAD recommend starting with the least intense formula available, using it every other night, and building up gradually from there. The people who skip that step are the ones who irritate their skin. Apply it at night. Retinoids can increase sun sensitivity, which is why the AAD recommends using them in the evening only.

Keep everything else boring. Using several anti-aging products at once can irritate skin, so the retinoid should arrive alone, on top of a routine that is already just cleanser, moisturizer and sunscreen. If you need that baseline first, our men's skincare basics lays it out in three steps. Moisturizer matters more than usual here. The AAD notes that in darker skin tones, retinoid irritation can trigger dark marks, and recommends starting slowly and using a moisturizer. Men with deeper skin have every reason to take the ramp even more gently.

Irritation, and when to stop

The AAD lists dryness, irritated skin, peeling and burning among the possible side effects of retinoid acne treatments, and notes that irritation does not usually mean you are allergic. For over-the-counter products its rule is simple. Stop using anything that stings, burns or tingles. With a prescription, call the dermatologist before quitting, since some prescription products do sting and the fix may be a smaller amount or fewer nights a week.

More is not faster. The AAD says plainly that applying more than your dermatologist recommends will not clear acne any sooner, and that overusing active ingredients can leave skin blotchy or overly dry.

Patience is the real skill. According to the AAD, most anti-aging products take at least six weeks to show results, and some take up to three months. For acne, it generally takes at least six to eight weeks before breakouts ease. And the results last only as long as you keep using the product.

Sunscreen is part of the deal

A retinoid routine without daily sunscreen is half a routine. While using one, the AAD recommends seeking shade, wearing sun-protective clothing such as a wide-brimmed hat, and applying a broad-spectrum, water-resistant sunscreen with SPF 30 or higher to all exposed skin. If your skin runs sensitive, look for a physical sunscreen with zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. Our sunscreen guide for men covers how to read the label and how much to use.

The AAD's own explainer, Retinoid or retinol?, is the page to read before you buy, and its bottom line matches ours. Talk to a dermatologist first if you have any real skin issue, from persistent acne to redness that never settles. For more routines, browse the Quiet Menace grooming section and our skincare and grooming essentials hubs.

Every other night, at night only, sunscreen every morning. Write the start date on the bottle with a marker. Six weeks is longer than it sounds.

In 2003 Aesop took its first customers in an odd little space in St Kilda, Melbourne. It was a narrow ramp that had once led cars down into an underground car park at the Prince hotel. The company was already sixteen years old by then, and it had grown up in a hair salon in Armadale.

A hairdresser and a chemist

The salon was called Emeis, the Greek word for us, and it belonged to Dennis Paphitis. Around 1987 he started blending essential oils into the hair color he used on clients. That habit turned into hair products, then body and skin products, which he developed with a chemist. The early line carried the salon's name before Paphitis renamed it Aesop, after the Greek writer of fables. The choice was a quiet joke at the expense of an industry built on exaggerated promises. A storyteller famous for moral tales seemed a funny name for a business that refused to make miracle claims.

Paphitis eventually left hairdressing to run the product side full time. His first employee, Suzanne Santos, went on to become the company's chief customer officer. The business grew slowly, in a way that would be hard to imagine for a beauty startup today, with no influencer seeding and no discount events. Aesop has long avoided conventional advertising and sales, preferring to let the shops and the products do the talking.

The apothecary look

Pick up a bottle of Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash and you are holding the whole brand in one hand. Brown bottle. Pale label. A block of small type that reads like a pharmacist's instructions. The name is set in Optima, a typeface with the calm authority of an old medical text. The hand wash itself smells of mandarin rind, rosemary leaf and cedar atlas, a herbal, slightly bitter combination that became the unofficial scent of good restaurant bathrooms in the 2010s.

The look borrows from the apothecary, where glass was tinted and labels were for information rather than seduction. That restraint is why it travels so well. A brown Aesop bottle sits as comfortably on a concrete basin in Tokyo as it does in a Victorian bathroom in London. It is also why the look has been copied so widely. Walk down any drugstore aisle now and you will find brown plastic bottles with sober labels from brands that never met a chemist. Imitation is cheap. The original still has the better copywriting.

For men who never thought of themselves as skincare people, Aesop was a side door. The products looked like grooming tools, not cosmetics, and the shops did not feel like a department store beauty floor. If you are building a routine from zero, our guide to men's skincare basics covers the steps dermatologists actually recommend, brown bottle or not.

No two shops alike

Aesop's stores are the reason architects love it. From the start the company decided against a uniform look. No signature color, no standard fit-out repeated from city to city. Each shop was designed for its address with a local architect, designer or artist, working with what was already in the building. In a 2012 interview with Dezeen, Paphitis explained that every store shares only a handful of fixed elements, product displays, a counter, storage, a place to sit and running water.

The results read like a design survey. Ilse Crawford designed the first London shop in 2008, inside a Victorian mansion block in Mayfair. The Melbourne practice March Studio designed a shop in Singapore, and the Paris studio Ciguë has handled several projects for the brand. In Tokyo the work went to Schemata Architecture Office and Torafu Architects, two firms with the same respect for material and handwork we found while reporting our Kyoto craft guide. A Los Angeles shop by Brooks + Scarpa, opened in 2017, had its walls lined with reclaimed cardboard tubing.

The idea is closer to architecture than retail. A chain that refuses to look like a chain is a contradiction, and Aesop made it work by treating every lease as a commission. The same instinct sits behind Le Labo's lab-like boutiques, which we look at in our piece on Le Labo and the rise of niche fragrance.

Who owns Aesop now?

Growth needed money. A private equity firm took a minority stake around the end of the 2000s. In December 2012 the Brazilian group Natura bought 65 percent of the company for roughly 70 million US dollars, and in 2016 it took full ownership. Paphitis later stepped back from running the business.

The biggest move came in April 2023, when L'Oréal agreed to buy Aesop for 3.7 billion Australian dollars, roughly 2.5 billion US dollars. The deal closed that August. By then the brand had close to 400 points of sale across 27 countries, more than 235 of them signature stores of its own. Long-serving chief executive Michael O'Keeffe left in December 2024 after more than two decades.

Corporate ownership usually sands the edges off a brand like this. From the outside, Aesop has kept its manners. The packaging and the one-off shops look much as they did before the deal. Whether that survives a global beauty conglomerate's appetite for growth is the real question for the next decade. Aesop's own account of its history still opens with that underground ramp in St Kilda, which tells you what the company thinks is worth protecting.

For more grooming history, start with Eau de Cologne, the 300-year-old scent, then browse the grooming section, our skincare coverage and our architecture hub. And the next time you walk into an Aesop shop, notice where the sink is. Running water was one of the few things every Aesop shop had to include, so the basin is never an afterthought.

Before the café there was a curtain. In 2016 Aimé Leon Dore opened its first shop on Mott Street in Nolita, and the door and windows were covered so nobody could see in from the sidewalk. The interior changed with every season. If you knew, you went in. If you did not, you walked past a draped storefront and never gave it a second thought.

Three years later the curtain came down. One block over on Mulberry Street, Teddy Santis opened a bigger flagship with a Greek coffee counter attached, and the label he had started in 2014 suddenly had a front porch.

A name built in Queens

Santis grew up in Queens, the son of Greek immigrants, and spent the 1990s moving between New York and Greece. What he soaked up in those years is still the brand's raw material. Graffiti, breakdancing, house music, hip-hop and a lot of basketball, run through a taste for good knitwear and old-school sportswear.

The name took some work. Santis first wanted to call the label Aimé, the French word for loved. It turned out to be too broad to trademark, so he and his wife built a longer one. Leon came from his father's nickname. Dore came from Theodore, Santis's own first name. The company launched in March 2014, and its headquarters are in Queens.

The early hits were exactly what a borough kid would make. Varsity jackets that pointed back to the New York Mets in their best years sold out fast, and open-knit leisure shirts gave the line its summer uniform. A 2015 project with Puma reworked the State sneaker. A 2017 capsule with Kith went full Mykonos, with anchors, boat paddles and evil-eye graphics. The Greek thread was there from the start. It just had not found its building.

Coffee on Mulberry

The new flagship opened in 2019 on Mulberry Street, with Café Leon Dore attached, a Greek-inspired counter serving coffee and pastries with seating out front. The shop itself was dressed like an apartment, a living room modeled on classic Parisian homes, with wood paneling, a hi-fi system and an installation by the New York artist Tyrrell Winston. That year, Jon Caramanica reviewed the store for his Critical Shopper column in The New York Times and filed ALD as a heritage brand that came after streetwear, which is still the most useful one-line description of the label.

The café is the part people remember. A clothing store gets your visit on release day. A coffee counter with outdoor seating gets you on an ordinary Saturday, and a full sidewalk is better advertising than any lookbook. Kith ran the same play with a cereal bar, as told in our history of Kith and Ronnie Fieg. Santis has named Nom De Guerre, the early-2000s basement shop at Broadway and Bleecker, as one of his biggest influences, and it sat minutes from where his flagship went in. Mulberry Street reads like a reply to it, a downtown shop that wanted to be found and gave you a reason to linger. It anchors the Nolita end of our SoHo streetwear guide.

The 550 and the grey shoes

The New Balance partnership began in April 2019 with the 997. That November brought the 990v2 and 990v5, and in March 2020 ALD revived the 827, a model that had been out of sight for more than two decades.

Then came the 550. New Balance first sold it in 1989 as the P550, a $45 low-top basketball shoe that went nowhere. When ALD brought it back in 2020, the model was so obscure that New Balance had to track down used pairs and old sketches to rebuild it. The reissue sold well enough that the 550 became a general release. An archive flop the company barely knew it had was suddenly a catalog staple.

On April 5, 2021, New Balance named Santis creative director of its MADE in USA line, a role the company called the first of its kind. The job covers design and marketing for shoes built in New Balance's American factories, which by the brand's own standard carry 70 percent or more domestic value. His first product landed in 2022. The muted, menswear-minded colorways he brought to the line did a lot to turn the 990 into an expensive-looking object, a shift we cover in our New Balance 990 history. The official announcement is in New Balance's press archive.

Porsches, powerboats and LVMH

ALD makes its collaborations look like hobbies. In February 2020 it revealed a one-off restoration of a 1990 Porsche 964 911 Carrera 4, the first time Porsche officially backed a vintage 911 restoration, with a capsule collection and an installation at Deitch Gallery on Wooster Street. In July 2023 came the ALD Technohull 38 Grand Sport, a powerboat built with the Greek rib maker Technohull and fitted with twin 450 horsepower Mercury engines. Woolrich, Drake's, Paraboot, Timberland, Suicoke and Rimowa have all appeared on the partner list.

The money followed the taste. In January 2022, Hypebeast reported that LVMH had taken a minority stake through LVMH Luxury Ventures, its fund for emerging labels. Neither the size of the stake nor the price was disclosed, and the company stayed in New York. The same coverage pointed to a London store on the way.

The store count has stayed small. Beyond New York there is a London shop, and in April 2026 MR Magazine reported a first Los Angeles flagship on Melrose Avenue as coming soon, with no opening date announced. In June 2026, Hypebeast reported the label's first dedicated women's capsule, sold online and in its flagships. Compare that with the store maps of Kith or Stüssy and the gap is obvious. For a label this talked about, a handful of doors is a small number, and the scarcity is part of the appeal.

More on the shops and founders behind this world lives in our culture section and the streetwear and collaborations hubs.

The Mott Street shop hid behind a curtain. Its replacement put chairs on the sidewalk and a coffee in your hand.

England, 1896. John E. Brooks is watching a polo match and notices something small. The players have buttoned the tips of their shirt collars down so the points stop slapping their faces at a gallop. He takes the idea home to New York, and by 1900 Brooks Brothers is selling it on ready-made shirts. Pair that collar with a heavy basketweave cotton called oxford and you have the most democratic shirt in menswear, one that has outlived every trend thrown at it since.

A Fix From the Polo Field

Brooks was the grandson of Brooks Brothers founder Henry Sands Brooks, and the collar he saw was a purely practical fix. Players needed their points to stay put. Brooks saw a product.

He had the collar copied, and by 1900 Brooks Brothers had it on its ready-made shirts. The company still calls its version the Original Polo Button-Down. The name comes from the sport, and it predates the knitted polo shirt most people picture today. The collar was soon paired with oxford cloth, and the American OCBD was born.

What makes oxford cloth different?

Oxford is a basketweave cotton. Instead of single yarns crossing one by one, pairs of yarns interlace, which gives the fabric a faint pebbled texture, a soft sheen and real weight in the hand. It is sturdier than poplin and far more casual. It also ages well, fading at the collar edge and softening with every wash.

The usual origin story says 19th-century Scottish mills named a set of shirtings after elite universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, and that only Oxford became a household word. It is a good tale and widely repeated. Treat it as textile lore, though, because nobody has documented it.

Campus Uniform

By the 1910s the shirt had found its way onto East Coast college campuses, and it stayed. Through the 1920s to the 1940s, students at elite universities built a look around soft natural-shoulder jackets, chinos, loafers and the button-down. By the 1950s it had gone fully mainstream, sold by Brooks Brothers and J. Press to men who wanted to look like they had studied somewhere with ivy on the walls, whether or not they had.

That era gave the shirt its double life. With a sack suit and a repp tie, it passed for business dress. Worn open with a crewneck sweater, it was the original weekend shirt. Jazz musicians adopted it too, so the button-down belonged to mid-century cool as much as it did to campus conformity. It is also the rare piece of clothing that looks better the less you fuss over it, which may be why both camps liked it.

Tokyo takes notes

In 1965 a group of Japanese style enthusiasts published Take Ivy, a book of candid photographs shot on American campuses. It caught undergraduates in rumpled oxfords, cuffed chinos and beat-up penny loafers, and it became a bible for Tokyo's young men, helped along by brands like VAN Jacket. When Take Ivy was reissued in English in 2010, it set off a fresh wave of heritage obsession in the West. Japan's habit of preserving American classics more faithfully than America itself shows up in the history of raw and selvedge denim as well.

The Ralph Lauren Remix

Ralph Lauren worked as a sales clerk at Brooks Brothers before launching his own line of wide neckties in 1967, soon sold under the Polo name. When he built a full menswear line, the oxford button-down became one of its cornerstones, cut a little fuller, offered in more colors and stitched with the pony logo. Lauren did not invent the shirt. He turned it into a story about aspiration, sold through magazine spreads and store fixtures dressed to look like a New England country house. You can follow that thread on our Ralph Lauren brand hub.

That pull traveled in unexpected directions. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Lo-Lifes in Brooklyn turned Polo into a badge of street credibility, a chapter we cover in our history of how hip-hop rewrote menswear. A shirt that signaled old money on one coast became a trophy on another.

Buying One Worth Keeping

The details that matter are small, but they compound.

The collar

Look for long points and a soft, unfused or lightly interlined construction. Together they produce the roll, the gentle S-curve between the band and the button that makes a button-down look relaxed instead of stiff. Short, fused collars lie flat and kill the effect.

The cloth

A good oxford should feel substantial, never papery. Non-iron finishes are convenient, but the chemical treatments flatten the texture that makes the cloth worth wearing. Untreated cotton wrinkles. That is the point.

The small stuff

A back collar button, a box pleat and a locker loop are traditional Ivy touches. You can live without any of them, but a shirt that has all three usually comes from a maker who knows the lineage. A single chest pocket is standard. Two pockets lean workwear.

How to Wear It Now

No shirt in a man's closet does more jobs. Wear white or blue under a navy blazer with grey trousers. Wear it untucked over chinos with suede shoes. Layer it under a shetland sweater in autumn. If you ever commission something on Savile Row, this is the shirt that will look most at home under a soft-shouldered sport coat, as our visitor's guide to Savile Row bespoke explains. More pieces in the same spirit live under wardrobe essentials, in the menswear history archive and across the Style section.

The one real rule is restraint. Let the cuffs fray. Skip the iron, or give the placket and collar band a quick press at most. And when the collar does that soft S-curve on its way down to the button, leave it alone. That curve has been on its way down to a button since a polo match in 1896.

Ricoh put the GR1 on sale in October 1996. It weighed about 175 grams, its magnesium alloy body was 26.5 millimeters deep, and its fixed 28mm f/2.8 lens was built from seven elements in four groups. From across the street it looked like any other black point-and-shoot. That was the whole idea.

A Cheap-Looking Camera With an Expensive Lens

The GR1 was a 35mm film compact with program and aperture priority modes, film speeds from ISO 25 to 3200 and a top shutter speed of 1/500 of a second. It also loaded backward. Close the back and the camera wound the entire roll out of the cartridge, then pulled the film back in as you shot, so a back opened by accident ruined only the frames you hadn't taken yet. It won the 1997 TIPA award for best 35mm compact camera.

The lens was the real story. Ricoh was confident enough in it to build a limited run of 3,000 manual-focus 28mm GR lenses in 1997 for M39 screw-mount rangefinders, the same mount family as early Leicas. Film shooters who now chase a Leica M6 will recognize the logic. Small body, great glass, no zoom.

The family grew fast. The GR10 of April 1998 kept the lens but moved to an aluminum body and dropped aperture priority. The GR1s, also from 1998, brought improved lens coatings to fight flare. The GR21 of April 2001 swapped in a 21mm f/3.5 and was made in small numbers. Then in September 2001 came the GR1v, which added manual ISO selection and a set of fixed focus distances that Ricoh labeled SNAP.

The cameras found serious owners. The British conflict photographer Philip Jones Griffiths used a GR1. Daido Moriyama, the Japanese street photographer whose grainy, off-kilter pictures of Tokyo shaped how a generation thinks about the genre, used the GR1v. When a man who shoots that fast and that close picks a camera, other people notice.

The Digital Years

Ricoh carried the name into digital in September 2005 with the GR Digital. It had an 8-megapixel 1/1.8-inch CCD sensor and a 5.9mm f/2.4 lens with the same 28mm equivalent view, and it was priced well above ordinary compacts despite a sensor that small. The GR Digital II followed with 10 megapixels and the same lens. The GR Digital III, released in July 2009, opened up to f/1.9, the fastest aperture of the line. The GR Digital IV of September 2011 added sensor-shift stabilization and was the last camera to carry the GR Digital name.

The big jump came in April 2013. The new camera was simply called the GR, and it put a 16.2-megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor, the size you'd find in a lot of DSLRs, behind an 18.3mm f/2.8 lens. The view was still 28mm equivalent, and the body stayed pocket-sized. Suddenly the pocket camera could hold its own against much larger kit, and the line stopped being a curiosity. The GR II followed in June 2015.

The GR III, unveiled in 2018, was smaller again at 109.4 millimeters wide, with a 24-megapixel APS-C sensor, sensor-shift stabilization and a minimum focus distance of 6 centimeters. In September 2021 the GR IIIx changed the formula for the first time in the digital era, with a 26.1mm lens giving a 40mm equivalent view, a tighter frame some shooters prefer for portraits on the street. The March 2024 GR III HDF replaced the built-in ND filter with a highlight diffusion filter for a softer, glowing look. Ricoh said in May 2025 that a GR IV was in development, and it arrived that September with a 25.74-megapixel APS-C sensor in a 228-gram body, 262 grams with battery and card.

Snap Focus, Explained

Autofocus is the enemy of a street picture. By the time a lens hunts and locks, the moment has crossed the road. Snap focus gets around this by deciding the distance in advance. You choose a preset, and the camera sets focus there and stays put.

On the GR III and GR IIIx, the Full Press Snap setting makes this a reflex. Press the shutter halfway and the camera autofocuses as normal. Jab it all the way down in one motion and it skips autofocus entirely and fires at your preset distance. Many shooters pair it with a small aperture. On an APS-C sensor and an 18.3mm lens at f/8, a preset of around two meters keeps everything from roughly a meter away to the far side of the street acceptably sharp. You stop looking at the screen and start looking at the street.

The idea goes straight back to the SNAP setting on the 2001 GR1v. Ricoh has kept refining one trick for a quarter century, which is rarer in camera design than it should be.

Why It Lives in Pockets

The modern GR has no built-in viewfinder, makes little noise and looks like nothing in particular. Compared with the rangefinder styling of a Fujifilm X100, which draws comments in a cafe, the GR draws none. People don't pose for it, and they don't stiffen up when they see it. For street work that matters more than any spec sheet.

It also slides into a jeans pocket, which is more than most APS-C cameras can manage. The closest analog experience is probably instant film, where the camera is a social object, the opposite of the GR's invisibility (see our Polaroid SX-70 history for that side of the story). Ricoh has leaned into the street identity directly. Its GR III Street Edition Special Limited Kit, 3,500 units worldwide, paired a metallic gray GR III with a leather hand strap and a compact detachable viewfinder, and Ricoh keeps a street photography page for the GR III on its site. The full model history of the film cameras is on Wikipedia.

For more cameras worth carrying, browse the tech section, the cameras hub and our Japan coverage.

The lens and sensor have changed many times since 1996. The view through the standard GR has not. The GR IV that Ricoh shipped in September 2025 sees the world at 28mm, exactly as the GR1 did on its first roll of film.

The red zip tie came first. When Nike and Virgil Abloh confirmed their collaboration in late August 2017, every shoe in the project carried one, a plastic loop printed with the date, the collaboration name and the words "zip-tie" in bold white letters. A piece of packaging had been promoted to a design feature and labeled as such. It was about as close to a thesis statement as Abloh ever wrote down.

He rarely needed more than that. A word in quotation marks, a tag left where a tag should not be, a factory detail made visible. The tricks were small. The ambition behind them was enormous, and for a few years in the late 2010s nobody in fashion moved faster.

The architect in the room

Abloh was born on September 30, 1980, in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanaian parents. He earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002, then a Master of Architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2006. That training explains a lot. He thought in templates and systems, in the idea that one rule applied consistently becomes a style, and he talked about clothing the way architects talk about a facade.

Fashion arrived through music. In 2009 he and Kanye West were in the same intern class at Fendi's Rome office, and the same year he opened RSVP Gallery in Chicago with Don C, a shop that put streetwear next to designer labels. His cover art for Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne was nominated for the Grammy for Best Recording Package in 2011. He was already working as a creative director in everything but title.

Pyrex, then Off-White

In 2012 he launched Pyrex Vision. The method was blunt. He bought deadstock Ralph Lauren flannels for around $40, screen-printed them and sold them for upward of $550. He closed the label about a year later. Read cynically, it was a markup scheme. Read generously, it was a seminar on what a logo is worth. Both readings hold up.

Off-White followed in 2013, based in Milan. The logo, built on alternating parallel diagonal lines, borrowed a graphic language that designer Ben Kelly had popularized decades earlier, a lineage that has been argued over ever since. The quotation marks became the house signature, the device that turned a hoodie or a handbag into a comment on itself. In 2015 Off-White was a finalist for the LVMH Prize, losing to Marques'Almeida and Jacquemus. Losing did not slow anything down.

The approach sat comfortably next to the downtown logic that Supreme built with its weekly drops. Both understood that young buyers wanted to be in on the reference. Abloh simply printed the reference on the product.

The Ten

The Nike project is still the best argument for his method. Abloh took ten existing models, deconstructed them and sorted the results into two packs. Revealing held the Air Jordan 1, Air Max 90, Blazer Mid, Air VaporMax and Air Presto. Ghosting held the Air Max 97, Air Force 1, Converse Chuck Taylor, React Hyperdunk and Zoom Vaporfly. Laces were printed "SHOELACES." Material names like AIR sat on the midsoles in quotation marks. The main release ran through October and November 2017, and Draymond Green wore the React Hyperdunk in the NBA season opener that October.

The Jordan 1 in that set is now part of the same story as the original 1985 shoe told in our Air Jordan 1 history. The Air Force 1, the most ordinary sneaker in America, became something you photographed before you wore it. The Ten itself wound down in December 2018, though Nike and Off-White kept releasing shoes together for years after, and the resale prices it generated helped build the platforms covered in our look at the sneaker resale economy. The full list lives on the Wikipedia page for The Ten.

Paris calls

On March 25, 2018, Louis Vuitton named Abloh artistic director of menswear, making him the first person of African descent to lead the line. His first show came that June in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, with Playboi Carti, Steve Lacy and Kid Cudi on the runway. It was the clearest signal yet that the energy hip-hop had pushed into menswear now set the agenda at the top of the business.

He kept the side projects going. In 2019 IKEA released Markerad, a collection of chairs, tables, rugs and mirrors, and its Frakta-style bag printed with "SCULPTURE" became the joke everyone understood. The same year the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago staged Figures of Speech, his first solo exhibition, which later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum. In 2020 he raised $1 million for the "Post-Modern" Scholarship Fund for Black students, administered by the Fashion Scholarship Fund.

After Virgil

In July 2021 LVMH took a 60 percent stake in Off-White, with Abloh keeping 40 percent. Four months later, on November 28, 2021, he died in Chicago at 41. He had been diagnosed with cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare cancer, in 2019 and had kept it private. Louis Vuitton turned its planned November 30 show in Miami into a tribute titled "Virgil was here."

Off-White has been looking for its next sentence since. Ib Kamara joined as art and image director in 2022 and later held the creative director title. In September 2024 LVMH sold Off-White to the brand management firm Bluestar Alliance. The Impression reported in August 2026 that Kamara was leaving after four years, with no successor named, and that the brand plans to work with ten outside collaborators reinterpreting its archive through April 2027. The same report said Bluestar had closed the New York flagship and the China stores.

That plan sounds a lot like Abloh's own working method, which was to treat an archive as raw material and hand it to friends. For more on the people who carried that idea forward, browse our culture section and the streetwear and luxury fashion hubs.

Look inside a pair of 2017 Air Prestos and the print is still there, small and deadpan: Off-White for Nike, Beaverton, Oregon USA, C. 2017. He even footnoted the inside of the shoe.

In 1925 Walter Gropius made Marcel Breuer a junior master at the Bauhaus and put him in charge of the furniture workshop. Breuer was in his early twenties. That same year, as the story is usually told, he bought his first bicycle and could not get over how light its steel frame was. Within about a year he had turned the observation into a chair.

A Student From Pécs

Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary, on May 21, 1902. In 1920 he took up a scholarship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and abandoned it the same year for the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, where he went through Johannes Itten's preliminary course and then landed in the carpentry workshop. His early pieces were wood, all right angles and slats. He passed his journeyman's exam in 1924. A year later he was running the shop.

Our history of the Bauhaus covers the school's move from Weimar to Dessau. What matters here is that Breuer arrived in the new building with the authority to experiment and an interest in a material nobody had put in a living room.

The Bicycle, as Told

The Wikipedia entry for the Wassily chair, which leans on the Cooper Hewitt in New York, says Breuer was struck by the lightness of his new bicycle's tubular frame. Some versions name the bike, some zoom in on the handlebars, and the details shift depending on who is telling it. Treat it as the origin myth it has become. The sturdier fact is that Breuer took the idea of a tube frame from bicycles and borrowed fabrication methods from local plumbers, who already knew how to bend pipe.

The result, designed over 1925 and 1926, is the club chair later catalogued as the B3. Look at it side on and it is close to a line drawing. A continuous run of steel tube traces the outline of a big upholstered club chair, and then the upholstery disappears. In its place are taut straps of Eisengarn, a waxed cotton "iron yarn" invented in the 19th century, for the seat, back and arms. Margaretha Reichardt, a student in the Bauhaus weaving workshop, improved the thread and developed the cloth and strapping. It is a club chair with the club removed.

The Bauhaus Kooperation biography of Breuer calls it the first tubular steel chair for domestic use. Steel tube was a material for bicycles and plumbing. Putting it next to the fireplace was cold and slightly shocking, and in the right room it still is.

Never Kandinsky's Chair

Wassily Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus while Breuer ran the furniture workshop. He admired the finished chair, and Breuer made a duplicate for his quarters. That is the entire connection. The chair was not designed for him, and for most of its first four decades it did not carry his name.

The early production history is messier than any catalog suggests. In 1926 or 1927 Breuer co-founded Standard-Möbel in Berlin with Kálmán Lengyel, and the company produced most of his early designs under license. The club chair was the one significant early Breuer design it did not offer. Thonet made it instead, from the late 1920s, as Model B3, in folding and non-folding versions with fabric straps tensioned by springs. That Thonet edition was discontinued during World War II and is now the rarest version of the chair.

Breuer left the Bauhaus in 1928 and opened an architecture office in Berlin. He moved his office to Budapest in 1933, to England in 1935 and in 1937 to the United States, where Gropius helped him into a professorship at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He moved his office to New York in 1946 and spent the rest of his career as a serious architect, with the Whitney Museum of American Art and the UNESCO building in Paris among the major commissions. The chair could easily have stayed a footnote.

Gavina Gives It a Name

It didn't, because of Dino Gavina, a Bolognese furniture entrepreneur who wanted the Bauhaus armchair back in production. Breuer was alive and working in New York, so this was a living designer's piece coming back, not an estate reissue. Gavina took the license after the war and introduced the version most people picture, with black leather straps in place of fabric. While researching the chair's origins, the company found the Kandinsky story and named the chair after him. The B3 became the Wassily, and it has been mass-produced since the 1960s.

Knoll bought the Gavina Group of Bologna in 1968, which brought Breuer's designs into its catalog, and it has made the Wassily ever since. That puts it in the same small club as the Eames Lounge Chair, a piece of furniture people can name on sight. The patents expired long ago, so copies are everywhere. Knoll holds the Wassily name, which is why reproductions are sold under other ones.

Why It Still Works

A lot of modernist furniture looks great in a photograph and asks something of you in person. The Wassily asks less than you would expect. The leather slings give, the back tilts you slightly, and the open frame means the chair barely registers visually even though its footprint is generous. In a small apartment it makes the room look bigger, which is not something you can say about most club chairs.

It is also the clearest early case of industrial design aimed at the home, and its influence went to odd places. In 1934 Peter Bang designed the Hyperbo radio-gramophone with a frame inspired by Breuer's tubular steel chair, a story told in our Bang & Olufsen history. Decades later Verner Panton chased the idea of a chair drawn in one continuous gesture, only in molded plastic, and our piece on the Panton Chair picks up that thread. More from the school and its heirs lives in our design section.

Breuer died in New York on July 1, 1981. The chair he designed in his early twenties carries the first name of a painter who simply liked it.

On April 21, 1989, Nintendo put a gray plastic brick on Japanese shelves for ¥12,500. Its screen measured 160 by 144 pixels and could show four shades of gray. There was no backlight, and the Sharp processor inside ran at 4.19 MHz. Atari and Sega would soon sell handhelds with color screens. Nintendo outsold both by miles.

The Man Who Fixed the Card Machines

Gunpei Yokoi was born in Kyoto in 1941 and studied electronics at Doshisha University. He joined Nintendo in 1965, back when it was a playing card company, and his first job was maintaining the assembly-line machines that printed hanafuda cards. In 1966 the company's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, noticed an extending arm Yokoi had built for fun in his spare time. It went on sale as the Ultra Hand and became a hit, and Yokoi stopped fixing machines.

By 1980 he had made Game & Watch, the pocket LCD games that fit a single title into something the size of a calculator. The thinking behind them later got a name, lateral thinking with withered technology. It sounds like a riddle, but the logic is purely commercial. Take components that are mature, cheap and completely understood, then find a use for them nobody has tried. Don't chase the newest chip. Yokoi believed that the fun of a game mattered more than its hardware, and that expensive new parts mostly made products late and fragile.

The Game Boy is that idea at full scale.

A Gray Brick Called DMG-01

Yokoi and Satoru Okada led development with Nintendo's R&D1 team. The production model carried the code DMG-01. It measured 148 by 90 by 32 millimeters, weighed 220 grams before you added four AA batteries, and used the flat cross-shaped D-pad that Yokoi had designed so the controls would sit flush with the casing instead of sticking out of it.

Critics had complaints. The graphics were crude, there was no light to play by after dark, and the thing was bulky. None of it mattered once the North American version arrived on July 31, 1989, at $89.99.

The secret weapon was a Soviet puzzle game. Henk Rogers brought Tetris to Nintendo of America, and its president, Minoru Arakawa, approved porting it and bundling it with the console. Outside Japan, the console shipped with Tetris in the box. A falling-block game with simple monochrome graphics suited that screen perfectly, and it was the kind of game people who never touched a console would play on a train. About one million units sold in the first weeks in the United States, and the 1989 allotment was gone within weeks. Tetris eventually sold around 35 million copies on the system, more than any other Game Boy game.

Why the Color Rivals Lost

The competition looked better on paper. Atari's Lynx, Sega's Game Gear and NEC's TurboExpress all had more advanced hardware and backlit color screens. All three lost, and badly. The Game Boy was cheaper, its batteries lasted far longer, and its library kept growing while the rivals struggled for games.

That is the withered technology philosophy in practice. A reflective monochrome LCD drew very little power. A backlit color panel in 1989 drank batteries. For a kid on a long car ride, the trade was obvious. You can see the same principle in our story on the Sony Walkman and personal audio, another Japanese machine that won by doing one thing well in your pocket rather than everything at once.

The Game Boy reached Europe on September 28, 1990, and it was tough as well as cheap. The most famous unit belonged to Stephan Scoggins, a medic deployed during Operation Desert Storm. His Game Boy was caught in a bombing of his barracks, and its front was scorched. It still switched on, with Tetris on the screen. For years it sat on display at Nintendo's New York store, until reports in 2023 said it had been returned to Nintendo of America's headquarters in Redmond.

The Long Tail and a Short Ending

Nintendo kept refining rather than replacing. The slimmer Game Boy Pocket arrived in Japan on July 21, 1996, running on two AAA batteries. The Japan-only Game Boy Light, with a backlit screen, followed on April 14, 1998. The Game Boy Color landed late that same year, and the Game Boy Advance in 2001. Original units kept selling until March 2003, and the Game Boy and Game Boy Color together reached about 118.69 million units. The rival that finally ended its run in the handheld market was its own successor, not a competitor. Sony's eventual entry into games has its own strange Nintendo backstory, told in our feature on PlayStation design history.

Yokoi's later years were harder. He produced Metroid and Kid Icarus for R&D1, two of Nintendo's most respected series, but his Virtual Boy of 1995 was a commercial failure. He left Nintendo on August 15, 1996, after 31 years. How much the Virtual Boy had to do with his exit has been debated ever since. He founded a company called Koto with several former colleagues, and it started work on a new handheld for Bandai, the WonderSwan.

The case for less hardware and more thought runs straight through the design canon, from Dieter Rams and his ten principles to the click wheel of the Apple iPod. Yokoi rarely gets mentioned in that company. He should. Browse more in the tech section, our tech history archive and the gaming hub.

On October 4, 1997, Yokoi's car rear-ended a truck on the Hokuriku Expressway. He got out to inspect the damage and was struck by a passing car. He was 56. The WonderSwan went on sale in 1999, two years after the man who designed the gray brick was gone.

In 1953 Rolex started building a steel Oyster for people who actually went underwater. References 6204 and 6205 were rated to 100 meters, wore a rotating bezel marked in minutes and a black dial with fat luminous markers, and reached the public at the Basel fair in 1954. Nine years later Sean Connery wore a 6538 in Dr. No. Seven decades on, the current 41mm Submariner still has the same face, and it is the most copied watch design in the world.

An Oyster for Divers

By the early 1950s Rolex already owned the idea of a sealed watch. Its Oyster case, patented in 1926, screwed shut like a submarine hatch. Once recreational scuba took off after the war, the next step was obvious.

The essentials were there from day one. A black dial with big luminous markers. A rotating bezel so a diver could track elapsed time at a glance. A screw-down crown. A steel case built to be worn hard.

Rolex was not alone. Blancpain introduced the Fifty Fathoms the same year, and collectors still argue about who did what first. The fair reading is that both brands answered the same need at the same moment. Rolex simply kept refining its answer longer, and with more stubbornness, than anyone else.

Big Crowns and Military Issue

The 6538

The mid-1950s reference 6538 is the grail. It carried an oversized winding crown that was easier to grip with wet hands, and it became a pop culture object when Connery wore one in Dr. No in 1962. That screen time, on a strap rather than a bracelet, taught a generation of men that a dive watch could go with a dinner suit.

Crown guards and the long-running 5513

In 1959 Rolex added crown guards, the shoulders of steel that flank the crown and absorb knocks. The case grew to 40mm around the same time. The chronometer-rated 5512 and the workhorse 5513 carried this new profile, and the 5513 stayed in production into the late 1980s. If you picture a vintage Submariner, you are probably picturing a 5513.

The 1960s and 1970s also produced the specialist variants that give the Submariner its credibility. Rolex supplied modified watches to the French diving company Comex, and a formal partnership began in 1971. The British Royal Navy issued its own "Milsub" versions with sword hands and fully graduated bezels. Those watches were never retail products, which is exactly why collectors chase them now.

A Date, and Three Dots Under the Crown

The Submariner Date arrived in 1969 as reference 1680, with a date window at 3 o'clock and the magnifying Cyclops lens Rolex already used on its Datejust. Purists grumbled about the broken symmetry. Customers bought it anyway, and the line has offered both versions side by side ever since.

In 1970 Rolex presented the Triplock crown, which uses three sealed zones and is identifiable by the three small dots under the coronet. It rolled across the range through the 1970s and is still the Submariner's main defense against water.

Sapphire, Ceramic, 41mm

The modern watch was built in quiet increments, and it got better largely by refusing to change its face. In 1979 the reference 16800 brought a sapphire crystal and raised water resistance from 200 to 300 meters, a rating the line still holds. In 1985 Rolex switched the Submariner Date to 904L steel, a corrosion resistant alloy the brand later renamed Oystersteel. The reference 16610 carried the Date through the 1990s and 2000s, and its 2003 anniversary edition, the 16610LV, introduced the green bezel that collectors nicknamed the Kermit.

Then came ceramic. Rolex had launched its Cerachrom bezel insert on the GMT-Master II in 2005, and the steel Submariner Date 116610LN adopted it at Basel in 2010. Ceramic does not fade or scratch the way the old aluminum inserts did, which keeps new watches looking new for decades. The same generation brought a broader case with thicker lugs, a change that divided enthusiasts.

In 2020 Rolex answered them. The current references, the no-date 124060 and the 126610LN Date, use a 41mm case with slimmer lugs and run on calibers 3230 and 3235. On paper it is a millimeter of growth. On the wrist it reads like a return to the balance of the 1960s watches.

Form, Following Function

Industrial designers talk about form following function, and few objects prove it like this one. Every visual cue on a Submariner, from the triangle at twelve on the bezel to the fat hour markers, exists because a diver once needed it. The same logic drives the restraint in Dieter Rams and his ten principles of good design, and it is why the watch never looks dated.

It also sits in a small club of products that stay culturally relevant without reinventing themselves, alongside raw selvedge denim and the Leica M6 and the film camera revival. Each one got more desirable the longer it stayed itself.

Its natural rival is the watch that went up instead of down. Our history of the Omega Speedmaster Professional, the Moonwatch covers the other great tool watch story of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Quiet Menace watches section, our watch history archive and the wider world of heritage brands fill in the rest. For primary detail, Rolex publishes its own timeline in From tool watch to icon, and the Rolex Submariner entry on Wikipedia keeps a running reference list.

Then go look at a 5513 in person, a 40mm steel case with the 1959 crown guards and a bezel counting off minutes, and set it next to a 2020 reference 124060. They were introduced nearly sixty years apart, and they share a face.

In July 1960 the SAS Royal Hotel opened in Copenhagen, a 22-floor tower that gave the low city skyline something new to look up at. Down in the lobby, guests sank into a deep, curved shell on a four-pronged aluminum foot. Arne Jacobsen had designed that too, along with nearly everything else they touched.

A Hotel Designed Down to the Ashtrays

Jacobsen, born in Copenhagen in 1902, trained as an architect, and the commission from Scandinavian Airlines let him work at full volume. Construction started in 1956. The tower owed a visible debt to Lever House in New York, a point the Victoria and Albert Museum makes plainly in its catalog. What set the job apart was the inside. Jacobsen drew the furniture, the lighting, the textiles, the cutlery and even the ashtrays. Cooper Hewitt calls the result a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art running from the doorknobs to the flatware. That flatware later turned up in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, picked because it looked like the future.

The lobby posed a specific problem. It was a public room full of people between flights, and a normal armchair leaves its sitter on display. The Egg's high, wrapped back fixes that. Swivel it toward the window and you have a small private room inside a big public one. Jacobsen built a family of chairs around it for the same project, including the lower, winged Swan, the Drop and the little Pot lounge chair, plus the Series 3300 seating for the SAS air terminal. Of everything in our design coverage, few objects are this tied to one building.

Wire, Plaster and an Argument About the Year

Fritz Hansen, the Danish maker that still produces the chair, says Jacobsen found the shape by experimenting with wire and plaster in his garage. Design histories usually connect it to Eero Saarinen's Womb chair, and Cooper Hewitt names Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames as the Americans Jacobsen was watching. Put the Egg next to the Eames Lounge Chair and the conversation between Copenhagen and California in the late 1950s is easy to see.

Even the date is contested. Fritz Hansen and most Jacobsen books say 1958. The V&A, which owns an early example, notes that its own registered description says 1959 and that auction records have used 1957.

The construction under the leather has changed too. The V&A's chair has a molded polystyrene core, and the museum's records say early versions used a material called styropore. Cooper Hewitt's 1958 example, given by Fritz Hansen, lists a steel frame, a fiberglass-reinforced polyurethane foam shell, latex foam rubber and cotton upholstery. Both sit on a cast aluminum swivel base. The current production chair carries the model number 3316 on Fritz Hansen's Egg page.

The factory was the right partner for this kind of object. Cabinetmaker Fritz Hansen got his trade license in Copenhagen in 1872, and the company spent the following decades on steam-bent and laminated wood. Jacobsen's Ant chair gave him his breakthrough with the firm in the early 1950s, and the Series 7 followed in 1955. The Egg and Swan were the next step, moving from bent plywood to upholstered shells, and they sit near the center of the mid-century modern canon because of it.

What Happened to Room 606

The hotel later took the Radisson SAS name and now trades as the Radisson Collection Royal Hotel, Copenhagen. Guest rooms were refitted over the decades, with one exception. Room 606 keeps its original decor, with wengé wood, a grey and blue-green palette, built-in makeup mirrors, a radio and an intercom, plus an Egg, a Swan and one of the rare Drop chairs. Fritz Hansen describes the present lobby as close in many ways to the 1960s original, and the Eggs and Swans are still part of it.

The building did a lot for Jacobsen's career. Oxford dons visited it, and his Munkegård School, before hiring him to design the new St Catherine's College in the 1960s. He won the competition for Danmarks Nationalbank in 1961, then died in 1971 before it was finished, leaving the firm Dissing+Weitling to complete it. If you are planning a trip, our Copenhagen design guide picks up where the hotel leaves off.

Big Brother, McDonald's and Gate Seating

The Egg's second life is the one most people know. It was the diary room chair in the first UK series of Big Brother. The New York Times reported in 2007 that McDonald's had used it in a redesign of a London restaurant, and in 2011 the paper noted Eggs in the boarding area of the renovated Terminal 2 at San Francisco International. A shape that recognizable was always going to end up on television. Plenty of industrial design classics never leave the showroom, and the Egg got out.

Jacobsen also drew an Egg sofa. Only a handful were made, a few of them for the hotel. In leather it shows a seam down the middle, because the shell is too large to cover with two whole cowhides.

Not every Egg in public is the real thing. A McDonald's on Nørrebrogade in Copenhagen has one, though some of the furniture around it is imitation. The silhouette is the easy part to copy, which is why the paper trail from Fritz Hansen or an authorized dealer matters more than the shape. For a full record of an early example, the V&A's catalog entry lays out the materials and the dating dispute in detail.

Upstairs, Room 606 still has its built-in radio, a jet-age hotel's idea of luxury from two decades before the Walkman put music in a pocket.

Madison Square Garden, July 19, 1986. Run-DMC get to My Adidas and ask the crowd to hold up their sneakers, and thousands of adidas go into the air. Somewhere in that arena sits adidas executive Angelo Anastasio, brought along by the group's co-manager Lyor Cohen. What happened next was a contract, and with it a shift in who gets to decide what men wear. Over the following decades, that decision moved from the runway to Harlem, Brooklyn and the back streets of Tokyo.

Laces Out in Hollis

By the mid 1980s the Hollis, Queens trio of Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels and Jason Mizell had a uniform that read like a manifesto. Black fedoras, leather jackets, gold rope chains and, above all, the adidas Superstar worn with the laces pulled out. The Superstar had begun life as a basketball shoe in 1969. Run-DMC made it a statement of neighborhood pride.

My Adidas came out in 1986 on the album Raising Hell, a song about a shoe that was really about self respect. The deal that followed the Garden show is recognized by Guinness World Records as the first sneaker endorsement for non-athletes. Suddenly a musician could move product like a point guard, a year after Nike bet everything on a rookie with the Air Jordan 1 in 1985, and the economics of the industry changed.

125th Street, Open All Night

While Run-DMC wore sportswear straight off the shelf, Daniel Day was making something no store sold. In 1982 he opened Dapper Dan's Boutique on 125th Street in Harlem and kept it open around the clock. His clients included LL Cool J, Eric B. & Rakim, Salt-N-Pepa and Mike Tyson, as well as the neighborhood's hustlers, who wanted to look as rich as they were.

Dapper Dan's genius was translation. The big European houses printed their monograms on bags and small leather goods. He screen printed Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Fendi logos onto leather and turned them into bomber jackets, coats and full suits, cut for the shapes his clients actually wore. The houses called it counterfeiting. Harlem called it couture.

Legal action brought by the brands closed the boutique in 1992. Then, in 2017, Gucci showed a jacket that closely echoed a 1989 Dapper Dan design. The backlash led to an official partnership, and in 2018 Gucci and Dapper Dan opened an atelier on Lenox Avenue. Hip-hop never asked luxury for permission. It wore the logo better and waited for the house to catch up. His life story is documented on his Wikipedia page and in his memoir, Made in Harlem.

Polo From Cap to Socks

Ralph Lauren sold an American fantasy of country houses, regattas and Ivy League ease, the world we explore in the history of the Oxford button-down. In 1988, a group of young men from Brooklyn decided that fantasy belonged to them.

The Lo-Lifes formed when two crews, Polo U.S.A. from Brownsville and Ralphie's Kids from Crown Heights, merged around a single obsession. The goal was to be dressed in Polo from cap to socks, a look the crew called lo down. The crew never pretended about how it built its wardrobes. Much of the clothing was shoplifted, often in coordinated rushes through department stores, and that outlaw edge is part of the legend.

What they wore mattered as much as how they got it. Bold color blocked windbreakers, oversized ski jackets, sailing gear and sweaters with big Polo graphics became trophies. When Raekwon wore a Polo Snow Beach pullover in a 1994 Wu-Tang Clan video, a piece of outdoor gear became a hip-hop artifact that collectors still chase.

The Lo-Lifes proved that a heritage brand's meaning is not fixed by the people who make it. The people who wear it hardest decide.

The Tokyo Connection

Across the Pacific, Tomoaki Nagao, known as Nigo, was building the next chapter. On April 1, 1993, he opened the shop Nowhere with Jun Takahashi of Undercover in the back streets of Harajuku, and the same year he launched A Bathing Ape, named after the film Planet of the Apes. Tiny production runs, camouflage, shark hoodies and a cartoon ape made Bape the most coveted label in the neighborhood we map in our Ura-Harajuku streetwear guide.

American rappers found Bape in the early 2000s, and Pharrell Williams became its most visible ambassador. In 2003 he and Nigo launched Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream, mixing skate, space age graphics and hip-hop swagger. Nigo launched Human Made in 2010, sold a majority of Bape to Hong Kong's I.T Group in 2011 and left the brand in 2013. In 2021 he became artistic director of Kenzo. In 2023 Louis Vuitton named Pharrell its men's creative director. The kids who once bootlegged luxury now run it.

Four Decades on One Table

The limited release, the collaboration, the logo as language and the musician as creative director all started as hip-hop ideas. The same logic powers Supreme and the rise of the drop model, and even serious tailoring now borrows hip-hop's confidence, a long way from the quiet rooms of Savile Row. Our brand hubs for adidas, Ralph Lauren and Bape go deeper, as do the menswear history and streetwear archives and the rest of our culture coverage.

Gucci's partnership with Dapper Dan opened on Lenox Avenue in 2018, 26 years after legal action from the big houses closed his storefront on 125th Street. This time the logos on his leather were official.

In 1979 a shop called Hollywood Ranch Market left Sendagaya, where it had opened seven years earlier, and moved to a quiet hill in Shibuya called Daikanyama. It brought American West Coast clothes and its own T-shirts to Tokyo well ahead of the crowd, and it helped invent the Japanese select shop, a store that buys from everywhere and answers only to its own taste. Nearly fifty years on, the hill still runs on that idea. So does Nakameguro, the river neighborhood at the bottom of the slope.

A hill built slowly

Daikanyama sits on the western edge of Shibuya ward, between Ebisu and Nakameguro. In the Edo period the high ground held residences for samurai families. Later it drew artists and writers, and in the Showa era, embassies. What it never got was the tower-block rush of Shibuya a few minutes away, and a lot of the credit goes to one architect.

Fumihiko Maki began Hillside Terrace in the late 1960s and kept adding to it for roughly three decades, a run of low white buildings, terraces and sunken courtyards along Kyu-Yamate-dori. Maki won the Pritzker Prize in 1993, and this is the best argument for it you can walk through for free. It set the height of the street and pulled its public spaces back from the traffic. Patience became the neighborhood's house style. Read Maki's biography, then walk the full length of the complex. The rest of Daikanyama starts to look like a reply to it.

Kyu-Yamate-dori and Hachiman-dori are the two streets to know. Both are wide and easy by Tokyo standards, which is why the area feels calm even on a Saturday.

The select shop's home ground

Hollywood Ranch Market is still the reference point, and its sister shops Okura and Hi! Standard come from the same family. Okura is the one menswear people cross the city for, an old building full of indigo-dyed clothing and textiles that take their cues from traditional Japanese garments. If your interest in indigo started with a pair of jeans, our raw and selvedge denim guide is the companion read.

Bonjour records Daikanyama opened in 1996 and still works the way a good Tokyo shop should, records next to books next to clothes, all chosen by people who clearly care about all three. Globe Specs Daikanyama is the eyewear stop, with frames sourced from around the world and staff who will talk hinges and bridge fits for as long as you let them.

Check before you go. Every shop named here appears in 2025 neighborhood coverage at this location, but small stores move and change stock, so look at each one's own site before you plan a route around it.

Klein Dytham's giant letter T

Daikanyama T-Site is what most visitors come for, and it earns the trip. Klein Dytham Architecture won an invited competition from the bookseller Tsutaya and finished the design in 2011. The firm split the program into three buildings of two to three floors, linked by walkways, and arranged them to keep the best of the trees already on the lot.

Then they put the client's logo to work. The facade grid is woven from interlocking white T shapes, so the brand becomes the structure rather than a sign hung on it. Inside, one wing has been given to books, one to music and one to film and magazines, with a long magazine street that has carried back issues of Japanese titles from the 1960s and 1970s, including Heibon Punch. The architecture and design shelves alone justify an hour.

Store layouts and departments change, so treat this as a description of the building, not a floor plan.

Down to the river

Walk downhill for ten minutes and you are in Nakameguro, where the Meguro River runs in a concrete channel between two rows of cherry trees planted so close that the branches touch over the water. In spring, when the trees are lit at night, the bridges fill shoulder to shoulder. The rest of the year it is one of the most pleasant urban walks in Tokyo. The Go Tokyo guide to Nakameguro has the official overview.

By the river, Kengo Kuma's four-story building for the Starbucks Reserve Roastery Tokyo is one of a handful of Starbucks roasteries in the world, with a roasting floor, a bakery counter, a cocktail bar and terraces aimed straight at the blossoms. You can be cynical about a coffee chain and still admit the timber work is good.

The better coffee is smaller. Onibus Coffee pours specialty roasts in a small wooden building by the elevated tracks, close enough to watch the trains go past. Sidewalk Stand is a small café by the canal, good for sandwiches and cold brew to take to a riverside bench.

Under those tracks is Nakameguro Koukashita, a long run of bars, shops and small galleries built into the arches, anchored by Nakameguro Tsutaya Books, the Daikanyama store's offshoot. Nearby, 1LDK sells pared-back clothing and lifestyle goods out of a converted residential building, just north of the station. Cow Books is a tiny secondhand bookshop for rare and out-of-print titles, worth the detour, and Waltz is a shop devoted to cassettes, records and old audio gear, which tells you everything about the neighborhood's sense of humor.

As with Daikanyama, confirm before you go. These places all turn up in 2025 coverage, but small shops here can move without much notice.

How to walk it

Start at Daikanyama Station on the Tokyu Toyoko Line, do Hillside Terrace and T-Site in the morning, then work through the shops on Hachiman-dori before heading downhill. Reach the river by early afternoon, get coffee, and finish under the tracks once the bars open. Weekdays are calmer. Late March and early April are beautiful and packed.

Pair the day with our Ura-Harajuku streetwear guide for the louder side of Tokyo, and our Kyoto craft guide for the slower one. For the man who turned Harajuku taste into a global business, read our piece on NIGO, Human Made and Kenzo. Seoul's version of this kind of neighborhood is in our Seongsu-dong guide. More in our Japan coverage, our city guides and the full Travel section.

On your way out of T-Site, stop on the pavement and look at the facade again. Every white piece of that lattice is a capital T.

By the late 1950s New York firefighters had a nickname for the blocks south of Houston Street that nobody wanted. Blazes in old storage buildings there had cost lives, and the district of half-empty warehouses became Hell's Hundred Acres. In 1962 a civic report recommended clearing most of it. The same iron facades now frame some of the most watched shop windows in menswear, and the line outside a store on release morning is as much a part of the streetscape as the fire escapes.

From Hell's Hundred Acres to loft living

SoHo takes its name from its position, south of Houston, and its look from the 1870s, when most of its cast-iron-fronted buildings went up. Iron fronts could be made in a foundry, bolted to the building and painted to pass for stone, which suited the manufacturers and wholesalers working on the floors behind them. Some of the street fabric is older. A scattering of Federal-era houses survives from the first decades of the 1800s, when this was a quiet residential edge of the city.

By the 1960s industry had largely gone and the area looked expendable. The City Club's 1962 report, Wastelands of New York City, argued for demolition, and the planned Lower Manhattan Expressway would have cut a highway straight across. Residents fought it and the road was never built.

Artists filled the gap. Lofts with tall windows and freight elevators were perfect for large work, and in the early 1960s an Artist in Residence status began letting a limited number of artists live in a factory building. Many more moved in without permission. In 1968 Donald Judd began living and working at 101 Spring Street, an 1870 building by Nicholas Whyte, and he stayed until his death in 1994. In January 1971 the city legalized residence for certified artists in SoHo's manufacturing buildings, and on August 14, 1973, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the SoHo Cast Iron Historic District. The boundaries were extended in 2010.

Galleries came after the artists, and retail came after the galleries. That sequence, cheap space first and prestige later, is the same one that turned Lafayette Street into a streetwear address.

Lafayette Street and the 1994 line

Supreme opened on Lafayette Street in 1994 as a skate shop, and it stayed on that corner for twenty-five years. In February 2019 the company announced a renovation of the original store and opened a temporary space on the Bowery. By September of that year lease signs had gone up in the old windows and Supreme confirmed the closure. That autumn it signed a long-term lease on the Bowery building, a former bank, and made it the New York flagship. The weekly release rhythm that built those queues is unpacked in our story on Supreme and the drop model.

Lafayette did not go quiet. A few blocks north, Kith's Manhattan flagship reopened in May 2025 after a renovation. For the backstory, read our history of Ronnie Fieg and Kith. The clustering makes sense. Streetwear shoppers cover these blocks in a single afternoon, and the shops know it.

Broadway, Prince and the luxury turn

Broadway is the neighborhood's loud main road, a long run of big flagships and bigger crowds. The one building worth slowing down for is the Prada Epicenter. Rem Koolhaas and OMA designed it inside the former Guggenheim Museum SoHo, and it opened in December 2001 after three years of research and development, according to Prada's own account of the store. A quarter century later it still makes most of its neighbors look like furniture showrooms.

East of Broadway the blocks get tighter and the shops more particular, and SoHo shades into Nolita without any sign telling you so. Stüssy's New York Chapter store reopened on Prince Street in February 2025, a fresh outpost for a label whose California roots we trace in our history of Stüssy. On Mulberry Street, Aimé Leon Dore keeps its New York flagship. Teddy Santis founded the brand in 2014, and its attached Café Leon Dore, a Mediterranean-style spot that draws on his Greek roots, has done as much to define the label as any lookbook.

How to walk it without wasting the day

Treat the neighborhood as a loose rectangle. Broadway is the spine, Lafayette and the Bowery mark the streetwear side to the east, and the side streets to the west, Greene, Mercer and Wooster, are where the cast iron is at its most theatrical. Prince Street and Spring Street run across the whole thing and make easy connectors.

Go early on a weekday if you want to look at clothes rather than shoulders. Release days change the rules entirely, and each brand runs its queues its own way, with sign-ups, raffles or plain lines depending on the drop. Those systems change often, so check each brand's site and social channels the week you travel rather than trusting a guide, this one included. Store locations shift too. Two of the shops above have moved or rebuilt in the past few years, and more will.

Book one thing in advance. The Judd Foundation opened 101 Spring Street to ticketed tours in 2013 after three years of restoration, and seeing how Judd arranged his own furniture, art and floors in a cast-iron building is the best context you can get for the neighborhood. Check the Judd Foundation for current tour availability, and read our piece on Donald Judd's furniture and Marfa before you go.

If SoHo leaves you wanting the original template, our guide to Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku covers the backstreets that shaped Supreme's generation, and our London guide to Soho and Dover Street Market picks up the story across the Atlantic. There is more in our streetwear archive, our city guides and the full Travel section.

One last thing to do costs nothing. Find a column on Greene Street that looks like carved limestone, hold a fridge magnet to it, and wait for the click.

In 1903, its first year of sales, King Camp Gillette's company sold 51 razors and 168 blades. Fifty-one. The idea, a double-edge blade so thin and cheap you threw it away instead of sharpening it, looked like a flop. The next year Gillette sold more than 90,000 razors, and by the end of World War I millions of men had the habit. A century later the same chrome design is back on bathroom shelves, and it still gives one of the closest shaves you can get.

Before Gillette, and After

Before the safety razor, shaving meant an open straight razor and a steady hand, or a trip to the barber. In the 18th century the French cutler Jean-Jacques Perret built a guard for the blade, inspired by a woodworker's plane. The term safety razor itself first shows up in a patent filed in 1880 by Frederic and Otto Kampfe of Brooklyn, whose single-edge design used a short wedge of steel.

Gillette was a traveling salesman, and his disposable blade was the leap. Making it at scale was the hard part, and machinist William Nickerson solved it with machinery for hardening and sharpening thin sheet steel. Gillette founded the American Safety Razor Company in 1901, applied for his double-edge patent the same year, and received it on November 15, 1904.

After that slow start, World War I made the double-edge razor universal. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Gillette supplied field razor kits for American soldiers, and a generation of men came home shaving the Gillette way every morning.

The Case Against the Cartridge

From the 1970s onward, multi-blade cartridges took over drugstore shelves. They are convenient. But the safety razor never disappeared, and over the past two decades it has made a serious comeback.

Start with the shave itself. A single sharp blade, held at the right angle, cuts cleanly. Then there is cost and waste, since a double-edge blade is a small piece of steel rather than a molded plastic cartridge. And there is the ritual. A brush, a bowl of lather and a heavy chrome razor turn five minutes of chores into something closer to the satisfaction of putting on a well-made Oxford button-down shirt. It is maintenance that feels like craft.

Picking a First Razor

The razor head determines how aggressive the shave feels. The main styles compare like this.

For a first razor, a mild closed comb model is the safe choice. Pair it with a blade sampler pack, because blade brands differ noticeably in sharpness and smoothness, and the right match matters as much as the handle.

Prep and lather

Most bad shaves start before the blade touches skin. Shave after a hot shower, or press a hot, damp towel to your face for a minute or two. Warm water softens the hair and makes it easier to cut. Wash with a gentle cleanser to clear away oil, and leave your face wet.

Soak your brush in warm water while you shower. Shake out the excess, then swirl it on a hard shaving soap or load it with a small dab of cream. Work the lather in a bowl, or directly on your face, adding a few drops of water at a time until it looks glossy and holds soft peaks. Too dry and it will feel tacky. Too wet and it will slide off. Paint it on in circles to lift the hairs, then finish with straight strokes.

Blade on Skin

Find the angle

Place the top of the razor head against your cheek with the handle almost parallel to your face. Slowly lower the handle until you feel the blade start to catch the hair. That is your angle, usually somewhere around 30 degrees. Too steep and the blade scrapes. Too flat and it skates without cutting.

Let the weight do the work

This is the biggest adjustment for anyone coming from cartridges. Do not press. A safety razor is heavy enough on its own, and pressing is the fastest route to nicks. The tool rewards patience over pressure, a lesson most men learn somewhere other than the bathroom. Use short strokes of an inch or two, and rinse the head often.

Go with the grain first

Map how your beard grows, because it often changes direction on the neck and jaw. On the first pass, shave in the direction the hair grows. For a closer finish, re-lather and make a second pass across the grain. Only experienced shavers should attempt a third pass against the grain. Use your free hand to stretch the skin flat over the jaw and under the nose.

Cold Water, Then the Splash

Rinse with cool water to clear away lather. Pat dry rather than rubbing. Follow with an alcohol-free balm if your skin tends to feel tight, or a classic splash if you like the bracing feel. That second option has a long history of its own, which we trace in our story of Eau de Cologne, the 300-year-old scent.

Rinse and dry the razor after every shave. Replace the blade when it starts to tug, and dispose of used blades in a blade bank or a sealed tin rather than loose in the trash.

The safety razor sits in the same family as the Rolex Submariner or a Braun shaver shaped by Dieter Rams and his ten principles of good design, objects whose basic form was right decades ago. The Quiet Menace grooming section has more routines and tools, as do our grooming essentials and heritage brands hubs. The safety razor entry on Wikipedia covers the long history of the design, and the biography of King C. Gillette explains how a disposable blade became a global business.

The blade you drop into a sealed tin when it starts to tug is a direct descendant of the one in that 1904 patent. Gillette meant for you to throw it away.

In 1997 a shop opened on Neal Street in London's Covent Garden selling duck canvas jackets and double knee pants under a name from Detroit. Nothing in it was made for a railroad yard or a building site. It was the first store of Carhartt Work in Progress, a European company with an American license, and it has been confusing tourists in Carhartt's home country ever since.

The short version is that there are two Carhartts. One is the Michigan workwear company that has been dressing tradespeople since the nineteenth century. The other is the label most people under 35 in Europe and Asia mean when they say the name. They share a logo and a lot of DNA. They are run separately.

Two sewing machines in Detroit

Hamilton Carhartt was born in 1855 in Macedon Locks, New York. In 1889 he started making overalls in Detroit out of duck and denim, with two sewing machines and five employees, and he aimed them at the railroad men who needed clothes that would not tear on the first shift. The company grew fast. By 1910 it had cotton mills in Georgia and South Carolina and factories in Detroit, Dallas and San Francisco. For a short spell it even built cars.

The products that matter to this story came later. The Chore Coat was first advertised in 1923. The Detroit Jacket arrived in 1954, short in the body with slash pockets and a zipped chest pocket, and some version of it has stayed in the range almost continuously since, according to Popular Science. The hooded Active Jacket followed in 1975. Hamilton Carhartt himself had died in a car crash in 1937, and his sons took over a business that would spend the rest of the century making very good clothes for people who did not care what they looked like.

The importer who wanted the real thing

In 1989, the year Carhartt turned 100, an importer named Edwin Faeh started bringing American products into Europe under what he called the All American Concept. Carhartt was one of the brands. Around the same time, the clothes were picking up a second audience. Carhartt WIP's own history dates it to 1992, when rappers, graffiti writers and street kids took to the jackets and pants for the same reasons a pipefitter would. They lasted, and they looked like work.

Edwin and Salomée Faeh set up Work in Progress in 1994 as Carhartt's exclusive European distributor. Two years later, in 1996, WIP secured a license to manufacture Carhartt products outside the United States. That license is the hinge. It meant a company in Europe could take the American archive and cut it for a different customer, one who was going to wear a Detroit Jacket to a club, not a loading dock.

Why Europe got a different Carhartt

The first WIP collection landed in 1997, the same year as the Neal Street store and the launch of skate and BMX teams. Two years earlier Carhartt had already turned up on screen in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, the 1995 film about three young men in the Paris banlieue, which gave the clothes a cool that no catalog could buy.

From there WIP built the brand like a culture magazine. In 1999 the illustrator Evan Hecox started drawing the ad campaigns that defined its look for years. In 2000 the company started Combination Records, an open platform for electronic music, and showed its first women's collection. Rugged Magazine followed in 2003, and Carhartt WIP Radio in 2008. The skate team went to Mongolia for the 2007 film Dirt Ollies, and the 2015 book From Dirt to Dust went back. Videos, a team and a magazine is the same playbook London's Palace would later run, and WIP's heavy fleece sits in the same family tree as the Champion Reverse Weave hoodie.

Collaborations started formally in 2010, and the list now reads like a fashion week schedule. A.P.C., Converse, Nike, Vans and Vetements were among the early partners, the sort of company a skate label like Stüssy had been keeping for years. New Balance and the British designer Toogood in 2022. A sacai collection in 2023 that reworked the classic shapes. WIP opened in SoHo, New York in 2011 and on La Brea in Los Angeles in 2019, which means the European spin on Carhartt is now sold back to Americans a few miles from shops that stock the original.

Back to Detroit

The detail that makes WIP more than a licensing deal is how often it points home. The brand lists Detroit and Berlin techno among its design influences, and in 2017 it collaborated with Underground Resistance, the Detroit techno collective. In 2019 it ran capsules honoring Motown and Fela Kuti. For a label whose yellow C still reads as late 1990s rap video, the music references are a long way from decoration.

It also makes things. A 2023 film, Many Hands, One Double Knee Pant, followed production of the pants at one of three WIP-owned facilities in Tunisia. That is a long way from two sewing machines in Detroit, and a fair answer to the charge that WIP is just a logo on a fashion jacket.

The fabric is still the point. Duck canvas starts stiff and takes months to soften, the same slow break-in that makes raw denim worth the effort. If you are buying one jacket, buy the Detroit and wear it hard. More of the workwear and heritage story is on our heritage brands hub and in the Style section.

In 2025 WIP marked the Active Jacket's 50th anniversary with an installation in the South Tank at the Tate in London. Fifty years after it was made for job sites, a hooded work coat got its own room at an art museum.

Nils Gregoriusson Tveranger was 13 when he left Aurland, on Norway's western fjords, for North America. He learned to make shoes there, and at 20 he went home. Around 1908 he introduced his first design in Aurland, and in 1910 it won him a diploma at the exhibition in Bergen. Around 1930 he made a laceless version with a strap stitched across the top of the foot and called it the Aurland moccasin.

That is the shoe that, after a few detours through England and a factory in Maine, became the penny loafer. Tveranger lived until 1953, long enough to see American college students put coins in it.

From the fjord to Esquire

The usual telling has Tveranger noticing how close the Native American moccasins he saw abroad were to the simple slip-ons Norwegians already wore at home, then combining the two. Whatever the inspiration, Aurland became a shoe town. A 1953 catalog listed about ten shoe factories there, and the shoes that went to the United States were sold as Norwegian Moccasins.

British anglers who fished in Norway between the wars brought pairs home, and London had its own version too. Raymond Lewis Wildsmith of Wildsmith Shoes made a slip-on house shoe for King George VI, often described as the first loafer. In the US, Esquire championed the style with photographs of Norwegian farmers in cattle-loafing sheds. Whether the word loafer came from those barns or from the idea of lounging around depends on who you ask.

Bass and the Weejun

George Henry Bass was born in Wilton, Maine, in 1843. In 1876 he joined a local shoe firm, E.P. Packard & Co., as junior partner, and by 1879 he owned it outright and had put his name on the door. G.H. Bass & Co. built its reputation on hard-wearing outdoor footwear, the Bass Moccasin Cruiser of 1906 and the Rangeley of 1910 among them, and the company made ski boots that Admiral Richard Byrd wore on his Antarctic expeditions.

Bass died in 1925, and his sons John and Willard ran the business when it introduced the Weejun in 1936. The name is a play on Norwegian, shortened into something an American shopper could say. The Bass version added the detail that matters, a leather strip across the saddle with a diamond-shaped cutout in the middle. Nobody at the factory in Maine could have known what students would do with it.

So why the penny?

Nobody knows for certain, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling shoes. The behavior is documented. By the 1950s, students at East Coast prep schools and colleges were tucking a coin into the slit on each shoe, and by the middle of the decade penny loafer was the name for a whole studied-casual look.

The most repeated explanation is that the penny was there for an emergency phone call. It falls apart quickly, since a pay phone call cost more than a penny and a single coin wouldn't have paid for one. The likelier answer is plainer. A bright copper coin looks good against brown or burgundy leather, and a small flourish on an otherwise sober shoe is exactly the kind of thing undergraduates do. Treat the phone booth story as campus folklore.

The loafer settled into the Ivy uniform next to chinos, crewneck sweaters and the oxford cloth button-down. Its popularity peaked in the mid to late 1960s, again from the early 1980s into the early 1990s, and once more on American campuses in the early 2000s. Around the early 1980s, socks became optional.

Who kept it alive

The most famous pair belonged to a performer, not a student. Michael Jackson wore penny loafers on stage, and most of his moonwalks and toe stands were done in them. That's quite a career for a shoe built for walking around a farm.

Corporate life went its own way. The Gucci horsebit loafer, with its metal bar across the strap, became Wall Street's status shoe in the 1970s and 1980s, a much flashier relative of the plain Weejun. Bass itself changed hands several times. Chesebrough-Pond's bought the company in 1978 and sold it to Phillips-Van Heusen in 1987, and G-III Apparel Group acquired it in November 2013 for $50 million. In 2011 Tommy Hilfiger built a limited collection around the Weejun penny loafer. Wikipedia's G.H. Bass entry has the full company timeline, and its page on slip-on shoes covers the Norwegian side.

How to wear them now

Start with fit, because a loafer has no laces to bail you out. It should grip across the top of the foot when new, with a little heel lift as you walk that settles once the leather gives. If your heel pops out of the back on the first try, go down a half size. If the strap digs in, it won't ease enough to matter.

The classic pairing still works. Burgundy or brown loafers, chinos with a short break or no break at all, an oxford shirt and a navy crewneck. For something less collegiate, go wider in the trouser. Pleated gray flannels, or loose fatigues hemmed so the whole shoe shows, make the loafer look current rather than costumed. With jeans, choose a dark, clean pair, and our guide to raw selvedge denim covers how to break them in.

Summer is easy. A heavy white T-shirt, shorts or cropped trousers, no visible socks. In cooler months a blue French chore coat over a sweater gives the shoe a workwear partner that keeps it from looking too neat. White socks are the riskier move, and they work best with black loafers and trousers cut short enough to show them on purpose.

Suede, as in the picture at the top of this page, softens the whole thing. It's the better choice if most of your wardrobe is denim and knitwear, and the worse one if you live somewhere wet.

More on the history of the clothes we still wear is on our menswear history hub and in the Style section.

Jackson's moonwalk first reached a national TV audience in May 1983, on the Motown 25 special taped that March in Pasadena, thirty years after Tveranger died. A shoe drawn up for fjord farmers ended up gliding backward across a California stage.

In April 1993, two young disciples of Hiroshi Fujiwara opened a shared shop called Nowhere in the backstreets behind Tokyo's Omotesando. Jun Takahashi filled his side with Undercover. Nigo launched A Bathing Ape, named after Planet of the Apes. The runs were small, the advertising nonexistent, and news traveled through magazines and friends. Within a decade those lanes in Jingumae had handed the world its template for streetwear, and you can still walk them in an afternoon.

Back Harajuku

The name means back Harajuku, and that is a fair description. Front Harajuku is the noise, Takeshita Street's candy-colored crush near the station and the luxury flagships lining Omotesando, the broad, tree-lined avenue that climbs toward Aoyama. Ura-Harajuku is what sits behind them, a grid of narrow, mostly pedestrian lanes in Jingumae, roughly the 3-chome and 4-chome blocks on a ward map.

The spine is Cat Street. It follows the course of a branch of the Shibuya River, which was largely channeled underground in the years around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The covered stretch became a long, meandering promenade between Harajuku and Shibuya. Nobody agrees on where the name came from. Theories range from stray cats to the street's narrowness to a rockabilly band, so enjoy the mystery.

Timing matters to the backstory. After World War II, the land that is now Yoyogi Park housed Washington Heights, a fenced compound for American military families. It was handed back around the time of the 1964 Games, by which point American records and clothes had already seeped into the surrounding streets along with an attitude to match. A generation of Tokyo kids grew up treating that culture as raw material.

The Mentor and the Shopkeepers

Hiroshi Fujiwara

Every account starts with Fujiwara. A former DJ who spent time in London and New York, he came back carrying punk, hip-hop and skate culture, and broadcast it through a magazine column called Last Orgy in the youth title Takarajima. His label GoodEnough is often called one of Japan's first true streetwear brands, and he later founded Fragment Design. He was less a shopkeeper than a filter. If Fujiwara wore it, it mattered.

Nigo and Jun Takahashi

At Nowhere, Takahashi's Undercover was a punk-minded line that would later show in Paris. Nigo's A Bathing Ape arrived the same year the shop opened. Other names, including Shinsuke Takizawa's Neighborhood, followed in the mid-1990s, and the backstreets filled with small stores selling small runs.

Small Runs, Long Lines

Scarcity did most of the work. Production runs were deliberately limited, stock appeared without big advertising, and information traveled through magazines and friends. If you wanted a piece, you had to know about it, show up and often wait in line. That model of hype through restraint is the ancestor of the release calendar culture we unpack in our story on Supreme and the rise of the drop model. A shop the size of a parking space could set the agenda for the entire planet.

BAPE then went global. Its camo, ape-head logo and patent-leather sneakers found an audience in American hip-hop in the 2000s, helped by Nigo's partnerships with Pharrell Williams, a chapter covered in how hip-hop rewrote menswear. Hong Kong's I.T Group bought a majority stake in the brand in 2011, and Nigo stepped away a couple of years later. Our BAPE brand hub has more.

Walking It Today

Getting there

Harajuku Station on the JR Yamanote Line and Meiji-jingumae station on the Tokyo Metro are the usual starting points. Walk down Omotesando, then duck into the side streets. Cat Street crosses Omotesando and runs south toward Shibuya, so you can walk the whole route and end up near Shibuya Station.

Check before you go

The Ura-Harajuku of the 1990s no longer exists in its original form. Many founding shops have closed, moved or changed ownership, and rents along Cat Street have risen sharply. Before you travel, confirm current addresses and opening hours on each brand's official site or social channels. Many independent stores open late in the morning, and some close one day a week.

Mind the etiquette

Small shops are small. Ask before taking photos inside, keep bags close on narrow shop floors, and follow posted rules on release days, which can include lotteries or numbered lines. Tax-free shopping for visitors is common at larger stores, but bring your passport and check eligibility at the till.

Build a route

Think in loops rather than lists. Start on Omotesando, explore the lanes on either side of Cat Street, and leave time for vintage shops, where American workwear sits beside Japanese reproductions. If you came for denim, our raw and selvedge denim guide explains why Japanese jeans command such respect. Sneaker hunters should brush up on the Air Jordan 1 story before they start haggling over vintage pairs.

Glossier, Still Worth It

The neighborhood is busier and more international than in its cult era, and Cat Street now has global brands on it. Smaller labels, vintage dealers and pop-ups still work the side streets. Our travel guides, the wider streetwear archive, our Japan coverage and the full Travel section have more trips built around style.

The best way to find what is current is the old Ura-Harajuku way. Walk slowly, look up at the second-floor windows, and follow the line.

New Balance set out to build the best running shoe it could with the 990. When it went on sale in 1982 the price was $100, and that number did more marketing than any advertisement could. The 990 is routinely called the first running shoe to reach three figures, a claim repeated so often it has hardened into fact. It may well be true. It is also the kind of record that is hard to check against every small-batch racing shoe of the era, so file it under legend until someone produces the price lists.

What isn't in doubt is the intent. New Balance wanted to build the best running shoe it could, charge accordingly and make sure people knew it was made in America.

A Boston Arch Support Company

The company is older than the sneaker business. William J. Riley, an Irish immigrant in the Boston area, founded the New Balance Arch Support Company in 1906 to sell a flexible arch support with three points of contact. Company lore says the name came from Riley watching chickens balance, and that he demonstrated his supports with a chicken's foot. Nobody can confirm it, and nobody at New Balance seems in a hurry to let it go.

The modern brand starts in 1972, when Jim Davis, then 28, bought the company. Under Davis, New Balance rode the American running boom and kept making shoes in New England, a decision that became the brand's identity. Its chief marketing officer, Chris Davis, has called the MADE in USA program the company's ultimate differentiator.

Grey on Purpose

The original 990 was grey suede and mesh, slip-lasted, with a patented heel stabilizer New Balance called the Motion Control Device. It was a technical shoe for people who logged real mileage. It was also, by design or by luck, extremely easy to wear with everything.

That second quality kept it alive. The 99X family grew around it, with the 995 in 1986, the 996 in 1988, the 997 in 1990, the 998 in 1993 and the 999 in 1996, before New Balance went back to the 990 name for the v2 in 1998, which added ABZORB cushioning. Then came the 991 in 2001, the 992 in 2006 and the 993 in 2008. Andrew Nyssen designed the 990v3 for the 30th anniversary in 2012, with ENCAP in the sole and a mostly mesh upper. The v4 followed in 2016, the v5 in 2019 with a TPU heel piece, and the v6 in 2022 with FuelCell foam. Each kept the grey, the big N and the American factory tag.

Washington, Jobs and Dads

The 990's street life began in Washington, D.C. Through the 1980s and 1990s the shoe was a status piece across the DMV. A StockX history of the model ties part of that to the city's drug trade at the height of the crack era, when the quiet grey and black colorways drew less attention than louder sneakers. D.C. shops DTLR and YCMC later got their own 990 collaborations, a fair acknowledgment of where the shoe's credibility came from.

The other famous wearer was Steve Jobs. New Balance officials have said Jobs favored the 99X series, and his grey pairs became part of the uniform with jeans and a black turtleneck. Through the 2010s that look helped give the 990 its dad shoe label. New Balance leaned in hard. The 990v5 campaign pitched the shoe to supermodels in London and dads in Ohio, which is about as honest as sneaker advertising gets.

Who Made the 990 Cool Again?

The fashion turn came in stages. Stüssy did a cream 990v4. Comme des Garçons sent the 990 down its Paris runway in 2018. JJJJound, Patta, WTAPS and Salehe Bembury all had turns on various versions. The real hinge was Teddy Santis. In April 2021 the founder of Aimé Leon Dore was named creative director of New Balance's MADE in USA line, with his first product due in 2022, and his muted, menswear-literate colorways made the 990 look like an expensive object rather than gym gear.

It now holds roughly the position the Air Max 1 holds at Nike, a performance shoe kept alive by people who will never run a mile in it. The difference is that New Balance still builds its MADE in USA 990s at home, a selling point the Converse Chuck Taylor lost when Converse moved production out of North Carolina after its 2001 bankruptcy.

The grey suede works with the rest of a heritage wardrobe, from raw selvedge denim to the fleece revival in our piece on Patagonia Synchilla and gorpcore. If the Salomon is the shoe of the trail, the 990 is the shoe of the commute, and our Salomon XT-6 story explains how both ended up on the same shop walls.

The full model timeline is on the 99X Series Wikipedia page, and StockX has the Washington, D.C. history. The 990 also earns its place in our heritage brands coverage, alongside its rivals in the sneakers section.

The price has moved a long way since 1982. The color hasn't.

In November 1996 a Tokyo shop called AC/DC Rag Store had a yellow and grey Nike Air Max from the previous year on sale for $1,345. Police across Japan were dealing with a wave of thefts and holdups in which young men were beaten or threatened and their Nikes taken. The Japanese press had a name for it, Air Max hunting. The Seattle Times ran the story under the headline Air Max Hunting Shocks Japan.

The shoe was the Air Max 95, and it was designed by a man from Nike's outdoor department.

The ACG Guy Gets the Air Max

By 1994 Tinker Hatfield had moved on from the Air Max line, the franchise he'd started with the window in the Air Max 1. The next one went to Sergio Lozano, a designer working in ACG, Nike's All Conditions Gear category. That was an odd pick on paper. ACG made hiking boots and trail shoes, and the Air Max was Nike's showcase runner.

Lozano went to the human body for his reference. In Nike's own telling, the outsole was modeled on a spine, the lacing system on a set of ribs, and the layered mesh and suede panels on muscle fibers. The panels run in bands from dark grey near the sole to pale grey near the collar, so the side of the shoe reads like something with tissue and bone under it. The Speed-Lacing eyelets wrap from the top of the shoe down to the sockliner, and the Swoosh got pushed back to a small spot on the heel, which was strange for a flagship Nike in 1995.

The shoe was meant for bigger, more powerful runners who needed all the cushioning they could get. That explains the forefoot. The Air Max 95 put visible Air under the front of the foot as well as the heel, a first for the line. It also sat on a black midsole, an unusual choice then, picked so the shoe would hide the dirt from runs.

The Color Wasn't New

The original colorway is the one everyone means. Grey gradient, black sole, and bright yellow on the eyelets, the Swoosh and the Air units. Sneaker people call it Neon.

A popular version of the story says the 95 introduced that yellow to Nike. Lozano's own account, in a Nike feature on the shoe, says otherwise. He has said the neon yellow was already in the company's palette and part of its racing heritage, and that he used it to draw the eye to the technology and the shoe's working parts. Take his word over the legend. What the 95 did was put that color on a shoe people wanted to wear off the track, and that changed what it meant.

Why Did London Call Them 110s?

In Britain the shoe retailed at £110, and that's what London called it. Nobody needed the model name. Around the turn of the millennium the 95 became something close to an unofficial uniform for grime, the sound coming out of East London. The way rap and its offshoots have dressed is traced in our history of hip-hop menswear.

The connection has never faded. In 2023 the London label Corteiz released its own Air Max 95s with Nike, and the brand returned to the shoe again in 2025. If you want to see the city's sneaker scene at street level, our London Soho and Dover Street Market guide is the place to start.

Tokyo, 1996

Japan's version of the obsession burned hotter and shorter. The same Seattle Times report described magazines like Boon, Cool and Get On! putting Nikes on their covers, shops buying up unsold pairs around the world and holding them until prices climbed, and older models on Takeshita Street in Harajuku going for $700 to $1,400. A Nike Japan spokesman said the demand was real but inflated by the shops and the magazines. Fakes became a problem alongside the thefts. In Japanese the robberies were called Air Max gari.

It was an early, loud preview of the market we now take for granted, the one we break down in our piece on the sneaker resale economy. The streets where it played out are mapped in our Ura-Harajuku guide.

Thirty-One Years On

The 95 holds up because it was designed from an idea instead of a trend. Lots of 1990s runners look dated now. This one still looks like a diagram of the body that it was always meant to be. It is heavy for a running shoe and few people run in it. It doesn't matter. The grey gradient works with almost anything darker than it, and the Neon is still the best pair, even after decades of colorways.

Nike tells its side in Behind the Design, Air Max 95. More sneaker history and Japanese street culture lives under Japan, and the rest of the shoe wall is in the sneakers section.

Flip a pair of OG Neons over and the black midsole Lozano pushed for is still doing exactly what he said it would. It hides the dirt.

On July 1, 1979, Sony put a blue and silver cassette player on sale in Japan for 33,000 yen. The TPS-L2 ran on two AA batteries, came with featherweight foam headphones and could not record a single second of sound, which struck plenty of people as a strange thing to charge serious money for. The first run of about 30,000 units sold out in roughly two to three months anyway. Music had been portable for decades. The Walkman made it private.

A Tape Player That Would Not Record

The TPS-L2 had a metal case and no recording function at all, and that missing feature was the whole idea. Every portable tape machine before it was built to capture sound. This one was built only to play it back, in stereo, straight into your ears. By 1980 the machine was on its way to Europe and the United States.

Whose idea was it?

The origin story is credited to Sony's top brass. Co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted a way to listen to music on long flights and had a modified Pressman, Sony's compact cassette recorder for journalists, rigged up for stereo playback. Fellow co-founder Akio Morita saw a consumer product in it and pushed the engineers to build one. Kozo Ohsone's tape recorder division handled the design and got it done on an aggressive schedule.

There is a footnote. German-Brazilian inventor Andreas Pavel had filed a patent in 1977 for a personal stereo concept he called the Stereobelt, and after years of legal fights Sony reached a settlement with him in the 2000s. The Walkman was Sony's product, but the idea of private stereo listening had more than one parent.

The Pressman, Gutted

Mechanically, the TPS-L2 was modest. Sony took the Pressman chassis, removed the record head circuitry and the speaker, and added stereo playback. The real breakthrough was what plugged into it. Headphones at the time were heavy, studio-grade hardware. Sony paired the Walkman with featherweight open-air headphones with foam pads, which made it comfortable to wear while walking, riding a train or standing in line.

That pairing let one person build a private soundtrack in a public space. You could walk through Tokyo or London or New York and hear your own music while everyone around you heard the city. It sounds ordinary now. In 1979 it was a genuinely new way of being in the world. Radios had made music portable long before. Making it private turned out to be the bigger idea.

Two jacks and a hotline

One detail shows how uncertain Sony was about what it had built. The TPS-L2 has two headphone jacks, built for sharing, and an orange hotline button. Press it and a small built-in microphone lets the two listeners talk to each other over the music. Sony worried that listening alone would seem antisocial. Users disagreed. They wanted the solitude, and the hotline button was dropped from the follow-up model, the Walkman II.

Soundabout, Stowaway, Freestyle

Sony's overseas offices reportedly worried that "Walkman" sounded like awkward English, so early exports wore different names. The original launched market by market like this.

The local names did not last. The Japanese name had already caught on with travelers and the press, and Sony moved to Walkman as its global brand. It became one of those rare product names that turned into a generic word for the whole category, the way people once said "Xerox" for any copy.

Mixtapes on the Move

The Walkman arrived just as the cassette was becoming the format of choice for mixtapes, bootlegs and homemade compilations. Pair a blank tape with a portable player and you had a personal broadcast system. That loop between recording at home and listening on the move fed directly into the rise of hip-hop, punk and new wave street culture, a story we trace in how hip-hop rewrote menswear.

It also changed how gear looked and felt. The Walkman turned electronics into accessories, things you wore on a belt or clipped to a jacket and chose with the same care as sneakers or a watch. Its no-nonsense layout shared the spirit of the functional modernism in our piece on Dieter Rams and the ten principles of good design, shrunk down to pocket size.

After the cassette

Sony kept stretching the brand. Its first portable CD player, the D-50, arrived in 1984 and grew into the Discman line, followed over the years by MiniDisc models and eventually digital players. Sony ended cassette Walkman production for the Japanese market in 2010, after selling roughly 220 million cassette Walkman units. The Walkman name still lives on Sony's digital audio players, a run of more than four decades for a product that began as an engineering side project.

Buying One Now

For collectors, the TPS-L2 is the holy grail of personal audio, especially in working condition with its original headphones. Later cassette models from the 1980s, especially the slimmer metal-bodied ones, are also prized for their build quality. The appeal is the same one driving the analog revival in photography, where a mechanical object rewards attention instead of demanding it. Our story on the Leica M6 and the film camera revival covers that side.

Belts inside old cassette mechanisms dry out and snap, so many vintage units need a service before they play reliably. Check that the battery compartment is free of corrosion. Treat any claim of a "mint" first-generation unit with healthy skepticism unless the seller can show it running.

Like the Omega Speedmaster Professional on the wrist, the Walkman earned its place through use, not marketing alone. The full tech section, our tech history archive and the related industrial design topic have more, and the Walkman entry on Wikipedia carries the detailed backstory.

If you do find a working TPS-L2, press the orange hotline button. It was Sony's hedge against the fear that listening alone would look rude, and by the Walkman II it was gone.

In 1919 Cartier put a new wristwatch into full production and made just six of them. Louis Cartier, grandson of the house's founder, had drawn it in 1917 from the outline of a Renault tank on the Western Front. More than a century later, that rectangle is still the default answer to what a man wears with a suit.

How do you get a watch from a tank?

You look at it from above. The Renault FT had two long tracks running down either side of a boxy hull, and Cartier's case did the same thing at small scale. The vertical side bars, which Cartier calls brancards, are said to stand in for the treads. The dial sits between them like the crew compartment. Revolution notes that the case also grew out of the earlier square Santos, so the Tank was less a lightning strike than a jeweler pushing a shape he already liked to its logical end.

The legend that comes attached is that Cartier presented a prototype to General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force. It is the kind of origin story a brand would invent if it did not already have one, and it has been repeated so often that it now functions as part of the product.

What matters more is timing. In 1917 most men still carried a pocket watch, and the wristwatch had a reputation as something for women or for soldiers who needed both hands. A flat rectangle from Cartier, shaped after a weapon, made the wrist look like the correct place for a gentleman's watch. It did not shout about it. That restraint is the whole design.

The 1920s were a run of variations

Production was tiny at first, six watches in 1919 and only a trickle after that. Then Cartier started playing. The Tank Cintrée arrived in 1921, stretched and curved to follow the wrist. The Tank Chinoise followed in 1922, with extra bars across the top and bottom that borrow from the gateways of East Asian temples. The same year brought the Tank Louis Cartier, the softened, rounded version that the house now treats as the standard.

Rudolph Valentino reportedly refused to take his off while filming The Son of the Sheik in 1926, giving the Tank its first screen role. Fred Astaire bought a Cintrée in 1928. Duke Ellington wore a Tank à Guichets, a version with small windows for jumping hours and minutes instead of hands. The 1930s got stranger. The 1932 Tank Basculante had a case that pivoted to protect the crystal, and the 1936 Tank Asymétrique slanted the whole dial.

Then the money dried up. Revolution reports that Cartier's wristwatch output fell from about 500 a year in the 1920s to 130 during the Depression. Louis Cartier died in 1942, and for decades the Tank coasted on the shapes he had already drawn.

Who wore it, and why it stuck

The list of owners reads like a seating chart for the twentieth century. Jacqueline Kennedy wore one. So did Yves Saint Laurent. Princess Diana was photographed again and again with a gold Tank Française, and in 2009 Michelle Obama wore a steel Française in her official portrait as First Lady.

Andy Warhol had the best line on the subject, and it is worth paraphrasing rather than quoting. He wore his Tank because it was the watch to wear, and by his own account he never bothered to wind it. Telling the time was beside the point. That is the most honest review a dress watch has ever received.

The reason it works on such different people is that it gives almost nothing away. No bezel, no crown guards, no logo you can read across a room. On the classic models you get Roman numerals, a railroad minute track, blued hands and a cabochon on the crown. It pairs with tailoring the way an Oxford cloth button-down pairs with a navy blazer, as a background you stop noticing.

Must, Américaine, Française and back again

The modern Tank lineup was built in three moves. In 1977 the Must de Cartier line put the shape in vermeil, gold over silver, with flat lacquered dials in deep red and later blue and black. It was cheaper, and it introduced the Tank to a buyer who would never have walked into a Cartier boutique for a gold watch. The Tank Américaine came in 1989 with a longer, curved case. The Tank Française followed in 1996 with a steel bracelet built into the case, and became the version a whole generation pictures first.

In spring 2021 Cartier brought the Must back as the Tank Must, again in monochrome red, blue and green dials that echo the 1977 run. The surprise was the SolarBeat model, which hides photovoltaic cells under the dial so the quartz movement charges from light, with a stated lifespan of around 16 years.

Compare it with the Genta school of the 1970s, where steel sports watches like the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak put screws and integrated bracelets on show, or the tool-first logic of the Omega Speedmaster. The Tank asks for none of that. It sits closer to the reduction in Dieter Rams's ten principles than to anything else in a watch case. Browse more in watch history, heritage brands and the watches section, or read the Cartier Tank entry on Wikipedia and Revolution's centenary history of the Tank.

The detail that still lands is the count. Six watches in 1919, made for a handful of people who had no idea they were buying the template for a hundred years of rectangles.

Late in GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan's Bond is trapped in an armored train with a bomb counting down. He raises his left wrist, a laser fires out of his watch, and he cuts his way through the floor. The watch was an Omega Seamaster Professional Diver 300M, reference 2541.80, and the year was 1995. Bond has worn an Omega in every film since.

A diver with a second crown

Omega had been making Seamasters since 1948, but the watch Bond picked up was new. Omega launched the Seamaster Professional 300 in spring 1993, as a three-hander and a chronograph, and it was a sharp break from the watch it replaced. The 1988 Seamaster Professional 200 had worn generic Mercedes hands. The 1993 watch brought back skeletonized hands in the old Plongeur style, cut out so you could see the dial through them.

That dial was the hook. It was blue, and it was stamped with a pattern of horizontal waves that caught light like water does. Around it sat a scalloped rotating bezel, and the whole thing rode on a five-link steel bracelet that looked engineered rather than jeweled. It was a dive watch for people who liked the idea of diving.

Then there was the extra crown at 10 o'clock. This was a manual helium release valve, the first on an Omega dive watch. It exists for a very specific person, the saturation diver who spends days in a pressurized habitat breathing a gas mix rich in helium. Helium atoms are small enough to work their way past a watch's gaskets. When the diver decompresses, that trapped gas needs a way out, or it can push the crystal off. Unscrew the valve and it vents.

Omega had argued for years that a well-built watch did not need one. A 1970s ad for the Seamaster 600 made the point that a watch proof against helium was proof against anything. By 1993 the company had changed its mind, and the valve became the detail that set the 300M apart from every Submariner in the window.

Why a costume designer chose it

Bond started out as a Rolex man. Ian Fleming put him in a Rolex in the novels, and Sean Connery wore a Submariner in Goldfinger in 1964. Roger Moore spent much of his run on Seiko. By the time EON was rebooting the series with Brosnan in 1995, a new watch was part of a new Bond.

The credit usually goes to Lindy Hemming, the costume designer on GoldenEye. Her reasoning, as it has been reported, was character work. Bond is a Royal Navy commander and a diver who does not want to be noticed, and she was convinced that man would wear a Seamaster. Omega's own people tell a parallel story about a marketing executive who pitched the idea more than once. Both can be true.

What is certain is the watch on screen. In GoldenEye, Brosnan wore the quartz 2541.80, built on Omega's caliber 1538. For Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997, The World Is Not Enough in 1999 and Die Another Day in 2002, he switched to the automatic 2531.80, running the caliber 1120. Over those four films the watch fired lasers, launched a grappling line and set off charges. It was a better gadget than most of the cars.

The Craig years and the 2018 rebuild

When Daniel Craig arrived in Casino Royale in 2006, he wore the 300M again, now as the co-axial reference 2220.80, alongside the newer Planet Ocean. After that the producers moved Bond into a Planet Ocean, an Aqua Terra and a Seamaster 300 through Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre.

The 300M came back in No Time to Die in 2021, in a titanium 007 Edition with a brown dial. By then the watch itself had been rebuilt. At Baselworld 2018, marking 25 years since the original, Omega released a new generation of the Seamaster Diver 300M with more than a dozen models. The dial and bezel moved to ceramic. The waves came back, now laser engraved. The date window shifted to 6 o'clock, the case grew to 42 millimeters, and the helium valve stayed at 10 o'clock with a new conical shape. Inside went the caliber 8800, a METAS certified Master Chronometer with a 55 hour power reserve and resistance to magnetic fields of 15,000 gauss.

What it means on the wrist

The 300M has always been the louder diver. Next to the Rolex Submariner it looks busy, with more texture and a lot more blue. That is the appeal. It is a watch that wants you to know it has a story, and the story is a film franchise.

It also explains a lot about Omega in the 1990s and since. The brand that sent the Speedmaster to the Moon learned that a movie could do for a dive watch what NASA did for a chronograph. Compare it with the working-class tool logic of the Seiko SKX007 or the vintage-flavored Tudor Black Bay, and the 300M sits right in the middle, part instrument and part costume.

If you are shopping for an older 2531.80, our guide on how to buy your first mechanical watch covers papers, servicing and pre-owned dealers. Browse more watch history, heritage brands and the watches section, or read the Omega Seamaster entry on Wikipedia and WatchTime's review of the 2018 Diver 300M.

The valve is still the giveaway. Most people who own a 300M will never go deeper than a hotel pool, and on every one of them there is a second crown at 10 o'clock, built for a diver coming up from a week at the bottom of the sea.

In 1956 Braun put a turntable under a clear acrylic lid and set it on a crisp metal and wood body, at a time when record players hid inside wooden furniture. Critics called the SK 4 Snow White's Coffin. One of its designers was a young man from Wiesbaden named Dieter Rams, who would run Braun's design department for roughly three decades and later boil his thinking down to ten principles. The phone in your pocket still follows several of them.

The Man From Wiesbaden

Rams was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1932 and trained in architecture and interior design. He joined Braun in 1955, initially to work on interiors, and soon moved into product design. Within a few years he was running the company's design department, a post he held from the early 1960s until 1995. He left Braun in 1997 after roughly four decades there.

Those decades produced an extraordinary catalog of radios, record players, tape recorders, alarm clocks, calculators, shavers, lighters and kitchen appliances, all sharing the same calm, almost silent look. Muted grays and whites. Small dots of color used only where they help the user. Controls laid out with the logic of a well-set table.

Braun before Rams

Braun was a radio and appliance maker founded by Max Braun in the 1920s. In the mid-1950s his sons Erwin and Artur Braun set out to modernize the company and brought in designers connected to the Ulm School of Design, including Hans Gugelot. That collaboration gave Rams room to work.

Snow White's Coffin and the T3

The SK 4 radio-phonograph was the breakthrough, designed by Rams with Gugelot. Today it sits in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The T3 transistor radio of 1958 is the piece that best predicts the future. A small rectangle with a perforated grille and a single round dial, it looks startlingly close to the first iPod. The ET 66 calculator, developed with Braun designer Dietrich Lubs, carried just as much weight, its layout later echoed by the calculator app on early iPhones.

Ten Rules, in Plain Terms

In the 1970s Rams grew concerned that the world was filling up with things that were neither useful nor lasting. He framed his response as a list of ten qualities he believed good design should have. The short names are famous. Our gloss on what each asks of an object follows.

1. Innovative

New technology creates chances to do things better, and design should grow alongside it. Novelty for its own sake does not count.

2. Useful

A product is bought to do a job. Design should strengthen that purpose and strip out anything that gets in its way.

3. Aesthetic

Beauty is not decoration. Objects we use every day affect our mood, so a well-made form is part of usefulness.

4. Understandable

A good product explains itself. You should be able to grasp how it works without reading a manual.

5. Unobtrusive

Tools are not art pieces. They should stay neutral and leave room for the person using them.

6. Honest

No exaggerated promises. A product should not pretend to be more powerful or valuable than it is.

7. Long-lasting

Avoid trends that date quickly. Good design should still look right years later, so people keep it instead of throwing it away.

8. Thorough down to the last detail

Nothing is arbitrary. Care in every detail is a form of respect for the user.

9. Environmentally friendly

Design should conserve resources and reduce physical and visual clutter across a product's whole life.

10. As little design as possible

Less, but better. Concentrate on what matters and remove what does not.

Rams never made objects disappear. He made the unnecessary parts disappear, and what remained felt inevitable.

Rams in Your Pocket

Look at almost any premium tech object and you will find Rams. Apple's longtime design chief Jony Ive has openly acknowledged the influence, and he wrote the foreword to a major Rams monograph. The tidy grilles, restrained palettes and single focal controls of modern speakers, phones and earbuds all trace back to Braun.

The same thinking runs through the gear we cover elsewhere. The Sony Walkman turned audio into a personal accessory with a similarly clean layout. The Leica M6 is a near-perfect demonstration of honest, long-lasting design. And the Nike Air Max 1 shows what happens when a designer makes the technology visible instead of hiding it, a very Rams idea applied to a sneaker.

Rams versus the Eameses

Rams and mid-century modern overlap without being the same thing. He arrived at the tail end of the mid-century period and shared its faith in industrial production and honest materials. American designers such as Charles and Ray Eames came from a warmer, more sculptural direction, which you can see in our history of the Eames Lounge Chair. Put the two side by side and you get the full range of postwar modernism, from Rams' rational calm to the Eames' plush comfort.

Fewer, Better Things

The problem Rams identified has only grown. We are surrounded by more products than ever, and many are built to be replaced. His principles work as a simple filter for buying fewer, better things, and they apply as neatly to a jacket or a watch as to a speaker. The Design Museum's profile of Dieter Rams is a good next read, and the design section, our industrial design coverage and the mid-century modern archive go further.

Rule seven says good design should still look right years later. The 606 Universal Shelving System Rams designed for Vitsoe in 1960 is still being made.

Just a trim. It is the most dangerous phrase you can say in a barbershop. It sounds modest, even polite, and it means almost nothing to the person holding the clippers. Your trim might be a quarter inch off the top. Theirs might be a fresh taper, a squared-off neckline and sideburns you did not ask to lose. Most bad haircuts start as bad briefs, and the fix costs nothing.

Bring pictures, and the right ones

Photos do more work than any description. Bring two or three shots of the same cut from different angles, including the side and the back, because the back is where most of the surprises live. Pick photos of someone whose hair resembles yours in thickness and texture. A dense, straight-haired model's quiff will not translate to fine, wavy hair, and a good barber will tell you so. Let them. A photo of a cut you hated is useful too.

Show up with your hair the way you normally wear it. Arrive straight from the gym with it flattened under a cap and your barber is guessing. Wear it styled, or at least say what product you use and how. Grease, water-based pomade and matte clay all sit differently, a range our history of pomade traces from Murray's to Reuzel, and a barber will cut the top with that finish in mind.

Taper, fade and the numbers

A taper and a fade both get shorter as they move down the head, and the two words get swapped constantly, even by barbers. Broadly, a taper shortens gradually toward the sideburns and the neckline and keeps some hair at the edges. A fade takes the sides much shorter, often right down to the skin, and blends upward. Fades come low, mid or high, which describes where the shortest section starts its climb. A low fade hugs the ears and neckline. A high fade runs up toward the temples and reads far sharper. If the terms trip you up, describe the result instead. Skin at the bottom, or no scalp showing at all, is clearer than either word.

Guard numbers refer to the plastic attachments that clip onto the clippers, and each number is a length. On Wahl's standard cutting guides, a No. 1 leaves 1/8 inch (3mm), a No. 2 leaves 1/4 inch (6mm), a No. 3 leaves 3/8 inch (10mm) and a No. 4 leaves 1/2 inch (13mm). Each step adds an eighth of an inch, up to a No. 8 at a full inch. Plenty of sets include half sizes too. Other brands run close but not always identical, so a two on the sides is good shorthand rather than a contract.

Also say whether you want the clipper work blended into the top with scissors or left as a visible line. A disconnected cut, with a hard step between short sides and a long top, is a deliberate style. If you did not ask for it, it is a mistake.

Texture, weight and the neckline

On top, length comes first. Say how much you want to keep rather than how much to take off, and show it with your fingers. Then talk about weight and texture. Weight is bulk, the thing that makes thick hair balloon out at the sides a few weeks after a cut. Asking your barber to take weight out means thinning it so it lies closer to the head. Texture means breaking up the blunt line at the ends, often by point cutting into them with the scissor tips, so the hair looks piecey and moves. Fine hair usually wants less of both. Thick hair often wants a lot.

The neckline gets ignored until it grows out. There are three common finishes. Blocked, or squared, is cut straight across and looks sharp when fresh, but it is the first to look untidy as hair grows below the line. Rounded takes the corners off a squared line. Tapered follows your natural hairline and fades the hair out to nothing, and it grows out the most gracefully, which is why barbers often suggest it to men who stretch the time between visits.

While you are down there, settle the sideburns (where they stop, and whether they get tapered) and whether you want a lineup, the crisp edge cut at the hairline with a trimmer or razor. Some shops finish the neck with a straight razor, which is worth saying yes to. If you have a beard, ask for it to be blended into the sides so the two read as one shape, then keep it in order between visits with our beard care guide.

How often should you go?

Frequency follows length. The shorter the sides, the faster the shape goes. Tight fades tend to look their best with a visit every two to three weeks. Classic tapered cuts usually hold for around four to six weeks. Longer styles can often go six to eight weeks between trims. Once you find a barber who gets it right, book the next appointment before you leave.

Talking to the person with the clippers

Start by telling your barber how you actually live with your hair. How much time you will spend on it in the morning matters, as does any quirk they should know about, like a cowlick at the crown or a part that refuses to sit on the left. Then show the photos.

Speak up early. The first pass with the clippers is the moment to say something, not the final turn of the chair toward the mirror. A barber would much rather hear a little longer on top before the scissors come out than after. Hair can always come off, and it cannot go back on, so when you are unsure, ask for slightly longer than the photo.

Ask questions at the end, too. What did they leave longer and why, and what product would they use on it at home? In the United States a tip is customary. Barbering is an old trade with a gory past, which our history of the barber pole gets into.

For more on cuts, shaves and products, browse the Quiet Menace grooming section and our grooming essentials hub. Before you pay, ask which guard went on the sides and type the number into your phone under the photo you brought. Next time, half the conversation is already done.

On June 10, 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration added bemotrizinol to the list of active ingredients allowed in over-the-counter sunscreen. The filter, known to formulators as Tinosorb S, has been used in sunscreens abroad for years. American shelves move slowly, which is a good reason to understand the bottle you already own.

Sunscreen is a drug in America

That surprises people. In the United States, sunscreen is regulated as an over-the-counter drug, which is why every bottle carries a Drug Facts box on the back with active ingredients, directions and warnings. The rules for what goes in it sit in an FDA document called a monograph, and changing that document takes years. That pace helps explain why new filters reach American shelves so slowly.

The front label is where the useful information lives. SPF stands for sun protection factor and mainly measures protection against UVB, the rays behind sunburn. Broad spectrum means the product also protects against UVA. Not every sunscreen is broad spectrum, so the phrase is worth checking for. The FDA requires any sunscreen that is not broad spectrum, or that has an SPF below 15, to carry a warning that it has only been shown to help prevent sunburn, not skin cancer or early skin aging.

Water resistance is regulated too. A bottle that claims it has to say whether it was tested to last 40 or 80 minutes of swimming or sweating. The word waterproof is not allowed, because no sunscreen is.

How much, and how often?

The American Academy of Dermatology recommends a broad-spectrum, water-resistant sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher. That is the baseline. Then comes the part almost nobody gets right, which is quantity. The AAD says most adults need about one ounce, roughly the amount that fills a shot glass, to cover the skin not hidden by clothing. Bigger bodies need more. For the face alone, the AAD says to use at least a teaspoon.

Timing matters. Apply it before you head outside, since the AAD notes it takes about 15 minutes for skin to absorb sunscreen. Reapply every two hours, and right away after swimming or sweating. One morning application under a hat at a summer wedding does not cover you through the reception.

The usual misses are the neck, the ears and the tops of the feet. If your hair is thinning, the scalp needs sunscreen or a hat, and the AAD's step-by-step application guide also recommends a lip balm with SPF 30 or higher. And the cloud cover excuse does not hold. Dermatologists recommend protection on gray days and in winter as well.

Mineral, chemical, and the slow shelf

Sunscreen filters fall into two camps. Mineral sunscreens use zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. In 2021 the FDA proposed that those two be recognized as safe and effective, and asked manufacturers for more data on twelve other common filters, including avobenzone, octocrylene and oxybenzone. The agency has been careful to say that asking for data is not a finding that those ingredients are unsafe. In September 2026 it finalized the removal of two older ingredients, PABA and trolamine salicylate, and told consumers they did not need to take any action.

For most men the choice comes down to how the product feels and looks. Mineral formulas can leave a white cast, especially on darker skin. Tinted versions help with that, and the AAD notes that tints made with iron oxide can also help protect against dark spots, because iron oxide blocks visible light. Chemical formulas tend to rub in clear. The best sunscreen is the one you will actually wear every day, so buy for texture first.

Make it part of the routine

The easiest way to stop forgetting sunscreen is to stop treating it as a beach product. A daily moisturizer with broad-spectrum SPF 30 covers your face and neck on ordinary days, and it slots into the routine laid out in our guide to men's skincare basics. Keep a stick in your bag for the face and ears. A gel is easier to spread over hairy arms and legs than a thick lotion. Bearded men should work it into the cheeks above the beard line, a spot we come back to in our beard care guide.

Sunscreen is one layer, not the whole plan. The FDA advises limiting time in the sun between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., and wearing protective clothing, sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat. Its consumer page on sun protection lays out the label rules in plain language.

A few practical rules from the same sources. Sunscreen should carry an expiration date. If it does not, the FDA says to treat it as expired three years after purchase, so a bottle whose age you cannot account for belongs in the trash. Labels are required to warn against excessive heat and direct sun, so a tube left on the dashboard all summer is a bad bet. And if you notice a spot that is new, changing, itching or bleeding, see a board-certified dermatologist rather than reaching for another product.

The Quiet Menace grooming section covers the rest of the shelf, from the apothecary design of Aesop to the wet shave. Browse our skincare and grooming essentials hubs for more. Then go check the crimp of the tube in your gym bag. If the date printed there says 2023, it is already done.

The number was 252. In 2007 Asics asked a young buyer at a New York sneaker shop to reinterpret one of its archive models, and Ronnie Fieg picked the Gel-Lyte III, a split-tongue runner most people had forgotten. He made three colorways and produced 252 pairs of each. The set, known ever since as the 252 Pack, landed on the cover of The Wall Street Journal and sold out in under 24 hours.

That is the founding myth of Kith, and unlike most founding myths it holds up. Everything Fieg has built since rests on the same skill he showed with those shoes. He knows exactly which version of a familiar thing people will line up for.

Thirteen and on the floor

Fieg grew up in Queens and started at David Z, his uncle's sneaker store, at 13, working as a stock boy and salesman. He stayed long enough to become manager and head buyer. Buying is an underrated creative job. It means deciding what a neighborhood wants six months before it knows, and Fieg spent his teens and twenties learning that in real time, on the floor.

The Asics project turned the buyer into a designer. A run of Gel-Lyte III collaborations followed, and his name started showing up on boxes. In 2011 he went out on his own.

2011, Brooklyn and Broadway

Kith opened in 2011 with two stores, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan at 644 Broadway. The Manhattan store opened on November 11, 2011. The Brooklyn store got a renovation in August 2015 that introduced Kith Treats, a cereal bar with 23 varieties of cereal plus toppings, milk options and ice cream, under a ceiling installation of 750 cast white Air Jordan 2s.

The cereal bar sounds like a gimmick. It is actually the key to the business. A sneaker store gives you a reason to visit on release day. A cereal bar gives you a reason to visit on a Tuesday, bring a friend and take a photo, and Kith Treats has traveled with the brand ever since. Supreme taught downtown New York that scarcity could be a business model. Kith added the idea that a store could be somewhere you simply hang out.

The edit becomes the brand

By the mid-2010s Kith had dozens of collaborations behind it, and the partner list kept stretching. Adidas, New Balance, Converse, Clarks, Timberland, Polo Ralph Lauren and Harris Tweed all signed on at different points. In 2017 came Cap'n Crunch for Kith Treats and a project with Daniel Arsham. In 2018 it was Coca-Cola, Tommy Hilfiger and The Jetsons. The mix of heritage names and cartoon nostalgia is the house style. Fieg likes the brand your dad trusted and the cereal you ate before school, presented with the same seriousness.

The sneaker side never went away. Kith's New Balance work sits naturally next to the story told in our New Balance 990 history, and its Asics and Nike projects feed the same collector economy covered in our guide to sneaker resale.

In October 2017 Kith moved its Manhattan flagship to 337 Lafayette Street in NoHo, less than a minute from the old shop. The 10,000 square foot, three-story store was designed with Snarkitecture and put men's apparel, footwear with Treats, and women's apparel on separate floors. It sits on the same downtown circuit covered in our SoHo streetwear guide.

Tokyo, Paris and a BMW

The international push came during the pandemic. Kith Tokyo opened in the summer of 2020. Paris followed in early 2021, inside the historic Pershing Building near the Arc de Triomphe, with 16,000 square feet over three floors, a restored Carrara marble staircase and a chandelier made from resin-cast Nike Air Max 1s, a reference to the Pompidou Center story behind the original Air Max 1. Sadelle's ran the courtyard restaurant, and Kith Treats sat next to it.

In October 2020 Kith and BMW revealed a special edition of the new M4 Competition, limited to 150 units worldwide. It is the clearest example of how far the brand's name now travels. A sneaker buyer from Queens had put his logo on a German sports car.

Courtside

On November 11, 2022, eleven years to the day after the Manhattan store opened, the New York Knicks named Fieg their first creative director, and Kith went on to shape the team's City Edition look. The role puts Kith inside the city's most loyal fan base.

The brand has kept widening. In 2024 it introduced &Kin, a line of unbranded staples, with the Summer 2024 collection. In August 2025 Kith staged its first runway show in six years at the renovated Lafayette Street flagship, presenting a Fall 2025 collection called INSTITUTION. By 2026 it counted more than 20 stores across three continents. Footwear News named Fieg its Person of the Year in December 2025. His background is laid out on Ronnie Fieg's Wikipedia page.

For more on the shops and labels that shaped this world, browse our culture section and the streetwear and collaborations hubs.

The Gel-Lyte III has carried Fieg's name in plenty of colorways since. The first run is still the one that explains everything else. Three shoes, 252 pairs each, gone inside a day.

Galerie Vivienne is a covered arcade in Paris with a glass roof and a mosaic floor, and in 1970 Kenzo Takada opened his first store and staged his first show there. In January 2022 Nigo brought his own first Kenzo collection back to the same passage. He was born in 1970, the year the house began, and nearly every look on that runway came with a hat, berets included.

It was a strange, neat homecoming for a man most people still file under one word. The ape.

Leaving the ape behind

The Bape story is told elsewhere on this site, from the 1993 opening of Nowhere in our Ura-Harajuku guide to the hip-hop years in how hip-hop rewrote menswear. The short version of the ending is that Nigo sold a majority of A Bathing Ape to Hong Kong's I.T Group in 2011 and left the brand in 2013.

By then he had already started over. Nigo founded Human Made in 2010, a year before the Bape sale, and he is still its creative director. Where Bape was loud, the new label played smaller, and its collaborations show a dry sense of humor. In 2025 it teamed up with the oat milk brand Minor Figures, and FashionUnited reported that it was the first brand collaboration Minor Figures had ever done. It is a small, slightly odd project, and that is the point.

Twenty years with Pharrell

No partnership defines Nigo's career like the one with Pharrell Williams. In 2003 the two launched Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream. A year later, according to LVMH, they worked together for Louis Vuitton for the first time, on the Millionaires sunglasses.

The Louis Vuitton thread kept running. In 2020 Nigo teamed up with Virgil Abloh on LV², a capsule collection for Louis Vuitton. In March 2022 he released I Know Nigo, his return to music after about two decades, with Pharrell, Pusha T, Kid Cudi, A$AP Rocky, Tyler, the Creator and Lil Uzi Vert among the features.

Then the friendship went onto the runway. In January 2025, at the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, Pharrell and Nigo presented Remember the Future, the Louis Vuitton Men's Fall-Winter 2025 collection, as co-designers. LVMH's account of the show lists sashiko stitching on denim, shippō weaving, kintsugi-style gilding on a Speedy and a cherry blossom motif. It is the clearest picture yet of what the two have been trading back and forth since 2003, and it sits right beside our coverage of Pharrell's Louis Vuitton menswear.

A Paris house

LVMH announced on September 15, 2021, that Nigo would become artistic director of Kenzo, succeeding Felipe Oliveira Baptista. He started on September 20. The fit was almost too tidy. He and Takada attended the same Tokyo fashion school, and he was the first Japanese designer to lead the house since Takada left in 1999.

The debut collection, shown during Paris men's week in January 2022, mixed varsity jackets and Harris Tweed overcoats with pinstriped suits worn over flat, kimono-style wool jackets, and brought back the red poppy, one of the house's oldest motifs. Pharrell, Kanye West and Tyler, the Creator were among the guests on the wooden chairs lining the arcade. It read as Ivy League dressing filtered through Tokyo, which is more or less what Nigo has always made.

He has kept the founder close. In January 2026 Kenzo showed its Autumn-Winter 2026 collection at 8 Rue Sedaine, the former Paris home where Takada lived until 2009. In between, Nigo took on another job, as creative director of the Japanese convenience chain FamilyMart, announced in February 2025 while he stayed at Kenzo.

Human Made goes public

On November 27, 2025, Human Made Inc. listed on the Growth market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, as the company confirmed in its own listing announcement. The Japan Times, citing Bloomberg, reported that the shares were priced at ¥3,130, the top of the marketed range, raising about ¥17.8 billion (around $115 million) and valuing the company at ¥71.7 billion. According to that report, Nigo and Pharrell were both among the existing shareholders selling shares in the offering. Proceeds from new shares were earmarked for new stores in Japan and for e-commerce.

Demand was heavy. HIGHXTAR reported that the stock closed its first day up 13 percent after trading as much as 26 percent higher during the session. Citing Asian media, the same report said the company's plans for the next two years include new flagships in Tokyo and Osaka and a bigger push into the United States.

That makes Nigo an unusual figure. He founded one of the most famous streetwear brands in history, gave it up, built a second one from scratch, took it public and ran a French luxury house at the same time. In 2026 the Design Museum in London gave him his first UK exhibition, Nigo: From Japan with Love, which ran from May 1 to October 4.

For more on the Tokyo scene and the people it produced, see our Japan and streetwear hubs and the full culture section.

Back in Galerie Vivienne, under the glass roof where Kenzo began, a man born in the house's first year sent his own Kenzo down the runway.

On October 23, 2001, Apple announced a $399 music player that only worked with a Mac. It held 5GB on a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive, weighed 6.5 ounces and had a 2-inch screen showing black text at 160 by 128 pixels. The first units shipped on November 10. Some skeptics online laughed it off.

A Hard Drive Nobody Was Using

The iPod started with a part. Jon Rubinstein, Apple's head of hardware, found a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive that Toshiba was still developing, and Apple bought the rights to it. Rubinstein then recruited Tony Fadell, who was hired in 2001 as an independent contractor to lead a project code-named P-68.

The team moved fast and borrowed heavily. PortalPlayer supplied the software base that became the iPod's operating system. A company called Pixo helped build the interface and firmware, with Steve Jobs supervising directly. Michael Dhuey designed the power supply. The name came from Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who had 2001: A Space Odyssey in mind.

The finished spec sheet looks modest now. Ten hours of playback from a 1,200 mAh battery. A FireWire port for syncing and charging. Mac OS 9.2 or later required. You can still read Apple's archived technical specifications for the original iPod, and what jumps out is how little it tried to do.

The Wheel Was the Point

Scrolling through a thousand songs with arrow keys would have been misery. Phil Schiller, then Apple's head of marketing, proposed a wheel instead, so a thumb could sweep through a long list in one motion. On the 2001 model the wheel physically turned, ringed by four buttons.

Jony Ive's Industrial Design Group wrapped it in a white polycarbonate front and a mirror-polished stainless steel back that scratched if you looked at it. That back was part of the charm. A worn iPod read the way a beaten-up watch case does, proof of use. The Museum of Modern Art holds a first-generation unit in its collection, catalogued under Jonathan Ive and the Apple Industrial Design Group, and the credit line says it was a gift of the manufacturer.

Then Apple iterated in public. A 10GB version followed on March 20, 2002. The second generation in the summer of 2002 replaced the spinning wheel with a touch-sensitive one and added Windows support, which is when the iPod stopped being a Mac accessory. The third generation in May 2003 went all touch, buttons included. On February 20, 2004, the iPod mini introduced the Click Wheel, with the buttons built into the wheel itself, and the full-size fourth generation adopted it that July.

Put the click wheel iPod next to the Braun hardware in our feature on Dieter Rams and his ten principles and the family resemblance is hard to miss. Fewer controls, each one doing more.

The Store That Made It Work

Hardware alone didn't do it. On April 28, 2003, Apple opened the iTunes Store and gave people a legal, simple way to buy songs one at a time. From there the line split into a family. The screenless iPod shuffle arrived on January 11, 2005. The iPod nano followed on September 7, 2005. The fifth-generation iPod added video that October. Apple sold its 100 millionth iPod by 2007.

The shuffle is the most radical of the lot. It had no screen at all, which meant giving up control and letting the device pick the next song. That sounds like a downgrade on paper. In practice it turned the iPod into something closer to a radio you owned, and it was small enough to wear like jewelry. The nano went the other way, a full-featured player thin enough to vanish in a coin pocket.

The white earbuds became a status signal in a way headphones never had been. Before the iPod, what you listened to was private. Afterward, the cable running from your pocket to your ears told everyone which brand you carried, a trick the Sony Walkman never quite pulled off with its foam headphones. If you lived through the era, you can probably still feel the click of the wheel under your thumb.

The Long Goodbye

The full-size model got the iPod classic name on September 5, 2007, the same year the iPhone arrived and started eating the iPod's reason to exist. Apple discontinued the classic on September 9, 2014. The iPod touch, which was really an iPhone without the phone, lasted until May 10, 2022, when Apple ended the line. By then it had sold about 450 million iPods.

The iPod belongs to a short list of devices that changed how people moved through a city, alongside the Walkman and the Nintendo Game Boy. It also sits in a broader story of music hardware with real design ambition, from the Technics SL-1200 turntable to the Teenage Engineering OP-1. More in the tech section, the tech history archive and our industrial design coverage.

Pick up a first-generation unit today and the wheel still physically turns under your thumb. Flip it over and the steel back is almost certainly covered in fine scratches, every one of them earned in a pocket.

On July 12, 2022, a London company not yet two years old called Nothing unveiled a phone with a clear glass back and roughly 900 LEDs arranged beneath it. Phone (1) went on sale nine days later for £399. It ran a midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G+ chip and wasn't sold in the United States at launch. It got far more attention than that chip would suggest, almost entirely because of how it looked.

The OnePlus Years

Carl Pei was born in Beijing in 1989, moved with his family to the United States and then grew up in Sweden. He started a degree at the Stockholm School of Economics in 2008 and dropped out in 2011 to work in China's smartphone business full time. A fan site he built about the Chinese phone maker Meizu caught the attention of the company, and in 2011 he joined its marketing team. In November 2012 he joined Oppo as international markets manager, reporting to Pete Lau.

In December 2013, Pei and Lau co-founded OnePlus in Shenzhen. Pei ran its global business, as director of OnePlus Global, for almost seven years, then left in October 2020. Nothing was founded that same month and announced on January 27, 2021, with Pei as CEO and a base in London. The seed round, reported at about $7 million, came from a list of names that read like a tech dinner party. Tony Fadell, one of the people behind the Apple iPod, was in. So were Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and YouTuber Casey Neistat. The company also picked up the trademarks and logo of Essential, Andy Rubin's shuttered phone brand, in January 2021, without saying what it planned to do with them.

Enter Stockholm

The interesting hire came in February 2021. As reported by Engadget at the time, Teenage Engineering signed on as a founding partner responsible for product design. Its CEO, Jesper Kouthoofd, was named Nothing's creative lead, and Tom Howard, the Stockholm company's vice head, became Nothing's head of design. If you know the playful aluminum gear covered in our Teenage Engineering OP-1 story, the move made instant sense. Pei had spent years selling phones on specs and price. Now he had some of the most admired hardware designers in Europe in his corner.

The first product was audio. Ear (1) was announced on July 27, 2021, and went on sale on August 17 for $99. The stems were transparent, showing the logic board, microphones and battery, and the case was a clear plastic shell where you could see the hinge and the magnets that hold each bud in place. Most brands hide all of that behind glossy white plastic. In October 2022 Nothing raised the price to $149, citing component costs.

What the Glyphs Actually Do

Phone (1) took the transparent idea to the back of a phone. Under the Gorilla Glass 5 sat a set of light elements built from roughly 900 LEDs, which Nothing called the Glyph Interface. It wasn't only decoration. The phone shipped with 10 ringtones, each paired with its own light pattern that flashed in time with the sound. A strip at the bottom edge doubled as a charging gauge when plugged in. The lights could work as a soft fill for the camera, and a separate red light showed when video was recording. A setting called Flip to Glyph switched the lights on only when the phone lay face down on a table.

That last feature was the clever one. A phone that can get your attention while lying screen down is a small argument for looking at your screen less, which is an odd thing for a phone maker to sell. It worked as a pitch.

The rest of the spec sheet was solidly midrange. A 6.55-inch 120Hz OLED display, two 50-megapixel rear cameras, a 4,500mAh battery, 33W wired and 15W wireless charging, IP53 splash resistance and Android 12 under a custom skin called Nothing OS. Reviewers liked the hardware and complained about software bugs and slow updates at launch. Few had anything bad to say about the looks.

Transparency as a Brand

Nothing turned one visual idea into a whole identity. Clear housings ran from the earbuds to the phones, and even the inside of the Ear (1) case had its name printed where you could read it through the lid. It is a cousin of Dieter Rams's principle that good design is honest, played for drama rather than restraint. The see-through look also has deep roots in gaming hardware, from clear 1990s handhelds to the transparent editions of the Analogue Pocket.

The company kept building. Phone (2) was announced on July 11, 2023, with a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. A cheaper sub-brand called CMF arrived the same year. Phone (2a), announced on March 5, 2024, sold more than 100,000 units on its first day, according to Nothing. In September 2025 Nothing raised a $200 million Series C led by Tiger Global, valuing the company at $1.3 billion. The full timeline lives on Wikipedia.

For more on gadgets where the shell matters as much as the chip, see the tech section, our industrial design hub and the audio archive.

Phone (3), launched on July 1, 2025, retired the light strips that made Nothing famous. In their place on the back sits a small circular dot matrix of LEDs called the Glyph Matrix. It looks less like a light show and more like a tiny low-resolution screen, the kind of display a 1980s calculator watch would have envied.

In 1939 Isamu Noguchi made a small plastic model of a coffee table for the decorator T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings and heard nothing back. In 1942, during the months he spent voluntarily interned at a relocation camp in Poston, Arizona, he saw a variation of that model in a Robsjohn-Gibbings advertisement. Nobody had asked his permission.

The Revenge Table

When Noguchi raised it, Robsjohn-Gibbings reportedly brushed him off with the line that anyone could make a three-legged table. Noguchi later wrote that the table he designed next was an act of revenge, and the V&A repeats the story in its catalog entry for an early example.

He had form in tables by then. Also in 1939 he made his first one, a commission from A. Conger Goodyear, the founding president of the Museum of Modern Art, in rosewood and glass with a more complicated sculptural base. Noguchi was a sculptor first. Born in Los Angeles on November 17, 1904, to the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and Léonie Gilmour, he arrived in Paris in April 1927 and went to work as a studio assistant to Constantin Brancusi.

The table that came out of the grudge is the simplest thing he ever sold. Two identical pieces of wood, one flipped against the other, pivot together and touch at one narrow point. A heavy freeform slab of glass sits on top, unfixed, held in place by weight alone. It is a sculpture you can put a drink on.

Herman Miller designer George Nelson wrote a piece called How to Make a Table and illustrated it with Noguchi's variant. In 1947 Herman Miller put that table into production in Zeeland, Michigan, as part of Nelson's first collection for the company, and it appeared in the 1948 catalog under the model number IN-50. It shares a showroom history with the Eames Lounge Chair, which Herman Miller launched less than a decade later.

Small Changes Over a Long Run

The table looks unchanged, but collectors know the differences. The first tops were 7/8-inch plate glass. In 1965 Herman Miller cut that to 3/4 inch and raised the base, taking the height from 15 inches to 15.75. Bases came in walnut, birch and cherry at first. Cherry lasted only the first year, birch was dropped after 1954, and ebonized walnut arrived later. In the late 1980s the company added indexing pins that set the two legs at a fixed 52 degrees.

That makes a birch base the quickest dating clue. The V&A's own birch example, it says, must have been made between about 1947 and 1955. Production also stopped for at least the decade from 1973 to 1983 before Herman Miller brought it back. New tables carry a medallion with Noguchi's signature, according to the Herman Miller design story. Vitra holds the rights everywhere outside North America, where MillerKnoll, Herman Miller's parent company, holds them.

Gifu, Summer 1951

The lamps came from a different trip. In June and July 1951 Noguchi visited the Ozeki and Co. lantern workshop in Gifu, a town known for paper lanterns, and the mayor asked him to help modernize them. He kept the traditional chochin structure, collapsible bamboo ribs under paper, and added electric bulbs and slender wire bases. He named them Akari, the Japanese word for light, and preferred the term light sculptures to lamps. Akari made its debut at a tea ceremony at the Eames House that same year.

The method has barely moved. At Ozeki, thin bamboo rods are stretched across wooden forms Noguchi designed, washi paper is cut into strips and glued onto the ribs, and once it dries the form comes out and the lantern folds flat. Over three decades Noguchi produced more than 200 models. The rights are split three ways. Vitra handles Europe, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum covers North America, and Ozeki sells in Japan. It is the same kind of slow handwork our Kyoto craft guide goes looking for.

Real Paper and Fake Paper

Counterfeit Akari are common. Genuine Ozeki pieces carry a printed red sun-and-moon mark. Bamboo ribs, visible fiber in the paper and that stamp are the giveaways. Wire ribs, plastic-feeling shades and listings that say Noguchi-style are the warning signs. Our design section has covered the same problem with chairs, and the rule is identical. Provenance first, silhouette last.

Noguchi spent the rest of his career moving between studios and countries. His garden at UNESCO in Paris opened on November 3, 1958. In 1969 he set up a studio in Mure, on Shikoku, with the stonemason Masatoshi Izumi, and began an ongoing series of large stone sculptures. The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, Queens, opened by appointment in April 1983 and officially in May 1985. Noguchi died in New York on December 30, 1988.

He belongs in the same conversation as Arne Jacobsen, another designer for whom furniture was never a separate discipline. For how Japan shaped a later generation of modernists, read our piece on Tadao Ando. The museum's next show, No Ordinary Light, Akari at 75, is scheduled to run from November 4, 2026, to September 5, 2027.

Seventy-five years after Gifu, the paper still goes onto the bamboo by hand, one strip at a time, at the same workshop.

In August 1967 a chair with no legs went on public view for the first time. It was a single S-shaped sweep of plastic, the seat flowing into a base that curled forward along the floor, and it held a person up by cantilever alone. Verner Panton had been sketching it for about a decade. Finding someone willing to make it took most of that time.

Out of Jacobsen's Office

Panton was born on February 13, 1926, in Gamtofte, Denmark. He studied architecture at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen from 1947 to 1951 and spent 1950 to 1952 in Arne Jacobsen's office, working mainly on furniture, including the development of the Ant chair. That studio would later produce the Egg chair. Panton opened his own practice in 1955.

Danish modern at the time meant teak and careful joinery. Panton went the other way. He liked saturated color in synthetic materials, and rooms where the furniture and the walls were the same idea. Copenhagen still wears the teak version of the national style proudly, as our Copenhagen design guide shows, and Panton spent much of his career working outside Denmark.

Ten Years of Sketches

The chair goes back to the mid-1950s. According to the official Verner Panton archive, he was already experimenting with a single-material cantilever chair for a WK-Möbel competition in 1956, and sketches from around 1957 clearly point to the final shape. The cantilever itself was old news. Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer were bending steel tube into cantilevered chairs in the late 1920s, and Breuer's earlier Wassily chair had already turned a frame into a drawing. Doing it in one molded piece, with no frame at all, was the new part.

Panton then had a full-scale model made in polystyrene. You could not sit on it. Its job was to win over manufacturers. That model now belongs to the Vitra Design Museum, and the Panton estate points out that it is often wrongly described as a prototype.

The breakthrough came in the early 1960s from Willi Fehlbaum, then managing director of Vitra. Fehlbaum agreed to develop the chair for series production, and Panton moved his family to Basel. Development ran hard from 1965 to 1967. The Danish design magazine Mobilia presented the result that year, and the official archive dates the first public showing to August 1967.

Five Materials, One Shape

The outline has barely moved since then. What the chair is made of has changed repeatedly, and that is how collectors date one.

The first series, from 1967 to 1968, was cold-molded polyester resin reinforced with fiberglass and then painted. Herman Miller sold the chair once Vitra began series production. From 1968 to 1971 the second series was made of painted rigid polyurethane foam.

In 1971 came the version that was supposed to democratize it. The third series used Luran S, a colored thermoplastic polystyrene that needed no paint, and you can identify it by ridges under the bend where the seat meets the base. The cheaper plastic did not age well. Production stopped in 1979, according to the Wikipedia history of the Panton Chair, because the chairs were not durable enough and looked worn over time.

For four years there was no Panton Chair at all. In 1983 it returned in painted rigid polyurethane foam, with Panton's signature on the base, and that foam version is still sold today as the Panton Chair Classic. In 1999 Vitra launched a series in colored polypropylene, and that version is still in production. A scaled-down Panton Junior for children followed in 2005.

The Panton Look

The chair is hard to separate from the rooms Panton built around it. In 1968 Bayer hired him to design its showroom on a Rhine excursion steamer at the Cologne furniture fair, the project that became Visiona, and he came back for Visiona 2 in 1970. In 1969 he did the interiors for the Spiegel publishing house in Hamburg, down to the canteen, which survives largely as he left it. Wall-to-wall orange, red and purple, with circles everywhere. The chair was the portable piece of a whole environment.

The magazines caught on early. In 1970 the British title Nova used it in a photo sequence called How to Undress in Front of Your Husband. In January 1995 Nick Knight photographed a nude Kate Moss on a Panton Chair for the cover of British Vogue. It sits in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Design Museum in London, and in 2006 Denmark added it to its official Culture Canon.

What keeps it from reading as a period piece is that plastic furniture never really caught up. Molded chairs are now cheap and everywhere, but almost none of them commit to a single gesture the way this one does. It works alone in a white room as sculpture and in a set around a dining table, and it slots into the same rooms as the Eames Lounge Chair without looking like a different century. It also explains a lot about where Memphis got the nerve to treat color as structure. For more furniture from the period, see our mid-century modern hub and the rest of our design coverage.

If you find a vintage one, turn it over. Ridges below the bend mean Luran S, made in the 1970s. A signature on the base means the foam version made from 1983 on.

On September 19, 1985, an earthquake partly or fully collapsed 472 buildings in Colonia Roma, most of them in the north of the neighborhood, and left about 15,000 people without homes. Roma had been sliding for decades already. Rent freezes imposed in the 1940s were not lifted until the 1990s, landlords stopped maintaining their buildings, and the population fell from about 95,000 in 1970 to about 35,000 by 1995. The quake turned a slow decline into an exodus, and Condesa, next door, emptied with it.

Both came back. Walk them now and the hard part is remembering that.

A suburb planned by a circus owner

Roma was approved as a residential development in 1902. Its backers were an odd crew, including the British circus owner Edward Walter Orrin, the clown Ricardo Bell, the American engineer Cassius Clay Lamm and his sons, and Pedro Lascuráin. With help from Porfirio Díaz's government it became the first colonia in Mexico City with proper roads, running water and sewers.

The planners modeled the wide, tree-lined boulevards on Paris and named the streets after the Mexican states and cities where the Orrin Circus had performed, which is why the street signs read like an old touring schedule, Durango, Colima, Tabasco, Zacatecas. Avenida Álvaro Obregón, the main spine, started life as Avenida Jalisco. The grand houses went up between 1906 and 1939, first in French-influenced styles and then, through the 1920s and 1930s, in Art Deco. By 1996 about 1,100 of those early-twentieth-century mansions were still standing. The history of Colonia Roma is worth reading before you go, if only for the detail.

The ground has not stopped moving. On September 19, 2017, exactly 32 years after the first disaster, another earthquake collapsed an office building on Álvaro Obregón and killed 49 people.

A racetrack you can still lap

Condesa takes its name from the Countess of Miravalle, whose hacienda once covered the land, and it was formally established in 1902. In 1910 Díaz opened a racetrack there run by the Jockey Club, used for horses and for early auto racing. It closed during the Revolution, but you can still follow it. Avenida Amsterdam traces the curve of the old track in a long loop, with a shaded pedestrian median down the middle and roundabouts named for volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Citlaltépetl among them. Look at the benches. Even those are Art Deco.

Parque México was laid out on the former track site in the 1920s as the center of the new neighborhood. Parque España, a few blocks away, dates from 1921 and marked a century since the end of the War of Independence. Through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s Art Deco was the house style.

The building to see is the Edificio Basurto on Avenida México, designed by Francisco J. Serrano and finished in the mid-1940s. It is a tall Art Deco apartment block built around a famous spiral staircase, which you can only really see from inside. It is a residential building, so admire it from the street unless a resident waves you in. Serrano also designed a building on Amsterdam, and once you know his streamlined corners you will start spotting them.

After 1985 the rents fell, younger residents moved in, and by the late 1980s the area had a bohemian reputation. Sidewalk dining, now the whole point of the place, was still a rarity in the 1990s.

Roma's galleries

Galería OMR is the anchor. Patricia Ortiz Monasterio and Jaime Riestra founded it in 1983, and for about 30 years it occupied a turn-of-the-century villa on Plaza Río de Janeiro. In 2015 it moved to a remodeled 1970s brutalist building on Calle Córdoba that once housed the record and book shop Sala Margolín. The building is half the reason to go. OMR's own history page has the details.

Galería Mascota, in Roma Norte, is a project space focused on emerging artists from outside Mexico, and it took part in the 2025 GAMA gallery week alongside OMR. MODO, the Museo del Objeto del Objeto on Colima, runs rotating shows built from everyday objects, and it is the closest thing the neighborhood has to a design museum. Casa Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, a Porfirian mansion that became part of the Slim Foundation in 2019, holds the late historian's collection of colonial-era art, a library and a sculpture garden. Over in Condesa, House of Gaga shows more experimental, avant-garde work.

Roma's independent design and vintage shops turn over faster than its galleries, so we have left them off this list rather than send you to an empty storefront. Walk Colima and Córdoba and you will find this season's crop.

Where to eat

Contramar has served seafood in Roma Norte since 1998 under the chef Gabriela Cámara, and the order is the pescado a la talla, a whole grilled fish painted with a red rub on one side and a green one on the other, plus the tuna tostadas. Go at lunch, the way Mexico City does.

Panadería Rosetta, the bakery from the chef Elena Reygadas on Colima, is our pick for breakfast pastry in the area. Maíz de Cacao builds its breakfast around corn and the cooking of the Huasteca region. For a serious dinner, EM, from the chef Lucho Martínez, holds a Michelin star and serves a tasting menu, and you need to book well in advance. In Condesa, Chiquitito Café is the long-running local coffee stop.

Check before you go. All of these appear at these locations in 2025 coverage, but menus, reservation rules and even addresses can change.

How to spend the day

Start with coffee at Chiquitito, then walk the Amsterdam loop clockwise and cut through Parque México to the Basurto. Cross Avenida Insurgentes into Roma, get a pastry at Rosetta, then do OMR, Mascota and MODO before a long lunch at Contramar. Spend the late afternoon in Plaza Río de Janeiro and along Álvaro Obregón, and finish with dinner at EM if you managed the booking.

If the Parisian bones of Roma appeal, our Le Marais style guide covers the original. For another city where the street does the shopping for you, see our Fairfax Avenue guide, and for the European modernism that ran parallel to Serrano's work, our history of the Bauhaus. More in our architecture and art archives, our city guides and the full Travel section.

Before you leave Roma, find the house on Calle Tepeji where Alfonso Cuarón shot his 2018 film about the neighborhood. A small plaque on the facade reads Aquí se filmó Roma.

In 1612 the Place Royale was inaugurated with a grand carrousel, a mounted parade staged to celebrate the engagement of the young Louis XIII to Anne of Austria. Henry IV had ordered the square built from 1605, a near-perfect block of red brick and stone pavilions over arcades. Four centuries later it is called the Place des Vosges, and on a warm Saturday its lawns hold more good outfits per square meter than most fashion weeks.

A marsh, a king and a lot of mansions

Le Marais means the marsh, and the name is honest about the ground. The district spans parts of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements on the Right Bank, and in the Middle Ages it sat just outside the walls of Paris. The Knights Templar kept their fortified Paris headquarters here, its great keep finished around 1240. In 1361 Charles V built the Hôtel Saint-Pol, and the royal court followed him.

The real boom came in the seventeenth century, after the square. Nobles and financiers built hôtels particuliers, private town mansions set back behind carriage gates and courtyards, and many of them still stand. The Hôtel de Sully, the Hôtel de Soubise, the Hôtel de Beauvais and the Hôtel Carnavalet are the names to know. Walk past any of them with the gate open and you see the trick of the Marais in one glance, a plain street wall hiding a stone courtyard of absurd elegance.

Fashion is fickle, and the aristocracy moved on in the late eighteenth century. After the Revolution the nobility abandoned the grand houses, many fell into disrepair, and the district became a commercial quarter rather than a fashionable one. It also became home to one of the city's main Jewish communities, with Eastern European families settling around the rue des Rosiers, an area called the Pletzl, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

How Malraux saved the Marais

The neighborhood was shabby and at risk by the middle of the twentieth century. In 1964 André Malraux, then minister of culture, made the Marais one of the first secteurs sauvegardés in France, a safeguarded sector protecting places of cultural significance. It is a large part of why the seventeenth-century district is still legible today.

Restoration followed, and many of the hôtels particuliers became museums. The Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris, occupies the Hôtel Carnavalet. The Musée Picasso is in the Hôtel Salé, built between 1656 and 1659 for Pierre Aubert, who grew rich collecting the gabelle, the tax on salt, which is how the house got its nickname. The museum closed for five years of renovation and expansion and reopened on October 25, 2014. At No. 6 Place des Vosges, the apartment where Victor Hugo lived from 1832 to 1848 is now the Maison de Victor Hugo, run by the City of Paris.

The Centre Pompidou was completed on the district's western edge in 1977, and from the 1980s the Marais also became the center of LGBT life in Paris, with bars, galleries and small shops following.

The Haut Marais and the concept store

The southern Marais, around the rue des Rosiers and the rue Vieille du Temple, is the busy, touristic half. Head north into the 3rd arrondissement and the streets get quieter, the fronts narrower and the shops more interesting. Locals call this stretch the Haut Marais, the upper Marais, and it is where the city's independent fashion retail has done its best work in the past fifteen years.

The Broken Arm is the shop to know. It opened at the beginning of 2013 on the rue Perrée, a short side street in the 3rd arrondissement, and it combines a sharp edit of designer menswear and womenswear with a café that serves its own pastries and lunch plates. It belongs to the same lineage as Dover Street Market in London, a store where the edit carries as much authority as any single label on the rails. If the kind of avant-garde tailoring stocked in shops like this is new to you, our profile of Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons is a good primer.

As with any guide to independent shops, check before you go. Small stores change their hours, move or close, and the Haut Marais has seen plenty of turnover. A brand's own site or the official Paris tourism listings are more reliable than an old blog post.

How to plan a day in the Marais

Start early at the Place des Vosges, before the arcades fill. From there the classic route runs west along the rue des Francs-Bourgeois toward the Carnavalet and the Musée Picasso, then north into the Haut Marais. Keep your head up. The best architecture is often on the second floor, in carved window surrounds and ironwork balconies, and the best courtyards are behind doors that look closed and are not.

Weekends are crowded, especially around the rue des Rosiers, so if you want calm, go on a weekday morning. Museums keep their own schedules and some close one day a week, so look them up the day before.

Dress for walking on cobbles, not for being photographed. Then again, people here manage both, and a good pair of leather-soled loafers will survive the stones if you are careful. If you want to see the counterpoint to Parisian ease, our Savile Row guide shows the English answer, and our Copenhagen design guide is a natural next stop.

For more trips, browse our city guides, our architecture coverage and the full Travel section.

On the way out, walk past the Hôtel Salé one more time. The grandest house in the neighborhood was paid for with the salt tax, and the nickname has outlasted everything else about him. Salé means salted.

Some Nike executives looked at the prototype and saw a hole. Tinker Hatfield, a former architect, had cut a window into the side of a running shoe's midsole so you could see the Air unit inside, and the worry was that customers would think the thing was broken. Nike released it anyway on March 26, 1987, in white, light grey and loud red. The Air Max 1 made hidden technology the point of the design, and sneakers have been showing their work ever since.

Great Cushioning Nobody Could See

By the mid 1980s Nike had a great technology and a visibility problem. Air cushioning, pressurized gas sealed in a flexible bag inside the sole, had been around since engineer Frank Rudy brought the idea to Nike in 1977. It first reached runners in the Tailwind, shown at the Honolulu Marathon in 1978. It worked. Runners loved it. But nobody could see it.

That mattered more every year. Running had exploded into a mass market, and competitors were selling their own cushioning systems with bold claims. Nike needed a way to make its edge obvious from across a store.

The Architect in the Shoe Department

Hatfield came to Nike in 1981 as an architect, not a shoe designer. A former University of Oregon pole vaulter, he spent his early years at the company designing offices and showrooms. By 1985 his drawing skills had caught the attention of the people running the footwear side, and he moved into shoe design.

That background explains the Air Max 1. Hatfield did not think about shoes the way shoe people did. He thought about structure, materials and how a building tells you what it is.

Pipes on the Outside

The Centre Georges Pompidou opened in Paris in 1977, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. It turned architecture inside out. Air ducts, water pipes, electrical conduits and escalators all run along the exterior, color coded by function, so the building's machinery becomes its facade. Many Parisians hated it. Designers were transfixed.

Hatfield visited in the mid 1980s and came away with a simple, radical thought. If a building could show its guts, why not a shoe? He proposed cutting a window into the side of the midsole so the Air unit sat in plain view. Every sneaker that shows you its technology today is still answering that question.

This is where the hole-in-the-sole objection came from, with some executives convinced buyers would read the window as fragile or unfinished. Hatfield and the team pushed it through anyway, and the window became the design's signature instead of its weakness.

The 1987 original

The best known original colorway paired white and light grey with a bright red mudguard and accents, and a blue version followed in the same first run. The red was deliberate, loud enough to stand apart from earlier Nike runners and to pull the eye straight to the window.

Underneath the color, the upper was a smart mix of mesh, suede and synthetic overlays. The heel window got the headlines, but the proportions (a sleek toe, a stacked heel, a clean Swoosh) are why the shape has aged so well. Early prototypes from 1986 had an even larger Air unit, a version collectors call the Big Bubble that Nike has since revived in tribute releases.

Nike's agency, Wieden+Kennedy, launched the Air range with a television spot set to the Beatles' original recording of Revolution. The grainy, kinetic footage of athletes and ordinary people in motion looked nothing like a typical shoe commercial. It also triggered a lawsuit from the Beatles' company, Apple Records, which was eventually settled out of court. The fight only made the campaign more famous.

Safari, Kiss of Death, Chlorophyll

For a while the Air Max 1 settled into life as a well loved runner. Then the 2000s collaboration era arrived and turned it into the most important canvas outside basketball.

Tokyo's atmos released its animal print Safari version in 2002 and the elephant print pack in 2007, both heavily influenced by the shop's roots in the scene we cover in our Ura-Harajuku streetwear guide. Dutch artist Parra put his stamp on an Amsterdam edition in 2005, the same year Kidrobot got its own pair. Clot's Kiss of Death arrived in 2006. Amsterdam's Patta, founded in 2004, released the green and white Chlorophyll in 2009 and brought it back as a retro in 2024.

These limited runs did for the Air Max 1 what retro releases did for the Air Jordan 1 from 1985. They turned an existing shoe into a collectible with a story, and they trained a generation of buyers to line up, refresh and trade. That scarcity logic peaked with the release mechanics explored in Supreme and the rise of the drop model.

The Window Kept Growing

Before 1987, performance technology was hidden. After the Air Max 1, it was the design. The family that followed, from the Air Max 90 to full length units, kept enlarging the window until the Air itself was the sole.

Hatfield's idea sits in a wider tradition of honest, readable design, the kind laid out in Dieter Rams' ten principles of good design and in objects like the Sony Walkman, which made new technology feel personal and obvious at a glance. It belongs as much to industrial design as to running, and our Nike brand hub and sneakers section carry the rest of the family. The Centre Pompidou has published its own account of the connection in the secret history of the Nike Air Max, and the broader line is documented on the Nike Air Max Wikipedia page.

In Paris, the Pompidou still wears its ducts and escalators on the outside, color coded by function. Hatfield's answer to it fits in the side of a heel.

The first Stone Island jackets were made from a cloth designed to cover trucks. In 1982 Massimo Osti, working in Ravarino in Emilia-Romagna, took a rigid, double-sided tarpaulin, coated it in pigmented resins and put it through an enzyme stone wash until it broke down into something you could wear. The result was called Tela Stella. It looked faded and military and slightly wrong for a fashion label, which was exactly the appeal.

He named the brand after the sea. Osti was drawn to Joseph Conrad's novels, all boats and weather, and took the name from them. The badge followed the same thinking, a compass rose with a nautical star, embroidered on a cloth patch and buttoned to the left side of the garment.

A lab disguised as a label

Osti never treated Stone Island as a trend business. He treated it as fabric research with sleeves attached. Military uniforms, technical gear and workwear gave the line its industrial look, but the real work happened in the dye house.

The list of experiments is long and specific. Raso Gommato, a rubber-coated satin, arrived in 1983. Thermosensitive fabric and rubber wool came in 1987. A reflective fabric followed in 1991. Each one reads like a lab note, and that is how Osti seemed to think about clothes, as a set of material problems with a jacket as the answer.

For a buyer, that means the small fabric label inside a Stone Island jacket matters more than the cut. Collectors chase specific treatments and specific seasons, and they talk about a good one the way watch people talk about a faded bezel, which our Submariner history knows something about.

Who owns the compass?

The money story moves quickly. In 1983 Osti sold half the company to Gruppo Finanziario Tessile, with Carlo Rivetti involved in the deal, and stepped back from operations to focus on design. In 1991 he sold GFT the other half. In 1993 GFT sold Stone Island to Rivetti, who folded it in with C.P. Company under a business called Sportswear Company. Osti left at the end of 1995.

Rivetti's choice for a successor was unexpected. In 1996 he brought in Paul Harvey as creative director, and Harvey kept the research habit alive. In 2017 Singapore's Temasek Holdings bought a 30 percent stake valued at 345 million euros. On December 7, 2020, Moncler announced it would buy Stone Island for 1.15 billion euros, and the deal closed on March 31, 2021.

The two labels Rivetti had joined were long since apart by then. In early 2010 Sportswear Company sold C.P. Company to FGF Industry, leaving Stone Island to carry the research legacy on its own. Under Moncler, Robert Triefus became chief executive in 2023 and took the chairman's title as well in 2024. A company that began with one man and a truck cover now sits inside a listed luxury group.

Paninari, casuals and the badge as a passport

The fabric made Stone Island. The badge made it a tribe. In Italy the paninari, a youth tribe built around expensive outerwear, adopted it as part of their uniform. In England, football casuals did the same through the 1980s and 1990s, turning a technical Italian jacket into terrace wear and a quiet signal to anyone who knew what the patch meant.

That terrace association has stuck to the brand, and Stone Island has never fully shaken it, nor seemed to want to. Very few logos on any garment say so much from twenty feet away. It works the way a pair of Air Jordan 1s works on a basketball court, a piece of clothing that sorts insiders from everyone else at a glance.

Collectors date jackets by the patch. Early badges had green edging. From around 2000 the edging switched to black, and that one detail is often the first thing a dealer checks.

From the terraces to Supreme

The 2010s brought Stone Island to North America, where it found a new audience with no memory of the terraces. Supreme was among the labels that collaborated with it, and the drops sold through the same hype machine we break down in our piece on Supreme's drop model. In 2024 it collaborated with Dior and began a portrait campaign shot by the photographer David Sims.

The best way into Stone Island is the same way the paninari found it, through outerwear. A garment-dyed overshirt or a nylon field jacket shows the dye work without the price of a lab fabric. Buy secondhand and you can afford a season with a story, as long as you check the edging on the patch first. If you like the idea of military kit filtered through obsessive design, read our histories of the MA-1 flight jacket and the Barbour waxed jacket, two pieces from the same family of military and country kit. Our streetwear hub and the Style section have the rest. The Wikipedia entry on Stone Island has a fuller fabric timeline.

Unbutton the badge and the jacket goes anonymous, a well-made olive coat with no name. Button it back on and everyone on the train platform knows exactly what you paid.

The night before February 22, 2005, about a dozen people were already camped outside Reed Space at 151 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. By the next day the crowd had grown to around 150, police were helping a large bouncer hold the line, and officers would end up making roughly twenty arrests. Jeff Staple's Pigeon Dunk existed in 150 pairs, 30 each at five New York shops, and the next morning it was on the front page of the New York Post under the headline Sneaker Frenzy.

The shoe at the center of it was twenty years old. For most of those years nobody would have camped out for it.

College Colors, 1985

The Dunk arrived in 1985 as a team basketball shoe. Its working name was the College Color High, changed late in the process, and it launched with the Be True to Your School program, which dressed the shoe in the colors of college basketball powers. Seven schools is the number most histories settle on (Michigan, Kentucky, Iowa, Georgetown, Syracuse, St. John's and UNLV), though the list grows or shrinks depending on who is doing the counting.

Credit for the design usually goes to Peter Moore, the Nike creative director who also drew the Air Jordan 1. That overlap has fed a long argument about which shoe borrowed from which. The two came out the same year, they share an obvious family resemblance, and you can find respectable sources arguing it in both directions. The safest version is that they were siblings from the same studio, and our Air Jordan 1 history covers the more famous one.

The Dunk faded from basketball quickly. It didn't fade from skateboarding. Iowa Dunk Highs were turning up in skate videos by 1986, because a flat, grippy cupsole and a padded high collar happened to work on a board.

The Retro Nobody Saw Coming

Nike brought the Be True colorways back in 1998 and 1999, after more than a decade out of production. The 1999 run included a Wu-Tang Clan Dunk High made in just 36 pairs. In Japan, the CO.JP program and Hiroshi Fujiwara's circle were treating the Dunk as a collector's object years before most Americans did, part of the cross-Pacific traffic we follow in our Ura-Harajuku guide.

How Did Skateboarding Rebuild It?

Sandy Bodecker was named general manager of Nike SB in 2001, and the Dunk became his main tool. The SB version got a fatter padded tongue, thick oval laces that held up against grip tape and a Zoom Air unit in the heel of the insole. Nike sold it through skate shops.

The releases started in 2002. The grey and navy I-95 SB Dunk Low came out in March, and the four original team riders, Reese Forbes, Gino Iannucci, Richard Mulder and Danny Supa, each got a Colors By pair. Stüssy had already done the first brand collaboration Dunk in 2001. Zoo York and Chocolate followed, and then Supreme's SB Dunks, which by September 2002 were drawing the kind of lines Supreme now draws for almost everything, the dynamic laid out in our piece on the Supreme drop model.

That became the formula for the decade. Small runs, skate shop accounts, a story behind every colorway and message boards like NikeTalk turning each release into a hunt. The Pigeon was simply the moment it spilled into the evening news. The money side of that story, and where it led, is in our look at the sneaker resale economy.

Back on the Shelf, Then Gone Again

Hype cycles end. By 2016 plenty of SB Dunks were sitting on shelves under $100, the same year Comme des Garçons Homme Plus sent Dunk Highs down its runway. Then it turned. Virgil Abloh revealed his Off-White Dunk Lows in 2019, Travis Scott's SB Dunk Low kept the classic Dunk sole rather than the updated SB tread, and Nike marked the 35th anniversary in 2020 with Be True Dunk Lows. Abloh's route into Nike is in our Virgil Abloh and Off-White story.

The Dunk's appeal is easy to miss because it is so plain. There is no visible Air, no strap, no signature athlete. It is a leather panel shoe in two colors, and that is exactly why it works as a canvas. The same quality made the Air Force 1 a collaborator's favorite, and it is what the Vans Old Skool offered skaters a decade before Nike paid attention.

There is some irony in the arc. The Dunk owes its legend to scarcity, to 150 pairs on Orchard Street, and its second life to being everywhere. Complex has a useful rundown of the Be True to Your School series, and nss magazine tells the Pigeon story in detail. The rest of the Swoosh back catalog lives on our Nike hub, with more sneaker history across the sneakers section.

Of the 150 Pigeons, only the 30 sold at Reed Space carried a number.

The cover of Life magazine for July 13, 1942, featured a T-shirt printed for the Air Corps Gunnery School. By then the plain cotton crewneck had been official US Navy issue for nearly thirty years, and printed ones were still rare. Within a decade Marlon Brando would wear the same plain shirt on a movie screen with nothing over it.

Few garments have climbed so far from where they started. The white tee began as the part of a sailor's uniform nobody was supposed to see.

Underwear with sleeves

The T-shirt descends from the union suit, the one-piece underwear that covered a man from wrists to ankles. In the nineteenth century people began cutting it into separate tops and bottoms, and by the late 1800s miners and stevedores had adopted the top half for hot, heavy work. It was cheap and it washed easily.

In 1913 the US Navy first issued the shirts as undergarments. Short sleeves and a crew neck were practical aboard ship. By the 1920s the word T-shirt had entered American English and Merriam-Webster, named for the shape it makes laid flat. Through the Great Depression it was the default shirt for farm and ranch chores, a working garment rather than a fashion one.

How did underwear end up in the movies?

The war did most of the work. After World War II, Navy men kept wearing T-shirts as undergarments, and returning veterans started wearing them casually with their uniform trousers. Millions of men came home already used to the shirt, the same route that brought the MA-1 bomber jacket and plenty of other military kit into civilian closets.

Hollywood finished the job. In 1951 Marlon Brando played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire in a T-shirt so tight and so plainly visible that it stopped reading as underwear. Four years later James Dean wore a white T-shirt under a red jacket with jeans in Rebel Without a Cause, and that combination became the template for American youth on screen. Pair it with a good pair of raw selvedge jeans today and you're still dressing from Dean's costume notes.

What Brando and Dean established was attitude more than garment. A white T-shirt on its own signaled a man who didn't need to dress up and didn't care who knew it. That reading has never fully gone away.

Ink, slogans and Miami Vice

The plain tee became a canvas in the decades that followed. Plastisol ink, invented in 1959, gave screen printers durable, stretchy prints, and the 1960s and 1970s filled T-shirts with protest slogans, band logos, ad campaigns and Milton Glaser's I Love NY. The blank white version never disappeared. It just became the thing everyone printed on.

Then in the mid-1980s Don Johnson wore a white T-shirt under an Armani suit on Miami Vice, and the undershirt moved one more step up the ladder. Wearing a tee with tailoring is now so ordinary it's hard to remember it once looked like a provocation. The Wikipedia T-shirt entry covers the printing side of the story in more depth.

The heavyweight turn

Most tees were light, cheap and sold by the pack. Hanes, founded in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the start of the twentieth century, became the name most men associate with the multi-pack undershirt.

The shift toward heavier cotton came from Hanes too. In 1975 a marketing manager noticed that large numbers of blank T-shirts were shipping to California and Hawaii, where people bought them to decorate. The existing shirts were too thin and came in too few colors, so the company built one meant to be worn on the outside. That was the Beefy-T, in 6-ounce ringspun cotton, and it marked its 50th anniversary in 2025.

Camber took heaviness further. The company traces its roots to a fabric plant started in Pennsylvania in 1948 and launched the Camber label in 1992. Its Max Weight tee has been sold since the 1990s at High! Standard, a shop in Daikanyama, Tokyo. If you're heading there, our Daikanyama and Nakameguro guide maps the neighborhood. Japanese buyers have dug through bales of used American clothing for Champion's Reverse Weave hoodie for much the same reason.

Lady White Co. came at the problem through construction rather than weight. Phillip Proyce, who had worked at Rising Sun Jeans, showed the brand at Inspiration LA in February 2015 with a white tee made in Los Angeles from start to finish, knit in tubular jersey from unbleached cotton so it has no side seams at all.

How to buy a good one

Shoulder seams should sit on the edge of your shoulder bone, not drop down the arm. Sleeves should end around the middle of the bicep and sit close without gripping. The hem should land around the middle of your fly, long enough to stay tucked if you tuck it and short enough to wear loose.

Check the collar before anything else. A thick, tight rib holds its shape after washing, and a flimsy one turns into a wavy line within a month. Heavyweight cotton reads as a shirt in its own right and drapes better under a chore coat. Lighter cotton is what you want under an oxford button-down. Buy the size that fits after washing, since unwashed cotton tees can shrink. With shorts and penny loafers a heavy white tee handles most of summer on its own.

More basics worth owning are on our wardrobe essentials hub and in the Style section.

Run a hand down the side of a Lady White Co. tee and there's no seam to find. The body comes off the machine as a single tube of cotton, which leaves the collar as the only real decision anyone made.

Kill Bill, Volume 1 opened in American theaters on October 10, 2003. Uma Thurman's Bride fights her way through the Crazy 88 in a yellow tracksuit with black stripes, Quentin Tarantino's homage to Bruce Lee in Game of Death, and on her feet is a pair of yellow sneakers with black stripes. Most people will tell you they were Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66s. The company timeline on Onitsuka Tiger's Wikipedia page calls them Tai-Chi shoes. The argument has never been settled, and it barely matters. The film sold the Mexico 66 to a generation that had never heard of Kobe.

A Basketball Shoe Company in Kobe

Kihachiro Onitsuka set up Onitsuka Shokai in Kobe in 1949 and reorganized it as Onitsuka Co. the same year. The brand's first basketball shoes followed, and by 1953 the Tiger mark was on a split-toe marathon shoe, the Marathon Tabi. In 1960 the company released the Limber Up, a training shoe, and an updated version came out in 1961.

That 1961 shoe matters more than its name suggests. On Onitsuka Tiger's own history page, the updated Limber Up is listed as the prototype for the Mexico 66. Plenty of retailers and blogs instead say the ancestor was a 1966 model called the Limber. Treat the family tree as disputed. What's certain is that the shoe sold today under the name Mexico 66 was a 2002 reissue, which means the name is younger than the shoe by several decades.

Stripes for Mexico City

The stripes came in 1966. Onitsuka held an internal design competition, and the winner was two pairs of crossing lines on the side of the shoe. It was called the Mexico line, and the target was the Olympic Games coming to Mexico City in 1968. The company's own timeline says the Limber Up was the first shoe to wear them. Onitsuka also made the official shoes for Japan's delegation in 1968, in red and white.

The mark outlived the company that drew it. The stripes later moved onto ASICS shoes, and a version of them sits on the side of most ASICS runners today, including the Gel-Kayano 14.

The Nike Detour

In 1964 Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman founded Blue Ribbon Sports, the company that became Nike, to import Japanese running shoes. Those shoes were Tigers, and they held their own. When Runner's World published its first shoe guide in 1967, Tiger models rated well. Bowerman also worked on designs for Onitsuka, and one of them became the Cortez. By the early 1970s the partnership had soured into a lawsuit, and a judge let both sides keep selling the shoe while Blue Ribbon kept the Cortez name. Onitsuka sold its version as the Corsair. Nike went on to the Air Force 1 and everything after it.

Onitsuka went the other way. In 1977 it merged with GTO and JELENK to form ASICS, an acronym from the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body. The Onitsuka Tiger name went quiet for the next twenty five years. One piece of the old company stayed in place, though. Onitsuka had set up a European base, Onitsuka Tiger GmbH in Düsseldorf, West Germany, back in 1975.

Why Did Yellow Win?

ASICS brought Onitsuka Tiger back in 2002, first in Europe, as a fashion label rather than a sports brand. The reissues were the Mexico 66, the Ultimate 81 and the Nippon 60. A year later came the first directly run Onitsuka Tiger store, in Tokyo, and then Kill Bill. In 2008 the company added Nippon Made, a range manufactured and finished in Japan.

Bruce Lee's shoes in Game of Death are argued over too. Some say they were Mexico 66s or Tai-Chis, and the Mexico 66 Wikipedia entry describes them as a generic yellow and black pair with different stripes. Either way, Tarantino was quoting Lee, and the yellow pair has belonged to both men ever since.

The shoe itself is the reason the revival keeps working. It is low, narrow and nearly flat, with a thin sole and a slim leather upper that sits close to the foot. In the early 2020s it became a staple again, worn by people who wanted something slimmer than a chunky runner. It does the job the adidas Samba does, only slimmer and in louder colors. Wear it with straight or wide trousers that break on the shoe and leave the yellow pair to people who can take the attention. A white pair with blue stripes is the easier daily shoe.

Onitsuka Tiger keeps its own 75th anniversary history, and the Mexico 66 Wikipedia page covers the film connection. For more Japanese labels with long memories, see heritage brands, our coverage of Japan and the full sneakers section. Japanese making with an even longer memory is in our Kyoto craft guide.

The shoes Onitsuka made for Japan's team in 1968 were red and white. The yellow came later, by way of Hollywood.

For 23 years, from 1996 to 2019, Seiko sold a genuine ISO 6425 dive watch with a crown at four o'clock, a click bezel and an automatic movement, and barely changed it. It was the watch forum regulars told beginners to buy first. When Seiko quietly pulled it in 2019, used prices started to climb.

Thirty years of divers before it

The SKX007 makes more sense once you see the family it came from. Seiko built Japan's first dive watch in 1965, the 150 meter reference 6217-8000 that collectors call the 62MAS. In May 1968 came the 6105-8000, and in July 1970 the 6105-8110, with its asymmetric case and crown guard. That second one earned a nickname when Martin Sheen wore it as Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, and collectors have called it the Willard ever since.

Then the line got bigger and tougher. The Professional 600 meter diver of 1975, the Tuna, put a shroud around the case. Through the 1980s the 6309 Turtle carried the cushion shape forward, and in 1988 Seiko replaced it with the 7002 series, a 150 meter diver with a screw-down crown at four. The 7002 is the SKX007's direct parent. Lay them side by side and the family face is obvious.

What Seiko actually built in 1996

The SKX007 arrived in 1996 as case reference 7S26-0020. It is a 42mm steel case, about 46mm lug to lug and 13.5mm thick, with that crown screwed down at four and shielded on both sides. Water resistance is 200 meters, and it meets ISO 6425, the international standard for dive watches that covers legibility in the dark, shock, magnetism and a working unidirectional bezel.

Inside sat the caliber 7S26, an automatic with 21 jewels beating at 21,600 vibrations per hour and about 40 hours of reserve, with a quickset day and date. It also had two famous limitations. It did not hack, meaning the seconds hand kept running when you pulled the crown, and it could not be wound by hand. You shook it to life or wore it until it ran. Purists complained. Owners mostly didn't care, because the movement was close to unkillable.

The crystal was Hardlex, Seiko's hardened mineral glass, and the hands and markers were packed with Lumibrite. The black dial and black bezel version was the 007. Its sibling, the SKX009, paired a deep blue dial with a red and blue bezel that everyone calls the Pepsi. There were K versions for export and J versions for Japan's domestic market, nearly identical apart from small dial text, and the J pieces always traded at a premium that nobody ever quite justified.

Why it became everybody's first diver

Price and plainness did most of the work. The SKX007 was cheap enough to buy without a second thought and serious enough that it never felt like a toy. It was a proper tool, the same logic that made the Casio G-Shock DW-5000C a cult object a decade earlier, applied to a mechanical watch.

Then it became a platform. Because the case, bezel, crystal and dial were simple and parts were everywhere, the SKX turned into the default base for watch modding. People swapped in sapphire crystals, aftermarket bezel inserts, new hands, new dials, entire new movements. Whole small businesses grew up selling parts for one reference. A modified SKX could look like almost anything, which is part of why the plain stock version stayed cool. It was a blank page that also happened to be finished.

It made a natural entry point to the bigger names. Plenty of owners went from an SKX to a Tudor Black Bay or a Rolex Submariner once they had learned what a dive watch was for. Some never bothered, because the SKX already did the job.

The 2019 exit and what replaced it

Seiko announced the end of the SKX in the second half of 2019. The replacement was a relaunched Seiko 5 Sports collection, unveiled in August 2019 with 27 references. Many of them borrowed the SKX case shape, but the brief had changed. The new caliber 4R36 has 24 jewels, beats at the same 3Hz, runs about 41 hours, and fixes both old complaints, since it hacks and hand winds. The trade was water resistance. With a push-pull crown instead of a screw-down one, the 5 Sports models are rated to 100 meters and do not carry ISO dive certification.

That trade is the whole story in miniature. Seiko gave the market a more convenient, more fashionable watch with the same face. What it took away was the thing enthusiasts actually loved, the proof that a real dive watch did not have to be expensive. Seiko's higher Prospex line now carries the professional diver work.

For the full family tree, The Seiko Guy's chronological guide to Seiko divers is the most patient source online, and Professional Watches covered the 2019 Seiko 5 Sports launch as it happened. Read our Omega Speedmaster story for the other kind of tool watch, then browse more watch history, the Japan hub and the watches section.

Pull an SKX007 out of a drawer today and the 7S26 will start ticking after a couple of flicks of the wrist, with the day wheel still set to whatever Tuesday it stopped on.

For Fall/Winter 2016, Supreme sold a red clay brick stamped with its box logo. It cost $30, it sold out quickly, and listings on eBay reportedly climbed into the hundreds of dollars. A building material had become a collectible because a skate shop that opened on Lafayette Street in April 1994 had spent two decades teaching people to show up on Thursdays. The brick was a joke and a test of that training, and the market bought it without blinking.

A Skate Shop on Lafayette

The man behind the shop was James Jebbia, a New York born retailer who grew up in England and returned to work in Manhattan's downtown shop scene. The store was built for skateboarders. The floor was left open so riders could roll straight in, the staff skated, and the product was a tight mix of decks, hardware and a small line of in-house clothing.

The logo came from the art world. Jebbia drew on the work of Barbara Kruger, whose bold white Futura words on red bars defined a generation of conceptual art, and the result was the red box with white Futura Heavy Oblique lettering. It was blunt, legible from across the street and easy to put on anything.

A logo that reads in half a second can live on a T-shirt, a sticker or a brick, and Supreme eventually put it on all three.

The Thursday Ritual

The traditional fashion calendar delivers a full collection to stores and lets it sit until markdown. Supreme flipped that. It designs two seasons a year, spring and summer, then fall and winter, but releases them in small batches every Thursday, online and in stores at the same time. Most items never restock.

The effect is psychological as much as commercial. Each Thursday becomes an event. Buyers study leaked lookbooks, line up outside stores or sit refreshing a web page, and the product sells out in minutes. Anyone who misses out has two choices, wait for next week or pay a reseller.

That second choice built an entire secondary market. Resale prices became public signals of a brand's heat, and every sellout reinforced the idea that owning Supreme meant being early and being in the know. Supreme was selling access before it sold clothing, and the clothing worked as the receipt. The same scarcity mechanics now drive everything from sneaker raffles to watch waitlists.

Dunks, Bricks and Louis Vuitton

Collaborations were the accelerant. In 2002 Supreme worked with Nike SB on a Dunk Low that borrowed the elephant print from the Air Jordan 3, a direct pull from New York's obsession with basketball sneakers. It helped turn the skate Dunk into a collector's shoe and set a template for limited sneaker releases that echoes the retro culture of the Air Jordan 1 and the collaboration boom around the Nike Air Max 1.

Then came the objects, the brick among them. The decisive leap, though, came in January 2017, when a Supreme collaboration appeared on the Louis Vuitton runway in Paris. The most establishment name in French luxury now shared a box logo with a downtown skate shop. Streetwear, built on the rules that hip-hop wrote into menswear, had become luxury's main source of energy, and this was the clearest proof yet.

Pricing the Hype

Investors put numbers on it. In 2017 Jebbia sold a large stake to private equity firm The Carlyle Group, in a deal reported at the time to value Supreme at roughly $1 billion. In November 2020 VF Corporation, owner of The North Face and Vans, announced it would buy Supreme outright for $2.1 billion in cash, completing the deal on December 28, 2020.

The marriage was shorter than expected. In July 2024 VF agreed to sell Supreme to EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear group behind Ray-Ban, for $1.5 billion, and the sale closed on October 2, 2024, according to VF's own announcement. Jebbia stayed on to run the brand.

A $600 million gap between those two prices says hype is valuable and also perishable. The drop model depends on demand outrunning supply, and keeping that tension alive for three decades is far harder than starting it.

Everybody Drops Now

Almost everyone copied it. Sneaker brands release by raffle. Luxury houses run surprise capsules. Small labels from Brooklyn to Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku, where A Bathing Ape refined the same idea of tiny runs and locked doors, treat scarcity as strategy.

Supreme showed that a brand can be a calendar as much as a catalog. Give people a reason to show up on a specific day, make the reward uncertain, and the product turns into a story they tell. Our Nike brand hub, the streetwear and sneaker history archives and the rest of our culture section pick up from here, and the brand's background is collected on the Supreme Wikipedia page.

Somewhere, a box logo brick that cost $30 in 2016 is sitting on a shelf, too valuable to build with.

The quartz crystal inside a cheap digital watch vibrates 32,768 times a second and keeps better time than almost any mechanical watch ever made. So the first thing to accept about buying a mechanical watch is that you are not paying for accuracy. You are paying for a small machine that runs on a coiled spring and, looked after, will outlive the phone in your pocket by decades.

Automatic, manual or quartz

A quartz watch runs on a battery, and a circuit counts the crystal's vibrations. It is accurate, cheap to run and needs a battery every few years. It is also what nearly killed the Swiss industry in the 1970s, a story told in our Swatch and quartz crisis history. There is no shame in quartz, and Cartier's own Santos-Dumont came back in 2019 with a quartz movement. It is just a different purchase.

A manual, or hand-wound, watch runs on a mainspring you wind through the crown. Most want winding every day or two. The upside is a thinner case, because there is no winding rotor, and a small daily ritual that a lot of owners end up loving. If you plan to wear a watch with tailoring, under a shirt cuff, hand-wound is worth a look.

An automatic adds a weighted rotor that swings as you move and winds the spring for you. Wear it every day and it never stops. Take it off and it runs for as long as its power reserve lasts. That number is worth checking before you buy. Cartier's caliber 1847 MC in the current Santos is rated at about 42 hours. Omega's caliber 8800 in the Seamaster Diver 300M gets 55. Take it off at 8 p.m. on a Friday and the 42 hour watch stops around Sunday afternoon, while the 55 hour one keeps going into the early hours of Monday.

On accuracy, a certified chronometer has passed testing by COSC, the Swiss testing office, and is held to between four seconds slow and six seconds fast per day. A typical uncertified automatic will drift more. Grand Seiko's Spring Drive splits the difference between the two worlds, and our Spring Drive and Zaratsu piece explains how.

Size is about length, not diameter

Every spec sheet leads with case diameter, and diameter is the least useful number on it. What matters is lug-to-lug, the distance from the tip of the top lugs to the tip of the bottom ones. If that overhangs the flat top of your wrist, the watch will look too big however modest the diameter sounds. The large Cartier Santos measures 39.8 by 47.5 millimeters, and the length is the number that tells you whether it will fit.

Thickness matters next. A diver that sits tall will catch on a dress shirt cuff, which is why the Cartier Tank has lived under French cuffs for a century and a dive watch usually has not. Lug width matters if you want to swap straps. Bracelets matter more than people think, so check how they size. Some, like Cartier's SmartLink, let you remove links yourself.

The honest advice is to try things on. A watch that photographs well can wear badly, and the reverse is true. Wear it with what you actually wear, whether that is an Oxford cloth button-down or a T-shirt.

What the water rating actually means

The depth on the dial is not a diving depth. Under the ISO 22810 standard it is a static pressure test, done once on a sample of new watches. Treat it as a guide to activities. A 30 meter rating means splashes and rain, not swimming. A 50 meter watch can handle a shower and shallow swimming. A 100 meter watch is fine for swimming, snorkeling and surfing. At 200 meters you are in serious water sports and skin diving territory.

A true dive watch meets a separate standard, ISO 6425. It must be rated to at least 100 meters, is tested at 125 percent of its rating, needs a unidirectional bezel or similar timing device and has to be legible in the dark at 25 centimeters. Compliant watches can be marked DIVER'S WATCH followed by the rated depth. A screw-down crown helps keep water out, and only works if you screw it down. For the extreme end of all this, see the helium valve on the Omega Seamaster 300M.

Servicing is part of the price

A mechanical movement runs on oils that dry out and gaskets that harden. A full service means the watchmaker takes the movement apart, cleans it, oils it, regulates it and replaces the seals. Rolex now suggests roughly ten years between services for its current watches. Many independent watchmakers recommend sooner if you wear a watch hard or own something older.

The warning signs are simple. It suddenly runs fast or slow, the power reserve shrinks, or there is fog under the crystal. Fog means stop wearing it and get it to a watchmaker. A watch that suddenly gains minutes a day may just be magnetized from a speaker or a laptop clasp, which is a cheap fix.

Where to buy, and how not to get a fake

An authorized dealer sells new watches with the manufacturer's warranty and papers. You pay full price, and you get a clean history.

Pre-owned is where the value is, and where the risk lives. Buy from a dealer with a written authenticity guarantee and a return policy. Ask for the box and papers, and check that the serial number on the papers matches the case. Ask for service records. Be wary of anything priced well under the market, because fakes follow demand. Revolution has called the Cartier Santos the most copied watch in the world for many years. Fakes are now good enough to fool photos, so have the watch checked by an independent watchmaker you choose. Original parts matter too, since a refinished dial or replacement hands can quietly change the value.

If you are still choosing, start with the histories. The Rolex Submariner, the Seiko SKX007, the Cartier Santos and the Casio G-Shock DW-5000C all tell you what a watch was built to do. Browse more in watch history, wardrobe essentials and the watches section, and the Wikipedia guide to water resistance marks has the full ISO tables.

One test beats all the rest. Ask the seller if your watchmaker can open the caseback before you pay. A good dealer will hand you the case knife. A bad one will find a reason why not.

The first Le Labo shop opened at 233 Elizabeth Street in Nolita, New York, after Fabrice Penot and Eddie Roschi launched the brand in 2006. It looked less like a perfume counter than a working lab. You picked a scent, and they mixed it while you watched.

A lab on Elizabeth Street

Penot and Roschi came out of the big fragrance business, and they built Le Labo as a reaction against it. Mainstream perfume in the mid-2000s ran on celebrity faces, glossy campaigns and bottles filled long before anyone bought them. Le Labo called its idea slow perfumery. The final bottle was compounded to order in the shop, then sealed and labeled by hand.

That ritual is still the brand's signature move. A staff member blends the scent behind a glass counter in a few minutes, and the label can carry your name or a short message. The date it was made goes on the label too. It is a small piece of theater, but it changes how a purchase feels. You are not taking a bottle off a pile. You are watching one get made.

The setting borrowed from the lab and the workshop at a time when most luxury retail was polished marble. The same instinct shaped Aesop's one-off shops in Melbourne and beyond, which we cover in our history of Aesop and its apothecary design. Both brands figured out early that the space could carry the story, so the advertising didn't have to.

What do the numbers mean?

Every Le Labo name follows the same formula. The word is the main note, and the number is the count of ingredients in the formula. Rose 31 contains 31 materials. Santal 33 contains 33, with sandalwood as the lead. Vetiver 46, Thé Noir 29 and Bergamote 22 work the same way.

It is a clever piece of branding because it sounds technical while telling you almost nothing about what the perfume smells like. Rose 31 is not a pretty rose. Bergamote 22 is not a classic citrus cologne in the Farina tradition we trace in our history of Eau de Cologne. The numbers turn each bottle into a formula on a lab sheet, and that coolness is the point. It also makes the shelf easy to remember. Stand in front of a row of identical bottles and you will still recall the one you liked by its number, the way sneaker people remember a colorway code.

One name breaks the rule. Another 13 began in 2010 as a commission for AnOther Magazine, and the name comes from the magazine rather than a raw material.

The Santal problem

Santal 33 started as a candle. The founders had perfumer Frank Voelkl create a sandalwood scent called Santal 26 for candles and a room spray, and customers kept asking for something they could wear. The personal fragrance took two years and hundreds of prototypes before it launched in 2011 as Santal 33. Its notes include sandalwood, cardamom, iris, violet, cedar and leather.

What followed is the strangest success story in modern niche fragrance. Santal 33 became the smell of a certain kind of New York, worn in bars, on subway platforms and by more than a few celebrities. The candle got its own pop culture moment when Beyoncé's 2016 visual album Lemonade showed two Santal 26 candles burning in the Sandcastles sequence.

Ubiquity has a cost. The more people wore Santal 33, the less it said about any one of them. Some longtime wearers started to complain that it had lost the distinctiveness that drew them to it. If you want a scent that works harder for you, our guide on how to build a fragrance wardrobe argues for owning a few bottles with clear jobs instead of one signature everyone else already wears.

City Exclusives and the Estée Lauder era

In 2014 the Estée Lauder Companies agreed to buy Le Labo, a deal WWD reported at around 60 million dollars. Industry coverage at the time listed freestanding stores in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Corporate money pushed the brand into more cities and onto more department store counters, and that reach is what turned Santal 33 from cult object to background noise.

The City Exclusives are Le Labo's answer to that reach. Each one is tied to a single city and, outside an annual event each September, sold only there. Gaiac 10 belongs to Tokyo. Tubereuse 40 belongs to New York. Poivre 23 is London's and Vanille 44 is Paris's. The brand's Wikipedia entry lists the rest, from Aldehyde 44 for Dallas to Osmanthus 19 for Kyoto. It is scarcity by geography, and it works for the same reason a Supreme drop works. You have to be there, or know someone who was.

The Elizabeth Street address still anchors the story, a few blocks from the shops in our SoHo streetwear guide. For more on scent, browse the grooming section and our fragrance hub. And if you do buy a bottle, read the label before you peel the box open. If you asked for a name, it is printed there for one bottle only.

On New Year's Day 1950, in a basement in St. Paul, Minnesota, William Marvy finished the design for a new barber pole. He had been selling barber supplies since he was about 12, and he was convinced he could make a better pole than the ones he saw on his rounds. He opened his factory that year, and by 1967 it had made its 50,000th. The object he was improving was several centuries old, and it advertised a service no barber would offer you today.

When barbers held the knife

For much of medieval and early modern Europe, the man who shaved you might also pull a tooth, lance an abscess, set a bone or bleed you. Physicians were university-trained and often regarded hands-on surgery as beneath them, and the church steadily pulled its clergy out of the work. The Council of Tours in 1163 barred clergy from performing surgery. The jobs drifted to barbers, who already had the blades, the basins and the steady hands. In Paris, the surgeons of the College of Saint-Côme drew a line between themselves, the surgeons of the long robe, and the barber-surgeons of the short robe.

Bloodletting was the bread and butter. The theory, inherited from ancient medicine, held that draining blood could rebalance the body and treat everything from fevers to headaches. It hung on for an astonishingly long time. George Washington was bled repeatedly in the hours before his death in December 1799.

The pole, as it is usually told

The standard origin story goes like this. A patient being bled gripped a staff so the veins in his arm would stand out. A basin caught the blood, and in some versions another held the leeches. Afterward the washed linen bandages were hung on the staff outside the shop to dry, and the wind twisted them into a red-and-white spiral that doubled as advertising. The painted pole is the memory of that staff, and the ball on top stands in for the basin. Older poles, by some accounts, had a basin at both ends.

It is a good story and probably right in spirit. The details are another matter. Accounts disagree on surprisingly basic points, including what the colors once signaled. One widely repeated version says that after the London barbers and surgeons merged in 1540, a statute ordered barbers to use red-and-white poles and surgeons plain red ones. Another version has barbers flying blue and white. Neither tends to come with a citation you can check, so treat the specifics as folklore built around a factual core. The barber-surgeon was real. The exact rulebook for his sign is murky.

Henry VIII and the Barbers' Company

The London side of the story is properly documented, thanks largely to the Worshipful Company of Barbers. It is first mentioned in 1308, when the city's Court of Aldermen elected Richard le Barbour to keep order among his fellow barbers. In 1462 Edward IV granted the company its first royal charter, giving it power to regulate the practice of surgery in London.

The big moment came in 1540. Under Henry VIII, an Act of Parliament merged the barbers with the Fellowship of Surgeons to form the Company of Barbers and Surgeons, and set out which work belonged to whom. Thomas Vicary served as its first Master. Hans Holbein the Younger painted the presentation of the charter, and the picture still hangs in Barber-Surgeons' Hall. The new company was granted the bodies of four executed criminals a year for anatomy teaching, and dissections were held in its hall.

The arrangement lasted a little over two centuries. In 1745, at the surgeons' request, a bill passed that let them leave and form the Company of Surgeons, which became the Royal College of Surgeons in 1800. That split is usually treated as the point where barbering and surgery went their separate ways in England, and from there the pole reads as a pure trade sign.

The company's hall on Monkwell Square was destroyed by incendiary bombs in December 1940, and the current building opened in 1969. Today much of its work is charitable, and surgeons have been admitted to the company again since 1919 in memory of the old union, a strange and rather lovely afterlife for a barbers' guild. Its own history page runs through the timeline in full.

So where did the blue come from?

American poles usually carry a blue stripe, and nobody has settled why. The most common theory is patriotic, blue added so the pole matched the flag. The Wikipedia entry on the barber's pole calls that possible, and labels the anatomical reading (red for arterial blood, blue for venous blood, white for the bandage) more fanciful. A third explanation, which Snopes traces to Robert Wallace's book The World of Rembrandt, describes a color code in 17th-century Amsterdam, where red meant bloodletting, white meant setting bones or pulling teeth, and blue meant a shave. None of the three is proven. The blue is not only American either. Canada, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines often use red, white and blue as well.

By the mid-20th century the pole had become a piece of American industrial design. In 1950 only a handful of American companies made poles. Marvy's arrived with a clear plastic cylinder, an aluminum housing and stainless steel fittings, and by the late 1960s his competitors had either closed or were buying from his factory. That is the pole most people picture, a slow spiral turning behind clear plastic, topped with a globe. As early as 1905, Wikipedia notes, observers were already describing barber poles as diminishing in the United States. They are still hanging on.

The ritual inside the shop has changed completely, from lancet to clippers, which our guide on how to ask for a haircut covers. The blade work survives in the straight razor revival and our safety razor shaving guide, and the grease that came after is in our history of pomade. For more, browse the Quiet Menace grooming section and our menswear history hub.

Next time you walk out with a fresh neckline, look at the pole by the door. The red stripe is the last trace of the one thing on the old menu no barber will sell you now.

In the late 2000s a group of London skaters shared a run-down flat in Waterloo, close enough to the Southbank undercroft to carry their boards there. The place was falling apart, so naturally they called it The Palace, and the people who lived in it became the Palace Wayward Boys' Choir. When Lev Tanju started a brand in 2009, he named it after the flat.

That is the Palace tone in one move. Take something shabby, give it a grand name, and keep a straight face. Seventeen years later the joke has Gucci, Juventus and Nike in on it.

A triangle that cannot exist

Tanju gave the illustrator Fergus Purcell, known as Fergadelic, a short brief. The brand would be built around triangles. Purcell came back with a Penrose triangle, the impossible optical illusion, with the word PALACE running along each of its three faces. The team called it the Tri-Ferg, a mash of triangle and Fergus. It has not changed since 2009.

It is a smart piece of graphic design. The implied depth makes it look monumental even on a sticker, and the endless loop suggests constant movement, which suits a skate brand. Purcell has kept drawing graphics for Palace over the years. The same year he co-founded the London label Aries with Sofia Prantera, which tells you how small and connected that scene was.

The business side came from Slam City Skates, the London shop and distributor that had been at the center of the city's skate scene since the 1980s. Gareth Skewis, who came from Slam City, became Tanju's partner and joint owner. Early Palace product went into a handful of London boutiques, The Hideout among them.

The Supreme connection

Palace's early videos looked like nineties tapes on purpose, grainy and handheld, with the original team of Lucien Clarke, Olly Todd and Charlie Young. Later riders included Danny Brady, Chewy Cannon, Karim Bakhtaoui, Blondey McCoy and Rory Milanes. The clips were funny, fast and very English, and they gave American kids a reason to care about London skating.

The decisive boost came from New York. Supreme opened its first European store in London in 2011, and the two brands quickly found each other. By 2012 Palace was stocked in Supreme's New York and Los Angeles stores. That year it was named European Skate Brand of the Year at the BRIGHT tradeshow in Berlin. For the full story of the downtown model Palace borrowed from, see our piece on Supreme and the drop.

Brewer Street and beyond

Palace opened its first shop on Brewer Street in Soho in April 2015, around the corner from Supreme on Peter Street. The two stores turned a few Soho blocks into a pilgrimage route, one that sits on the same walk covered in our London Soho and Dover Street Market guide. In 2017 Palace opened its first American flagship on Howard Street in New York, close to Supreme's Lafayette Street store, and released Palasonic, its first full-length video. Flagships in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong came later.

The football years

Palace's collaborations always leaned toward sport and toward the slightly naff corners of British life. Umbro came first in 2012, then Reebok in 2013 and Adidas in 2014. The Adidas relationship ran to Wimbledon-themed tennis pieces and football projects that sit neatly beside the shoes covered in our Adidas Samba history. There were also Ralph Lauren, Evisu, Moschino, Salomon, Winmau darts, Stella Artois in 2021, and a Calvin Klein CK1 video starring Willem Dafoe.

The biggest swing was Juventus. On October 30, 2019, the club wore a Palace and Adidas fourth kit for the first time in a home match against Genoa, with the old black and white stripes refreshed with neon green accents and the Tri-Ferg sitting under the Adidas logo. Cristiano Ronaldo and Paulo Dybala wore it. A London skate brand on a Serie A shirt was a strange and brilliant sight.

Gucci followed in October 2022 with a collection that, true to form, leaned on football shirts. And in late October 2025 Palace released its first Nike collaboration, a football-themed collection built around Nike's early 2000s Total 90 silhouette reworked as a sneaker, with a campaign that teased Manor Place, a free indoor skate park and football pitch in London backed by the two brands.

What Palace gets right

Plenty of skate brands have tried to grow up without losing their audience. Palace managed it by refusing to take itself seriously while taking the product very seriously. The jokes kept the core happy. The quality and the collaborations brought in everyone else. It is a balance that Stüssy found decades earlier in California, and few brands since have pulled it off.

For more, read the Palace Skateboards Wikipedia entry, explore skate culture and streetwear, or head back to our culture section.

The Tri-Ferg is still drawn the same way it was in 2009. Try tracing it with a finger and you never reach the end.

On May 20, 1873, a Reno tailor named Jacob Davis and a San Francisco dry goods merchant named Levi Strauss received a patent for riveted work pants, cut from a top-grade denim called XX. For most of the century that followed, the clean, self-finished edge on American denim was simply how cloth came off the loom. Now people roll their cuffs to show that edge off and pay a premium for jeans that arrive stiff, dark and unwashed. Two words explain why, raw and selvedge.

Raw and Selvedge Are Not Synonyms

The two words get used as if they mean the same thing. They do not.

Raw is a finishing term. Raw, or dry, denim goes from the loom to the sewing room without being washed, stonewashed or distressed. It arrives stiff, dark and saturated with indigo. Every fade it develops comes from the person wearing it.

Selvedge is a weaving term. A traditional shuttle loom throws the weft yarn back and forth across the warp in one continuous pass, so the edges of the cloth finish themselves and do not unravel. That "self edge" is where the word comes from. Shuttle looms produce narrow cloth, typically around 30 inches wide, while modern shuttleless looms weave bolts 60 inches or wider much faster.

Because selvedge cloth is narrow, makers cut jeans so the finished edge runs down the outseam. Roll the cuff and there it is, often with a colored thread running through it. That is the detail enthusiasts look for.

A Tailor in Reno

Davis was riveting the stress points of work pants in the early 1870s, and he needed a partner to patent and mass-produce the idea. He turned to his fabric supplier, Strauss. Levi Strauss & Co. treats the patent date as the birthday of the blue jean. The XX cloth came from the Amoskeag mill in New Hampshire, and the 501 lot number came later.

For most of the twentieth century, American jeans were woven on shuttle looms simply because that was how cloth was made. Selvedge was the default, and nobody paid extra for it.

Why did American mills stop?

Demand and economics. As jeans became a global uniform in the decades after World War II, mills shifted to wide, fast shuttleless looms that could produce far more fabric with less waste. Narrow looms became a niche. The most famous American holdout, Cone Mills' White Oak plant in Greensboro, North Carolina, opened in 1905 and wove selvedge on vintage Draper looms until it closed at the end of 2017. For a lot of denim fans, that closure marked the end of an era.

Okayama, Osaka and the Faithful Copy

American clothing arrived in Japan in force after the war, and a generation grew up revering it. In 1973, Big John, based in Kurashiki in Okayama Prefecture, began making what is widely described as the first fully Japanese jeans, using domestic denim from the Kurabo mill. The Kojima district nearby, already skilled at sewing heavy cotton for school uniforms, grew into a jeans-making center.

The next wave came in the late 1980s and 1990s. A group of Osaka-area labels, nicknamed the Osaka Five (Studio D'Artisan, Denime, Evisu, Fullcount and Warehouse), set out to reproduce vintage American jeans down to the slub of the yarn. A popular story claims they bought old American shuttle looms that US mills had discarded. Denim historians push back on that, noting that much Japanese selvedge was woven on older Japanese-made Toyoda looms. Whoever built the looms, Japan was making the jeans America had stopped making.

The same devotion to the original shows up all over Japanese menswear, from the campus classics in our history of the oxford button-down shirt to the backstreet boutiques in our streetwear guide to Ura-Harajuku. There is more on our Japan topic hub.

Buying the First Pair

Check the shrinkage

Ask whether the fabric is sanforized. If it is, buy close to your true fit and expect the waist to give a little. If it is unsanforized, follow the maker's shrink guidance closely, because a full soak can take an inch or more off the leg.

Pick a weight you will actually wear

Denim weight is measured in ounces per square yard. Around 12 to 14 ounces is a comfortable starting point. Heavier fabrics of 16 ounces and up fade dramatically but take real commitment to break in.

Choose a cut, not a trend

A straight or gently tapered leg will outlast whatever silhouette is fashionable this season. Baggy denim has its own lineage, which we trace in how hip-hop rewrote menswear.

Wear Them Hard, Wash Them Rarely

Wear them often. Fades form where the fabric creases and rubs, behind the knees, across the lap and around the pockets. A pair of raw jeans ends up as a record of your knees, your wallet and every bike ride you forgot about. Many owners hold off on the first wash for months to let those creases set, but there is no prize for waiting. When you do wash, turn the jeans inside out, use cold water and a mild detergent, and hang them to dry. Expect indigo to rub off on light sneakers and pale upholstery at first.

Mend instead of replacing. That patience is what makes raw denim one of the real heritage-brand pleasures, and the Style section has more pieces built to last. A blown crotch or a frayed hem is a reason to visit a repair shop. The colored line down the outseam will still be there after the patch.

In January 2016 Justin Saunders posted three pictures to his site. A Victory Sportswear trainer, a Vans Style 36 LX and a New Balance 990v3. There was no caption on any of them, because there never was. Looking back years later, Sneaker Freaker read those three posts as a preview of JJJJound's first three sneaker collaborations.

That is how JJJJound works. Saunders shows you what he likes for a long time, and eventually some of it comes back with his name on the box.

Pictures with no words

Saunders, a Montrealer, started the site in 2006 as a personal mood board. He posted images without comment, and by 2008 the text was gone entirely. What remained was a scroll of what he called moods. Vintage cars, film stills, tan interiors, models. No explanations, no prices, no links to buy.

It sounds like nothing. It turned out to be a very precise tool. In an internet built on hype and captions, a page that only showed things, and showed them in a consistent register of muted color and good proportion, read like a point of view. Virgil Abloh was an early admirer of the blog, and Saunders moved in the same circle as Abloh, Heron Preston and Matthew M. Williams around the Been Trill years. He also worked as a consultant for The New York Times' T Magazine. In a 2016 interview with Surface, Kanye West described checking his own ideas against whether they would pass as JJJJound approved. For a blog with no words, that was a lot of influence.

From tote bag to studio

The first physical product came in 2013, and it was a tote bag. That fits. The early shop sold the kind of goods a mood board would recommend, mugs, socks, beanies and totes, plain and well made, and they tended to sell out. Logo hoodies made with Victory Sportswear went the same way.

Over the years JJJJound grew into a design studio in Montreal, making its own line of minimal basics and working with outside partners. It never moved to New York or Paris, and it never needed to.

The collaborations

The sneaker work is where most people meet the brand, and it tends to follow a pattern. Take a shoe people already love, mute the color, and keep the branding quiet.

Vans came early. Hypebeast flagged the project in April 2017, three Old Skool colorways in green, brown and grey, each with white stitching, laces and foxing. The shape is the one traced in our Vans Old Skool history. The New Balance run began in 2018 with a tonal 990v3, and in 2020 JJJJound released the 992 in grey and in green. Both colors went fast. It belongs to the same family covered in our New Balance 990 history.

Reebok got the treatment with the Club C 85 and the Classic Nylon. Then came Asics. JJJJound took on the Gel-Kayano 14 in 2022, a late-2000s running shoe that suits the muted treatment, and the two have also done a GT-2160. The model's comeback is its own story, told in our Asics Gel-Kayano 14 piece, and in June 2025 the Kayano 14 came back for what Hypebeast counted as the pair's third sneaker together, in White/Midnight and White/Black/Blue. Danner boots, A.P.C. and Bape Stas have all been on the list too.

The secondary market noticed. In an October 2020 piece, StockX reported that the 2018 990v3 was reselling for more than $2,000 on its site and that each of the ten JJJJound sneakers it listed was going for more than 120 percent of retail. Sneaker Freaker keeps a running history of the footwear projects for anyone tracking every pair.

Why taste became the product

Most collaborations add something. A logo, a print, a story about a city. JJJJound mostly takes things away, and it is better at it than almost anyone. The appeal is that you are buying the editor's eye, the confirmation that this exact shoe, in this exact grey, is the right one. It is closer to Dieter Rams than to the Supreme drop model, even when the release sells out just as fast.

The risk in that approach is obvious. Strip away too much and a collaboration becomes a general release in a nicer color, with only the resale price to tell you otherwise. JJJJound gets away with it because the choices hold together, release after release, the same way the blog held together post after post. You can spot a pair across a room without looking for the logo.

That is also why it matters past sneakers. JJJJound showed that selection, done in public for years, could be a brand in its own right. Plenty of labels can copy the grey. Fewer can copy the years of looking that picked it.

For more on how collaborations shaped the current market, see our collaborations and streetwear hubs, or browse the culture section.

Three pictures in January 2016, no words attached. By the end of 2018 there were JJJJound Vans and a JJJJound 990v3. Nobody needed a caption.

Teenage Engineering announced the OP-1 at the Frankfurt Musikmesse in 2009, brought a prototype to the NAMM Show in Anaheim the following January and started selling it in 2011. It was the Stockholm company's first product, a thin powder-coated aluminum slab with 24 keys, four knobs and a 320 by 160 pixel OLED screen.

Four Guys From Stockholm

The company was founded in Stockholm in 2005 by Jesper Kouthoofd, David Eriksson, Jens Rudberg and David Möllerstedt. The first three had run a game company called Netbabyworld between 1999 and 2003. Möllerstedt had headed the audio department at the game studio EA DICE. So the team that made a synthesizer came from games and graphics, not from the old synth houses, and the OP-1 shows it.

Most synths of the period looked like lab equipment or furniture. The OP-1 looked like a calculator someone had designed for fun. The black keys look more like buttons than piano keys. The screen draws a cartoonish graphic for each mode instead of a wall of numbers. Plenty of early coverage called it whimsical and toy-like, and that is fair. It is also misleading, because the toy is a serious instrument.

A Synth That Thinks It Is a Tape Deck

Under the playful screen sits a six-voice synthesizer with a list of engines that reads like a band lineup. FM, Cluster, Digital, DNA, Dr Wave, String, Phase, Pulse and Voltage, plus a sampler. You can sample from the built-in microphone, from an audio input, or from the built-in FM radio, which can also modulate effects. A G-force sensor inside lets you tilt the whole unit to control effects.

The real hook, though, is the tape. The OP-1 records onto a four-track digital tape deck that behaves like a cassette portastudio. You can record over what is already there and flip recordings into reverse. Instead of a piano roll or a grid of clips, you get the constraints of tape, and those constraints are why people finish songs on it. The foam packaging even doubled as a carrying case.

The design world noticed. The OP-1 won one of Sweden's Design S Awards in 2012 and took second prize in Georgia Tech's Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition in 2014. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art added one to its permanent collection, donated by the company. Musicians noticed too. Beck, Depeche Mode, Jean-Michel Jarre, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Chvrches and Efrim Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor have all been cited as users, which is a strange and wonderful spread of taste for one small keyboard. The full list lives on the OP-1's Wikipedia entry.

The Year It Disappeared

From late 2018 into early 2019, you couldn't buy a new OP-1. Teenage Engineering had run out of the AMOLED screens it depended on. Rumors spread that the synth was gone for good, and used units started selling for more than the original retail price, the same resale pattern that drives the sneaker resale economy. Production came back in February 2019 with a retail price about 35 percent higher, to cover new parts and redesigned hardware. A lot of fans grumbled about poor planning. They paid anyway.

That moment captures the company's strange position. It makes music gear, but it is treated like a fashion label with drops, sellouts and collectors. The first Pocket Operators, launched in January 2015, were a collaboration with the Swedish denim brand Cheap Monday, and they looked like bare calculator circuit boards. The OD-11 wireless speaker took its shape from a 1974 Sonab speaker by Stig Carlsson, a look backward at Swedish audio history.

After the OP-1

The OP-Z followed in September 2018. The company designed the Frekvens audio and lighting collection for IKEA, worked with Nothing on the ear (1) earbuds of 2021, built the crank for Panic's Playdate handheld and co-designed the Rabbit r1 AI gadget announced in January 2024. Its EP-133 K.O. II sampler arrived in November 2023. In May 2022 came the OP-1 field, the long-awaited successor to the original.

The thread running through all of it is a kind of Scandinavian clarity with a sense of humor, closer to the Danish lineage in our Bang & Olufsen design history than to anything from the big Japanese synth makers. It also sits comfortably next to Dieter Rams and his ten principles, with more jokes. If you plan a design trip around Scandinavia, our Copenhagen design guide is the natural next stop.

For more gear with real personality, see the Technics SL-1200, the tech section, our music hub and the audio archive. The company itself lives at teenage.engineering.

In 2012 the company sold accessories that fit onto the OP-1's knobs, including one built to work with Lego gears and motors. Nobody needed that. It is exactly why people fell for it.

The original Game Boy's screen was 160 pixels wide and 144 tall. The Analogue Pocket's is 1600 by 1440, exactly ten times the resolution in each direction, packed into a 3.5-inch LCD at 615 pixels per inch. Analogue announced the handheld on October 16, 2019. It took more than two years, a pandemic and a global chip shortage before the handheld was released on December 13, 2021, at $199.99, in black or white.

Who Makes This Thing

Analogue was founded in 2011 by Christopher Taber, and for most of its life it has made one kind of product. Expensive, beautifully finished machines that play original cartridges from old consoles. The Nt mini, an NES, arrived in 2017. The Super Nt played Super Nintendo carts in 2018, and the Mega Sg did the same for Sega's 16-bit console in 2019. Each one was a hardware answer to a hobby that had mostly settled for software.

A big part of that story is Kevin Horton, an American electrical engineer known online as kevtris, whose FPGA work sits under Analogue's consoles from the Nt mini onward. Retro hardware fans knew his name long before Analogue put it on a spec sheet. The Pocket was the company's first handheld, and its first machine built around a portable classic rather than a living room console.

Why FPGA Isn't Emulation

Most retro gaming runs on emulators, software that pretends to be an old console while running on a modern processor. Emulators can be very good, but they are always an imitation. Timing quirks get approximated, input lag creeps in, and a game that leans on some odd hardware behavior can break in ways nobody notices for years.

A field-programmable gate array works differently. It is a chip whose internal logic can be rewired after it leaves the factory. Load the right configuration, called a core, and the chip behaves like the original circuitry, with signals moving in parallel the way they did on the real hardware. The Pocket uses two of them. An Altera Cyclone V with 49,000 logic elements does the heavy lifting, and a smaller Cyclone 10 with 15,000 handles system management.

There is a fair caveat. An FPGA core is still somebody's re-creation of a chip, and it is only as accurate as the work that went into it. But the approach removes the layer of software guesswork between the cartridge and the screen, and for players who care about exact timing, that is the point.

The Pocket's 1.1 software update arrived in July 2022, six months later than first planned, and introduced openFPGA, a framework that lets outside developers write their own cores for the hardware. The same update added save states, which Analogue calls Memories, and a Library of info cards for games.

Real Cartridges, Real Link Cables

Out of the box the Pocket plays original Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance cartridges. Adapters sold separately take Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Atari Lynx and TurboGrafx-16 games, so a drawer of 1990s handheld carts from several companies can run on one machine. There is a Game Boy link cable port, a microSD slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack and USB-C charging. The 4,300mAh battery is rated for 6 to 10 hours.

Plug it into the optional Analogue Dock and the Pocket sends video to a TV over HDMI, with support for wired and wireless controllers for local multiplayer. It also ships with Nanoloop, a music synthesizer and sequencer, which makes it a pocket instrument as much as a game machine. Fans of the tiny music gear in our Teenage Engineering OP-1 story will recognize the appeal.

The Shape of a Game Boy

The design argument is the most interesting thing about the Pocket. Nintendo's first handheld, the DMG-01 covered in our Game Boy history, measured 148 by 90 by 32 millimeters. The Pocket measures 149 by 86 by 22 and weighs 275 grams. It keeps the vertical layout, the screen up top and the controls below, but trades gray plastic for a flat, minimal shell that looks like it came out of a design studio rather than a toy factory. It won a Red Dot design award in 2022.

Analogue also learned the drop playbook that runs through our Supreme drop model feature. A glow-in-the-dark edition came in September 2023, followed by transparent colors in October and Classic editions in Game Boy colors in November. All-aluminum versions in white, black, gray and indigo followed on July 15, 2024. The clear shells put it in the same see-through tradition as Nothing's phone and earbuds.

Analogue kept going after the Pocket, with the Duo, a TurboGrafx-16 machine, and in 2025 the Analogue 3D, an FPGA take on the Nintendo 64, the console that went up against the original PlayStation. For the full spec list, see the Analogue Pocket entry on Wikipedia and TechCrunch's report on the launch.

More handheld history lives in the tech section and our gaming hub.

One more detail from that July 2022 update. Alongside openFPGA, Analogue added a core for the DEC PDP-1 computer so the Pocket could run Spacewar!, a game written for that machine in 1962. It is now playable on a device that fits in a back pocket, 27 years older than the Game Boy whose cartridges it was built to read.

On September 18, 1981, the Arc '74 gallery in Milan opened the first Memphis exhibition, a roomful of furniture surfaced in cheap plastic laminate and colored like a cereal box. The man behind it, Ettore Sottsass, was 64 and had spent a quarter century designing machines for Olivetti. Nobody expected the grown-up in the room to start the riot.

A Dylan Record on Repeat

The group took shape one evening in December 1980, when Sottsass invited a circle of young designers and architects to talk about where design should go next. Bob Dylan's Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again kept playing in the background, over and over, and the name stuck. They liked the ambiguity. Memphis is a blues town in Tennessee named after a capital of ancient Egypt, and the double meaning suited a group that had no interest in being one thing. The Triennale Milano credits Sottsass and the critic Barbara Radice, his wife since 1976, as founders.

Three months later, according to the Design Museum in London, they met again carrying around a hundred drawings. The roster that eventually formed is a who's who of 1980s design. Michele De Lucchi, Aldo Cibic, Matteo Thun, Marco Zanini, George Sowden, Nathalie Du Pasquier and Martine Bedin were at the core. Peter Shire, a sculptor and potter, came in from California. Masanori Umeda, Shiro Kuramata, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Andrea Branzi and Javier Mariscal added work as well.

Why a Serious Designer Chose Laminate

Sottsass had earned the right to misbehave. Born in Innsbruck on September 14, 1917, he graduated in architecture from the Politecnico di Torino in 1939 and opened his own studio in Milan in 1947. Adriano Olivetti hired him as a design consultant in 1956. His Elea 9003 mainframe computer won the Compasso d'Oro in 1959, and in 1969 he and Perry A. King gave the world the Valentine portable typewriter. Through the late 1960s and 1970s he also ran with Italy's radical design movement, alongside groups like Superstudio, Archizoom and Global Tools.

Memphis was where all that restlessness went public. The core material was plastic laminate, the stuff of kitchen counters and diner tables, with terrazzo patterns lifted from flooring. Putting it on a bookcase was the joke and the point. Few movements in furniture have been so openly about surface. It was the exact opposite of the restraint that Dieter Rams was preaching at Braun, and a direct shot at the clean modernist line that ran back to the Bauhaus.

The signature piece is Sottsass's 1981 Carlton room divider, a totem pole of bright laminate built from solid blocks and open voids. An example sits in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. His Casablanca bookcase came the same year. Martine Bedin put her Super lamp on wheels, and the V&A holds her first prototype. Michael Graves contributed the Plaza dressing table and stool in 1981. The Triennale's history of the collective is a good place to see the full spread.

Lagerfeld Bought Almost All of It

Plenty of people hated it, and of everything in our design coverage, Memphis is still the subject most likely to start an argument. The Design Museum notes that many critics ridiculed the work and dismissed Memphis as a fad. One very rich man disagreed. Karl Lagerfeld bought almost the entire inventory to furnish his apartment in Monte Carlo, then sold the lot at Sotheby's in 1991.

By then the group was already over. Sottsass left in 1985 to concentrate on his architecture firm, Sottsass Associati. Memphis had been conceived from the start as temporary, and the Triennale dates the end to 1988, though some histories put it a year earlier.

David Bowie was the other great collector. He assembled more than a hundred Memphis and Sottsass pieces, and after his death in 2016 Sotheby's London sold one hundred of them on November 11 that year, with a Carlton carrying a pre-sale estimate of £7,000. Sottsass himself had died in Milan on December 31, 2007, at 90.

The Afterlife Is Longer Than the Life

Memphis ran for seven years and has been resurfacing ever since. The Wikipedia entry on the Memphis Group tracks the trail. Nickelodeon built the set of Double Dare in the style. Vaporwave picked it up in the 2010s, and Wired coined the term Corporate Memphis for the flat illustration style that was everywhere in the late 2010s. Dior's Fall/Winter 2011 to 2012 couture show and Missoni's Winter 2015 collection both drew on it. Du Pasquier made Memphis-style patterned bags with HAY in 2013 and a collection for American Apparel a year later.

The furniture never fully stopped either. Memphis Milano still manufactures pieces from the original era, and in early 2022 Dezeen reported that Italian Radical Design, the company behind Gufram, had acquired the brand, with Sandra and Charley Vezza directing it. Milan is still where this argument plays out every spring, and our Milan Design Week guide covers the city as it is now. Our industrial design hub has the machines Sottsass made before he started breaking things.

Peter Shire's Bel Air armchair is still in production. That means you can buy, brand new, a chair that was designed in the Memphis years to annoy the tasteful.

On October 3, 1962, Wally Schirra climbed into Mercury-Atlas 8, the capsule he called Sigma 7, wearing a watch nobody at NASA had issued him. It was an Omega Speedmaster CK2998, bought with his own money, a chronograph Omega had designed five years earlier for racing drivers. Three years later the same family of watch survived a NASA test program built to wreck it. In July 1969 Buzz Aldrin wore one on the Moon.

A Watch for the Track

Omega introduced the Speedmaster in 1957 as reference CK2915, designed by Claude Baillod. It launched alongside the Seamaster 300 and the Railmaster, a trio of professional watches for divers, scientists and engineers. The Speedmaster's audience was motorsport. It put a tachymeter scale on the bezel rather than the dial, so a driver could read average speed over a measured distance at a glance, and the name followed from there.

Inside was the calibre 321, Omega's version of a Lemania column wheel chronograph. It was robust, serviceable and accurate. Nobody in Biel was thinking about orbit. That came later, and it came from the astronauts themselves.

Schirra's watch was never official equipment. It was simply a good chronograph owned by a pilot who liked tools that worked. That informal habit pushed NASA toward a formal decision. In 1964 the agency's operations director, Deke Slayton, requested chronographs from several manufacturers, and the job of testing them went to engineer James Ragan.

Eleven Ways to Kill a Watch

Ragan designed eleven tests intended to destroy a watch. After one brand was disqualified for failing basic specifications, the finalists were Omega, Rolex and Longines-Wittnauer. The program, as later documented in published accounts of the tests, included the following.

Only the Speedmaster, reference ST 105.003, passed all of them. It did not win on looks. It won by refusing to break. The watch NASA bought was a commercially available model, not a special build. On March 1, 1965, the Speedmaster was flight qualified for all manned space missions.

Gemini, Then Apollo

It went to work almost immediately. On March 23, 1965, Gus Grissom and John Young wore Speedmasters on Gemini 3, the first crewed Gemini flight. That June, Ed White strapped a 105.003 to the outside of his suit for the first American spacewalk on Gemini 4.

By the mid-1960s the word Professional had appeared on the dial with reference 105.012, followed by the 145.012. In 1968 Omega moved the watch to the calibre 861, which replaced the column wheel with a cam system that was simpler to produce. The look barely changed. That consistency is part of why the Speedmaster reads as one continuous object across nearly seventy years.

The first watch on the Moon

Apollo 11 landed in July 1969. Neil Armstrong stepped out first, but his Speedmaster stayed inside the lunar module as a backup, because the module's electronic timer had malfunctioned. Aldrin wore his outside. That makes Aldrin's 105.012 the first watch worn on the Moon, and it is the moment that gave the Moonwatch its name.

The watch's finest hour came a year later. When Apollo 13 lost power in 1970, Jack Swigert used his Speedmaster to time a critical 14 second engine burn that helped bring the crew home. The astronauts later honored Omega with the Silver Snoopy Award, NASA's recognition for contributions to flight safety.

Hand-Wound, Still

The modern Moonwatch Professional still winds by hand, still wears a 42mm asymmetric case, and still offers a Hesalite crystal, the acrylic that cracks instead of shattering into loose fragments. In 2019 Omega revived the calibre 321 for special editions. In January 2021 it replaced the long-running calibre 1861 with the calibre 3861, adding a co-axial escapement and Master Chronometer certification. In 2022 the Swatch collaboration known as the MoonSwatch put the silhouette on a new generation of wrists.

The shape is the point. Like the Sony Walkman and the birth of personal audio, the Speedmaster is hardware that defined a category by being in the right place with the right specs. It shares that honesty with the Leica M6 and the film camera revival, and with the useful-first restraint described in Dieter Rams and his ten principles of good design.

Depth Versus Speed

The Speedmaster and the Submariner are the two great tool watches of their era, one built for depth and one for speed. The Submariner is a sealed case and a bezel. The Speedmaster is a chronograph that proved itself in a vacuum. Our Rolex Submariner history follows the other path, and the full Quiet Menace watches section, our watch history archive and the tech history hub go further.

The Omega Speedmaster entry on Wikipedia tracks every reference, and WatchTime's account of how NASA chose the Speedmaster details Ragan's test program. It is worth remembering who else was in that lab in 1965. One of the three finalists was Rolex, and only the Omega passed everything.

In Copenhagen there is a hotel room that has not changed its mind since 1960. Room 606 at the hotel Arne Jacobsen designed for SAS still has its grey and blue-green palette, its wengé wood and the furniture he drew for the building, and it is the only room in the hotel left with his original decor. That a hotel would keep one room as a working period piece says a lot about how this city treats design.

A museum in a hospital

Start at Designmuseum Danmark, because everything else makes more sense afterward. The museum was founded in 1890 by the Confederation of Danish Industries and the Ny Carlsberg Museumslegat, and since 1926 it has occupied the former Royal Frederik's Hospital, built from 1752 to 1757 under King Frederik V to designs by Nicolai Eigtved and Lauritz de Thurah.

The conversion matters as much as the collection. The architect and furniture designer Kaare Klint adapted the old hospital wards with Ivar Bentsen in the 1920s and then furnished the whole museum himself, designing its entire interior inventory. So the building is a lesson in the thing it exhibits, rococo bones fitted out by one of the founding figures of modern Danish furniture.

The museum closed in 2020 for a major renovation and reopened on June 19, 2022. Check the museum's own history page and current exhibition schedule before you go, since galleries rotate and some close for installation.

Jacobsen's total hotel

Arne Jacobsen designed the SAS hotel between 1956 and 1960, and he did not stop at the building. The interiors and fittings were his too, and the Egg and Swan chairs were designed for the hotel. It has changed names more than once since, so look it up by its history rather than by an old brand name.

Even if you are not staying, the building is worth seeing as an argument. Jacobsen treated a commercial tower as a single object, from the facade to the door handles, and the chairs he made for it went on to outlive the original fit-out by decades. The story of the Egg, from hotel lobby to the auction houses, is in our history of the Arne Jacobsen Egg chair.

Amagertorv and the shopping streets

Most visitors arrive on Strøget, the long pedestrian shopping route that became traffic-free in 1962, and most of it is the same high street you can see anywhere. The exception is Amagertorv, the square at its middle, dominated by the Stork Fountain, a gift built in 1894 for the silver wedding anniversary of the future Frederik VIII and Crown Princess Louise. The square was the city's main marketplace for centuries, and most of its buildings date from after the fire of 1795.

Two addresses on and around the square are worth your time. Illums Bolighus was founded in 1925 as BO by the businessman Kaj Dessau, working with the artistic consultant Brita Drewsen, and the brand still keeps its flagship on Amagertorv. It sells furniture, lighting and interior design, and it works as a kind of department store of Danish taste.

A short walk away, HAY House is the global flagship of the company Rolf and Mette Hay built. In 2025 HAY also moved its design and product development teams into a new creative headquarters behind one of the colored facades of Nyhavn, a short walk away. The Hays are good at making Danish modernism feel young without making it cute, which is harder than it sounds.

Like any shop, check before you go. Store layouts change, and concessions inside the bigger stores move from season to season.

Get out of town to Louisiana

The best design day in Copenhagen is partly outside it. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art sits on the Øresund coast at Humlebæk, about 35 kilometers north of the center. The businessman and cheese wholesaler Knud W. Jensen bought the abandoned estate in 1955 and opened the museum in 1958, in buildings by the young architects Vilhelm Wohlert and Jørgen Bo. The odd name comes from the property's first owner, Alexander Brun, who named the estate after his three wives, all of them called Louise.

The architecture is the reason to go. The buildings were set into the old estate's garden on the coast, and the walk between the galleries is half the experience. Go on a clear day and leave time to sit outside by the water.

When to go, and what to read first

June is the month that matters. The 3daysofdesign festival takes over showrooms, galleries and cultural spaces across the city each year, and the 2026 edition ran from June 10 to 12. Expect launches, open studios and crowds. If you prefer the furniture without the crowds, any other month is quieter. Copenhagen was also the UNESCO-UIA World Capital of Architecture in 2023, a reminder that the buildings deserve as much attention as the chairs inside them.

For background reading, our pieces on Bang and Olufsen's design history and on USM Haller modular furniture set Danish and Swiss modernism side by side. If you are building a design-focused trip around Europe, our Milan Design Week guide covers the April counterpart to 3daysofdesign. More in our furniture and mid-century modern archives, our city guides and the full Travel section.

On the way back across Amagertorv, stop at the Stork Fountain. It was an anniversary present in 1894, and Illums Bolighus has been selling furniture on the square around it since 1925, when it was still called BO.

In 1956 a leather armchair made its debut on daytime television. It appeared on Home, the NBC show hosted by Arlene Francis, with Charles and Ray Eames on set and the chair itself showing off three curved shells of rosewood-veneered plywood on a swiveling cast aluminum base. Charles reportedly wanted it to look like a well-worn baseball glove. Seventy years on, Herman Miller and Vitra still build the 670 chair and 671 ottoman in a form close to that original, and counterfeiters have never stopped copying it.

Venice, California, Mid-1950s

The chair came out of the Eames Office in Venice, California, run by the husband and wife team. By the mid-1950s they were already the most celebrated designers in America. They had spent the 1940s pioneering molded plywood, first for wartime projects and then for chairs, and their furniture for Herman Miller had turned modern design into something ordinary families could buy.

The lounge chair was a different kind of challenge. Their earlier pieces were light, affordable and mass-produced. This one would be a luxury object, built to be the most comfortable seat in the house.

A club chair, rebuilt

The starting point was the traditional English club chair, the deep leather armchair of gentlemen's clubs and libraries. The Eameses wanted to keep its generous scale and comfort while rebuilding it with modern materials and techniques, broken in and welcoming like that baseball glove.

A popular story holds that the very first chair was made as a gift for their friend, the film director Billy Wilder. It is widely repeated in design writing, though accounts differ on the details, so treat it as part of the chair's legend rather than its documented production history.

Three Shells and Hidden Clips

The construction is where the genius lies. The chair has three curved plywood shells, one each for the headrest, backrest and seat, all formed under heat and pressure in molds. Leather cushions attach to the shells with hidden clips, so there are no visible screws or nails on the upholstery. A cast aluminum base swivels and tilts the chair back at a relaxed angle, and the matching ottoman follows the same logic.

The result looks heavy but feels light, and the gaps between the shells give the chair its floating silhouette. Comfort and rigor turn out to be compatible here, engineering you sink into. It is furniture that shows exactly how it is made, which ties it to the honest design philosophy in our feature on Dieter Rams and the ten principles of good design.

Prime Time for a Chair

That television launch was unusually modern for a piece of furniture, and it helped make the chair famous far beyond design circles. The Museum of Modern Art in New York later added a 1956 rosewood example to its collection, donated by Herman Miller in 1960.

Who builds it

Herman Miller has produced the chair continuously in the United States since 1956. The company is now part of MillerKnoll. For Europe and the Middle East, the Swiss firm Vitra is the authorized manufacturer, and it describes making the chair with methods that date back to the 1950s. The current range is on Vitra's Lounge Chair page.

From rosewood to palisander

For its first few decades, the chair's shells wore Brazilian rosewood veneer over five layers of plywood. In the early 1990s, as Brazilian rosewood became heavily restricted, production moved to other woods and a stronger seven-layer construction. For the chair's 50th anniversary in 2006, Herman Miller introduced a version in sustainably sourced palisander, which brought back some of the dark, figured look of the originals.

In 2008, Herman Miller and Vitra added a taller and deeper version alongside the classic size, since people today are, on average, taller than they were in 1956. Vitra also offers special white and black editions with pigmented or lacquered shells.

Spotting a Fake

The chair is one of the most counterfeited pieces of furniture in the world. The problem started almost immediately, and in 1962 the Eameses ran newspaper ads warning buyers about imitations. A few basics help separate authentic examples from copies.

• Genuine chairs carry manufacturer labels or medallions under the seat or ottoman, and their style changed over the decades.
• Look for three separate plywood shells and cushions that attach without visible fasteners.
• The base and arm supports should be solid cast aluminum with a clean finish.
• Buy from an authorized dealer or a specialist who can document a vintage chair's history.

Vintage rosewood chairs from the early decades are the most sought-after. As with collectible watches such as the Rolex Submariner, original parts and honest condition matter more than a showroom shine.

Built to Be Handed Down

The chair sits at the center of the mid-century modern revival and works in almost any interior, from a book-lined study to a minimalist loft. It also fits the Quiet Menace idea of things worth owning, objects made well enough to be repaired and handed down, like a bespoke suit from Savile Row or a mechanical Leica M6. Herman Miller tells its own design story of the chair and ottoman, and the design section, our mid-century modern archive and the wider industrial design topic have more.

If you are looking at a vintage example, look under the seat before anything else. The label under the seat will tell you more than the leather on top.

At the Salon des Arts Ménagers in Paris in 1973, a French furniture maker showed a seat that looked like it had been dropped from a height. It had no frame and no legs, just a low, crumpled mass of quilted foam. A lot of visitors were skeptical. The organizers gave its designer, Michel Ducaroy, the René-Gabriel prize, an award for innovative and democratic furniture. The seat was called Togo, and Ligne Roset has never stopped making it.

A Walking Stick Company Goes Soft

Ligne Roset's history starts in 1860, when Antoine Roset set up a workshop in the Ain department of eastern France turning wood for parasols and walking sticks. When fashion killed the parasol, the wood turners moved on to chair parts, and the company began making upholstered furniture in 1936. It is still family-run and still based in Briord.

Ducaroy came into the story around 1960, when he began working with Jean Roset and went on to lead the company's design department. That is not an obvious origin for the most sensual sofa of the 1970s. A designer running a factory's whole range thinks about durability and cost first, and Togo is built around both.

A Toothpaste Tube, Folded

Ducaroy's own description has become part of the legend. He compared the shape to a tube of toothpaste folded back on itself like a stovepipe and closed at both ends. Look at a Togo from the side and that is exactly what you see, a soft cylinder bent into a backrest and a seat, with the fabric gathered into deep ridges along every curve.

Those ridges are the construction, not decoration. Togo is foam all the way through, with layers of different densities cut, glued and wrapped in a heavily quilted cover. Accounts differ on the exact number of densities, but the principle is the same in all of them. There is no wooden frame to find and nothing hard to hit. Each piece is made by hand in Briord. The folds come from precise stitching, and the upholsterers judge the tension of the foam as they work.

The timing helped. Togo arrived in a short window when designers were throwing out the sofa as a box with cushions on top. Mario Bellini's Camaleonda appeared in 1970 and Roche Bobois launched the Mah Jong in 1971. Togo was the most extreme of the three, a seat you sit in rather than on, about as far from the hard edges of a USM Haller credenza as furniture gets.

It Took Decades to Catch On

The launch was not a hit. As Azure magazine told the story for the 50th anniversary, the early buzz in Paris did not turn straight into sales, and the numbers built slowly over the following years. By the anniversary the count had passed 1.5 million. A smaller version for children, the Mini Togo, joined the range along the way.

The modern boom is easier to date. In 2026 Antoine Roset, the company's CEO, told ArchitectureAU that demand rose sharply during COVID, when people wanted familiar, comfortable furniture. It photographs well from above, it reads instantly as a design object, and it looks better slightly rumpled, which suits a feed of lived-in rooms. Interior designers like it for practical reasons too. It is low, so it keeps sightlines open, and it comes in several configurations, from a single low chair to corner units.

The famous owners help. Azure counted Lenny Kravitz and Matt Sorum among the owners, with four apiece. For the 50th anniversary in 2023, Ligne Roset dressed the sofa in a limited Pierre Frey fabric based on a painting by the artist Heather Chontos.

The Fakes Problem

Anything this recognizable gets copied, and Togo's simple-looking shape makes it an easy target. Some of the copies are open knockoffs sold as lookalikes. The more corrosive kind, according to Antoine Roset in the ArchitectureAU interview on Togo dupes, turns up on the vintage market. A seller takes a real Togo label, sews it onto a new cover over a different structure and lower-grade foam, and sells the result as an original. Roset says these replicas tend to lose their shape within a few years.

The brand has gone after both. ArchitectureAU reports that Ligne Roset won its case against the French marketplace Selency after four years, takes down more than 1,000 sites a year and has started using an AI system to help its legal team. It has also added a QR code linked to a blockchain-based digital passport for each piece, which can be transferred to a new owner along with the sofa. For now that passport is available only in France. If you shop secondhand, the logic is the same as with sneakers, and our piece on the resale economy explains why provenance ends up worth as much as the object.

That puts Togo in strange company for a sofa. It is a 1970s piece of furniture with a counterfeit problem and an authentication system, closer in that respect to a watch or a sneaker than to most furniture. Its nearest relatives in our design coverage are pieces like the Panton Chair and the Eames Lounge Chair, designs whose outlines are so familiar that the copies sell on the shape alone.

The label that matters now is a QR code. The one that mattered in 1973 was a prize for democratic furniture.

In 1991 a 25-year-old medical student named Klaus Biesenbach and four others took over a derelict margarine factory on Auguststrasse, in what had been East Berlin. A local housing association leased them the buildings for 25 years. They called the place Kunst-Werke, and as KW Institute for Contemporary Art it is still there, which makes it one of the few things in Mitte that has outlasted the decade that made the neighborhood famous.

The East, unlocked

When the Wall came down in November 1989, Mitte was the historic center of a city that had just lost its rules. Many buildings stood empty, and plenty of them were quickly squatted by artists. Squats and short-lived basement clubs opened and closed in a matter of months. The most famous squat was Tacheles, a half-ruined former department store building on Oranienburger Strasse that artists occupied after the Wall fell and that was finally cleared in 2012, after which the site went to an investor.

Auguststrasse became the gallery street almost by accident. In 1992 Biesenbach staged a project called 37 Rooms in spaces along the street, and galleries followed the crowds he drew. Allgirls Gallery was founded the same year by a group of young women. For the rest of the decade, if you wanted to see what was new in Berlin, you walked the old Scheunenviertel, the barn quarter, a tight grid of streets north of Hackescher Markt.

It did not last in that form. By the late 2000s rents had climbed, the number of galleries in Berlin had grown from a few to a few hundred, and many of them moved to the former West. What Mitte kept was the habit of treating a shop as a place to see things, and that is the reason to go now.

Auguststrasse, then and now

Start at KW. In 1995 a fund tied to the Berlin lottery bought the building and leased it back to the institute, and a renovation ran from 2016 to 2018. Emma Enderby has directed it since 2024. The courtyard holds Café Bravo, a glass pavilion that makes a good spot for a first coffee. The KW history is worth a read before you arrive.

Farther down the street, Do You Read Me?! is the magazine shop worth crossing the city for, deep on fashion, art, design and architecture titles from everywhere. This is where you buy the international issues you will never see at a newsstand at home.

Clärchens Ballhaus, also on Auguststrasse, has been a dance hall since 1913, and in 2024 it reopened under a new concept, with dancing back in the old mirror hall. It is a strange and wonderful thing to find on a gallery street, a room built for waltzing that has watched everything else on the block change around it.

Torstrasse and the building with four lives

Torstrasse cuts across the top of the old center, and for years it marked the line between the polished side of Mitte and its plainer blocks. Now it is mostly a nightlife street, busy late and quiet before noon. Rosenthaler Platz, where it crosses Rosenthaler Strasse, was a strip of kebab shops in the 1990s before cafés and bars moved in.

One building on Torstrasse holds the whole century. It opened in 1929 as the Kaufhaus Jonass, a Bauhaus-style department store run by two Jewish businessmen, Hermann Golluber and Hugo Haller, where customers could pay in installments and bring goods back within a week. The Nazis forced the owners to emigrate, and the building became the seat of the Reich Youth Leadership, which ran the Hitler Youth. In 1946 it was nationalized and became the headquarters of the SED, the party that would go on to rule East Germany, and was known as the House of Unity. Protesters gathered outside it during the uprising of June 17, 1953. From 1959 it held the Institute for Marxism-Leninism and the party archive. By the mid-1990s it stood empty, and after reunification an investor group converted it into a private members' club. A glass stele outside marks the history. For the design movement its facade borrowed from, see our history of the Bauhaus.

Alte Schönhauser and the old grid

The shopping lives a few blocks south, on Alte Schönhauser Strasse and its neighbors. Alte and Neue Schönhauser Strasse, Münzstrasse and Mulackstrasse are where the independent designers, small concept stores and fashion boutiques cluster. Neue Schönhauser has the bigger designer labels and the rents to match. The Hackesche Höfe, a run of connected courtyards near Hackescher Markt, fill their ground floors with small boutiques and workshops.

We are not naming individual boutiques on these streets. Mitte's shops change tenants faster than any guide can track, and we could not confirm a current roster from 2025 or 2026 sources, so take the street names and walk them. The best finds here have always been the ones in a courtyard you almost skipped.

How to spend a day

Begin on Auguststrasse with KW and coffee, then browse Do You Read Me?!. Walk down Sophienstrasse to the Hackesche Höfe, then work up Alte Schönhauser Strasse and loop through Mulackstrasse and Münzstrasse. In the evening, head up to Torstrasse for a drink, and look for the old Jonass building on the way. If you want theater, the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz runs some productions with English surtitles. The official visitBerlin guide to Auguststrasse and Torstrasse covers the bars.

Check before you go. KW, Do You Read Me?!, Clärchens Ballhaus and the Volksbühne all appear at these locations in current sources, but exhibitions close for installation and programs change, so look at each one's own site first.

For other cities that shop this way, read our guides to Le Marais in Paris, London's Soho and Dover Street Market and Copenhagen design. More in our art and architecture archives, our city guides and the full Travel section.

Clärchens Ballhaus was holding dances on Auguststrasse sixteen years before the Kaufhaus Jonass opened its doors. If you get inside, find the mirror hall.

Early in the 1700s, an Italian perfumer living in Cologne wrote to his brother about a scent he had made. It reminded him, he said, of an Italian spring morning. Johann Maria Farina built it on bergamot, lemon and orange at a time when European perfume ran on animal musks and dense, smoky notes, and he named it after his adopted city. Three centuries later, nearly every fresh citrus fragrance on a department store counter still borrows his idea.

The Farinas of Cologne

The family were Italian merchants from the Vigezzo Valley in the Alps. In 1709 Johann Baptist Farina founded a business in Cologne selling fashion goods and luxuries. His younger brother, Johann Maria Farina, born in 1685, had moved to the city a few years earlier and soon joined him.

Johann Maria was the nose. His citrus composition went out into the world as Eau de Cologne, water of Cologne, and it was a luxury object from the start. The fragrance was sold as aqua mirabilis, miracle water, a name that hints at the era's habit of marketing scents as tonics as much as perfumes. Farina's house went on to supply royal courts across Europe.

Opposite Jülich Square

From 1733 the firm traded as Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichs-Platz, literally Johann Maria Farina opposite Jülich Square, after the address of its shop. That short phrase became a trademark in its own right, and the company is widely described as the oldest perfume factory still in existence.

Success invited imitation. After French rule brought free trade to Cologne in the late 1790s, other merchants began selling their own versions of Eau de Cologne, and some of them borrowed the Farina name. The family fought back for decades. Its campaigns for trademark protection fed into the debate that produced Germany's first trademark law in 1874.

The House Number That Became a Brand

The most famous competitor came from Wilhelm Mülhens, a Cologne merchant who sold his own Eau de Cologne on Glockengasse from the late 1790s. Brand legend says a Carthusian monk gave Mülhens a secret recipe as a wedding gift in 1792. Read that one with a raised eyebrow.

The number is better documented. In 1794 the city council ordered all of Cologne's houses to be numbered, and a building on Glockengasse was assigned number 4711, the address Mülhens would make famous. A charming tale about a French officer painting the digits on the facade has circulated for generations, but historians regard it as a product of advertising. Mülhens also traded for years under a borrowed Farina name until the courts finally barred it, and the company eventually adopted the house number itself as its brand. Some of the best fragrance branding in history is a municipal address, and nobody planned it.

That number turned a simple splash into one of the most recognizable brands in European grooming. Ownership moved several times in recent decades. Wella bought the Mülhens company in 1994, Procter and Gamble acquired Wella in 2003, and in 2006 the 4711 brand was sold to Mäurer and Wirtz, a fragrance company based in Stolberg near Aachen. The original shop on Glockengasse is a tourist stop.

Cologne, the Word

The language gets slippery here. In Europe, eau de cologne names a specific concentration and style. In the United States, cologne has become shorthand for almost any men's fragrance. The traditional classification runs like this.

Exact numbers vary by house, but the logic holds. A classic eau de cologne is designed to be splashed on generously and refreshed, not dabbed once and forgotten.

Splash, Then Splash Again

Treat it as a refresher rather than a signature that has to last until midnight. A classic citrus cologne is ideal after a shower or shave, in hot weather, or at the gym bag stage of the day. It pairs naturally with a traditional wet shave, which we break down in our modern guide to the safety razor and wet shaving.

Apply it to skin rather than clothing, since citrus oils can mark fabric. Expect to reapply. That is how the style was meant to work. A bright citrus splash suits the same easy, warm-weather wardrobe as the Oxford button-down shirt, and it makes a smart souvenir from any city with a long grooming tradition, much like the shops you will find on a walk down Savile Row on a bespoke tailoring visit to London.

Still the Template

Eau de Cologne belongs with the Rolex Submariner or a pair of selvedge jeans. It set a template that later versions still follow. The Quiet Menace grooming section has more tools and rituals worth keeping, as do our grooming essentials and heritage brands hubs. The German Patent and Trade Mark Office tells the Farina trademark story, and the Eau de Cologne entry on Wikipedia covers the fragrance itself.

Both rival houses ended up with addresses for trademarks. One is a phrase pointing across Jülich Square. The other is a house number the city council handed out in 1794.

Turn a Vietnam-era MA-1 inside out and it stops being camouflage. The sage green nylon disappears and you are wearing safety orange, a color meant for one situation only. A downed airman could reverse the jacket so a rescue crew could spot him. Plenty of people own an MA-1 without ever flipping it, which is a shame, because the orange is still the best design idea on the garment.

Why jets needed a new jacket

The MA-1 came out of the 1950s, when jet aircraft made the old leather flight jackets look like antiques. Its direct ancestor was the B-15, first in cotton and later in nylon, which kept a wool pile collar inherited from the earlier B-10. That collar was warm and it got in the way of the straps a pilot wore. The MA-1 swapped it for a knit rib collar, kept the nylon and cut the bulk.

Nylon itself was a prewar invention, used for parachutes during World War II and only then moved into flight clothing. The jacket was built to a military specification, MIL-J-8279, which the Pentagon revised over the decades with a trail of suffix letters. The F revision of November 1978 is generally described as the most significant, and later G versions in 1988 and 1990 were meant for ground crew only.

The color was a wartime decision. Early B-15 and L-2 jackets were dark blue. During the Korean War the services moved to sage green because it blended into the ground, and the MA-1 inherited that shade. The orange interior came later and is associated with the Vietnam years.

Knoxville and an accountant named Gelber

The company most tied to the MA-1 had a messy birth. In January 1948 Robert Lane and his wife Helen incorporated Superior Togs to make flight jackets for a Defense Department contract. When the government suspended that contract in 1952, Lane formed Rolen Sportswear in the same Elizabeth, New Jersey, factory, and in 1957 he created Dobbs Industries in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Two years later Lane was accused of bribing a government official, and his businesses were barred from federal work. His accountant, Samuel Gelber, broke away and incorporated Alpha Industries in Knoxville on October 17, 1959, with backing from Herman Wynn. Alpha's first defense contracts were for parkas and shipboard shirts. In 1963 it won the contract to make the MA-1, and Vietnam filled every floor of its factory.

The jacket's American military life wound down around 1980. Alpha's own heritage page dates the switch to 1980, when the fire-resistant Nomex CWU-36/P began replacing nylon jackets like the MA-1 for aircrew. Alpha had started selling to civilians in 1970, so it was ready when the surplus customer became the main customer. The flying A logo arrived in 1992.

Surplus stores, punks and The Face

MA-1s reached Europe in small numbers in the mid-to-late 1950s, through surplus sales and the black market. By the late 1970s the jacket had been claimed by British youth. Punks wore it. Mods wore it. Skinheads wore it, and it picked up a hard edge it has never fully shed.

The appeal was practical before it was symbolic. An MA-1 was cheap at army surplus, warm without weight, short enough not to get in the way, and tough. Through the 1980s the style magazines The Face and i-D shot it again and again, and designers began cutting their own versions in new fabrics and colors.

Britain's habit of turning functional outerwear into tribal uniform did not stop with the MA-1. For the next chapter, from Italian dye houses to the football terraces, read our history of Stone Island and the compass badge. For the American campus equivalent, the varsity jacket is the closest relative in the closet.

Raf Simons and the $47,000 bomber

The jacket's fashion peak came from a Belgian designer. Raf Simons' Fall/Winter 2001 show, Riot! Riot! Riot!, sent out oversized bombers in camouflage covered with patches referencing counterculture, and the pieces became holy relics of archive fashion. One sold on Grailed for $47,000 in 2018, a record at the time, according to Hypebeast. Drake wore one in his Toosie Slide video and Kanye West has worn the design as well.

That collection explains a lot about modern menswear. It took a military jacket with a working-class street history and treated it as a canvas for youth culture, the same move that runs through our history of hip-hop and menswear. Alpha took the hint. In October 2020 it partnered with A Bathing Ape on dual-branded pieces, a pairing that makes more sense once you have walked the backstreets in our Ura-Harajuku guide.

Buying one now

The US military no longer issues the MA-1, though Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines still use it. Alpha still sells it, and a standard version costs a tiny fraction of a Raf original. Size for a short, full body that stops at the hip, because the cropped length is what makes it work. A long MA-1 is a different jacket.

Look for the details that matter. An orange lining, ideally one you can actually wear on the outside. Ribbed cuffs and a waistband that grip instead of sag. Nylon with a little sheen rather than a matte polyester stand-in. More outerwear and military classics are on our menswear history hub and in the Style section.

Then turn it inside out once, just to see the color nobody was ever supposed to need.

On March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the New York Knicks. He did it in Converse All Stars, canvas high tops with a rubber toe cap and a round patch on the ankle, the shoe almost everyone in the game wore. By the 1960s Converse's share of the basketball shoe market is usually put at somewhere between 70 and 80 percent. It is hard to name a brand that has owned a sport's footwear that completely since.

The shoe on Chamberlain's feet was already 45 years old.

Canvas and Rubber, 1917

The Converse Rubber Shoe Company was founded in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1908 to make rubber footwear. It started on canvas shoes in 1915 and introduced the All Star as a canvas sports shoe in 1917. The construction was simple, a canvas upper vulcanized to a rubber sole, and the basic recipe has barely moved in more than a century.

What did change was the name. For that, you need the salesman.

Who Was Chuck Taylor, Really?

Charles Taylor was a real person, which already puts him ahead of plenty of brand namesakes. He grew up in Indiana, captained his high school team in Columbus, and played semi-pro ball for the Columbus Commercials and the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, among other Midwest teams. Converse hired him as a salesman in 1921.

He is also at the heart of one of the most durable myths in sneaker history. For decades his biography included stints with the Original Celtics and the Buffalo Germans, two of the great early professional teams. No records confirm either, and Taylor never set the story straight. Journalist Abraham Aamidor's 2006 biography, Chuck Taylor, All Star, is the place to start for the documented version.

The real Taylor is more interesting than the legend. He was a gifted salesman who fed customer complaints back to the factory, and his suggestions are credited with making the shoe more flexible and supportive, which says a lot about how much a good salesman's ear was worth. He ran free basketball clinics, starting with an informal one at North Carolina State in 1922, and kept them going for nearly thirty years. He managed a traveling All-Stars team and helped launch the Converse Basketball Yearbook. Converse put his signature on the ankle patch in the early 1930s (1932 is the year most often given), and he is believed never to have received a royalty for it.

He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1968, inducted in 1969, and died of a heart attack that June.

When Basketball Walked Away

Taylor's death lined up, roughly, with the end of the Chuck's reign on the court. Leather shoes from adidas and then Nike took over through the 1970s, a shift we cover in our adidas Superstar history, and by the 1980s Nike had passed Converse as the leading basketball brand.

The Chuck simply found other feet. Its revival through the 1980s and 1990s was driven by nostalgic baby boomers and then grunge kids rather than players, and that cheap, unfussy quality turned it into a default shoe for anyone who wanted to look like they hadn't tried very hard. It shares that path with the Nike Dunk and the Vans Old Skool, basketball and skate shoes that found their real audience once the sport had moved on. It also fits the same corner of a wardrobe as a Champion Reverse Weave hoodie, an athletic object that outlived its athletic purpose.

Bankruptcy and the Chuck 70

None of that saved the company. Converse filed for bankruptcy in January 2001 and shifted production from Lumberton, North Carolina, to Asia. In July 2003 Nike agreed to buy it for $305 million. For scale, Nike had reported $10.7 billion in revenue the previous year, against $205 million at Converse. The Seattle Times covered the Nike deal at the time.

Under Nike, Converse did the smart thing and went back to the archive. In 2013 it launched the Chuck 70, modeled on the version that predates the small early 1980s revisions to the standard Chuck. It has heavier canvas, a glossier, taller rubber sidewall and more cushioning underfoot. If you want one pair, buy that one. It costs a little more and looks noticeably closer to what players wore before basketball left. The standard Chuck is still the right call for a beater pair you plan to destroy.

The Chuck also belongs with the slim, low-slung shoes that work with tailoring and wide trousers, alongside the adidas Samba. For the full documented life of the salesman, the Chuck Taylor Wikipedia page is a good start. Converse is one of the oldest names in our heritage brands coverage, and the shoes that dethroned it fill the sneakers section.

Check the ankle patch on any pair sold today. The signature is still there, the name of a salesman who, as far as anyone knows, never collected a royalty for it.

On April 15, 1972, Audemars Piguet unveiled a steel watch at the Basel fair and priced it above many gold watches. It had an octagonal bezel held down with exposed screws, a bracelet that flowed straight out of the case and a name borrowed from British warships. The Royal Oak looked like nothing else in Switzerland.

A phone call and a long night

The timing was terrible, which is the point. Swiss watchmaking was being squeezed by cheap, accurate quartz from Japan, and a house like Audemars Piguet, small and family owned in the Vallée de Joux, had every reason to play safe. Instead, the idea for a luxury steel sports watch came from Carlo de Marchi, the brand's agent in Italy, and managing director Georges Golay took it to Gerald Genta.

The house legend is that Genta was asked on the eve of the Basel fair and delivered the design the next morning. Like most watch legends it has been polished with retelling, and the dates shift depending on who tells it. The shape that came out of that night is the part nobody argues about.

The visual source was a deep sea diving helmet, with its bolted faceplate. Genta turned that into an octagonal bezel fixed with hexagonal screws, set on a tonneau case. The dial got a fine grid of raised squares, the Petite Tapisserie pattern made by the dial specialist Stern Frères. The bracelet was integrated, so case and band read as a single piece of metal. Nobody had dressed steel up like that before.

The 5402 and its thin heart

The first reference was the 5402ST, a 39mm case that looked enormous at the time and later earned the nickname Jumbo. It was also very thin, around 7mm, and that thinness came from the movement. Audemars Piguet used the calibre 2121, an automatic derived from Jaeger-LeCoultre's calibre 920 and only about 3.05mm thick.

Then there was the price. The exact Swiss franc figure varies depending on who you read, but the sources agree on the shape of it. The Royal Oak was the most expensive steel watch on the market, priced above a gold Patek Philippe dress watch and many times the cost of a Rolex Submariner. Charging a precious-metal price for a base-metal watch was the actual innovation. Genta drew the octagon, but the audacity was Golay's.

It was not an overnight hit. Dealers were slow to warm to it, and the first production run reportedly took years to sell through. The 5402 was effectively the only Royal Oak for about four years, until Jacqueline Dimier designed the first women's model, reference 8638, in 1976. Gold and two-tone versions arrived in 1977, and from there the collection never stopped growing.

Even the house hedged its bet. Audemars Piguet built quartz watches in those years too, and quartz versions of the Royal Oak itself joined the catalog. It is easy to forget now, with the Royal Oak treated as a mechanical trophy, how real the pressure from battery watches felt inside Swiss workshops at the end of the 1970s.

Why is it called the Royal Oak?

The name comes from the Royal Navy, which gave the name HMS Royal Oak to a line of warships honoring the oak tree where the future Charles II hid after losing the Battle of Worcester in 1651. A watch that took its look from diving gear and its name from battleships was making a clear statement about the kind of man it expected on the other end of the bracelet.

From the Beast to the 16202

The second big swing came in 1993 with the Royal Oak Offshore, a 42mm case about 15mm thick that critics nicknamed the Beast. It took the octagon and blew it up for a decade of oversized watches, and Arnold Schwarzenegger later wore a custom Offshore in the film End of Days. It set the template for the chunky luxury sports watch.

The original kept quietly evolving. The ultra-thin perpetual calendars of the 1980s, the Royal Oak Concept for the 30th anniversary in 2002 and decades of gold, platinum and skeleton variations all hang off the same octagon. For the 50th anniversary in 2022, Audemars Piguet retired the 15202 and, finally, the calibre 2121. The new 16202 keeps the 39mm Jumbo case at 8.1mm and runs the calibre 7121, which beats at 4Hz instead of 2.75Hz, extends the power reserve from 40 hours to 55 and adds a quickset date.

Genta went on to draw the Patek Philippe Nautilus, and the steel sports watch he invented became one of the most chased categories in the business. It sits at the far end of the dial from the Cartier Tank, which hides everything, and close in spirit to the industrial honesty of the Omega Speedmaster. Read more in watch history and industrial design, or browse the Quiet Menace watches section. Sotheby's has a thorough timeline of the Royal Oak's evolution, and Hypebeast covered the 2022 Jumbo Extra-Thin launch.

Turn a 2022 anniversary 16202 over and the rotor, cut from solid 22-karat gold, carries a 50th anniversary logo, half a century after Genta's long night at the drawing board.

Press the shutter release of a Leica M6 halfway and two small red arrows light up in the viewfinder, pointing the way to turn the aperture ring or the shutter dial. When both glow, you are on target. That is the entire electronic interface of a camera Leica introduced in 1984, built close to 175,000 times by hand and reissued in 2022 because used bodies had become hot property. No autofocus, no motor, no screen. The film crowd treats it as the default.

Rangefinder, Plus a Meter

Start with the format. The M6 is a rangefinder, not an SLR. You look through a bright window beside the lens rather than through the lens itself, and you focus by lining up a small ghost image in the center of the frame. The result is a camera that is quiet, compact and fast in a way mirror cameras never quite match. Street photographers and photojournalists loved the system for exactly that reason.

The M6 kept all of that and added the one thing most earlier M cameras lacked, a built-in light meter. Leica had tried metering in the M5 of 1971, but that camera's larger body divided loyalists. The M6 put a meter inside the familiar classic shape, one that offers advice and leaves the decision to you.

A meter that stays out of the way

The meter reads light reflected off a bright spot painted on the shutter curtain, and it draws power from small button cells. Only the meter needs that power. The shutter, film advance and rewind are entirely mechanical, so an M6 with a flat battery still works perfectly well. That mix of guidance and independence goes a long way toward explaining why the camera still feels relevant.

From Wetzlar to the M6

Leica's story starts in Wetzlar, Germany, where the Leica I, presented in 1925, became the first 35mm camera to be successfully mass-produced. The M system arrived in 1954 with the M3, which set the template for every M camera since. Three decades later, the M6 took the classic M body and gave it a meter, a move that kept longtime users happy while making the system easier for everyone else.

Leica says it handmade close to 175,000 M6 cameras across the original run. That is a significant number for a precision instrument assembled largely by hand, and it explains why so many survive on the used market today. Viewfinder magnifications varied over the years, with 0.72x as the standard choice and 0.58x and 0.85x options appearing later for wide-angle and telephoto shooters.

The TTL years

The M6 TTL, introduced in 1998, added through-the-lens flash metering when paired with compatible flash units. It also brought a larger shutter speed dial that turns in the same direction the meter arrows point, fixing a back-to-front quirk of the classic model, plus a center dot in the finder to confirm correct exposure. The TTL body is a few millimeters taller to make room for the extra electronics. Production ended in 2002, and Leica moved forward with other film models while the photo world went digital.

The 2022 Comeback

By the 2020s, film was enjoying a real renaissance. Younger photographers wanted the deliberate pace of 36 exposures, the color of real emulsion and the satisfaction of a mechanical object. A camera that makes you slow down has started to look like a luxury when your phone shoots without limit. Used M6 bodies had become hot property, and Leica answered in October 2022 with a new M6 built in Germany. The full details are in Leica's own press release.

The reissue looks like an early M6, down to the red Leitz logo and the slanted rewind crank. Under the skin, Leica updated what mattered most. The rangefinder uses a modern 0.72x finder with every optical surface coated against stray light. The meter now shows a red dot when exposure is correct, in addition to the two original arrows, and there is a warning when the battery runs low. The top cover is milled from solid brass with a tough black lacquer, the kind of finish that wears through to the metal beneath over years of use.

Original or Reissue?

That depends on what you value. An original M6 carries history and character, and many photographers like knowing their camera has already seen decades of work. The trade-offs come with age. Older finders can be prone to flare, with the focusing patch washing out in strong backlight, a quirk the reissue's coated optics were designed to tame. Any used body also benefits from a check by a qualified technician.

The reissue removes most of that uncertainty and adds the brass top plate, which ages with more charm than painted alloy. It also arrives new, with factory support. Collectors tend to treat originals as heritage pieces and the reissue as a daily tool, though plenty of people shoot both.

Living with one

Treat it the way you would a serious mechanical watch. Buy from a reputable dealer, budget for servicing and use it often, because mechanisms like to move. The same appreciation for honest, repairable engineering runs through our stories on the Rolex Submariner and the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch.

A Plain Top Plate

The M6 belongs to a family of objects whose form follows function so closely that they stop looking dated. Its clean top plate and lack of decoration would fit neatly into the philosophy described in our feature on Dieter Rams and the ten principles of good design. It also shares a cultural moment with another analog object now being rediscovered, the cassette player we profile in Sony Walkman and the birth of personal audio. On a strap over a navy jacket or an Oxford button-down shirt, it looks quietly sure of itself.

The tech section, the tech history archive and our industrial design coverage cover more of the gear that shaped modern life.

The 2022 reissue warns you when its battery runs low. The 1984 original never really needed to. When its cell died, the arrows went dark and the shutter kept firing.

In 1966 the perfumer Edmond Roudnitska gave Dior a men's fragrance built on lemon, bergamot, basil and rosemary, with a jasmine material called hedione in the heart. Eau Sauvage is still on counters six decades later. That is the bar for the first bottle you buy, and the four that follow should clear it too.

Five bottles, five jobs

The signature scent is a myth sold to men who only want to shop once. Nobody wears the same jacket in August and January, and fragrance follows the same logic. A good wardrobe covers a handful of situations. Hot weather and the gym bag. The office. Evenings. Cold months. And one bottle that is entirely yours.

Before you buy anything, understand concentration. Eau de cologne is light and fades fast. Eau de toilette is the everyday standard. Eau de parfum and extrait sit denser on the skin and last longer, so you use less. We break down the full scale in our history of Eau de Cologne, and it matters here because the same scent can wear very differently across those formats. A fresh citrus as an EDT and a winter amber as an EDP is a sensible split.

The fresh bottle

This is the one you reach for after a shower in July. Citrus, herbs, maybe a little vetiver to keep it from turning into lemonade. Two classics make the case. Eau Sauvage is the obvious pick, sharp and clean with enough moss and vetiver underneath to feel grown up. Acqua di Parma Colonia, created in a small workshop in Parma in 1916, is softer and more Italian, a cologne built for linen and long lunches. LVMH has owned the house since 2001, and the Acqua di Parma story is a good lesson in how a regional cologne becomes a global one.

Wear these generously and expect to reapply. That is the style. It is also the bottle to pair with a proper shave, the routine we cover in our guide to safety razor wet shaving.

The daily wood and the dark green

The office bottle needs to be present without announcing itself. Terre d'Hermès, composed by Jean-Claude Ellena and launched in 2006, is the modern benchmark. Orange and grapefruit up top, pepper in the middle, then cedar, vetiver, patchouli and benzoin. It smells like warm stone and citrus peel, and it suits a navy suit as easily as an Oxford button-down with the sleeves pushed up.

The evening slot can go darker and greener. Guerlain Vetiver, from 1959, is the classic version, with coriander and citrus over a dry, earthy vetiver base. For something moodier, Lalique's Encre Noire, created by Nathalie Lorson in 2006, pairs cypress with several kinds of vetiver and smells like wet wood in a dark room. Neither is a crowd-pleaser in the obvious way. That is why they work after dark.

Something for January

Cold air flattens fresh scents, so winter needs warmth and weight. Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille, part of the first Private Blend collection in 2007 and composed by Olivier Gillotin, is the textbook example. Tobacco leaf, vanilla, cacao, tonka and dried fruit. It is rich, so one spray under a heavy coat is plenty, and two can clear a room. If your winter uniform runs to waxed cotton, it sits naturally alongside a Barbour jacket and a scarf.

The fifth slot belongs to you. This is where niche houses earn their prices, with stranger, more personal compositions that are harder to place on a stranger. Le Labo built a business on that idea, and its story, along with the problem of a niche scent turning mainstream, is in our piece on Le Labo and slow perfume.

How to shop for it

Never buy from a paper strip. Fragrance changes on skin over hours, and the top notes you smell in a store are gone within the first stretch of wear. Ask for a sample or buy a small decant, wear it for a full day, and judge it by how it smells at dinner rather than at the counter.

Test one scent at a time, two at most, one on each wrist. Your nose gets tired fast. Go back a second day before spending real money.

Apply to skin rather than clothes. Pale fabrics can stain, and fragrance behaves differently on cloth. Two or three sprays is the ceiling for most eau de toilettes, fewer for anything labeled parfum. Store bottles somewhere cool and dark. A sunny bathroom windowsill, with all that heat and steam, is the worst shelf in the house.

If you notice redness or itching where you spray, stop using that fragrance and talk to a dermatologist. Fragrance ingredients can irritate some skin, and a doctor is the right person to sort out why.

For more scent and grooming coverage, browse the Quiet Menace grooming section and our fragrance hub. A last tip from the counter. Keep the boxes. Light is hard on perfume, and the cardboard sleeve your Terre d'Hermès came in is better storage than any glass shelf.

In January 1969 the Beatles played their final live performance on the roof of Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row. Then, on Valentine's Day, Tommy Nutter and cutter Edward Sexton opened Nutters of Savile Row on the same short Mayfair street, with wide lapels, bold cloth and a shop window you could actually see into. The Row had been London's address for bespoke tailoring since the early 1800s. It has never been quite as stuffy as its reputation, and it is easier to visit than you might think.

Officers, Then Cutters

The street was laid out between 1731 and 1735 as part of the Burlington Estate and named after Lady Dorothy Savile, wife of the 3rd Earl of Burlington. Its first residents were mostly military officers and their families, which turned out to be good news for anyone who could make a uniform fit.

Tailors arrived in the late eighteenth century, first on neighboring Cork Street and then on Savile Row itself by the early 1800s. The decisive moment came in 1846, when Henry Poole, whose family firm had been founded in 1806, opened an entrance onto Savile Row. Poole's reputation, and a client list that eventually included royalty, drew other cutters. Huntsman, which began as a gaiter and breeches maker in 1849, moved onto the Row in 1919. Anderson and Sheppard opened in 1906. By the twentieth century, the street's name was shorthand for the best suit money could buy.

Spoken For

On the Row, bespoke is a specific process, and the word has a precise meaning. It is usually traced to cloth being spoken for by a customer, and it describes a garment cut from a paper pattern drafted from scratch for one person.

The cutter and the tailor

Two roles matter most. The cutter takes your measurements, studies your posture, drafts the pattern and cuts the cloth. The tailors, often specialists in coats or trousers, sew the garment largely by hand. Historically, cutters were salaried staff while many makers worked as skilled independents paid by the piece.

The fittings

A first commission typically moves through several stages. There is the consultation and measuring, then a basted fitting where the suit is loosely tacked together so it can be pulled apart and recut. One or more forward fittings follow, closer to finished, and then final adjustments. The goal is a garment that fits the body you have, including the dropped shoulder and the slightly longer arm you never noticed. Done right, it is built around you one fitting at a time until it stops feeling like clothing.

The standard

To protect that process, a group of houses founded the Savile Row Bespoke Association in 2004. Its full members are expected to be based on or within 100 yards of the Row, cut individual paper patterns, employ apprentices, and typically put at least 50 hours of hand work into a two-piece suit. That is a useful benchmark when comparing houses, though plenty of excellent tailors operate outside the association.

Rooftops and Protest Signs

Nutters brought in clients including the Beatles, Mick Jagger and Elton John, and the rooftop gig at No. 3 still draws visitors to the building.

The street has had to defend itself, too. When Abercrombie and Fitch planned a children's store at No. 3, tailors and their supporters protested in 2012. It opened in 2014 anyway, and by 2021 it had closed. Ready-to-wear has a long history on the Row, but the bespoke houses have stayed fiercely protective of what makes the street distinct. The soft-shouldered American counterpoint to this tradition runs through our history of the oxford button-down shirt.

Your First Visit

Getting there

Savile Row runs parallel to Regent Street in Mayfair, between Conduit Street at the north end and Vigo Street and Burlington Gardens at the south. Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus Underground stations are both within a comfortable walk. Cork Street and Clifford Street, both nearby, are worth a detour.

Walk first, then book

Start by simply walking the street. Many houses display cloth, finished garments and sometimes cutters at work through basement or street-level windows. When something catches your eye, check the house's website for consultation booking. Opening hours, appointment policies and weekend availability vary, so confirm with the house directly before you go.

Talk about budget early

Bespoke is a serious investment, and pricing varies widely by house and cloth. Ask directly what a first two-piece suit costs, how many fittings to expect, and whether the house travels for fittings if you live abroad. Reputable tailors will answer plainly.

Bring references, not demands

Arrive with an idea of how you will wear the suit, whether for work, weddings or travel, and images of silhouettes you like. Then listen. A good cutter will tell you what suits your build, and that conversation is half the pleasure.

Beyond the Row

Pair a Savile Row visit with the shirtmakers and fragrance houses of nearby St James's and Jermyn Street, a natural follow-on to our story on the history of eau de cologne. If your travels take you east instead, our streetwear guide to Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku shows a very different kind of craft obsession. For a piece that rewards patience the way bespoke does, try our raw and selvedge denim guide.

The Wikipedia entry on Savile Row is a solid primer, and our tailoring coverage, more travel guides and the full Travel section go further. When you do walk the street, look down as well as in. Some of the best views on the Row are through the basement windows, where you can sometimes catch a cutter at work.

Around 1979 a young surfboard shaper named Shawn Stussy settled in Laguna Beach, California, to build boards under his own name. He signed each one with a marker. The signature was loose and slanted, adapted from the way his uncle, the artist Jan Stussy, signed his own work. To promote the boards, Stussy had the scrawl screen-printed onto T-shirts and sweatshirts.

The shirts took on a life of their own. Almost every streetwear brand you can name, from New York to Tokyo to London, descends in some way from that moment.

Boards first

Stussy had been at it since childhood. He started surfing young and was shaping boards in his teens, long before anyone thought of him as a clothing designer. The clothes began as promotion, then grew into Bermuda shorts and caps that he sold out of his car around town.

The business needed a partner. Frank Sinatra Jr., a friend with a head for business and no relation to the singer, came in to run the numbers. The two went into business together in 1984, with Stussy designing and Sinatra running the company.

One small correction while we are here. The pointed "Cool S" that a generation doodled in school notebooks is often credited to the brand. It has nothing to do with Stüssy.

The Tribe

What made Stüssy different was how it spread. There was no advertising and no celebrity seeding in the modern sense. Instead Stussy traveled, to London, Paris and Tokyo, and built a loose network of DJs, artists, musicians and shop owners who wore the clothes and passed them around. This became the International Stüssy Tribe. Membership often came as a gift, a jacket or T-shirt with the interlocking double S logo, and with it invitations to the gatherings.

Hiroshi Fujiwara introduced the brand to Japan in the mid-1980s, which turned out to be one of the most important decisions in its history. Japan became a second home for Stüssy and a training ground for the Harajuku labels covered in our Tokyo Ura-Harajuku guide. By the early 1990s the brand's hip-hop leaning graphics had made it a fixture in clubs, part of the wider shift traced in our history of hip-hop and menswear.

The company moved into a 4,000 square foot office in Irvine in 1987 and launched in Europe in 1988. Sales were reported at around $20 million a year by the early 1990s. In November 1991 the first Stüssy boutique opened in SoHo in Manhattan, a 900 square foot shop, and in 1992 stores followed in Laguna Beach, Tokyo and on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles.

The Sinatra years

In January 1996 Shawn Stussy resigned as president, staying on briefly as a consultant, and Sinatra bought out his share. Observers wondered aloud whether it could keep its edge without its namesake. It did. The Sinatra family has owned it since, and Frank Sinatra Jr.'s son David Sinatra later took on a leading role in the business.

The company kept its head down and its distribution tight. In 2014 it cut around $30 million worth of wholesale accounts, according to Business of Fashion, to put more weight on its own stores, which Stüssy calls chapters. By 2022 it counted 25 Stüssy-branded stores. It is the opposite of the loud scarcity model Supreme built on Lafayette Street, and it has proved just as durable.

Nike, Dior and the long tail

The Nike relationship began in 2000 with a Huarache and has rarely stopped since. A Dunk High followed in the early 2000s and an SB Dunk Low in 2005. The 2020 run, with the Air Zoom Spiridon Cage and a pair of Air Force 1s, introduced the brand to a new generation, and the Dunk side of the story connects to our Nike Dunk history. In 2025 the two revived the Baltoro, a boot first released in 1990 as part of the ACG line.

There was also a homecoming of sorts. On December 3, 2019, Kim Jones showed the Dior Men Pre-Fall 2020 collection at the Rubell Museum in Miami, and Shawn Stussy, out of retirement, was the collaborator. His handwriting ran across the clothes. The project was presented independently of the Stüssy company, which he had left in 1996. The following year Stüssy marked its 40th anniversary with a Comme des Garçons capsule.

Why it lasted

Stüssy invented the template that Palace, Supreme and dozens of others would refine. A hand-drawn logo. A tight circle of friends who wear it first. Limited distribution. A sense that you are joining something rather than buying something. Palace's London story runs on almost exactly the same rules.

The Stüssy Wikipedia entry covers the corporate history in more detail. For more, explore our streetwear and menswear history hubs, or the rest of the culture section.

The signature on a new Stüssy tee is still the one a surfer scrawled on a board in Laguna Beach in 1979. Nobody has ever needed to redraw it.

Fujifilm showed the X100 at Photokina in Cologne in September 2010 and shipped it in March 2011 for $1,199.95. It had a 12.3-megapixel APS-C sensor, a fixed 23mm f/2 lens and a viewfinder that could flip between glass and pixels. Most digital cameras of the time looked like bars of soap. This one looked like the 1960s.

The Hybrid Trick

The headline feature was the viewfinder. Look through the X100 and you see a 0.5x optical finder, a real window onto the world like the one in a Leica M6, with framelines and shooting data projected over it electronically. Flick a lever on the front and the same eyepiece becomes a 0.47-inch electronic viewfinder with about 1.44 million dots. Fujifilm called it a hybrid, and nobody else offered anything like it.

The rest of the camera followed the same logic of old shapes and new guts. The lens was equivalent to 35mm on full frame, the classic street focal length, built from eight elements in six groups with one aspherical element and a built-in three-stop ND filter. The top and bottom plates were die-cast magnesium alloy. Shutter speed and exposure compensation had their own metal dials on top, and aperture lived on a ring around the lens, so you could set the whole camera with it switched off. The camera weighed about 405 grams and was made in Japan.

It was not perfect. Early reviews were full of complaints about slow autofocus and fussy menus. Photographers bought it anyway, because it was the first digital camera in years that made people want to carry a camera instead of a phone. The rangefinder look and the fixed prime turned out to be the selling points. You couldn't zoom, so you walked.

The X100 was also the first model in what became Fujifilm's X series. The dials, the metal and the retro proportions all spread from this one camera to the interchangeable-lens bodies that came after it, and made Fujifilm a serious name among enthusiasts again.

Five Revisions, One Shape

Fujifilm kept the silhouette and rebuilt what was inside. The X100S, announced in January 2013, moved to a 16.3-megapixel X-Trans CMOS II sensor with no optical low-pass filter and much faster autofocus. The X100T arrived on September 10, 2014, adding an electronic rangefinder view inside the optical finder and built-in Wi-Fi. Both launched at $1,299.

The X100F, announced on January 19, 2017, jumped to a 24.3-megapixel X-Trans CMOS III sensor and added a focus joystick and an ISO dial built into the shutter speed dial. Then came the X100V on February 4, 2020, at $1,399. It had a 26.1-megapixel X-Trans CMOS 4 sensor, a redesigned and sharper 23mm f/2 lens, a two-way tilting touchscreen, 4K video and partial weather resistance once you added a filter. It is the one that broke out of the camera world.

How TikTok Sold Out a Camera

The usual account traces it to 2022. Videos on TikTok showed off the X100V's retro body and its Film Simulation modes, the in-camera color profiles that mimic Fujifilm film stocks and give straight-out-of-camera JPEGs a recognizable look. Orders flooded in. The camera had never been easy to find thanks to pandemic supply problems, and now it was nearly impossible. Even used X100F bodies held their value, which almost never happens to a digital camera six years after launch.

The appeal is easy to read. A generation raised on phone photos wanted something that felt like an object, made pictures that looked different from an iPhone's and still fit in a jacket pocket. It is the same impulse that brought back instant film, which we cover in our Polaroid SX-70 history, and that keeps vintage Japanese hardware like the Sony Walkman in circulation. The X100 just did it with a battery and an SD card.

The X100VI and the Waitlist

Fujifilm announced the X100VI on February 20, 2024, with a 40.2-megapixel X-Trans CMOS 5 HR sensor, six-stop in-body image stabilization, a Reala Ace film simulation and a launch price of $1,599.95. Preorders poured in, and demand outran production through 2024. In June 2025 Fujifilm said cameras for the American market, the X100VI among them, would be built in Japan rather than China, a response to tariff uncertainty. The original 2010 announcement coverage is still up on DPReview and makes a funny contrast with today's waitlists.

The X100 sits next to the rangefinders it borrowed from and the street-shooting culture it feeds. For more cameras worth carrying, see the tech section, the cameras hub and our Japan coverage. For Fujifilm's own take, the brand keeps its X series history at fujifilm-x.com.

Sixteen years and six generations in, the lens is still a 23mm f/2, and the lever that swaps glass for pixels is still on the front of the body, exactly where Fujifilm put it in 2010.

On April 1, 1919, less than five months after the armistice, Walter Gropius merged two art schools in Weimar into a single new one and called it the Staatliches Bauhaus. Its founding program carried a woodcut of a cathedral by Lyonel Feininger. Fourteen years later the Nazis sealed the doors.

Weimar, 1919

Gropius built the school out of the Grand Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art and the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts, and the merger was the whole idea. Art and craft would stop being separate careers. Every workshop, from ceramics and weaving to carpentry, metal, printing, glass, wall painting and the stage, ran with two heads, a master of works who knew the trade and a master of form who was an artist. Students started with a preliminary course that threw them at raw materials before they were allowed to specialize.

The teaching staff now reads like a museum wall. Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy all taught there. In 1923 the school built the Haus am Horn for its first big exhibition, a model house that is now part of the school's UNESCO listing.

Weimar's politics did not stay friendly. After the 1924 state election, the new conservative government cut the school's funding in half, and a press release dated December 26, 1924, announced that the Bauhaus would close at the end of March 1925.

Dessau and the Glass Box

The city of Dessau took it in. Gropius designed the new building himself, and it became a key text of modern architecture. It officially opened on December 4, 1926, after just over a year of construction. It is an asymmetrical complex of linked wings for workshops, a vocational school, administration, an auditorium and a five-story studio block called the Prellerhaus. The facade uses a glass curtain wall that carries no structural load, a step on from Gropius's earlier Fagus Factory. Most people's mental picture of the Bauhaus is that glass corner.

About 600 meters away, Gropius built the flat-roofed Masters' Houses in 1925 and 1926, a detached director's house for himself and three double houses for the teachers. Feininger and Moholy-Nagy shared one double house, Schlemmer and Georg Muche another, and Kandinsky and Klee a third. That last arrangement deserves a moment. Two of the most important painters of the century lived on either side of a party wall.

In Dessau the emphasis moved from one-off objects toward well-designed products made with industry. Marcel Breuer's tubular steel furniture came out of it, along with Marianne Brandt's metalwork and a line of Bauhaus wallpaper. That shift, from craft object to industrial product, is the thread that runs through every piece of industrial design we cover, from Dieter Rams at Braun to the Eames Lounge Chair.

The Chair That Started With a Bicycle

Breuer was running the cabinet-making workshop when he bought his first bicycle in 1925 and was struck by how light its tubular steel frame was. The club chair he designed over 1925 and 1926, the Bauhaus piece of furniture you are most likely to have sat in, used bent steel tube and straps of Eisengarn, a waxed cotton thread. Margaretha Reichardt, a student in the weaving workshop, improved the thread and developed the cloth and strapping. The design was only possible because Mannesmann had recently perfected a process for making steel tube without a welded seam.

It was not designed for Kandinsky. He admired it, and Breuer made him a copy for his quarters. Thonet produced the chair from the late 1920s as the Model B3, in folding and non-folding versions, and that edition is now the rarest. The name came decades later, when the Italian company Gavina reissued it with black leather in place of fabric. Knoll bought the Gavina Group in 1968 and has made it ever since. The patents have expired, but Knoll owns the Wassily name, which is why reproductions are sold under other names. The Wikipedia entry on the Wassily chair covers the licensing in detail.

Breuer's next idea, the cantilever chair, ended up in court. A German copyright fight over the cantilever principle was eventually settled in favor of the Dutch architect Mart Stam, who is usually credited with the first one.

Closed, Then Everywhere

The school went through directors fast. Gropius resigned in February 1928 and named the architect Hannes Meyer as his successor. Dessau's mayor, Fritz Hesse, dismissed Meyer in the summer of 1930 after students became politically radicalized, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over. On September 30, 1932, a Dessau city council with a National Socialist majority forced the Bauhaus out. Mies moved it into a derelict factory in Berlin-Steglitz and ran it as a private school. In April 1933 the authorities sealed the building, and on August 10, 1933, Mies announced that the Bauhaus was dissolved.

Then it spread. Gropius and Breuer taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Mies went to Chicago to lead architecture at the Armour Institute, and Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus there in 1937. When it folded, the industrialist Walter Paepcke helped back the school that replaced it. Black Mountain College in North Carolina picked up the teaching method. In Tel Aviv, German Jewish emigré architects helped build the White City, more than 4,000 buildings from the 1930s, which UNESCO recognized in 2003.

UNESCO had already listed the Bauhaus sites in Weimar and Dessau in 1996, and in 2017 it extended the listing to the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau and the Laubenganghäuser, the balcony-access apartments in Dessau. The Bauhaus Kooperation makes the point that there was never one consistent Bauhaus style, which is worth remembering every time a flat-pack store slaps the word on a bookcase. The rebellion against all this restraint came later, loudest in Memphis and its plastic laminate, and the Swiss engineering of USM Haller shows how far the systems idea traveled. No school in our design coverage has a longer shadow.

An air raid damaged the Dessau building in 1945 and destroyed the director's house down the road. The chair from Breuer's workshop is still in production, named for a painter it was never designed for.

In 2017 South Korea's president and first lady had shoes made at a small workshop in Seongsu-dong. It was a small, very public vote of confidence in a trade that was struggling. According to the Korea Times, the district had at one point turned out more than 80 percent of the country's handmade shoes, and by the following year industry estimates put the number of shoemakers at about 2,500, down from roughly 6,000 five years earlier. Today the crowds come for something else, a pop-up, a flagship or a coffee in a converted warehouse.

How the factories got here

Seongsu sits in Seongdong District on the north side of the Han River, across from Gangnam. From the late 1960s it filled with shoe factories, auto parts shops and printers, and in the decades that followed, apartment blocks went up to house the people who worked in them. Shoemakers relocated here from older clusters near Seoul Station and in Myeong-dong, drawn by cheaper rent.

The trade peaked and then wore down. From around 2000, cheaper imports from China chipped away at the business, and per-shoe fees for workshop labor barely moved for years. In 2013 Seoul's mayor pledged to turn Seongsu into a footwear fashion hub to rival Bologna, and signs for the Seongsu Handmade Shoes Street went up. The signs did more for the neighborhood's image than for the shoemakers. Rising rents have pushed many factories out to the edge of the metropolitan area, and the 2018 Korea Times report on the last shoemakers of Seongsu is still the best snapshot of what that looked like on the ground.

The Brooklyn of Seoul

Around 2010 young artists began moving into empty factory buildings and opening galleries and cafes, and the press started calling Seongsu the Brooklyn of Seoul. The comparison stuck because it was half right. Like Williamsburg, the area had big industrial spaces, low rents and an easy subway ride to the money.

The building that set the template was Daelim Changgo, a 1970s rice mill and warehouse that reopened as a gallery space in 2016 with its red brick walls and bare industrial bones intact. Plenty of the warehouse cafes that followed borrowed its look. In September 2024 the same building became a Musinsa store, a single 704-square-meter floor stocked mostly with Korean labels.

Cafe Onion opened its first store here in 2016, and helped prove that people would cross the river for a pastry and a raw concrete wall. The neighborhood's proximity to Gangnam did the rest. Brands discovered they could rent space cheaply for a few weeks, stage a pop-up, and draw affluent shoppers who would never have come for the shoe workshops.

Dior, ADER and the flagship era

The real signal came in 2022, when Dior opened a glass-structured concept store in Seongsu. Luxury had arrived in a district whose main export used to be handmade shoes, and in 2025 the Korea Herald still listed Dior among the brands with permanent spaces in the area. Big international houses have staged pop-ups here ever since.

The Korean labels are the most interesting part. ADER error, the label that treats its stores as installation art, has a Seongsu flagship, and so does Tamburins, the Korean fragrance brand. Musinsa, the Korean fashion platform, opened a megastore here on April 24, 2026, five levels of fashion and beauty, and the station now carries its name as Seongsu (Musinsa) Station.

All of it runs on scarcity and turnover, the same logic Tokyo's backstreets taught the world in the 1990s, which we cover in our Ura-Harajuku guide and in our story on Supreme and the drop model. Seongsu just runs it at a faster clock speed, with whole buildings changing tenants between seasons.

How to approach a visit

Seongsu Station on Line 2 is the obvious entry point, a short ride from Gangnam. Walk it slowly and without a fixed list. Flagships and pop-ups sit side by side with the remaining shoe workshops, and the contrast is the point of coming.

Seoul Forest itself is worth an hour. The park opened in June 2005 on land with a remarkable list of former lives, from royal hunting ground to Seoul's first water purification plant in 1908 to a racecourse built in 1954. It is the breathing space the district needs.

Pop-ups are the main event and also the main headache. They open and close in a matter of weeks, and some ask visitors to reserve a slot online. Check each brand's social channels in the days before you travel. The same goes for any shop named here. Seongsu changes tenants faster than anywhere else in Seoul, so treat every address as provisional and check before you go.

The crowds are real. The Korea Herald reported that Seongsu Station logged more than 30 million entries in 2024, up from 18.5 million a decade earlier. Weekday mornings are the only time the main streets feel walkable.

If you go looking for shoes, our histories of the New Balance 990 and the Adidas Samba show what mass production looks like at its best. For more, browse our streetwear archive, our city guides and the full Travel section.

On your way back to the station, look for a ground-floor workshop with its door rolled halfway up. Inside, someone is still lasting a leather upper by hand, two blocks from a queue for a perfume launch.

In 1964 Rei Kawakubo graduated from Keio University in Tokyo with a degree in the history of aesthetics and took a job in the advertising department of Asahi Kasei, a textile company. Her training was in looking at things, not in cutting cloth. In 1967 she went freelance as a stylist, and by 1969 she was designing and making her own clothes.

You can see that start in every Comme des Garçons collection since. The clothes look like they were designed by someone who came at fashion from the outside, as images and ideas first and garments second.

Tokyo, then Paris

Kawakubo, born in Tokyo on October 11, 1942, started the Comme des Garçons label in 1969 and incorporated it as a company in 1973. The first boutique opened in Tokyo in 1975, and a men's line followed in 1978. Then came Paris. The company showed there for the first time in 1981 and opened a Paris boutique in 1982.

The 1982 collection, known as Destroy, is the one people still argue about. It was savaged by the press, and critics settled on labels like Hiroshima chic. The labels were cruel and they missed the point, but they also proved she had broken something. Nobody writes that kind of headline about a collection they can ignore.

The usual reading is that she wanted to start from zero, ten years into her own label. Destroy was what zero looked like.

Lumps, bumps and a museum

For the next fifteen years Comme des Garçons kept testing what a garment could be. The defining show was Spring/Summer 1997, Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, which built padding into the clothes so the body's outline bulged where no body does. It became known as the lumps and bumps collection, and it led to a collaboration with the choreographer Merce Cunningham, a dance piece called Scenario.

Not every provocation landed well. The Sleep menswear show of 1995, with shaved heads and striped pajamas, was attacked for evoking concentration camp uniforms, and a 2020 menswear show drew criticism over cultural appropriation. A label that makes discomfort its method sometimes misjudges whose discomfort it is borrowing.

In May 2017 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, about 150 outfits arranged in an all-white maze. Kawakubo was only the second living designer the Met's Costume Institute had honored this way, according to her Wikipedia biography. The show treated the clothes the way the brand always has, as objects to walk around rather than outfits to buy.

The heart with eyes

And yet the Comme des Garçons piece most people actually own is probably a cotton T-shirt with a cartoon on it.

PLAY launched in 2002, a line of graphic tees, knits and accessories that sits outside the seasonal runway calendar. Its logo, a red heart with a pair of eyes, came from the Polish artist Filip Pagowski. He had written to Kawakubo in the 1980s, was cast in a Comme des Garçons show in summer 1992, and drew the heart as a separate idea that first went to another company project before PLAY claimed it, according to AnOther.

In 2009 PLAY partnered with Converse on the Chuck Taylor All Star, a plain canvas sneaker with that red heart on the side. It is still in production more than fifteen years later, and its staying power makes sense once you know the shoe underneath, which we cover in our history of the Converse Chuck Taylor. PLAY added a fragrance in 2007, and the house's perfume line goes back to 1993, with Odeur 53, an anti-perfume, released in 1998. Anyone into the stranger end of scent should read our piece on Le Labo and niche fragrance.

Selling the strange

The other half of the business belongs to Adrian Joffe, Kawakubo's husband, who joined the company in 1987, married her at Paris City Hall in 1992 and now runs Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market as chief executive. Dover Street Market opened in London in 2004, then in Ginza in 2012 and New York in 2013, and it turned the Comme des Garçons way of seeing into retail. Our London Soho and Dover Street Market guide covers the original. The same year, 2004, the company opened its first Guerrilla store in Berlin, a pop-up shop set to close after a year.

The company also works as an incubator. Junya Watanabe and Tao Kurihara both started their own labels inside it, and Comme des Garçons partnered with H&M in 2008, a high street collection from the least high street designer alive. For the Tokyo shops where designer labels and streetwear now sit on the same rails, see our Ura-Harajuku guide. Our Japan topic hub and the Style section have more.

Buy the heart tee if you want the easy way in. Then go look at a 1997 lumps and bumps dress behind glass, and notice that the same company made both.

In April 2024 the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, apologized for wearing adidas Sambas. Social media had decided that the shoe of the moment had been ruined by being seen on a politician, and Sunak played along. It was a strange place for a football training shoe from 1949 to end up. It was also a fairly precise measure of how far the Samba had traveled.

A Shoe for Frozen Ground

Adi Dassler designed the Samba in 1949, the same year he registered adidas, to solve a winter problem. Northern European pitches froze hard, and players needed something they could train on without sliding around. His answer was a low shoe with a black kangaroo leather upper, a long fold-over tongue and a gum rubber sole with a suction-style pattern meant to grip icy ground.

The timing matters. Adi and his brother Rudolf had split their shared shoe business in Herzogenaurach, Rudolf had gone off to start Puma, and the Samba came out of the first year of a company that was still proving it could stand on its own. A shoe that solved a specific problem for working footballers was exactly the kind of product it needed.

The name is where the story splits. The common version says Dassler called it Samba because it reached the market around the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, and that a warm-weather name suited a shoe debuting in a warm country. adidas itself has said that isn't so, and that German football fans gave the shoe its nickname. Both versions get told with total confidence. Only one comes from the company, which doesn't automatically make it true, but it does mean the World Cup story deserves an asterisk.

Futsal, Five-a-Side and Skate Parks

The Samba survived by finding new floors. Its slim shape and gummy sole made it a fixture in futsal and indoor football, where it is still worn, and the Samba Classic, built for five-a-side with an extended tongue and a lighter synthetic construction, became a staple of weeknight games. Away from the pitch, football fans kept it, and limited editions turned into the shoes supporters picked up on away trips.

In the 1990s skaters and BMX riders wore Sambas too, which eventually pushed adidas to build the Samba ADV for skating. The shoe also split into a small family, including the Samba Millennium without the long tongue and the Samba '85. The one that took over the world is the Samba OG, suede and leather, a contrasting gum sole, three stripes and the word SAMBA stamped in gold on the side.

Who Started the Samba Craze?

Fashion found the Samba slowly and then all at once. Fiorucci did a collaboration in February 2019. Grace Wales Bonner's first Samba arrived on November 20, 2020, and it reframed the shoe as something a serious menswear designer could build a season around. Gucci, Pharrell and Sporty & Rich all had their turns, and Wales Bonner came back with another release in May 2024.

By 2022 and 2023 the Samba was the most wanted sneaker in fashion, selling out constantly and reselling well above retail, pushed along by celebrities, models and the blokecore look, which borrows football shirts and terrace style for everyday wear. adidas now calls the Samba its second best-selling design ever, with more than 35 million pairs sold, behind the Stan Smith. That is the company's count, so read it as a company figure. The Sunak episode was the top of the cycle. Once a sneaker becomes a punchline about a politician, it has stopped being anybody's secret.

Why It Works With Everything

The low profile is the whole appeal. The Samba sits closer to the ground than the adidas Superstar and far closer than the New Balance 990, so it works under wide trousers and with tailoring in a way chunkier sneakers don't. It also rides on the same instinct as the Converse Chuck Taylor, a sports shoe slim enough to pass as an everyday shoe.

Styling it is easy. A black OG with a Barbour wax jacket is about as British as a sneaker outfit gets. A white pair with a varsity jacket leans American. And with a good pair of raw selvedge jeans, cuffed short enough to show the gum sole, you have the look that defined 2023.

The trend will cool, as trends do, and the Samba will go back to doing what it did for seventy years before Instagram, quietly selling to people who play football on Tuesday nights. The Samba Wikipedia page keeps a full collaboration table, and nss magazine has a good piece on how it became the world's most popular football shoe. The Samba's siblings are on our adidas hub, and the older stories sit in sneaker history and the sneakers section.

Turn a new pair over. The sole still carries the suction pattern Dassler designed for frozen pitches in 1949.

In early 2021, Patek Philippe president Thierry Stern confirmed that the company would stop making the steel Nautilus 5711/1A, the most wanted watch it had ever produced. Secondary market prices had climbed to several times retail. Patek's answer was to end it. The decision only makes sense once you know where the watch came from, which is a porthole, a Jules Verne submarine and a designer who had already done this once.

Genta's second act

By the mid-1970s Gerald Genta had already designed the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, the steel sports watch that cost more than gold. Patek Philippe wanted its own. Genta drew the Nautilus in 1974, and it launched in 1976 as reference 3700/1A.

The idea came from a ship's porthole. The case has a rounded octagonal bezel that sits between two flanges on either side, the ears that collectors spot from across a room, which echo the hinges of a porthole hatch. The name came from Captain Nemo's submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The dial was a deep blue with horizontal embossed grooves, and the bracelet was integrated so that the steel ran unbroken from the case into the links.

At 42mm it was enormous for the time, and like the Royal Oak it picked up the nickname Jumbo. It was also priced like a Patek, which in steel was the whole provocation. Genta had already shown with the Royal Oak that the market would pay gold money for a steel case if the design carried it. The Nautilus was the second test of that theory, at the most conservative house in Geneva.

The quiet decades

The Nautilus spent the 1980s and 1990s growing sideways. Patek added a quartz ladies' model in 1980, followed by a 37mm mid-size for men. In 1996 came a version with Roman numerals and a smooth dial without the grooves, and gold versions soon after. The 1998 reference 3710 added a power reserve indicator in the original 42mm size, and the 2005 reference 3712 brought a moonphase and a small pointer date.

None of these changed the core design. That is the Patek way, slow and almost stubborn. Where the Royal Oak went loud in the 1990s with the Offshore, the Nautilus mostly stayed in its lane, a steel watch for people who already owned the gold ones.

2006 and the 5711

For the 30th anniversary in 2006, Patek redesigned the collection with a rounder three-piece case and introduced the reference 5711. It kept the blue horizontal dial, now in black-blue, added a central seconds hand and ran the in-house automatic calibre 315 S C.

Then demand outran everything. By the late 2010s the 5711 had become the watch that stood for the entire luxury steel sports watch boom, a status object recognized by people who could not name a single complication. In 2016 Patek marked the 40th anniversary with a platinum 5711 limited to 700 pieces and a 44mm white gold chronograph limited to 1,300. In 2018 it added the reference 5740, the first perpetual calendar in the Nautilus line, in an 8.42mm white gold case.

Why Patek killed its best seller

The discontinuation of the steel blue-dial 5711/1A-010 in 2021 was one of the rare moments a luxury brand said no to money. Stern's reasoning, as he explained it at the time, was that Patek did not want to be known for a single model. A house that makes minute repeaters and grand complications could not let one steel time-and-date watch sit on top of its pyramid.

The send-off was handled carefully. The last regular production version was the 5711/1A-014 with a sunburst olive green dial. In December 2021 Patek released a 5711 with a robin's egg blue dial signed Tiffany and Co., limited to 170 pieces. Afterward the white gold 5811/1G took over the core role in the collection, a deliberate step away from steel.

Where the Nautilus sits now

What the Nautilus proved is that Genta's formula from the Royal Oak was not a one-off. Steel, an integrated bracelet, a distinctive bezel and a price that refuses to apologize became a category every serious brand now competes in. It shares that line of descent with the Rolex Submariner, a tool watch that crossed into status, and it sits at the opposite end of the room from the cheerful plastic of the Swatch. For the opposite approach to luxury, quiet and rectangular and nearly logo-free, read our Cartier Tank history.

There is more in watch history, industrial design and the Quiet Menace watches section. DMARGE has a good account of Patek's decision to discontinue the 5711, and First Classe lays out the 5711 timeline reference by reference.

The detail that says the most about the watch is the one nobody notices at first. The bezel ears were drawn from a porthole hinge, a bit of nautical hardware that Patek has never removed in fifty years.

Plenty of beards die in the second week. The stubble has lost its rakish charm, it itches at night, and the neckline looks like an accident. The American Academy of Dermatology's beard advice starts right there, with the skin under the stubble, which is the best argument for looking after the skin before the hair.

Surviving the stubble weeks

Most of the itch is dry skin underneath new growth. Short, stiff hairs push against skin that suddenly gets less attention, because you stopped shaving and the routine went with it. The fix is boring. Keep washing, keep moisturizing.

Dermatologists recommend a daily moisturizer suited to your skin type during this phase, ideally one with SPF 30 or higher since the skin under a thin beard still sees plenty of sun. Moisturize even if your skin runs oily. It softens both the skin and the hair, which makes the stubble less scratchy.

If you get ingrown hairs, the AAD suggests a gentle exfoliating scrub once or twice a week during the stubble phase, followed straight away by moisturizer. Gentle is the operative word. Scrubbing hard at red bumps tends to make them angrier. Men with tightly curled hair are especially prone to razor bumps, known medically as pseudofolliculitis barbae, and for some of them growing a beard is the most comfortable option. If the bumps persist, become painful or leave dark marks, book a board-certified dermatologist. That is a medical question, not a grooming one.

Wash it like skin, because it is

A beard collects whatever your face meets during the day, from lunch to city grime. The AAD recommends washing the face and beard daily. Use a gentle cleanser matched to your skin rather than a bar of soap, work it in with your fingertips so it reaches the skin, rinse with lukewarm water and pat dry.

Skin type decides the cleanser. If you are oily or prone to breakouts, the AAD points to a gel cleanser containing salicylic or glycolic acid. Dry skin does better with a hydrating, fragrance-free formula. Sensitive skin wants something creamy and soap-free. If you don't know which camp you are in, our guide to men's skincare basics walks through how to tell, and why the bar of soap in your shower is the wrong tool for your face.

Hot water feels good and does damage. It strips the oils that keep the skin under a beard comfortable, so turn the temperature down for the last minute of your shower.

Oil, balm or conditioner?

Once the beard has filled in, the products start to matter. The AAD's advice splits along skin type again. Normal to dry skin benefits from beard oil, used sparingly so the beard does not look greasy. Acne-prone skin does better with a beard conditioner, which softens the hair without loading the skin with oil.

A few drops of oil is enough for most beards. Warm it between your palms, push it in against the direction of growth so it reaches the skin, then smooth everything back down. Balms add a little wax for hold, useful for longer beards that want to wander. Pick unscented products if your skin is sensitive, or if you wear fragrance and don't want the two fighting. Matching scent to the rest of your shelf is its own art, which we cover in our guide to building a fragrance wardrobe.

Shape it like you planned it

Trimming is where a beard stops looking like neglect. A comb is the first tool, because you cannot cut what you cannot see. Detangle, then trim to guide length with an electric trimmer, and switch to scissors once the hair is too long for guards. The AAD suggests applying a little shaving oil, cream or gel before trimming to protect the skin.

Set two lines and keep them. The cheek line should follow the natural edge of your growth, perhaps tidied slightly. The neckline is the one most men get wrong. A rough guide is a finger or two above the Adam's apple, curving back toward the ears. Shave below it after a shower, when hair is softer, going with the grain and rinsing the blade after each stroke. The AAD advises changing blades every five to seven shaves. A double-edge razor gives a precise edge here, and our safety razor and wet shaving guide covers the technique. For the sharpest lines a barber's straight razor is hard to beat.

The cheeks above the beard still need sun protection, and so do the patches beneath a thin beard. Our sunscreen guide for men covers which formulas spread easily over hair.

The AAD's tips for a healthy beard are a solid reference if you want the full list. For more, browse the Quiet Menace grooming section and our grooming essentials and skincare coverage. One last habit worth stealing from good barbers. Comb the beard out before you judge it in the mirror, because a beard pushed flat on the pillow all night always looks worse than it is.

On April 1, 2019, a 2005 canvas by KAWS went under the hammer at Sotheby's in Hong Kong. When bidding stopped, The KAWS Album had sold for HK$115.9 million, roughly $14.7 million, a record for the artist at the time.

The week before, a 37 meter inflatable version of his best-known character had been lying on its back in Victoria Harbour. Twenty years before that, the same character had been a small vinyl toy produced by Bounty Hunter in Japan. KAWS has always worked on all three scales at once, and that is the whole story.

Bus shelters and backgrounds

KAWS is Brian Donnelly, born on November 4, 1974, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He started as a graffiti writer, then studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York, graduating with a BFA in 1996. After school he freelanced for Jumbo Pictures, painting backgrounds for the animated series 101 Dalmatians, Daria and Doug.

At night he worked on a different kind of image. Through the 1990s he opened up advertising displays on billboards, bus shelters and phone booths, using a skeleton key given to him by the artist Barry McGee, and painted his own characters over the ads before closing them back up. The ads stayed. They just acquired company. It was a sharp joke about who owns the street, and it got him noticed.

The Companion arrives

In 1999 he created Companion, a cartoon figure with a skull and crossbones head and X-ed out eyes. That year the Japanese company Bounty Hunter produced the first vinyl Companion in black, brown and grey, and Christie's records the edition as 500 of each colorway.

Japan was the right place for it. Tokyo's streetwear shops already understood the appeal of a small, limited object, a culture covered in our Ura-Harajuku guide, and designer toys fitted in next to T-shirts and sneakers. In 2006 KAWS opened OriginalFake with Medicom Toy, a store and label in Aoyama, Tokyo, which ran until May 2013.

The editions kept coming and kept getting bigger. A grey Five Years Later Companion arrived in 2004 in an edition of 500. A Four Foot Companion followed in 2007, about 127 centimeters tall, in editions of 100 per color. Star Wars versions followed, a Stormtrooper Companion in 2008 and a Boba Fett in 2013, and the Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama gave one a reflective silver skin. Each release was a small, scarce drop, and the logic matched what Supreme was doing with clothing across the Pacific.

Everywhere at once

By the 2010s Companion had escaped the shelf. In 2012 it flew as a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. That same year the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth acquired the sculpture Where the End Starts.

Fashion followed. Uniqlo's relationship with KAWS began in 2016 with a Sesame Street line, then a Peanuts line in April 2017 and a second Sesame Street line in November 2018. The collaboration released on June 3, 2019, became a news story of its own. Online stock reportedly sold out in seconds in China, videos on Weibo showed shoppers crawling under security gates and pulling down displays, and a 99 yuan T-shirt reappeared on Taobao for close to 400 yuan, according to sina.com.cn. Few things illustrate the economics of resale more neatly.

At the other end of the market, Kim Jones staged his first Dior men's show in June 2018 around a 10 meter tall version of KAWS's BFF character, built from roughly 70,000 flowers according to Dior. It was the same luxury and street crossover that Virgil Abloh was pushing at Louis Vuitton that same week.

Floating, then hanging

KAWS:HOLIDAY took the idea outdoors. After stops in Seoul and Taipei, the 37 meter Companion lay on its back in Victoria Harbour from March 22 to 31, 2019, part of Hong Kong Arts Month. The day after the run ended, the Sotheby's sale made the headlines.

Museums caught up. The Brooklyn Museum staged KAWS: WHAT PARTY from February 26 to September 5, 2021, a survey of 25 years of work covering drawings, paintings, sculpture, furniture, product and fashion collaborations, public projects and augmented reality pieces, organized around five themes. The Brooklyn Museum's exhibition page still lists the show. In October 2021 Fortnite added a KAWS Skeleton outfit, which put the work in front of an audience that may never set foot in a gallery.

High, low and the same figure

It is easy to be snobbish about an artist whose work hangs in museums and on Uniqlo hangers. It misses the point, which is that he never chose. The same figure appears on a mass-market T-shirt, a limited vinyl toy and a canvas that sells for millions, and none of those versions apologizes for the others.

For more on where art meets streetwear, explore our art and collaborations hubs, or the rest of our culture section.

The first Companions from 1999 came in three colors only. Black, brown and grey, five hundred apiece, made with Bounty Hunter in Japan.

Sony put the PlayStation on sale in Japan on December 3, 1994, for ¥39,800. It was a light gray box with a CD drive under a flip-up lid, and its controller carried four symbols nobody had seen on a gamepad before. It went on to sell 102.49 million units. It exists because Nintendo walked out on Sony.

The Deal Nintendo Broke

In 1988 Sony and Nintendo agreed that Sony would develop a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo, tentatively called the Play Station or SNES-CD. Ken Kutaragi, a Sony engineer who ran a hardware division, was the driving force. Then Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, quietly cancelled the arrangement and lined up Philips instead, without telling Sony.

The timing was brutal. Sony announced the Nintendo partnership and the Play Station on the first day of CES in 1991. The next day, Nintendo's Howard Lincoln told the show about the Philips alliance. At a meeting in June 1992, Sony president Norio Ohga backed Kutaragi's plan for a proprietary CD-ROM console, and the project became Sony's own. The choice of CDs over cartridges made games cheaper to produce and gave developers far more room, which mattered more than any spec sheet.

Under the lid sat an R3000 processor made by LSI Logic, running at 33.8688 MHz. The machine reached North America on September 9, 1995, at $299, and Europe on September 29.

Teiyu Goto's Handles

The look of the PlayStation belongs largely to Teiyu Goto, a Sony designer who joined the company in April 1977 and had worked on digital clock radios, radio cassette players and video cameras. He produced several shell designs for the console, and the choice among them was made quickly.

The controller was his real fight. Sony's management wanted a flat pad in the Nintendo mold. Goto wanted grips. Moving the middle fingers onto the new shoulder buttons made a flat pad less stable in the hand, and handles fixed that. He showed a flatter prototype to the same executives and the grips survived. The model SCPH-1010 controller launched alongside the console in Japan.

Then the symbols. Goto explained in a 2010 interview reported by Engadget that the circle and the X stand for yes and no, the triangle for a point of view and the square for a sheet of paper, used to open menus. Four simple geometric marks, no letters. They work as a logo on their own, without any help from the word PlayStation.

Sony kept refining the pad. The Dual Analog Controller had a short run in 1997, and the vibrating DualShock became standard equipment on Japanese consoles from November 1997.

Clubs, Not Living Rooms

In Europe, Sony sold the PlayStation as nightlife. Marketing manager Geoff Glendenning went after young adults raised on rave and club culture rather than kids. Sony worked with nightclubs, including Ministry of Sound, to set up PlayStation areas where people could play demos between sets. The Sheffield design studio The Designers Republic produced promotional material for that audience, and Psygnosis' Wipeout became the game most closely tied to the club scene. Gaming had been a bedroom hobby. Sony made it something you could be seen doing. That shift runs parallel to the story told in our Sony Walkman history, where the same company turned private listening into a public look.

The Black Monolith

The PlayStation 2 launched in Japan on March 4, 2000, then in North America on October 26 at $299. Goto had near-total creative freedom this time, and he turned the gray box into a matte black slab that could stand upright. Sony presented the black as a reference to the vastness of space, and the blue stand as the earth. It played DVDs, which made it a living room appliance as much as a console, and it ran on the Emotion Engine processor co-designed with Toshiba. It became the best-selling console of all time, at about 160 million units, and production ended on January 4, 2013.

The original kept selling too. The slimmed-down PS one, released in Japan on July 7, 2000, was the best-selling console of that year, ahead of the PS2. Goto went on to design the PlayStation 3, his last major project for Sony. The PlayStation 5, launched on November 12, 2020, came from a team led by senior art director Yujin Morisawa, and its white wings put the console's shape back at the center of the conversation.

The rivalry that started in 1991 is half of the story. The other half is on the Nintendo side, in our history of the Game Boy and Gunpei Yokoi. For more machines that changed how people spent their free time, see the Apple iPod, the tech section, our gaming hub and the industrial design archive. The full hardware record is on Wikipedia's PlayStation page.

One of Goto's designs is smaller than any controller. In the mid-1990s he also created the logo for Sony's VAIO computers, which means millions of people carried his work in a laptop bag without ever learning his name.

In 1969 the Rothschild Bank in Paris ordered 600 workstations from a metalworking company in Münsingen, Switzerland. The furniture was a grid of chrome-plated steel tubes, ball joints and colored steel panels. It had been designed for the company's own offices. That bank order turned it into a product, and the product is still sold today.

From Locksmith to Systems Builder

USM started in 1885 as a metalworking and locksmith's business founded by Ulrich Schaerer. Over the following decades it moved into window fittings, then ornamental hinges and precision-machined sheet steel. It was a supplier, the kind of company whose work you never notice.

That changed in 1961, when Paul Schaerer, an engineer and the founder's grandson, joined the business as the third generation of family management. That same year Schaerer met Fritz Haller, an architect with a small office in Solothurn, and Haller took on the design of new buildings for the company. Haller, born in 1924, had spent a year after the war working in Rotterdam for the Dutch architect Willem van Tijen, after seeing the city's wartime destruction firsthand.

Haller did not really design buildings. He designed systems for producing them. The factory in Münsingen, finished in 1963, went up on a modular steel frame he later developed into the MAXI building system, and the plant has been extended since. Two years after the factory came a glass-walled office pavilion on the same logic. A smaller version of the system, MINI, went into the Schaerer family's own house, the Buchli, designed in 1968 and finished in 1969.

The Furniture Came From the Building

Once the buildings were modular, the furniture inside them looked wrong. In 1963, according to USM's own history, Haller and Schaerer developed furniture to match the modularity and flexibility of the new buildings. The result used three elements. Chrome-plated steel tubes form the frame. Chrome-plated brass ball joints connect the tubes. Steel panels in a set palette of colors fill in the sides, shelves, doors and drawer fronts. Everything screws together, and anything can be taken apart and reconfigured.

The ball joint was the invention. USM filed for a patent on it in 1965, and the whole system depends on it, since every connection in the frame runs through one. Pull a credenza apart and you can rebuild it as a bookcase or a reception desk with the same parts.

Commercial sales began with the Rothschild order in 1969. It is hard to imagine a better first client for an office system that looked like a piece of engineering. The Bauhaus had dreamed of furniture made like industrial products. USM Haller was literally that, produced by a metal shop, sold as a kit, and finished in the same chrome as a machine.

For a bank the pitch is easy to see. Desks, storage and counters could all come out of one kit, and when a department moved floors the furniture could be unbolted and rebuilt rather than thrown out. That is an engineer's idea of luxury, where the expensive part is that you never have to buy it twice.

Fifty Years in the Same Catalog

The rest of the timeline is unusually calm. USM launched its Kitos range of height-adjustable desks and tables in 1989, opened its first showroom in Hamburg in 1998, and set up a US headquarters in New York in 2002, followed by subsidiaries in Tokyo in 2008 and the UK in 2015. In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added USM Haller to its permanent collection. In 2015 the company marked fifty years of the system, and in 2018 USM Haller received Cradle to Cradle certification.

The look has barely moved, which is the point, and it makes USM an outlier even among the long-running classics in our design coverage. The furniture is built to be reconfigured rather than replaced. Few pieces of furniture are so honest about being a set of parts, and that puts it in the same family as the Dieter Rams idea that good design should be long-lasting and as little design as possible.

Why It Works Outside the Office

Put a USM sideboard in a living room and it still reads as office equipment, which is exactly its appeal. It is serious and slightly cold, it comes in strong colors, and it has the quality of good industrial design everywhere, where every joint is visible and nothing pretends to be anything else.

It also sits comfortably next to work it influenced or resembles. Donald Judd's metal furniture, made with the fabricator Lehni AG from 1984, shares the same flat panels, strong color and refusal of decoration, though Judd arrived there from sculpture rather than engineering.

Haller kept thinking at larger scales. His Totale Stadt studies, published from the late 1960s into the 1970s, imagined urban systems that could be scaled up to cover the planet. The furniture is the small end of the same idea.

The patent application for the brass ball joint went in during 1965. The 600 workstations went to Paris four years later.

The first Salone del Mobile in 1961 covered 11,860 square meters, organized by Italian furniture makers from the Federlegno-Arredo trade association who had seen a furniture fair in Germany and decided Italy needed its own. By 2018 the fair counted 434,509 visitors from 188 countries. Most people who say they are going to Milan Design Week mean both things at once, the fair and the city, and the first rule of planning is to understand that they are two separate events sharing a week.

The fair in Rho

The Salone del Mobile.Milano is the trade show. It runs at Fiera Milano in Rho, on the northwest edge of the city, in the vast exhibition complex designed by Massimiliano Fuksas. The fair moved there in the mid-2000s from the older fairground at Portello, closer to the center, and the move changed the shape of the week. The fair became a trip out of town, and the city center was left to everyone else.

Inside are the core exhibitions, the main furniture show, furnishing accessories, the Workplace3.0 office show and S.Project, plus the biennials that alternate year to year. Euroluce, the lighting show, takes place in odd years. The next edition runs from April 13 to 18, 2027, and Euroluce returns with it, according to the Salone's official 2027 announcement.

The part of the fair worth seeking out is SaloneSatellite. Marva Griffin founded it in 1998 at the request of the organizers, and it is reserved for designers under 35. If you only have one day for Rho, start with Satellite and work outward.

Fuorisalone, the city that grew around the fair

Fuorisalone means outside the Salone, and nobody planned it. According to the Fuorisalone's own history, it grew up over about thirty years. In the late 1970s Cassina became the first company to treat its city showroom as an extension of its fair stand. In 1981 Alchymia brought design into the Politecnico, and the first Memphis exhibition at the Arc 74 gallery drew wide attention. Our piece on Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group explains why. By 1983 Abitare magazine was covering the off-fair activity, and in the early 1990s Gilda Bojardi of Interni organized a Designer's Week network of showrooms that became the first official guide.

The districts came next. In 2000 Gisella Borioli and Giulio Cappellini of Superstudio opened their Superstudio premises in the Tortona area to design as well as fashion, and the next year Zona Tortona became the first district to brand itself for the week. Brera followed. The Brera Design District, run by the agency Studiolabo, packs its galleries, showrooms and courtyards with a dense run of events every April. Interni's big thematic installations, staged in public space from 1998, eventually found a home in the cloisters of the Università Statale.

Then there is Alcova. Valentina Ciuffi and Joseph Grima have used architecturally significant buildings that are normally closed to the public since 2018, and the event has become a reliable platform for emerging designers. In 2026 Alcova took over Villa Pestarini, a late-1930s house by Franco Albini that had never before been open to visitors, and returned to the military hospital in Baggio, built between 1928 and 1931, which it had first used in 2021. The line-up usually changes from year to year, so the announcement is part of the fun.

Where to spend your time

Galleries anchor the serious end. Rossana Orlandi runs her gallery out of a former tie factory on Via Matteo Bandello, set around a courtyard with old vines, and it stages its own exhibition of collectible and young design during the week.

Divide your days by geography, not by brand. Milan is compact but the week's districts are not next to each other, and the time lost crossing town between Tortona, Brera and the fair adds up. One day for Rho, one for Brera, one for Tortona and the canals, and a free day for Alcova and whatever you heard about the night before is a sensible shape for a first visit.

How to plan for April

Book a place to sleep the moment the dates are announced. The 2027 dates are already public, and hotels and short-term rentals fill early. Register for the fair online in advance, since trade and public access rules are set by the organizers each year and can change. For Fuorisalone, many events are free to walk into, but popular installations sometimes ask for advance booking, and the evening parties are a separate economy of guest lists. Check the official Fuorisalone and Salone sites in the weeks before you travel, because programs are finalized late.

Pack comfortable shoes. The fair halls are enormous and the rest of the week is spent on foot. If you want something to read on the train out to Rho, our pieces on Dieter Rams and his ten principles and on the Eames Lounge Chair are a good warm-up for a week of looking hard at furniture. And if you are making a year of it, our Copenhagen design guide covers 3daysofdesign in June.

More in our furniture and industrial design archives, our city guides and the full Travel section.

The best moment of the week usually arrives without warning. It is the courtyard you walk into because the gate is open, with a chair on a plinth that nobody at the fair has seen yet.

In 1964 the United States sent a motorcycle team to the International Six Days Trial in East Germany, and Steve McQueen rode with it. He and his teammates raced in Barbour Internationals, waxed cotton jackets made in a town at the mouth of the River Tyne. McQueen was already a movie star. The jacket on his back had been designed for British riders and, before that, the company behind it had been selling oilskins to sailors.

Docks to Hollywood in seventy years, and the jacket barely changed. The people wearing it did.

Oilskins for the North Sea

John Barbour, born in Galloway in Scotland, crossed the border into England as a young man. In 1894 he set up J. Barbour and Sons on Market Place in South Shields as an importer of oilcloth, selling oilskins and other protective clothing to the seamen who had to work through North Sea weather. Oiled cloth was the technology of the day, heavy and stiff, and it kept a man dry on deck.

The family business grew by mail. In 1908 Malcolm Barbour produced the first catalog, and by 1917 it accounted for almost three quarters of sales. In 1921 the catalog began offering rewaxing and repairs, a service the company still runs more than a century later.

The International and the McQueen effect

The jacket that took Barbour off the waterfront arrived in 1936. Duncan Barbour, a keen motorcyclist, developed the International, a waxed cotton motorcycle suit that British international teams wore until 1977. During the war, a two-piece version called the Ursula suit became standard issue for the Royal Navy's submarine service. In 1947 civilians picked up the International for everyday riding.

Then came McQueen in 1964, and the image of a movie star in a wax jacket on a dirt bike has been doing Barbour's marketing for free for six decades. The company launched its first Steve McQueen collection in 2011 to mark the International's 75th anniversary.

Margaret Barbour's jackets

The modern range came from one person. Margaret Barbour joined the board after her husband John died in 1968 and became chairman in 1973. In 1980 she designed the Bedale, a short riding jacket in 6 ounce waxed cotton with a corduroy collar, bellows pockets, rear vents and a nylon drip strip inside to stop damp creeping up from the horse. In 1981 the company moved into its Simonside factory in South Shields, where the waxed jackets are still made. The Beaufort followed in 1983, based on French shooting jackets, longer in the body than the Bedale and fitted with a large game pocket across the back. The Border, longer still, joined the range in the same era.

Royal approval came in the same years. The Duke of Edinburgh granted Barbour a royal warrant in 1974, Queen Elizabeth II in 1982 and the Prince of Wales in 1987. That stamp, along with Princess Diana wearing the jacket, attached Barbour to the 1980s Sloane Ranger look, and for a while the Beaufort was what you wore to look like you owned land.

Why it keeps coming back

The jacket has survived several identity changes since. By the late 2000s waxed jackets were all over the fields at Glastonbury, worn by musicians and models as well as the crowd, and a country jacket had become festival wear. In 2012 Daniel Craig wore a modified Barbour as James Bond in Skyfall. Alexa Chung's womenswear collaborations with the brand began in 2019. More recent partners range from Ganni and Erdem to Supreme, and in 2023 Barbour worked with Gucci's Continuum program on reworked secondhand jackets.

The real reason it lasts is the wax. Barbour still rewaxes and repairs jackets for customers, and in 2021 it marked 100 years of the service. A well-kept Bedale goes darker and more creased with every reproofing, much like a pair of raw selvedge jeans that records every wear. It belongs with the Stone Island and MA-1 jackets in a short list of outerwear designed for a job and adopted for everything else. And if you want the town version of British clothing heritage, our guide to visiting Savile Row covers the other end of the spectrum.

Buying advice is simple. The Bedale if you want it short and versatile, the Beaufort if you want pockets and more coverage, the Border if you live somewhere it rains sideways. Size with a sweater underneath. Rewax when the cloth starts to look pale and dry, and never put it in a washing machine. A damp sponge is all the cleaning it needs. Barbour's own history page has the full timeline, and more heritage pieces are on our heritage brands hub and in the Style section.

In May 2024 King Charles III granted Barbour a royal warrant, 37 years after he gave the company one as Prince of Wales. In November 2021 he had opened its Wax for Life repair workshop in person. Few jackets can say a future king cut the ribbon on their repair shop.

In 1984 Nike did what sneaker companies always did with a two-year-old basketball shoe. It discontinued the Air Force 1. Three retailers in Baltimore, Charley Rudo, Cinderella Shoes and Downtown Locker Room, didn't accept that. They kept selling through every pair they could get and persuaded Nike to keep supplying them, which led to the Color of the Month Club, a run of exclusive colorways made for those stores. The pairs sold through completely. In 1986 Nike re-released the Air Force 1 nationally, the first time the company had ever reversed a discontinuation.

Every retro release since owes something to those three shops.

Air in a Basketball Shoe

Bruce Kilgore designed the Air Force 1, which arrived in 1982 as a high top and the first Nike basketball shoe with Air cushioning. Kilgore, who also designed the Air Ship and later the Air Jordan 2, gave it a chunky cupsole, a circular pivot point on the outsole under the forefoot and an ankle strap on the high. Air had started in running, and our story on the Air Max 1 explains how Nike later made it visible.

Nike launched the shoe with the Original Six, NBA players Moses Malone, Michael Cooper, Calvin Natt, Jamaal Wilkes, Bobby Jones and Mychal Thompson, and followed with team-specific high colorways. The low arrived in 1983 and quickly became the version that mattered. The name turned into a small line of its own, with five numbered Air Force models before the series ended with the Air Force 5 in 1990. Only the first one stuck.

Why Did Harlem Make It Uptowns?

Baltimore proved there was demand. New York gave the shoe its identity. The all-white low became so tied to Harlem that people started calling it the Uptown, and keeping a pair spotless was part of the appeal. There are long-running stories of 1980s hustlers throwing pairs away the moment they showed wear, which says something true about the shoe even if the details have grown with each telling.

The timeline is fuzzier than the legend, too. A mostly white pair with a gum sole came out in 1991, but the true triple white low didn't settle in as the default until the mid 1990s. Jay-Z is often credited as the first rapper to name the all-white Air Force 1 on record, on Can I Live II in 1998.

Hip-hop wrote it into the record. Nelly's Air Force Ones, released in 2002, tied the sneaker to rap for a whole new generation, and Nike made exclusive pairs for Roc-A-Fella and Terror Squad that only reached the public more than a decade later. Our history of hip-hop menswear covers how sportswear became that culture's formal wear.

The Collaboration Canvas

The plain leather upper made the Air Force 1 an easy shoe to reinterpret. Japan got early pieces, including the Japan-only CO.JP Linen in 2001. New York artist Stash released his high in 2003. In 2014 Nike brought in Riccardo Tisci, then at Givenchy, the first high-fashion designer it tapped for a sneaker collaboration.

Then Virgil Abloh took it further than anyone. His Air Force 1 was part of The Ten in 2017, and his Louis Vuitton and Nike Air Force 1 set a Sotheby's record when 200 pairs sold at auction in February 2022 for a combined $25.3 million. Galerie has the details of that sale. The full arc of Abloh's career is in our Virgil Abloh and Off-White story.

White on White

The all-white low is still the one to own. It is the sneaker equivalent of an Oxford cloth button-down, plain enough to wear with nearly anything and loaded with enough history to mean something. It has also outlasted most of its rivals. The Nike Dunk, three years younger and built on a similar idea, had to wait for skaters to rescue it. The adidas Superstar, its closest equivalent from the other side of the rivalry, spent years as a nostalgia shoe before its own revival.

If you buy one, accept that the toe box will crease. Some people fight it with shoe trees and crease guards. Others decide the creases are the point, proof that the pair actually gets worn. Either way, the leather softens, the sole yellows slowly and the shoe starts to look like yours. Cleaning is a small ritual, a damp cloth on the leather and a soft brush on the midsole, and doing it every few wears beats one heroic scrub a season. The Air Force 1 has never needed a heritage reissue in the way the Air Jordan 1 did, because it never really went away after 1986.

The Air Force Wikipedia page covers the wider family. The shoe's wider world is on our Nike hub, in the streetwear archive and across the sneakers section.

The pivot circle on the outsole was drawn in 1982 for players spinning in the post. These days it mostly turns on subway platforms.

At Baselworld in 2012, Tudor showed a dive watch with a faded burgundy bezel, no crown guards, a domed crystal and gilt printing on a black dial. It looked like something pulled from a 1950s drawer, and that was the plan. The Heritage Black Bay, reference 79220, turned a brand that had spent decades in Rolex's shadow into one with its own following.

A trademark first, a brand later

Tudor began as paperwork. In 1926 the Swiss watchmaker Veuve de Philippe Hüther registered the Tudor name on behalf of Hans Wilsdorf, the founder of Rolex. Wilsdorf took over the trademark himself in 1936, and in 1946 he founded Montres Tudor SA. From the start it was the more affordable way into the Rolex orbit.

That logic still holds. Tudor and Rolex are sister companies, both owned by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation. For most of the twentieth century, though, the relationship cut both ways. Tudor had credibility by association, and it also had a reputation as the budget option, a watch people explained rather than bragged about.

The tool watch years

What gave the Black Bay its material was Tudor's real working history. In 1952 Tudor released the Oyster Prince, its first self-winding watch, and 26 of them went on the British North Greenland Expedition that ran from 1952 to 1954. In 1954 came the Oyster Prince Submariner, reference 7922, rated to 100 meters. In 1958 the reference 7924 pushed the rating to 200 meters and added an oversized crown of about 8mm, which is why collectors call it the Big Crown.

The military followed. From 1964 Tudor produced a Submariner for the US Navy, and from the 1960s into the mid-1980s it supplied the French Navy, the Marine Nationale, with tool watches in bulk, delivered without bracelets. The angular snowflake hands, which became Tudor's signature, were developed with the French Navy in mind, and the first snowflake Submariner, reference 7016, arrived in 1969.

Those references are the Black Bay's source code. The crown, the case profile and the hands all come from somewhere specific.

2012 and the burgundy bezel

By the late 2000s Tudor had a problem. It had stopped selling in the United States in the early 2000s, and the brand began a relaunch in 2009 with the Grantour line. The real reset came in 2012, when Tudor released both the Pelagos and the Heritage Black Bay.

The Black Bay was not a reissue of any one watch. It was a composite. The big crown nodded to the 7924. The snowflake hands came from the Marine Nationale era. The lug bevels and the missing crown guards echoed 1950s Submariner cases, and the domed sapphire crystal recalled the plexiglass of vintage Oysters. The burgundy bezel insert gave the whole thing a tropical, sun-faded look.

It worked fast. In 2013 the Black Bay won the Revival prize at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, and Tudor went back on sale in the United States the same year, followed by the UK in 2014. Blue and black versions followed within a couple of years.

Manufacture movements and the Fifty-Eight

The next step was to stop relying on outside movements. In 2015 Tudor launched the North Flag with its first in-house calibre, the MT5621, and over the following years it rolled its own Manufacture movements across the sports collection, the Black Bay included.

Then came the watch that made the Black Bay a hit with people who usually buy vintage. At Baselworld 2018 Tudor introduced the Black Bay Fifty-Eight, reference 79030N. It shrank the case to 39mm and the height from over 14mm to 11.9mm, thanks to the new MT5402 calibre, which is COSC certified, uses a silicon hairspring and runs for 70 hours. It kept the gilt details, the snowflake hands and a red triangle at 12 on the bezel. The name points to 1958, the year Tudor's Submariner reached 200 meters. The same year brought the Black Bay GMT on the in-house MT5652.

In 2021 the Black Bay Ceramic, with the MT5602-1U, became Tudor's first METAS certified Master Chronometer, the strictest certification Tudor had ever put on a dial, from a brand once sold as the affordable alternative.

Why it matters

The Black Bay showed that a heritage brand can raid its archive without making a museum piece. It borrowed real details from real watches, mixed them into something new and priced it so people would wear it daily. Plenty of brands have tried the same trick since. Few had an archive this deep to work from.

Compare it with the original Rolex Submariner that Tudor's divers grew up beside, or with the Seiko SKX007 that taught many owners what a dive watch is for before they moved up. Explore more in watch history, heritage brands and the watches section, and for the steel sports watch at the opposite end of the price scale, read our Patek Philippe Nautilus history. Wikipedia's Tudor entry covers the full timeline, and Worn and Wound's Black Bay Fifty-Eight launch report has the 2018 specs.

On a Fifty-Eight, the hour hand still carries the blunt snowflake shape drawn for French Navy divers in 1969, now sitting on a dial that most owners will only ever take into a swimming pool.

Look at the edge of most men's sinks and you will find a bar of soap doing three jobs badly. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends swapping it, on the face at least, for a gentle cleanser and lukewarm water. That single change is where a proper routine begins, and the rest is shorter than you think.

Know what you're working with

Skin type decides almost every product choice, so figure yours out before spending money. Dermatologists sort skin into five broad types. Normal skin is clear and comfortable. Dry skin feels tight or flaky. Oily skin looks shiny by midday. Combination skin is oily through the forehead, nose and chin and drier elsewhere. Sensitive skin stings, burns or reddens after products.

A simple test is to wash your face, leave it bare for a few hours, then look. Shine everywhere points to oily. Tightness points to dry. Shine only through the center of the face points to combination. Plenty of men are surprised by the answer. If you still can't tell, a dermatologist can.

The morning routine, in three steps

The core is three products, used daily.

Cleanser first. The AAD advises washing your face every day and after exercise, using a gentle facial cleanser rather than a bar of soap. Massage it in with fingertips, rinse with lukewarm water and pat dry. Hot water and rough towels are harder on skin than they need to be.

Moisturizer second. Apply it while your skin is still slightly damp, right after showering or shaving, so it holds in water. The AAD recommends moisturizing even if your skin runs oily. Just pick a lighter formula, such as a gel or lotion rather than a heavy cream.

Sunscreen third. The AAD recommends a broad-spectrum, water-resistant SPF 30 or higher on all exposed skin, including the ears, neck and scalp if your hair is thin, plus a lip balm with SPF. Reapply about every two hours outdoors. On a normal office day, a moisturizer with broad-spectrum SPF 30 can cover the last two steps in one. Our sunscreen guide for men explains how to read the label and how much to use.

That is the whole daily routine. Serums, toners and masks can come later if you are curious, but none of them replace the basics. Consistency beats complexity. Three products used every day will do more for you than ten used whenever you remember.

Read the label before you buy

Labels tell you more than the marketing does. If you are prone to breakouts, look for products marked oil-free or non-comedogenic, which are formulated not to clog pores. If your skin is sensitive, choose products labeled fragrance-free. The AAD flags a trap here. Unscented is not the same thing, and an unscented product may still contain fragrance used to mask the smell of other ingredients.

Packaging can be beautiful and still sensible. Aesop made a whole brand out of sober brown bottles and dense ingredient copy, a story we tell in our history of Aesop and its apothecary design. Read the back of any bottle the same way you would read the spec sheet on a watch. What is actually in it, and does it suit you?

Introduce one new product at a time and give it a few weeks before you judge it. If your skin reacts, stop using it. Mixing four new products in a week makes it impossible to tell which one caused the problem.

Shaving is skin care

For many men, shaving is the hardest daily event their face goes through. The AAD's advice is practical. Soften the hair first with warm water, use a moisturizing shave cream, shave in the direction the hair grows and rinse the blade after every stroke. Replace the blade every five to seven shaves. If you get razor burn, bumps or ingrown hairs, the AAD suggests trying a single- or double-blade razor rather than a multi-blade cartridge.

That is a big reason the double-edge razor has made such a comeback, and our safety razor and wet shaving guide covers technique from lather to finish. If you have stopped shaving altogether, the skin under the beard still needs cleaning and moisturizing, which is the subject of our beard care guide.

When to see a dermatologist

No routine replaces a doctor. Check your skin regularly, including your back with a mirror or a partner's help. The AAD advises watching for new spots, and for moles that itch, bleed or change color, since these can be warning signs of skin cancer. It also notes that men over 50 have a higher risk of melanoma, and that caught early, it is highly treatable.

Book a board-certified dermatologist for anything suspicious, for acne that does not settle with basic care, or if you are simply unsure what your skin needs. The AAD's skin care tips for men are a good reference to bring along.

For more routines and tools, browse the Quiet Menace grooming section and our skincare and grooming essentials hubs. Start tonight by moving the bar of soap back to the shower where it belongs.

On the night of June 20, 2023, the Pont Neuf, the oldest standing bridge over the Seine, was covered in gold. The paving had been turned into a runway printed with Louis Vuitton's Damier check, more than 1,750 guests were reported in attendance, and Pharrell Williams and Jay-Z performed "Frontin'," the 2003 single that launched Pharrell's solo career. The camouflage version of the Damier that ran through the collection had a name that only Pharrell could get away with. He called it Damoflage.

Nobody at that bridge was confused about what Louis Vuitton had bought. It had hired a designer, and it had also hired the most connected entertainer in the room.

Why Pharrell, why then

The job had been empty since Virgil Abloh died in November 2021, and the shadow was long. Abloh had turned the menswear line into the clearest proof that streetwear now powered luxury, a story told in our piece on Abloh and Off-White. Louis Vuitton named Pharrell men's creative director in February 2023. The house's new chief executive, Pietro Beccari, who had only just taken over, framed it as a homecoming, pointing to Pharrell's earlier collaborations with the brand in 2004 and 2008.

He did not arrive as a tourist. Pharrell had been producing with Chad Hugo as The Neptunes since the early 1990s, and in 2003 he soft-launched Billionaire Boys Club with Nigo, the founder of A Bathing Ape. He also runs Icecream. In 2017 he became the first man to front a Chanel handbag campaign, and in 2016 he became a co-owner of G-Star RAW. He had worked with Nike, Adidas, Timberland and Moncler. The fashion résumé was long, even if it had never included running a Paris house.

The appointment also closed a loop opened by hip-hop's long march into menswear. Now one of hip-hop's own was setting the collection.

The cowboy and the garden

If the debut was about scale, the second show was about range. On January 16, 2024, Pharrell staged his Fall-Winter 2024 collection at the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris, with scenery evoking the American West. The clothes leaned on cowboy silhouettes and workwear, the bags took on frontier details, and Mumford & Sons debuted a new song, "Good People," produced by Pharrell, during the show.

It was a sharp move. Western wear is one of the oldest American uniforms, and putting it on a Paris runway let Pharrell talk about travel and heritage, Vuitton's favorite subjects, in his own accent. It also showed the format that would hold for the next two years. Every show is a set, a soundtrack and a story, and the clothes arrive inside all three.

Pompidou, Fondation, and a wave

On June 24, 2025, the Spring-Summer 2026 collection came to the plaza outside the Centre Pompidou with a life-sized Snakes and Ladders board designed by the architect Bijoy Jain. The theme was a passage from Paris to India, with jeweled cricket jerseys and tailoring inspired by Bollywood.

On January 20, 2026, the Fall-Winter 2026 show moved to the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Guests sat around a grassy runway with a glass-walled apartment at the center, models moved in and out of it like characters in a film, and a gospel choir and full orchestra played from the balconies. The show opened a year of celebrations for the 130th anniversary of the Monogram.

Then came the surf. On June 23, 2026, the Spring-Summer 2027 collection played out on a sandy set of dunes with a giant curling wave rising from it, a silver camper reimagined as a glass habitat and a prelude featuring the surfers Mikey February and Julian Wilson. The clothes included wetsuit textures, weathered denim, beaded bombers and logoed surfboards, along with a new flat-soled skate shoe that pointed straight back to Billionaire Boys Club, Icecream and Nigo. Louis Vuitton also said it would support the reef restoration group Coral Gardeners in French Polynesia. The house has the full looks on its Spring-Summer 2027 show page.

What it adds up to

It is fair to say the shows sometimes outshine the clothes. But the clothes are not the only product at Louis Vuitton menswear. The product is attention, and Pharrell generates it at a scale few designers can, with front rows that mix actors, athletes and musicians and soundtracks that keep pulling in his own work.

The more interesting thread is how much of his own history he keeps folding in. Damoflage turned the house check into camouflage, a streetwear staple. The surf collection put a skate shoe on the runway. It is the same instinct that made Supreme's tie-up with the house such a shock in 2017, only now the outsider runs the studio.

For more on where fashion meets music, explore our luxury fashion and music hubs, or head back to the culture section.

Three years in, the house codes are still the anchor. On the Pont Neuf the Damier was gold underfoot. By the surf show the Monogram was stamped on diving gear.

Edwin Land announced the SX-70 at Polaroid's annual meeting in April 1972. It went on sale in Miami late that year for $180, with film at $6.90 for a pack of ten. Folded, it was a flat slab. Opened, it was a single-lens reflex camera that pushed a finished color print into your hand.

A Camera That Folds Into Itself

Most SLRs are boxes. They need a fixed mirror and a prism sitting above the lens, and that geometry takes up space. The SX-70 solved the problem with folding optics. Pull up the top and the body swings open into a wedge, with three unusually shaped mirrors inside, one of them a Fresnel reflector, angled so you see an upright image through the finder. Close it and the whole optical path collapses flat.

The lens was a four-element 116mm f/8 glass design that could focus down to 10.4 inches. The shutter ran from 1/175 of a second to longer than ten seconds, governed by an automatic exposure system Polaroid called the Electric Eye. You focused, pressed the shutter button and let the camera handle the rest.

Land drove the project, with a long list of engineers behind him. The industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss and his firm did the final styling. The original Model 1 body was glass-filled polysulfone plated with a copper, nickel and chromium alloy, which is why it reads as metal at a glance. Later Model 2 and Model 3 versions used ABS plastic in Ebony or Ivory, and the Model 3 dropped the reflex viewing altogether in favor of a simple finder cut into the hood.

The Battery in the Box

The other genius move was in the film. SX-70 integral film came ten exposures to a pack, with a print area of 79 by 79 millimeters on a 3.5 by 4.25 inch sheet. Each pack also carried a flat 6-volt Polapulse battery that powered the camera's motors, electronics and exposure system. Every time you loaded film, you replaced the power source. A camera with a dead battery was a camera that needed film.

Polaroid commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to explain all this. Their 11-minute film SX-70, scored by Elmer Bernstein, mixes live action and animation to walk through the camera's invention and uses. It premiered at a stockholders meeting and became a sales tool. If you know the Eames Office mainly through furniture, start with our Eames Lounge Chair history and then watch the film. It is the same sensibility applied to a camera.

The SX-70 went national in the fall of 1973, and about 700,000 had sold by the middle of 1974.

Artists Got There First

The serious photographers came early. Walker Evans started using an SX-70 in 1973, at the age of 70, and treated it as a serious tool rather than a novelty. Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton all used or praised it. Lucas Samaras went further, pushing and smearing the emulsion while the prints developed for his Photo-Transformations series from 1973 to 1976. The camera even flew in space, carried on the Skylab 3 and Skylab 4 missions to photograph a video display.

Polaroid kept evolving the design. The Sonar OneStep of 1978 added sonar autofocus, making it the first consumer autofocus SLR. Production of the SX-70 itself ran until 1981. Later SLR 680 and 690 models used 600-type film and added a built-in flash.

That is the arc of a lot of great analog hardware. A brilliant mechanism, a decade of production, then a long second life among people who refuse to let it go, the same story we tell about the Leica M6.

The Film That Almost Died

The SX-70 survived its own company. Polaroid phased out Time-Zero film in 2005 and 2006, and in February 2008 it announced it would stop making instant film altogether. Every SX-70 in the world was about to become a paperweight.

Later that year Florian Kaps, André Bosman and Marwan Saba founded the Impossible Project. In October 2008 it bought Polaroid's remaining production machinery for $3.1 million and leased a building at the old Polaroid plant in Enschede, in the Netherlands. Mass production began in 2010. The company bought the Polaroid brand in 2017, renamed itself Polaroid Originals that September and began selling SX-70 film under the old name. In March 2020 it simply became Polaroid.

The instant revival connects to the digital one, too. The same hunger for a physical object and a recognizable look powers the Fujifilm X100. Find more in the tech section, the cameras hub and our industrial design coverage. The SX-70's full technical record is worth a read for the optics alone.

The first film the Impossible Project released, in 2010, was PX 100 Silver Shade First Flush. Two years earlier, everyone had assumed there would never be another pack.

Some of the first furniture Donald Judd designed was a pair of sinks. They went into 101 Spring Street, the five-story cast-iron building in SoHo he bought in 1968. Another early piece was a bed for his children in Marfa, Texas. By his death in 1994 he had a long catalog of chairs, tables, beds and shelves, mostly because he could not find anything worth buying.

A Sculptor Who Hated Shopping

Judd was born on June 3, 1928, in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. He served in the US Army in Korea in 1946 and 1947, worked as an art critic from 1959 to 1965, and in the early 1960s stopped painting to make the three-dimensional work that got him filed under minimalism. Furniture turned out to be a short step from there.

He explained the motive himself in a 1993 essay with a title that doubles as a complaint, It's Hard to Find a Good Lamp. The gist was that you simply could not walk into a store and buy a decent chair. So he drew his own. After the bed, as he renovated buildings in Marfa, a pergola for outdoors, shelving for his library and furniture for his ranch south of town.

He was also a serious collector of other people's furniture. The Judd Foundation lists pieces by Alvar Aalto, Gerrit Rietveld, Gustav Stickley and Rudolph Schindler in his homes, and it names Josef Albers and Le Corbusier among his influences. In 1991 he commissioned a woodworker, Robert Nicolais, to make reproductions of Schindler furniture for one of his Marfa buildings. The Le Corbusier connection runs straight into our story on Pierre Jeanneret's Chandigarh chairs.

Marfa, 1971 Onward

Judd first visited Marfa in 1971. He began buying property there in 1973, starting with the restoration of the East Building at the compound now called The Block, or La Mansana de Chinati, and in 1977 he moved there full time. The wood furniture at The Block was fabricated in the 1970s by Alfredo Mediano, who worked for Judd, and it was built for a family and a house rather than a market.

The bigger project took shape on the edge of town at the former Fort D.A. Russell, an old army post. With initial help from the Dia Art Foundation in New York, construction and installation began in 1979. The site now covers 340 acres and holds Judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, made from 1982 to 1986, and 15 untitled works in concrete, made from 1980 to 1984. The Chinati Foundation opened to the public in 1986, and after Dia transferred the property and art, Judd hosted the first Chinati open house on October 10, 1987.

He kept buying. Between 1989 and 1991 he picked up the former Marfa National Bank Building, which became his Architecture Studio, a former Safeway that became an Art Studio, the old Marfa Hotel and the former Crews Hotel, among others. In June 2025 the Donald Judd Historic District, fifteen buildings and one work of art across the Chinati Foundation and The Block, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with a period of significance from 1973 to 1994.

Plywood, Aluminum and a Factory in Yorkshire

Until 1982 the furniture was made for Judd's own family and homes. That year it was first made for anyone else. In 1984 he moved into metal, working with Lehni AG, a fabricator founded in 1922, on sixteen designs including chairs, benches, tables, shelves, a desk, a stool and a bed. He used brass, copper, clear anodized aluminum and aluminum painted in RAL colors, and the Judd Foundation's history of the metal furniture notes that the bent-edge technique came from a 1964 bookshelf by the designer Andreas Christen. The metal pieces are still made individually, with a lot of handwork in bending the edges.

In 1986 he wrote an essay called On Furniture. His argument was that a chair's art lies in its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair, and not in looking like art. That is about as clear a statement as anyone has made against the idea of furniture as gallery object, and it is worth holding next to the systems thinking of USM Haller, the other great metal furniture of the period, which got there from engineering.

The production story after that reads like a supply chain. In January 1987 he left Lehni for Janssen, a painted aluminum fabricator in the Netherlands. In September 1990 wood-frame furniture began at Design Workshop in Yorkshire, overseen by Hester van Royen. In June 1991 he ended wood fabrication with Jim Cooper and Ichiro Kato, and Jeff Jamieson and Rupert Deese took over making furniture at 101 Spring Street. On April 23, 1991, the Saint Louis Art Museum opened Donald Judd Furniture, his first museum show devoted to it. The Judd Foundation chronology logs all of it.

The Straight Chair

The 1993 essay ran in the catalog for a furniture retrospective at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In it Judd argued that a straight chair is the best kind for eating or writing, and his own chairs are the argument made physical. They sit upright and make no apology for it.

For anyone who comes to furniture from fashion or art, Judd is the clearest example of an artist who refused to let the two blur. His furniture is not a sculpture you can sit on. It is a chair built by someone who knew exactly how sculpture worked and kept it out. Texas has another pilgrimage for people who care about architecture, Tadao Ando's Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which we cover in our piece on Ando's concrete. Few names in our design section connect art, architecture and furniture this directly.

Judd died in Manhattan on February 12, 1994. He is buried at Ayala de Chinati, his ranch in far West Texas, out among the furniture he built for it.

In February 2007 The Hundreds opened its first flagship on Rosewood Avenue, just off Fairfax. Eighteen years later the brand closed its Los Angeles flagship and turned its attention to online sales and retail partners. On his Substack, Bobby Hundreds explained the decision, pointing to a street that had been sliding for years before the pandemic, to empty storefronts up and down the block and to young customers who now prefer to buy online. He also disagreed with the idea that Supreme's departure was the blow that killed the street. Either way, the most important three blocks in West Coast streetwear are not what they were, and that makes this a good moment to understand them.

A deli street first

Before anyone queued on Fairfax for a box logo, they queued for rye bread. The neighborhood grew in part from Jewish families leaving Boyle Heights, east of downtown, as that district changed, and by the early 1960s only New York and Tel Aviv had more Jewish residents than Los Angeles, according to a 2018 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Fairfax became its commercial spine, a run of bakeries, butchers, grocers and delis.

Canter's is the survivor. Ben Canter and his brothers came west from Jersey City in 1931 after their deli there closed, opened first in Boyle Heights and later bought a storefront on North Fairfax. It is still there, and it is still the place to start a walk up the street.

At the south end, Fairfax runs into an older Los Angeles. In July 1934 Fred Beck and Roger Dahlhjelm persuaded E.B. Gilmore to let farmers sell produce from their trucks on a corner of his family's land at Third and Fairfax. The Gilmores had run a dairy there since 1880 and struck oil around 1900. About a dozen farmers turned up, and the Farmers Market has been there since. Its clock tower dates from 1948, and the market's own history page is a fine rabbit hole.

2004 and the land rush

Supreme opened its first West Coast store on Fairfax in 2004, a decade after the brand started in New York. At the time the street was still a quiet run of family businesses. Within a few years it was something else. In a 2019 Complex oral history, a local sneaker boutique owner recalled rents climbing several times over within a few years.

The Hundreds arrived in 2007. Crooks and Castles and Huf followed, and so did a generation of kids who treated the sidewalk as a clubhouse. Members of the Odd Future collective hung around and worked on the street before they were famous, and their presence pulled in an even younger crowd. Release days put a line on the pavement outside Supreme that became part of the street's identity, the product of the same scarcity mechanics we break down in our piece on Supreme and the drop model and in our look at the sneaker resale economy.

Food followed fashion. Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo opened Animal in 2008 and Jon and Vinny's in 2015, and for a while Fairfax was the rare Los Angeles street where you could spend a whole day without getting back in the car. By 2018 the writer of that Los Angeles Review of Books essay counted about 20 streetwear stores on the three central blocks and about five Jewish businesses left.

How the street emptied

The decline came in layers. The pandemic cut foot traffic and pushed buyers online. Rents and costs kept rising. Looting during the 2020 protests damaged stores and gave the block a reputation it has struggled to shake. Animal closed in 2023, the same year Supreme moved its Los Angeles store to the Sunset Strip. The Hundreds followed in 2025.

What is left is a street with gaps in it. Canter's and Jon and Vinny's were still operating in 2025, and Tyler, the Creator's Golf store a block away remains a reason to come. Plenty of storefronts are empty, and the whole block feels like it is waiting for the next idea. For the bigger picture of how Los Angeles fed hip-hop style and vice versa, read our history of how hip-hop rewrote menswear.

How to do Fairfax now

Park once and walk. The core runs roughly from Melrose Avenue down toward Beverly Boulevard, and from there it is a straight shot south to the Farmers Market at Third Street and the museums at Wilshire.

Go hungry. A pastrami sandwich at Canter's is the correct opening move, and the Farmers Market's stalls are better than they need to be. At the far south end, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened on September 30, 2021, in Renzo Piano's renovation of the 1939 May Company Building at Wilshire and Fairfax, now called the Saban Building, with his new dome-shaped addition beside it.

Check before you go. Stores on Fairfax have been opening, closing and moving faster than any guide can track, and release-day rules belong to each brand. Look at the brand's own site and social accounts in the week you travel. If the Fairfax story makes you want to see where the template came from, our guides to SoHo in New York and Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku cover the other two corners of the triangle.

For more, browse our streetwear archive, our city guides and the full Travel section.

On the way out, stand for a minute on the stretch where the Supreme line used to form. Twenty years ago this was a quiet block of bakeries and family shops, and it may be quiet again for a while before anyone works out what it becomes next.

In 1957 Yvon Chouinard taught himself to blacksmith and hammered his first climbing pitons out of an old harvester blade. Nearly seventy years later, the clothing company that grew out of that habit is owned by a trust and a climate nonprofit, and its fleece pullover is worn by people who have never touched a rock.

The garment in the middle of that story is the Synchilla Snap-T. Four snaps, a stand-up collar, a flapped chest pocket and nylon trim. It looks like nothing. That is the point.

Pitons first, clothes second

Chouinard and Tom Frost formally founded Chouinard Equipment in 1965, and it became the biggest climbing hardware company in the United States. The clothing was almost an accident. In 1970 Chouinard started climbing in rugby shirts he had found in Scotland, and by 1972 he was importing them for American customers. In 1973 the company adopted the Patagonia name for its clothing and opened its first store in Ventura, California. The Fitz Roy skyline logo came in 1975. The hardware side later ran into trouble. Chouinard Equipment filed for bankruptcy in 1989 after losing safety lawsuits, and former employees bought the business and carried on as Black Diamond.

The early clothes were about staying warm on a wall, and wool and down had problems. Wool got heavy when wet. Down was useless when soaked. In 1977 Patagonia released a pile jacket, a synthetic layer that stayed warm in the damp. In 1980 it started teaching customers to dress in layers, a system the fleece would soon slot into.

Malden Mills and the birth of Synchilla

Pile worked, but Patagonia wanted something softer, and it found a partner in Aaron Feuerstein of Malden Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In the late 1970s the two companies worked on turning the mill's polyester into a double-faced insulating fabric. Patagonia sold its version under the name Synchilla, while Malden sold the same family of fabric to other brands as Polarfleece, renamed Polartec in 1986. The Skiing History obituary of Feuerstein lays out that partnership in detail.

The Synchilla Snap-T pullover arrived in 1985 and became the house classic. In 1993 fleece made from recycled plastic soda bottles arrived, and Patagonia's current Synchilla is listed as recycled polyester. Malden Mills had its own famous chapter in December 1995, when its Lawrence plant burned down and Feuerstein kept hundreds of workers on the payroll while he rebuilt. He lost control of the company in 2001, and it became Polartec Inc. in 2007.

The vest years

Fleece gave Patagonia a second life that had nothing to do with climbing. By the 2010s its zip fleeces and vests, often embroidered with a company logo, had become office wear in finance and tech, a soft uniform worn over a button-down. In April 2019 the company said it would focus its co-branded corporate program on mission-driven companies, with B Corps as priority clients, and reports at the time said financial institutions were among the firms that would no longer get logo vests, as Time reported. The oxford button-down underneath survived the change.

It was not the first time the company had put its money where its catalog was. Since 1986 it had pledged 1 percent of sales or 10 percent of profit, whichever was higher. Three years after the vest decision it went much further. On September 14, 2022, Patagonia announced that Chouinard was handing over ownership. All of the voting stock, 2 percent of the company, went to the Patagonia Purpose Trust. The other 98 percent, the nonvoting stock, went to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit that receives profits to fight climate change.

What gorpcore borrowed

In May 2017 the writer Jason Chen named the look in an article for The Cut. Gorpcore took its name from gorp, the hiking slang for trail mix, often explained as good old raisins and peanuts, which is probably a backronym. It described city people wearing technical outdoor clothes with no intention of going outdoors, a cousin of normcore with better zippers.

The trend took off in the 2020s, boosted during the pandemic when everyone suddenly wanted to be outside. Patagonia sat at the center, alongside Arc'teryx, The North Face and Salomon, whose trail shoe we cover in our history of the Salomon XT-6. Styled right, a Snap-T now sits as easily next to Carhartt WIP double knees as it does next to a climbing harness.

Gorpcore also explains why a waxed Barbour and a Snap-T can sit in the same closet. Both were made for weather, both last for years, and both look better after they have been used. More of that thinking is on our wardrobe essentials hub and in the Style section.

If you buy one, buy the regular Synchilla Snap-T rather than a heavier jacket and wear it as a mid layer. Pick a trim color you like, because you will see it every day. The company's future profits are pledged to climate work through the Holdfast Collective, which is a stranger ending for a fleece pullover than anyone writing about gorpcore in 2017 would have guessed.

On March 16, 1966, the Van Doren Rubber Company opened its first store at 704 East Broadway in Anaheim, California. Paul Van Doren and his brother Jim were behind it with Gordon Lee and Serge D'Elia, and the first customers bought canvas deck shoes, the model now sold as the Authentic. The shoe that would make Vans recognizable from across a skatepark was still eleven years away.

Style 36

Vans became a skate company over the following decade. The Era arrived in 1976, designed with the skaters Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta, the same year the Off the Wall motto started appearing, and Southern California skaters made the brand their own. The appeal was practical. Vans made sticky, flat-soled canvas shoes that gripped a board, and a skater who wore through a pair could come back and buy another without much damage to a teenage budget.

A year later, in 1977, Vans introduced Style 36. It was the first Vans shoe to carry the sidestripe. The Old Skool name came later, and collectors still use Style 36 as shorthand for the original. Today's version pairs canvas with suede at the toe and around the heel, sitting on the waffle sole that makes every Vans feel the same underfoot.

Where Did the Sidestripe Come From?

Vans' own account is that Paul Van Doren drew it as a random doodle. The company first called it the jazz stripe. Other tellings, including Hypebeast's history of the shoe, credit in-house designer George Greenwood with working the line into the Old Skool and coming up with the jazz stripe nickname. Those versions don't really contradict each other, since a founder's sketch refined by a designer is how plenty of logos happen. Even the year wobbles a little. Some histories date the stripe to 1976, while Vans puts it on Style 36 in 1977. The clean single-doodle version is simply the one the company prefers to tell.

What matters more is what the stripe did. It made Vans legible at a distance. The canvas Authentic looked like a lot of other deck shoes. Anything with the stripe was instantly a Vans, starting with the Sk8-Hi in 1978. The plain Slip-On caught on around the same time, and in 1982 Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli wore checkerboard Slip-Ons in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which did for that shoe what no ad budget could.

Bankruptcy, Supreme and the Vault

The 1980s nearly ended the company. Vans cut prices in 1984 amid heavy competition and a flood of counterfeits and filed for bankruptcy protection. It recovered, sponsored the Warped Tour through the 1990s and kept its skate credibility, and in 2004 it merged with VF Corporation in a deal reported at $396 million.

The Old Skool's fashion second act started with Supreme. In 1996 Brendan Babenzien, then Supreme's design director, introduced a three-colorway Supreme Old Skool, an early chapter of the shop-meets-skate-brand model we cover in our piece on the Supreme drop model. Vault by Vans opened in 2003 as the premium collaboration line. In 2009 it reissued the Old Skool '92 as part of a 20th anniversary pack for Ray Barbee, and the Blends Bones Old Skool followed in 2014. Vans had been letting customers design their own shoes since the late 1960s, and that habit of handing the shoe over to other people runs straight through all of it. The collaborations work because the shoe is a neutral surface. Two panels of suede, a canvas quarter and a stripe give a designer just enough to change without losing the outline.

The Cheapest Classic

The Old Skool's appeal is mostly about restraint. It costs less than most shoes with comparable history, it looks right with workwear and with tailoring, and it wears in rather than out. The waffle sole flexes enough to feel the board, which is why skaters still buy it to skate in. Black with the white stripe is the default for good reason. It hides scuffs, it goes with everything, and it is the pair most people picture when they hear the name. It sits in the same small group as the Converse Chuck Taylor, cheap canvas shoes with a real story behind them.

It also explains Nike's long game in skateboarding. When Nike SB rebuilt the Nike Dunk for skaters in 2002, it was chasing credibility Vans had built over three decades of sessions and shop accounts. The British side of that culture is in our Palace Skateboards history, and the workwear pairing that suits a black Old Skool is in our story on Carhartt WIP.

Vans tells its version of the shoe's history on its Old Skool page, and the Vans Wikipedia page covers the company. Skate shoes and everything they spawned run through our streetwear coverage and the sneakers section.

Wear a pair long enough and the suede at the toe goes grey and rough well before the stripe starts to fade.

Watch the seconds hand on a Grand Seiko Spring Drive and it never ticks. It slides around the dial in one continuous sweep, the visible result of an idea a Seiko engineer named Yoshikazu Akahane had in 1977. It took more than 600 prototypes, some 230 patents and nearly thirty years to reach its finished form. Akahane died in 1998, the year after Seiko first described it in public.

A mechanical watch with a quartz brain

Akahane joined Seiko in 1971 and worked on batteries for quartz watches. That matters, because Spring Drive is an argument with quartz. In 1977, at Suwa Seikosha, he imagined a mechanical watch whose speed would be governed by an electronic circuit, and he called the concept Quartz Lock.

The principle is easy to say and hard to build. A Spring Drive starts like any mechanical watch, with a mainspring in a barrel, wound by a rotor or the crown. There is no escapement and no balance wheel. Instead the gear train drives a small rotor called the glide wheel, which spins eight times a second. A quartz crystal and an integrated circuit check its speed once per rotation and apply an electromagnetic brake to hold it exactly on pace. Seiko calls the system the Tri-synchro Regulator. Because the glide wheel drives the seconds hand directly, the hand sweeps instead of stepping.

No battery is involved. The mainspring powers everything, including the tiny circuit.

Twenty years of failure

The first prototype, built in 1982, ran for four hours. The IC simply drew too much power, about a hundred times what the final product would need, and the project was shelved. It came back in 1993 with more efficient chips, stalled again, and only in 1997, with components drawing around one hundredth of the earlier consumption, did the numbers finally work. That same year Seiko described Spring Drive in the Journal of the Swiss Society for Chronometry, and in 1998 it was shown at the Basel fair.

The first production watches went on sale in Japan in December 1999, limited manual wind pieces from Seiko and Credor, including the Credor GBLG999 and Seiko SBWA002. In September 2004 the first Grand Seiko Spring Drive automatic arrived as the SBGA001, and in 2005 automatic Spring Drive went on sale outside Japan.

Current standard calibers are rated to within plus or minus 15 seconds a month, roughly a second a day, with a 72 hour reserve. For Grand Seiko's 60th anniversary the calibre 9RA5 pushed that to five days of power and plus or minus 10 seconds a month, while cutting the movement depth from 5.8mm to 5.0mm.

Built in the mountains of Nagano

Every Grand Seiko Spring Drive is made at the Shinshu Watch Studio, inside a Seiko Epson facility in Shiojiri, Nagano Prefecture, with views of the Jonen and Hotaka ranges. The site descends from Suwa Seikosha, the same workshop that produced the first Grand Seiko in 1960. Suwa Seikosha became part of Epson through a 1985 merger. The studio makes the movements, cases, dials, hands and indexes in house. In 2000 Epson also set up the Micro Artist Studio at Shiojiri, a small team that builds the brand's most elaborate pieces.

The mountain setting is not just brochure copy. Grand Seiko has based dial textures on its surroundings. Its snowflake dial, created in 2005, takes its cue from the snow that covers the Shiojiri area for months each year and from the dial finish of a 1971 Suwa Seikosha watch known as the 56GS. It has become the dial people picture when they hear the name.

Zaratsu, or why the edges look wet

Spring Drive explains the movement. Zaratsu explains why a Grand Seiko case looks the way it does. A Seiko designer named Taro Tanaka wrote a strict set of rules, the Grammar of Design, governing case shapes, indices, hands and dials. The 1967 44GS was the first watch built to it, and the rules still apply.

Those rules demand large, flat, angled surfaces with mirror finishes, and Zaratsu is how you get them. A craftsman presses the case against a rotating disc and controls the angle and pressure by eye and by feel, reading heat, vibration and the wear of the abrasive through their fingertips. Done right, the polished plane shows no distortion at all, so a reflection runs across it like a sheet of water. Grand Seiko applies the same finish to the hands and applied indices, which is why the dial seems to flicker as you tilt your wrist.

It is slow work that takes years to learn, and Grand Seiko says only a few people in the world have the skill to do it at this level. Most Zaratsu is done on steel and titanium, with gold and platinum cases for the top collections.

Seiko's lineage runs through our Seiko SKX007 diver history and Casio's very different idea of Japanese toughness in the G-Shock DW-5000C story. For the Swiss reaction to quartz, read our Swatch and quartz crisis history. Browse more in watch history, Japan and the watches section. Grand Seiko's own Shinshu Watch Studio page and the Spring Drive entry on Wikipedia cover the technical detail.

Akahane's first prototype, in 1982, ran for four hours. The calibre 9RA5 that carries his idea today runs for five days.

In 1925 a Chicago barber named C.D. Murray started selling a thick, waxy, oil-based pomade out of his own shop. It held like cement and shone like a new car. It was also famously hard to wash out, so much so that the company's own website has recommended dishwashing liquid to get it off.

Chicago grease and Birmingham cream

Murray's Superior Pomade was aimed first at Black customers, and it found a much wider audience as it spread. In 1959 a Detroit pharmacist, Harry Berlin, began selling it from his drugstore and worked closely with the Murray family to market it. As of 2017 the pomade was still being made in Detroit. Royal Crown and other petroleum-heavy dressings sat beside it on barbershop shelves for decades.

Across the Atlantic, a different formula took over. In 1928 County Chemicals, working out of the Chemico Works on Bradford Street in Birmingham, England, launched Brylcreem. It was not a true grease. Brylcreem is an emulsion of water and mineral oil held together with beeswax, lighter than an American pomade but with the same high shine.

Brylcreem became shorthand for a whole generation of British men. During the Second World War, members of the Royal Air Force were nicknamed the Brylcreem boys. The cricketer and footballer Denis Compton, who played for Middlesex, England and Arsenal, became one of the first British sportsmen to earn serious endorsement money, and his face sold Brylcreem through the 1940s and 1950s. Its famous jingle, created by Hanley M. Norins of Young and Rubicam, sold the idea that a tiny amount went a long way.

How did the pompadour get its name?

The style that made pomade famous carries a name with almost nothing to do with it. Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, wore her hair swept back without much height at all. The label was applied in the twentieth century, and it stuck.

The men's pompadour arrived in the 1950s, carried by country singers, rock and roll stars and film actors. Elvis Presley was photographed with one in 1954. James Dean wore one too, and Little Richard took it as high as it could go. Most of it ran on Brylcreem or a tin of grease. The hair was pushed up and back off the forehead, combed into shape and polished until it reflected the stage lights.

The look belonged to a whole uniform, from cuffed selvedge jeans to white T-shirts. Our raw denim and selvedge guide covers the other half of that outfit. In the 1980s the rockabilly scene revived the pompadour, and psychobilly bands pushed it forward into the exaggerated quiff.

Why pomade went away

The heyday of pomade ran roughly from the 1930s through the 1960s. Then men grew their hair longer and wanted it to move. Drier, looser, more natural styles took over, and a product that left hair stiff and shining looked like something your father wore.

There was a practical problem too. Petroleum-based pomade got everywhere. It stained pillowcases and car seats, and it took several washes to clear. For a generation chasing the shaggy look, the trade was no longer worth it.

Water changes everything

The revival came from barbershops. In the 2000s Donnie Hawley, the barber behind the Hawleywood's shops, created Layrite, a water-soluble pomade designed to hold like wax and rinse out with water. It gave the vintage scene the look of grease without the week-long cleanup, and it opened the door for a wave of small brands.

Suavecito, based in Santa Ana, California, built its following through rockabilly and lowrider culture, with a skull logo and later a women's line called Suavecita. In Rotterdam, the barbers Leen and Bertus opened Schorem in 2007, a shop built around classic cuts and old-school service. Its house brand, Reuzel, takes its name from the Dutch word for lard, a wink at the animal-fat greases of the 1950s. The tins are color coded. Pink is the heavy grease, green the medium grease, and blue the water-soluble strong hold usually recommended to beginners.

Choosing and wearing it now

The choice comes down to hold, shine and how much you hate washing your hair. Oil-based pomades give the most authentic look and can be restyled through the day with a comb, but they build up and take real effort to rinse out. Water-based pomades wash out easily and are the friendlier place to start. Matte pastes and clays are the modern cousins, with hold and very little shine.

Work a small amount between your palms until it warms, apply from the back to the front so the front does not get overloaded, then comb into place. A fine-toothed comb gives the sharp lines of a 1950s side part. Fingers give a looser, modern finish. If grease is your choice, a clarifying shampoo once a week keeps the buildup in check. Keep the neck and sides sharp, which is where a good barber, a straight razor or our safety razor shaving guide comes in, and if you grow a beard alongside it, our beard care guide covers the rest.

The Brylcreem story on Wikipedia and the entry on Murray's Pomade are good starting points if you want the deeper history. For more, browse the Quiet Menace grooming section and our menswear history hub. And if you inherit a tin of Murray's from a grandfather, keep a bottle of dish soap by the shower. The company was not joking.

In 2016 Supreme sold a red clay brick stamped with its box logo for $30. It was a joke, and eBay listings reportedly climbed into the hundreds of dollars. That brick explains the sneaker resale market better than any spreadsheet. The retail price is a suggestion. The real price is whatever the second buyer will pay, and an entire industry now exists to set it.

Around 2021, widely reported estimates put the secondary sneaker market at about $10 billion, and StockX forecast it could reach close to $30 billion by 2030. That forecast is a company figure, so read it as a pitch as much as a measurement.

The consignment wall

Before the apps, there were shops. Flight Club opened in 2005 as one of the first consignment stores for sneakers, and it is often described as a museum, with its rarest pairs priced well into five figures.

Consignment is simple. A seller brings in a pair, the shop checks it, sets or agrees a price and puts it on the wall. When it sells, the shop keeps a commission and the seller gets the rest. The seller never has to meet the buyer. The buyer gets something close to a guarantee, because the store's reputation rides on every pair. Stadium Goods later built a similar business around reselling collectible models above their original retail.

The shops did something else. They made resale respectable. A wall of deadstock Jordans with price tags in the thousands turned the Air Jordan 1 and the Nike Dunk into assets with visible prices.

Detroit's stock market

StockX took that model online and gave it a trading screen. The company was founded in Detroit in 2015 and launched in February 2016. Its founders were Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, Greg Schwartz and Chris Kaufman. Luber had run Campless, a site that tracked rare sneaker prices, which Gilbert acquired before Luber moved from Philadelphia to Detroit to lead the new company.

The pitch was a stock market for things. Buyers place bids, sellers place asks, and when they meet the trade happens at that price. The seller then ships the pair to a StockX facility, where staff inspect it before sending it on. Counterfeits go back to the seller and the buyer gets a refund. StockX has run authentication centers in Detroit, Tempe, Moonachie in New Jersey, West London and Eindhoven. Historically the fees came in two layers, a transaction fee that drops as sellers do more volume and a payment processing fee.

The model scaled quickly. StockX raised money at a $1 billion valuation in June 2019, and in April 2021 Reuters reported a $255 million round that valued the company at more than $3.8 billion. StockX said it sold $1.8 billion in merchandise in 2020. It moved into electronics that November and announced NFT trading in January 2022.

GOAT grew into the other giant. TechCrunch reported in February 2017 that it had raised a further $25 million to expand its mobile marketplace, and the two are generally described as the platforms that dominate the market. eBay answered with an authentication program of its own for sneakers, which CNN covered in 2021.

Bots, raffles and the war at the front door

Resale needs supply, and supply means beating everyone else to retail. That is where bots come in, custom programs that hit release pages faster than any human can. The best bots are themselves sold in limited quantities and resold on forums and Discord servers for well above their original price. Small boutiques struggle most, because they lack the resources to keep the bots out.

Nike's answer was the SNKRS app, launched in 2015. It uses variations on a raffle, including timed draws, and over time it leaned more and more on draws instead of first-come, first-served sales. The results have been mixed. Raffles feel fairer, but they also make every pair feel scarcer, which only feeds the second market.

None of this is new. In Japan in the mid-1990s, demand for the Nike Air Max 95 ran so hot that it was linked to muggings and a flood of fakes. Collaborations made the effect sharper. The pairs from Virgil Abloh's The Ten and the Uniqlo shirts that KAWS released in 2019 were resale stories before they were fashion stories, and the most coveted low-run releases can trade at many times their original price.

Who wins

Brands have a complicated relationship with the market. Resale prices are free marketing, the clearest public proof that a shoe is hot. They also send profit to people the brand never sees. Stores like Kith built their reputations on making retail an event so that buying first-hand still felt special.

The buyer's side has changed most. Twenty years ago you needed to know a guy. Today you need an app, a card and patience while a pair travels through an authentication center. The StockX Wikipedia entry and the page on sneaker collecting cover the history. For more, explore our sneaker releases and sneaker history hubs, or the rest of our culture section.

Flight Club's rarest pairs carry five-figure tags. The Supreme brick cost $30. The market treats both numbers with exactly the same seriousness.

In 1925 two Danish engineers, Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen, started building radio equipment in the attic of the Olufsen family manor near Struer, in northwest Denmark. Their first product, the Eliminator, let a radio run off mains electricity instead of batteries. A hundred years later the company is still headquartered in Struer, still selling sound as sculpture.

A Ten-Kroner Logo

The early years had a design streak and a commercial blind spot. In 1934 Peter Bang designed the Hyperbo, a combined radio, gramophone and speaker in a black metal shell inspired by Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chair. It was gorgeous and almost nobody bought it. Design Week puts the total at 40 units, and only one is known to survive. If the Breuer connection interests you, our Bauhaus history covers the school that shaped him.

The logo came cheaper. In the early 1930s a 16-year-old painter's apprentice named Henning Dahl Mikkelsen drew it and asked for a fee of five kroner. Svend Olufsen liked the design so much that he paid him ten. Mikkelsen went on to become a well-known cartoonist, the creator of the syndicated comic strip Ferd'nand.

Jacob Jensen and the Beogram 4000

The B&O look most people picture comes from Jacob Jensen. Over 27 years he designed 234 products for the company, and he was the lead designer on most of its major products into the late 1980s. He worked in the same era as Dieter Rams at Braun, and the two make a useful pair. Rams pared things down to neutrality, while Jensen pared them down to glamour. Our feature on Dieter Rams and his ten principles covers the German side.

His masterpiece is the Beogram 4000 of 1972. The turntable used a tangential tonearm that tracked straight across the record, the way the cutting lathe did, rather than swinging in an arc. A second, smaller arm carried a photocell that detected whether a record was on the platter and how big it was, then set the speed and lowered the stylus on its own. You pressed a button and the machine did the rest.

The Museum of Modern Art paid attention early. In 1972 it added several Jensen designs for B&O to its Design Collection, including the Beolit 1000 radio and the Beomaster 1200 and 3000 receivers. Then from April 14 to June 18, 1978, MoMA ran Design for Sound by Jacob Jensen, one of very few shows the museum had ever devoted to a single company's products. Olivetti and Braun had been the earlier examples. The show used a later version of the turntable, the Beogram 4002 and 4004, as its emblem, which tells you which object the curators thought said it best. Jensen died in 2015, at 89.

David Lewis and the Glass Doors

B&O's next chief designer was British. David Lewis was born in London in 1939, settled in Denmark and took over the role in the early 1980s, working freelance from his own Copenhagen studio. Where Jensen built horizontal slabs, Lewis turned things on their side and made the mechanism part of the show.

He designed the Beosound Ouverture in 1991. Then came the BeoSound 9000 of 1996, a six-disc CD player with a radio that put all six discs on display side by side instead of hiding them in a drawer. An early version planned for ten discs before the team settled on six. Dazed reports that the idea came from CD cases in a London shop window. Lewis also designed televisions, including the Beovision Avant of the mid-1990s, and a long line of Beolab speakers. He died on November 8, 2011, at 72.

The BeoSound 9000 became a film prop as much as a hi-fi. Dazed has tracked its screen appearances from The Big Lebowski to About a Boy, along with B&O kit in The Dark Knight and No Time to Die. Set decorators reach for B&O for a reason. Nothing signals money and taste in a single frame quite like it.

A Hundred Years In

The modern company still swings for the fences. The BeoLab 90 of 2015, developed with the German consultancy Frackenpohl Poulheim, weighs about 137 kilograms per speaker, carries 18 drivers and can switch its sound from a narrow beam to an omnidirectional spread. On October 8, 2020, B&O announced the Beogram 4000c, 95 original 1970s turntables collected and fully restored at the Struer factory to mark its 95th year, each fitted with a new oak frame and a built-in phono preamp so it would plug straight into modern speakers. The company reached its centenary in 2025.

The Danish design story continues in our Copenhagen design guide and our piece on Arne Jacobsen's Egg Chair. For the Japanese answer to the turntable question, read our Technics SL-1200 history. More in the tech section, the audio hub and our heritage brands coverage.

Every one of those 95 restored Beogram 4000c decks was individually numbered and shipped in a solid oak box.

Two chairs were due to go under the hammer in Paris on June 25, 2026. They carried inventory markings, PU/Chem/55 and PGI/W/CH-0202, that tie them to Panjab University and to PGIMER, the city's postgraduate medical institute. Two days earlier, Chandigarh registered two criminal cases over them, and after New Delhi intervened through diplomatic channels the sale was put on hold.

Furniture for a New Capital

The chairs were designed as office equipment. After independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Le Corbusier to plan a new city, and Le Corbusier turned to his cousin and longtime partner Pierre Jeanneret to furnish it. Jeanneret, born in Geneva on March 22, 1896, had run a practice with Le Corbusier since 1922, and from 1927 to 1937 Charlotte Perriand worked alongside them at the studio on rue de Sèvres in Paris. The partnership broke during the war, when Jeanneret joined the French Resistance and Le Corbusier worked with the Vichy government. Chandigarh brought them back together.

The government complex went up between 1951 and 1965. Jeanneret spent more than a decade on site as the city's chief architect, advising the local government and designing buildings of his own, including Gandhi Bhawan and the library at Panjab University. He also produced a huge range of designs for chairs, tables, cabinets and lamps, for every grade of employee from judges to janitors. The signature detail is the compass leg, a pair of angled supports that splay like a drafting compass. Frames were mostly solid teak or rosewood, and seats were often woven cane.

Credit is messier than the auction catalogs suggest. The designer Eulie Chowdhury and other Indian designers worked on the furniture, authorship was not documented, and Maristella Casciato, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, has said Chowdhury managed production. The pieces were made by small carpentry workshops across Punjab, using cheap local materials, with no known pattern book. Popular models stayed in production for decades, which is part of why nobody can say with confidence how many pieces exist. Jeanneret died on December 4, 1967, and his ashes were scattered on Sukhna Lake. His house, No. 57 in Sector 5, opened as a museum on what would have been his 121st birthday in 2017.

From Scrap Pile to Saleroom

For decades the furniture did its job and was replaced when it broke. In the late 1990s French dealers found discarded pieces piled in Chandigarh's streets and buildings and persuaded officials to auction them off. They bought from scrap dealers, junkyards and government sales at low prices. India's export rules defined antiques as objects over 100 years old, and this furniture was not even 50, so nothing stopped it from leaving.

The market built fast. By the mid-2000s the big New York auction houses were offering Chandigarh lots, and Christie's even sold a cast-iron Chandigarh manhole cover designed by Le Corbusier. The Paris dealers most associated with the material include François Laffanour of Galerie Downtown, Patrick Seguin, Philippe Jousse and Eric Touchaleaume of Galerie 54, and a 2010 book on the furniture helped make it a category. In 2013 the artist Amie Siegel traced the trade in her film Provenance, which Christie's then auctioned in London. It is the mid-century modern equivalent of the sneaker resale economy, a utilitarian object turned into a collectible by scarcity and a story.

The Fakes Problem

This is where buying gets dangerous. No foundation polices production or verifies provenance, Jeanneret never filed patents, and no exclusive license exists. The Wall Street Journal's 2019 investigation, by Sarah Medford, laid out the problem in detail. Listings labeled Jeanneret ranged from real pieces to honest reproductions to outright knockoffs, and online they are hard to tell apart.

The paper's sources described several tricks. Some makers leave new chairs outdoors for a year to age them. The designer Billy Cotton bought a desk that turned out to be fake, and the giveaways were joints that were too precise for handwork, wood on the underside that was too uniform and a finish that looked too new under its fake patina. Christie's specialist Michael Jefferson described what he called gene-splicing, building a whole chair around a single original arm. Laffanour said that some restored pieces had been heavily reconstructed. Even the source is not clean. The paper reported that inmates at Chandigarh's central jail had at one point been making new batches of chairs.

Authentic pieces often carry crudely painted or stenciled codes, like HCS/CT.18, for High Court Secretariat, coffee table number 18. The same advice applies here as with an Eames Lounge Chair or anything else in our design coverage. Buy from a dealer who will put the provenance in writing, and assume that a cheap one is not what it says.

Cassina launched an Hommage à Pierre Jeanneret collection developed with his heirs. Phantom Hands, a Bangalore workshop, makes its own re-editions in teak and cane. Neither pretends to be vintage.

India Pushes Back

Back in Chandigarh, the outflow became a scandal. In 2011 India's Ministry of Home Affairs issued a letter meant to stop sales and exports of the furniture, and the Capitol Complex became part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2016. The legal position stayed weak. In a December 2021 reply reported by the Tribune, the Archaeological Survey of India said the furniture did not count as an antiquity or art treasure under the 1972 Antiquities and Art Treasures Act and that it might not be able to act against foreign sales. Reports since 2015 describe thefts from Panjab University and the Government College of Art and Craft, and organized gangs swapping originals for replicas before smuggling them out.

The Tribune reported that the June 2026 cases were the first criminal action of their kind, after more than 100 international auctions of Chandigarh furniture since 2009. A week earlier, seven pieces had sold in Brussels for about Rs 1.6 crore. The administration also asked the Ministry of External Affairs to work with French authorities to stop the sale and help repatriate the chairs if they had been removed unlawfully.

For anyone who loves this furniture, the uncomfortable fact is that the stenciled code that proves a chair is real also proves whose it was. Donald Judd, who counted Le Corbusier as an influence, is in our Marfa furniture story, and Chandigarh's concrete belongs in any history of postwar architecture.

PU/Chem/55 reads like an inventory number from a chemistry department at Panjab University. Somebody in Chandigarh is now asking for it back.

Aritsugu started out in 1560 as the workshop of the swordsmith Fujiwara Aritsugu. Today it sells kitchen knives and pots from a narrow shopfront on Nishikikoji-dori, inside Nishiki Market, to customers who range from Kyoto's top chefs to home cooks buying their first gyuto. The staff will sharpen what you bought, and that after-sales care is the part most visitors overlook. In Kyoto a well-made thing is expected to last, and the shop that sold it is expected to keep it working.

A city that kept its trades

Kyoto was Japan's imperial capital for centuries, and its crafts grew up to serve the court, the temples and the tea ceremony. The Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design counts traditional Kyoto crafts in 74 categories, from pottery, paper and lacquer to dolls, lanterns, prayer beads, confectionery and Buddhist altars.

That number hides a hard decline. Output in Nishijin, the city's historic weaving district, has shrunk dramatically since the 1970s, and demand for traditional crafts in general has fallen sharply. The ones that have survived have usually done it by finding new customers without abandoning the old methods, which is the most useful lens for a visitor. You are not here to see crafts preserved behind glass. You are here to see them still being sold.

HOSOO is the textbook case. The company was founded in Nishijin in 1688, and its ninth-generation head, Tokujiro Hosoo, expanded into kimono in 1923. The family is still in charge. Masataka Hosoo is the 12th-generation master, which puts more than three centuries of one family's weaving behind every bolt of cloth.

Tea caddies at the slow end

If you only see one workshop's work, make it Kaikado. The company has made chazutsu, metal tea caddies, in Kyoto's Shimogyo ward since 1875, and it is widely described as the oldest maker of handmade tea canisters in Japan. It marked its 150th anniversary in 2025. Takahiro Yagi, born in 1974, is the sixth-generation head. He began his apprenticeship under his father in 2000.

The caddies are shaped by hand from copper, brass or tinplate in more than 130 steps, using a method that goes back to the first generation and is still passed from craftsman to craftsman. The real pleasure comes later. Copper darkens and brass mellows with handling, so a caddy bought now will look different in ten years, and better.

Kaikado keeps its main store in Shimogyo near the Kawaramachi Rokujo crossing, and it also runs Kaikado Café in a former streetcar depot on Kawaramachi-dori, a short walk away. Our story on Grand Seiko and Zaratsu polishing covers the same Japanese obsession with hand finishing applied to steel watch cases.

Canvas, incense and a menswear detour

Kyoto craft is not only for the kitchen and the tea room. Ichizawa Shinzaburo Hanpu, a family business founded in 1905, built its name on hand-sewn canvas totes, backpacks and work bags with the stiff, honest weight of something designed to carry tools. Kyukyodo, founded in 1663, made its reputation on incense, stationery and calligraphy supplies. Both are old enough that their histories are part of the city's, and both are worth looking up before you go.

For a contemporary detour, TT opened in December 2021 in an early twentieth-century townhouse just off the main street of Gion, with a boutique for Taiga Takahashi's clothes, modeled on garments a century old, a gallery for his sculpture and a tea room upstairs that took reservations. Takahashi died the following year, so check that it is still trading before you plan around it. At its best it made the case that craft and clothing are the same conversation. If you are building a Japan trip around clothes, pair it with our streetwear guide to Tokyo's Ura-Harajuku and our raw and selvedge denim guide.

How to plan a craft trip

Start at the Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design in the basement of the Miyako Messe exhibition hall in Okazaki. It shows around 200 newly made objects across the 74 craft categories, the displays change with the seasons, almost everything is for sale and there is a live demonstration every day, from candle making and bamboo work to yuzen dyeing. The official Kyoto tourism guide to the museum has the details. Use it as a map, then go and find the makers.

Book ahead for anything hands-on. Some workshops take visitors and many do not, and arrangements change, so treat nothing on this list as permanent. Check each shop's own website for current details before you go, and be ready for small stores to close one or two days a week.

Bring patience, and treat shop staff as experts rather than salespeople. Ask how a piece is made and how to care for it. That conversation is often the best thing you take home. For more on Japanese design in the home, see our piece on Isamu Noguchi's Akari lamps and coffee table and our look at Tadao Ando's architecture.

More in our Japan coverage, our city guides and the full Travel section.

Back at Aritsugu, ask how they would sharpen the knife you are buying and when you should bring it in. A knife from this shop is meant to come back.

In 1865 the Harvard baseball team added an Old English H to its gray flannel shirts. It was a uniform detail, nothing more, the kind of thing a team does so the crowd knows who is batting. Within a few years players badly wanted to keep that letter, and a century and a half later it is sewn on jackets worn by people who have never played anything.

Which makes the varsity jacket an odd thing to own. It was designed to be earned. Almost everyone who wears one now has bought it.

An H worth keeping

Harvard's football team took up the H in 1875. For roughly 25 years after the letter first appeared, team captains let players who had taken the field in the big games, against Yale or Princeton, keep their H jerseys. Everyone else handed theirs back. That rule, according to the history of the varsity letter, is probably where the letter as an award begins. The cloth was the prize. The shirt was just what it happened to be sewn on.

In 1891 the baseball team started regularly wearing a letter sweater, black with a small crimson H on the left breast. The idea spread fast. By 1911 a yearbook from Phoenix Union High School, in what was then still Arizona Territory, showed a student in a V-neck sweater with a P on the front, the earliest known high school example. For about forty years, from the 1890s to the 1930s, the sweater was the standard way to wear a letter. Some schools also handed out stadium blankets in the 1920s and 1930s.

From sweater to jacket

The jacket we know took shape in the 1930s. Lettered wool jackets with leather sleeves in a contrasting color, finished with chenille letters, appeared on campuses and quickly became the look. The combination made practical sense. Wool kept a body warm in a cold stadium, leather sleeves stood up to wear at the cuffs and elbows, and the thick looped chenille made a letter you could read from the far side of the field.

That basic recipe barely changed. A modern varsity jacket still has a wool body, leather sleeves, a snap front and striped knit trim at the collar, cuffs and hem. The only real update is practical. Some letterman makers now add an inside pocket sized for a phone.

The jacket also kept its social weight. A letter on your chest meant you had played, and in American high schools the jacket became a kind of portable résumé. It sat alongside the campus staples of the era, from the oxford button-down to the hooded sweatshirt, which Champion first made as a sideline layer for athletes, as we cover in our history of the Reverse Weave hoodie.

A San Francisco maker

One maker with a long run in the category is Golden Bear Sportswear in San Francisco. Its first customers, in 1922, were the city's longshoremen, who needed coats that would stand up to the wind off the bay, and it worked out of a workshop on Howard Street. About two decades later it introduced a bomber jacket inspired by World War II fighter pilots, and the varsity jacket followed as the bomber's younger brother, as Mr Porter put it in a profile of the brand.

Golden Bear supplied varsity jackets to local schools and motorcycle jackets to the local police, and its client list grew well beyond both. David Letterman designed custom jackets with the company during his run on the Late Show, which is either a coincidence or the best joke in the business. The company still makes jackets by hand in San Francisco, now on Potrero Avenue.

If you want a military cousin with the same short, rib-trimmed shape, read our history of the MA-1 flight jacket. Golden Bear made both, for very different customers.

How hip-hop took the letter

The jacket's second life began off campus. In the 1980s hip-hop adopted the varsity jacket, and in the 2010s it did so again. Avirex, Phat Farm and Rocawear all made their own versions. The move made sense. A varsity jacket is already a garment about belonging and status, and hip-hop style has always been fluent in both, as our piece on hip-hop and menswear explains.

The letter no longer has to mean you played. It can stand for a label, a crew, a city or nothing at all, and the jacket still reads as American from a block away.

Buying one

Go for wool and real leather if you can, because the whole appeal is how the two materials age differently. A plain jacket with no letter is easier to wear than one with somebody else's school on the front. Keep the fit close at the hip. A baggy varsity jacket looks borrowed, which may be intended, but it is not the original shape. More classic American clothing is on our menswear history hub and in the Style section.

The newest feature on a letterman jacket is that phone pocket. The wool, the leather and the fat chenille letter would all be familiar to a halfback in 1935.

In 2012, at Salomon's Advanced Week in Greece, the South African ultrarunner Ryan Sandes tested a new trail shoe. It became the S/LAB XT-6, and Sandes went on to wear it at the Western States 100, the Leadville 100 and Fish River Canyon. Within a decade the same shoe was on the walls of Dover Street Market and on the feet of people whose longest run is to catch a train.

Built for Ultras

The XT-6 came out of S/LAB, the Salomon team that builds shoes and apparel for elite trail athletes. Its family tree runs back through the XT-5 and XT-4 to the XT Wings. Patrick Leick, who runs Salomon's service to athletes, began customizing the original XT Wings for top runners, and he has described the six generations as small evolutions that kept what was working. The release year depends on who you ask. Salomon's own athletes were testing it in 2012, and many histories put the launch in 2013. Benjamin Grenet, Salomon's lead footwear designer, drew it. The full original name, S/LAB XT-6 Softground, spells out the brief. This was a shoe for mud and soft mountain ground, with enough protection for races that run through the night and well into the next day.

The spec sheet explains the look. A SensiFit cradle wraps the midfoot, Quicklace cinches with a single pull, EnergyCell foam handles cushioning, and an aggressive outsole with multidirectional lugs grips mud and loose rock. The breathable mesh upper is caged in TPU overlays. In Salomon's telling, Grenet wanted the design to magnify the technology and make it visible, which is the same instinct that put a window in the Nike Air Max 1.

François D'Haene was one of the athletes who used it. His wins include the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in 2012, 2014 and 2017 and the Diagonale des Fous on Réunion in 2016 and 2018, and he has said the XT-6 was among the first shoes he wore on the Salomon team.

From Annecy to Paris

Salomon was founded in 1947 by François Salomon and his family in Annecy, in southeastern France, and made skis and then bindings long before it made running shoes. adidas bought the company in 1997, and the Finnish group Amer Sports took it over in 2005. None of that history pointed toward fashion.

The turn came through Paris. In 2015 the boutique The Broken Arm collaborated with Salomon, and around the same time Jean-Philippe Lalonde, who had worked on Veilance, the city line from Arc'teryx, launched the Salomon Advanced division. Going through past seasons, he found a box of S/LAB XT-6s. His insight was about color. Take the shoe out of racing palettes, put it in muted or tonal ones, and it stops reading as race equipment and starts reading as design. A couple of years later Lalonde had the XT-6 in Dover Street Market.

Why Did Fashion Want Trail Shoes?

Part of the answer is comfort. Part of it is that technical gear looks honest in a way most sneakers no longer do. A shoe built to survive a hundred miles of Alpine trail carries a kind of authority that a retro basketball shoe, rereleased for the fortieth time, can't fake. That is the same logic behind the fleece revival we cover in Patagonia Synchilla and gorpcore and the technical outerwear of the Stone Island compass badge.

The collaborations followed fast. Boris Bidjan Saberi worked with Salomon in the mid 2010s, and later partners included Comme des Garçons, Beams, Wander, Hidden NY, Carhartt WIP, Madhappy, End., KITH in 2022 and atmos in March 2023. MM6 Maison Margiela worked with the brand on its own shoe, the Cross Low. Our histories of Kith and Ronnie Fieg and of the sneaker resale economy explain how a shoe goes from niche to sold out, and by 2023 Salomon pairs were trading on resale sites like any other hyped sneaker.

The Shoe of the Moment

The XT-6 works in a city for the same reasons it worked on a trail. It is light, it grips wet pavement, and the Quicklace means it goes on and comes off in seconds. Paired with wide trousers and a technical shell, it makes the look. With Carhartt WIP workwear it reads more practical than precious. If the New Balance 990 is the commuter's shoe, the XT-6 is the one for the weekend that might involve a hill. The loud racing colorways are still around, too, and they are worth a look for anyone who finds the tonal pairs a little too polite.

Salomon tells the story in its own feature on the XT-6, from trailblazer to fashion icon. The rest of the trail-to-street crossover is in our streetwear archive and the sneakers section.

Pull the Quicklace toggle on a pair bought for the city and it does exactly what it did for D'Haene on the trails around Mont Blanc. One tug and the shoe is locked.

On Christmas Day 1969, Seiko put the 35SQ Astron on sale in Japan, the first analog quartz wristwatch you could actually buy. Switzerland did not panic right away. It had about 1,600 watch companies and around 90,000 people working in the industry in 1970. By 1984 that workforce had fallen to a little over 30,000. The comeback started with a cheap plastic watch.

The Swiss saw it coming

The bitter part is that the Swiss were not caught off guard by the technology. In 1962 a group of firms founded the Swiss Horological Center, the CEH, in Neuchâtel, specifically to develop electronic watches. In 1967 it presented the Beta 21, a quartz prototype. Electronic timekeeping was not new either. Hamilton had sold an electric watch in 1957, and Bulova's tuning fork Accutron arrived in 1960.

What the Swiss did not do was commit. The industry was built around mechanical craft and a huge number of small firms, exactly the structure cheap quartz punished. Japan led on volume, and quartz watches that first cost around $100 eventually cost a few dollars. A world recession in the 1970s made a bad situation worse.

Two giants on life support

Swiss watchmaking was dominated by two groups. SSIH, formed in 1930 when Omega and Tissot merged, and ASUAG, formed in 1931 with help from the Swiss government and the banks. By the end of the 1970s both were in serious trouble. SSIH's creditor banks took control of it in 1981, and ASUAG went the same way the following year.

Enter a consultant. Nicolas Hayek, born in Beirut in 1928, ran his own industrial consultancy in Zurich, Hayek Engineering. Commissioned in the early 1980s to restructure SSIH and ASUAG, he recommended merging them. In 1983 SSIH and ASUAG combined into one holding company. In 1985 a group of investors led by Hayek, including Stephan Schmidheiny, bought a majority stake from the banks, and in 1986 the business became SMH with Hayek in charge.

Fifty-one parts

The product that changed the math came from ETA, ASUAG's movement maker. Ernst Thomke returned to run ETA in 1978. Under him, two engineers, Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller, developed the concept for a radically simplified quartz watch. Thomke's team had already built the Delirium, a luxury quartz watch, which showed what ETA could do at the top end. The Swatch went the other way, but it borrowed the Delirium's key trick of using the case itself as the base plate for the movement.

It used 51 components, against about 150 in a traditional watch, in a plastic case. It was meant to be disposable, cheap enough to buy as a second watch, which is where the name came from.

The Swatch was presented in Zurich on March 1, 1983. About two years after launch, sales had reached four million, and by 1988 the total had passed 50 million.

Fashion, not horology

The trick was that Swatch never sold itself as a watch company. It sold color, design and constant novelty. New designs kept coming, artists designed limited editions, and the marketing was loud. The company hung giant 13 ton Swatches on skyscrapers in Frankfurt, New York and Tokyo. A Swiss watch became something you bought on impulse, in multiples, to match an outfit, the way people would later buy sneakers from a Supreme drop.

The volume business funded everything else. SMH bought Blancpain in 1992, renamed itself the Swatch Group in 1998, and bought Breguet in 1999, with Hayek installing himself as Breguet's CEO. Omega, already inside SSIH, came along for the ride, which is why the Omega Speedmaster and the 2022 MoonSwatch sit in the same corporate family. Hayek died suddenly in June 2010. By 2002 about 650 Swiss watch companies remained, and 90 percent of the watches made in Switzerland were quartz.

What the crisis really changed

The quartz crisis is usually told as a story about technology, but the bigger change was in what a watch was for. Once a cheap quartz watch kept better time than an expensive mechanical one, accuracy stopped being a reason to buy luxury. It is no accident that the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak in 1972 and the Patek Philippe Nautilus in 1976 were sold on design and status rather than precision. Seiko, meanwhile, spent decades on Grand Seiko's Spring Drive, a hybrid that ties a mainspring to a quartz regulator. The industry kept both stories alive. Swatch sold disposable fun, and the same group sold mechanical prestige.

Read more in watch history, industrial design and the Quiet Menace watches section. Swissinfo's history of the quartz revolution has the employment figures, and Revolution's profile of Swatch and Hayek covers the launch.

The number that sums it up is 51, the part count on the first Swatch, and the name Swatch later gave to its Sistem51, a mechanical movement with the same count of parts, all assembled by machine.

In Skyfall, released in 2012, Naomie Harris's Eve shaves Daniel Craig's James Bond with a straight razor in his hotel room. There is no gunfire in the scene, just lather and a steady hand. It still did something unusual for a Bond film. Retailers reported a jump in straight razor sales afterward, as men went looking for a blade their great-grandfathers had abandoned.

From Sheffield to the scrap drawer

The steel-edged folding razor is a Sheffield invention. Sheffield was making the first steel-edged cutthroat razors by 1680, and for more than two centuries the cutthroat was how most men got shaved, at home or at the barber's chair. By 1740 Benjamin Huntsman was making razors with hollow-ground blades of cast steel, using a process he had developed himself. The French adopted it first. English makers came round only after watching it succeed across the Channel.

Then came the safety razor. King C. Gillette's double-edge design, with blades cheap enough to throw away, needed almost no skill, and it is the story we tell in our safety razor and wet shaving guide. Electric shavers took more ground from the 1950s. As men learned to shave themselves, the barbershop shave faded too, and the straight razor slid into the back of the drawer.

It never vanished. Barbers kept using them, and a handful of European workshops kept forging new ones.

Solingen and Thiers

Two names carry most of the weight today. DOVO was founded in 1906 by two men named Dorp and Voos, in Wald, a town later absorbed into Solingen, Germany's blade city. It began as a pure razor factory, with its own forge and hollow grinding. Fritz Bracht took over shortly before the Second World War, and a small knight with sword and hammer became the company's mark. The DOVO company history traces the rest, including the string of brands it acquired after the war.

In France, Pierre Thiers founded Thiers-Issard in 1884 in Thiers, a cutlery town in the Auvergne. He joined his surname to his wife's family name. The company is known for an old lead-hardening process that French law allows it to keep using, and for its singing razors, hollow ground so thin that the blade rings when you pluck it. Gilles Reynewaeter bought the business in 1985.

There is a good argument that these razors belong with the other objects built once and built right. A DOVO and a Rolex Submariner share a basic truth. Look after them and they outlive you.

What are you actually buying?

A straight razor is a simple object with a surprising vocabulary. The handle is a pair of scales, held to the blade by a pivot pin. The tang is the small tail you hold while shaving. The spine runs along the back of the blade, the edge along the front, and the point at the far end. The heel sits where the edge begins, near the shank, and the toe is its front corner.

Width is measured in eighths of an inch, usually from 3/8 to 7/8. A 5/8 blade is the most popular size, wide enough to hold lather and narrow enough to reach under the nose. Then there is the grind. A wedge or flat grind is heavier and stiffer, forgiving on thick beards. A hollow grind is thinner and flexes slightly, which gives more feedback and a closer shave but asks more of the shaver. The point matters for beginners. A round point, sometimes called a Dutch point, is the gentle choice. Square and spike points are sharper at the corners and easier to nick yourself with.

If you are starting out, buy a 5/8 round point with a half-hollow or full-hollow grind, and buy it shave ready from a reputable seller.

Strop, hone, repeat

The blade is the easy part. The maintenance is where men give up.

Before each shave, the edge is stropped on leather. Stropping does not sharpen. It realigns the edge, and it should be done with almost no pressure, spine always leading so you never drag the edge into the leather. Every so often, depending on how often you shave and how well you strop, the razor needs honing on a stone to restore the edge itself. Many owners send their razors out for a professional hone rather than learning it at home.

Steel choice changes the routine. Carbon steel takes a keen edge and hones easily but will rust if left wet. Stainless resists corrosion but is harder to hone. Dry the blade fully after every shave and leave it open until it is bone dry.

The shavette option

If maintenance sounds like a second job, there is the shavette. It looks like a straight razor but holds a replaceable blade, and in some places barbers are required to use them for hygiene reasons, while other jurisdictions still allow traditional blades. Japanese maker Feather, founded in 1932 and producing blades in Seki, Gifu, is a common name here, with its Artist Club range.

A shavette is a decent teacher, but it can be harsher than a well-honed traditional blade. Go slowly, keep the angle low, about 30 degrees, and never shave against the grain on the first few attempts. If your skin reacts with lasting irritation or bumps, our beard care guide has dermatologist-backed advice, and a board-certified dermatologist can help if the problem persists.

The straight razor entry on Wikipedia goes deep on grinds and points. For more, browse the Quiet Menace grooming section and our heritage brands hub, or pair your shave with the pomade and pompadour history that came with it. And when you buy your first razor, buy the strop the same day. A blade with no strop is just an expensive way to cut yourself.

The first thing people noticed was the length. Fear of God's early T-shirts ran extra long, and that was enough for Big Sean's stylist to start paying attention. Kanye West saw the same shirts, and a few weeks later he called Jerry Lorenzo. Lorenzo traveled to Atlantic City to meet him, and the meeting turned into work on West's collaboration with the French label A.P.C.

It is a very 2010s origin story. One garment, cut a little differently, travels from a stylist to a superstar and becomes a brand.

The ballplayer's son

Lorenzo was born Jerry Lorenzo Manuel Jr. on October 5, 1977, in Sacramento, California. His father is Jerry Manuel, the former major league player, coach and manager, and Lorenzo spent much of his childhood moving with his father's baseball jobs. He earned a bachelor's degree at Florida A&M and an MBA at Loyola University Chicago, working part time in the sales department at Diesel while he studied.

The early career looked nothing like fashion. He worked on corporate sponsorships for the Los Angeles Dodgers and at a sports marketing agency. In 2008 he began promoting parties in Los Angeles, and those nights drew people like Virgil Abloh, Pusha T and Kid Cudi. The same year he started managing the outfielder Matt Kemp, with a focus on Kemp's image and styling.

Baseball never left the work. Lorenzo's seventh Fear of God collection paid tribute to the Negro Leagues, with pieces that drew on his father's decades in the game.

Fourteen thousand dollars

Lorenzo started Fear of God with a budget of $14,000 and no formal fashion training. The name comes from his Christian faith, which he has said inspired it.

The influences were clear from the start. Kanye West, whose own move into fashion was happening in parallel. Kurt Cobain, for the flannel and the worn-in denim. Allen Iverson, for the way he made basketball style feel personal. And Rick Owens, whose Dunks sneakers Lorenzo bought in 2006, a purchase that showed him a basketball shoe could live in the luxury world. Put those together and you get the Fear of God look. Oversized, layered, washed-out colors, very expensive fabric made to feel like something you had owned for ten years.

It was a California answer to the downtown New York streetwear Supreme had defined, slower and softer, and it suits the Los Angeles that runs through our Los Angeles Fairfax Avenue guide.

On tour with Bieber

The broadest exposure came from music. For Justin Bieber's Purpose World Tour in 2016, Lorenzo designed five custom stage looks and helped design the tour merchandise. The merch drew on Cobain's wardrobe, graphic T-shirts, flannel overshirts and denim, and it helped make tour merch look like real clothing. It sits in a long line of musicians shaping menswear, traced in our history of hip-hop and menswear.

Essentials, Vans and Nike

The sneakers came next. In 2017 Lorenzo reworked the Vans Era 95 with an all-over print. In 2018 Nike released his signature Air Fear of God 1, a basketball shoe built with the same lux casual attitude as the clothes. The timing was perfect. Virgil Abloh's The Ten had just shown that a designer's name on a Nike could move the whole market, and the Air Fear of God 1 landed in that window.

Also in 2018 he launched Essentials, a subsidiary line that Vogue described as a competitively priced sister label. Essentials is where most people met the brand, usually in a hoodie or a plain tee, and its staples sit neatly beside the classics in our hoodie history. It was a smart split. The main collection stayed rare and expensive. Essentials took the silhouette to everyone else.

The Adidas chapter

In 2020 Lorenzo moved on from Nike and became Global Head of Adidas Basketball, an unusual job for someone who had come up through T-shirts and tour merch. It was also a logical one for a ballplayer's son who had spent a decade proving that basketball, faith and Los Angeles could share a wardrobe.

The move changed the shape of the business. A label that started with one oversized tee now worked on three levels, the main collection at the top, Essentials in the middle and a sportswear partnership with one of the two biggest names in athletic footwear. Few independent American designers of his generation have had that kind of reach, and fewer still got there without a fashion school on the résumé. Lorenzo's route ran through a baseball clubhouse, a business school and a nightclub door instead.

For more, read Jerry Lorenzo's Wikipedia entry, explore our streetwear and luxury fashion hubs, or head back to the culture section.

The T-shirts still run a little long. That was the first idea, and it is still the one you notice.

Matsushita Electric introduced the Technics SL-1200 in October 1972. It was a direct-drive record player aimed at the middle of the hi-fi market, built to play albums in living rooms with as little wow, flutter and motor noise as possible. Nobody marketed it to DJs. Within a decade, DJs had made it theirs.

Direct Drive, Explained

A belt-drive turntable spins its platter with a rubber belt looped around a small motor. The SL-1200 had no belt. Its motor magnet sat directly under the platter, wrapped around the spindle, so the motor and the platter were effectively the same rotating part. A team led by Shuichi Obata developed the deck in 1971 as an evolution of earlier Technics designs, with a servo system keeping the speed steady.

The practical result was torque. The platter came up to speed almost instantly and held it under load. For a home listener that meant consistent pitch. For anyone who wanted to put a hand on the record, it meant something much more interesting. DJs found that they could drag a record back and forth by hand while the motor kept the platter at the correct speed, and that discovery fed directly into scratching.

The MK2 Changes Everything

The model that made the legend was the SL-1200MK2, which arrived at the end of the 1970s. It swapped the original speed dial for a pitch slider, added quartz-locked speed control and improved the braking, so a record stopped and started exactly when you told it to. That made it ideal for riding the pitch to match two records by ear. Discos and radio stations bought it. So did hip-hop DJs in New York, and the deck became part of how that music was made.

Slipmats did the rest. A felt disc between the platter and the vinyl let a DJ hold the record still while the platter kept spinning underneath, then release it on the beat. With quartz-controlled speed and a slider for fine adjustment, beat-mixing in a live set became reliable rather than heroic. The MK2 and its successors became the most common DJ and scratch decks in the world, the hardware equivalent of a uniform.

That ubiquity was its own advantage. A touring DJ could walk into almost any club booth and find the same pair of decks, set up the same way, with the same feel under the hand. Nobody had to relearn anything at two in the morning. One period review even pointed out that the MK2 was never intended as a DJ deck, which by then hardly mattered. The style that grew up around those booths is part of our hip-hop menswear history.

The DMC World DJ Championships made the association official in gold. Winners received 24-karat gold-plated Technics turntables as prizes.

Three Million Decks Later

Technics kept iterating without breaking what worked. The MK3 arrived in 1989, the MK5 in 2000 and the MK6 in 2008, each with refinements to finishes, tonearm damping and pitch control. Some editions became collector pieces. The SL-1200GLD of 2004 was limited to 3,000 units to mark three million turntables sold in the line's first three decades.

The decks were also absurdly durable. Plenty of 1970s units are still in heavy use, and the SL-1200's Wikipedia entry notes that an SL-1210MK2 belongs to the Science Museum in London as part of its Modern World collection. That is a long way from a hi-fi showroom.

Then, on November 1, 2010, Panasonic announced it was ending production of Technics analog turntables, delivering the news through a statement to the DMC championships. It looked like the end of the line.

The Comeback

It lasted about five years. At CES 2016 Panasonic announced the Grand Class SL-1200GAE, limited to 1,200 units for the Technics brand's 50th anniversary, with a magnesium tonearm and a new motor design. The standard SL-1200G followed later that year, and the lighter SL-1200GR came in January 2017.

The model aimed squarely at DJs again was the SL-1200MK7, unveiled at CES in January 2019. It added reverse play, adjustable motor torque and adjustable start and stop speeds. In 2021 Panasonic moved all of its turntable production from Japan to Malaysia. Some reviewers found it lighter and less solid than the old Japanese-built decks. DJs bought it anyway.

The SL-1200 belongs next to the other machines that rewired how people listen. Read about portable sound in our Sony Walkman history, the Danish take on the turntable in our Bang & Olufsen design history, and a very different instrument in the Teenage Engineering OP-1. Browse more in the tech section, the audio hub and our music coverage. Technics itself is at technics.com.

The 1972 SL-1200 had no reverse button and no reason for one. The 2019 MK7 has one, because the people who kept the line alive were never the people it was built for.

In the mid-1970s a young architect in Osaka finished a small two-story house in Sumiyoshi in cast-in-place concrete. He had no architecture degree. He had spent a short spell as a boxer. In 1979 the Architectural Institute of Japan gave the Row House in Sumiyoshi its top prize, and Tadao Ando was on his way.

The Self-Taught Route

Ando was born in the Osaka area in September 1941, the elder of twin boys. From about the age of two he was raised by his maternal grandmother, and he took her surname, Ando. He was not interested in school. After the brief run in the ring, he taught himself architecture by working for short stints with designers and city planners, and at around 18 he went to look at the temples and tea houses of Kyoto and Nara. Through the 1960s he made study trips to Europe and the United States. In 1969 he set up his own office in Osaka, the city he has never really left.

That self-education matters to the work. The lessons came from buildings rather than lectures, and his projects keep returning to things you can only learn by standing inside old Japanese spaces, the way a wall frames a view and how light moves across a plain surface over a day. If you want to see the sources yourself, our Kyoto craft guide is a decent starting point.

The Row House itself is tiny, and the sources cannot even agree on the year. Most references say it was completed in 1976, though other dates turn up, and the Pritzker's laureate page files it under its other name, Azuma House, with a date of 1977. What nobody disputes is the concrete. From there Ando built Rokko Housing in Kobe, a scheme whose first phase had 20 units and whose second, on the next site and a decade later, had 50.

Water, Light and a Lot of Concrete

The run of buildings from the late 1980s made his name abroad. The Church on the Water in Tomamu, Hokkaido, came in 1988. The Church of the Light in Ibaraki, Osaka Prefecture, followed in 1989, and the Water Temple on Awaji Island in 1991. For Expo '92 in Seville he built the Japan Pavilion largely in wood, a reminder that he is not a one-material architect, even if the concrete gets all the photographs.

In 1992 Benesse House opened on the island of Naoshima in Kagawa Prefecture, and it began a relationship that has lasted more than three decades. The Chichu Art Museum opened there in 2004. In spring 2025 the Naoshima New Museum of Art opened on a hilltop near the Honmura district, showing work by artists from across Asia, and according to the Benesse Art Site it is his tenth building among the island's art facilities. For anyone interested in how Japan presents art, Naoshima is the clearest case study there is.

In 1995 Ando won the Pritzker Prize, presented to him on May 22 at the Grand Trianon in Versailles. He was the 18th laureate and the third from Japan, after Kenzo Tange in 1987 and Fumihiko Maki in 1993. The honors kept coming, including the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1997, the AIA Gold Medal and the Kyoto Prize in 2002, the Order of Culture in 2010 and a Compasso d'Oro in 2024. He has taught as a visiting professor at Yale, Harvard and Columbia.

Museums, Mansions and an Old Exchange in Paris

The American work is mostly museums. The Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis opened in 2001 and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2002, which puts an Ando building a long drive across Texas from Donald Judd's concrete works in Marfa. Wrightwood 659 in Chicago followed in 2018. In Tokyo he designed 21_21 Design Sight, which opened in 2007. In Venice he restored Punta della Dogana in 2009, and in Paris he worked on the conversion of the old Bourse de Commerce into a museum for the Pinault Collection. Back in Osaka, the Nakanoshima Children's Book Forest opened in 2020.

Then there is Malibu. A house he designed for Bill and Maria Bell, commissioned in 2003, took until 2014 to finish because of its oceanfront site. In May 2023 Beyoncé and Jay-Z bought it through a trust for $200 million, a sale that put an Ando building in front of an audience that normally follows hip-hop style, not architecture.

Why the Concrete Feels Different

Most concrete buildings look heavy. Ando's tend to look calm, and that is the trick. The walls are smooth and exact, and the drama comes from light and water rather than form. That puts him in the same conversation as Isamu Noguchi, another figure who split his life between Japanese craft and modern materials, which we cover in our story on the Noguchi table and Akari lamps. Few names in contemporary architecture, or anywhere in our design section, get more out of less.

The prize committee in 1995 praised his work for its surprises in space and form. Thirty years later he is still building. It all started with the row house in Sumiyoshi, a building so small that the reference books still cannot agree on when it was finished.

In 1957 a fire burned out John Stephen's menswear shop on Beak Street, and he moved around the corner to 5 Carnaby Street. He called the new place His Clothes. By 1967 he ran 15 shops on the same street, the papers called him the King of Carnaby Street, and the narrow lane behind Regent Street had become one of the most famous shopping streets in the world. Almost seventy years on, the blocks around it still hold one of London's best runs of menswear and streetwear, and a short walk south sits the store that changed what a fashion shop could look like.

Carnaby and the first menswear boom

Carnaby Street is older than its reputation. It takes its name from Karnaby House, built nearby in 1683, and it was laid out a couple of years later and filled with small houses by 1690. For most of its life it was a modest Soho back street.

Stephen changed that. He spotted the young menswear market of the late 1950s before almost anyone, and he dressed it. Mods came first, then the hippie and peacock styles of the late 1960s, and stars of the beat boom wore his clothes. On April 15, 1966, Time magazine put the street in its Swinging London coverage, and the same year the Kinks released Dedicated Follower of Fashion, a song that sent the whole scene up. The Greater London Council pedestrianized Carnaby Street in October 1973.

The fall was quick. Stephen closed his last business in 1975, and the street drifted toward souvenir shops for tourists. He died in 2004, and a year later Westminster City Council put up a green plaque in his honor at 1 Carnaby Street. For another story of clothing that young people took over and made their own, read our history of the MA-1 bomber jacket.

The Soho streetwear grid

Modern Soho streetwear grew in the same few streets. Footpatrol, the sneaker shop that has traded since 2002, sits on Berwick Street. Supreme arrived in London in 2011 and keeps its shop on Peter Street. Palace, the London skate brand whose rise we chart in our history of Palace Skateboards, set up on Brewer Street in 2015. END. is on Broadwick Street, Cole Buxton joined the area on Marshall Street in 2020, and Golf Wang has a shop on Beak Street, the same street where Stephen's first business burned. Soho's own visitor guide to streetwear lists most of them.

The geography explains a lot. The streets are short, the shops are small and everything is within ten minutes on foot, so a release at one store sends a crowd past three others. That is the same density that made Fairfax Avenue work for a decade, which we cover in our Los Angeles Fairfax guide, and the same weekly scarcity logic we unpack in Supreme and the drop model.

Dover Street Market, the beautiful chaos

Dover Street Market opened on September 10, 2004, at 17 to 18 Dover Street in Mayfair, a building that had once housed the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Its founders were Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and her husband, Adrian Joffe. The model was the old Kensington Market, a warren of independent stalls under one roof, and Kawakubo described the result as a kind of beautiful chaos.

In March 2016 the store moved to Haymarket, into the building Thomas Burberry put up in 1912, between Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. It is a short walk from Soho, and it is worth doing in the same day. The format has since traveled to Ginza, New York, Singapore, Beijing, Los Angeles and, in May 2024, the Marais in Paris. If you are heading there, our Le Marais style guide covers the neighborhood around it. The London store has a Rose Bakery café, as do several of its siblings, a concept created by Rose Carrarini and her husband, Jean Charles.

If the clothes on the Comme floors are new to you, start with our profile of Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons. You will understand the building better once you understand her.

How to walk it

Start at Oxford Circus, walk south down Regent Street and turn left into the Carnaby grid. Work through Beak, Broadwick, Marshall and Berwick Streets, then cut down through Soho to Brewer and Peter Streets. From there it is a ten-minute walk to Haymarket for Dover Street Market. If you have time for tailoring, our Savile Row guide is on the other side of Regent Street.

Go on a weekday morning if you can. Release days at the bigger brands bring lines and sometimes raffles, and each brand sets its own rules, so check their sites and social accounts the week you travel. Shops in Soho move and close often. Treat every store named here as worth checking before you go.

More in our streetwear and luxury fashion coverage, our city guides and the full Travel section.

Before you leave Carnaby, find the green plaque at No. 1. It is small and easy to miss, a modest memorial for the man who turned this street into a byword for menswear.