Urban Retro

Urban Retro is a great store for tshirts, toys, gelaskins and more. Labels available include HiCalorie, Chunk, SeventySeven, Supreme Being to name just a few, and you can get 20% off everything until December 21st just by using the discount code XMASRUSH. Suh-weeet.

After a short abscence, I'm happy to say that our friends and sponsors designgive are back online and have resumed kicking ass. They've got a few new designs from some great artists including Matt Owens, Si Scott and Jenna Ebanks, topped off with great prices and of course the option to contribute a portion of the sale to a charity of your choice (from the list provided). Ahh, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over.

I hate to say it - but the Brisbane Tee Party is one of the most poorly promoted events ever. It's on today and starts in an hour and ten minutes. I live in Brisbane, work in the city, go to stores, bars, galleries etc, read the free newspapers and streetpress quite a lot, and I write a freakin tshirt blog - and I only found out about this last night!! Poor! They don't even have a website - just a myspace that doesn't even tell you who's going to be there. Slack. They say are going to have Brisbane's best tshirt designers there but I know some who won't be - cause they don't even know the damn thing is on!

Anyway, hopefully it should be a great day, and if for some sad reason you are reading a tshirt blog on a Saturday morning and you live in Brissy, head along and check it out. It's on from 9am to 4.30pm at Ahimsa House, 26 Horan Street, West End. I'm going (I'll be the guy with the skull pop shirt if you wanna say hi) and I'm sure there should be some sweet new labels there just waiting to be discovered.

Oksana Kemarskaya has a nice little profile site/store called Kimazo. I'm not sure that I completely understand... but I damn well like it. This shirt comes from a series of four and are available in both short and long sleeved varieties. Ooooh, options!

I like long names. Maybe this is because I have a particularly long name myself - two middle names both with three syllables. Of all my names I like my surname the least, mainly due to the fact that it only has three letters.

Perhaps slightly pre-determined by my fondness for the gratiutously named, I love Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction (despite me being too lazy to type their name in full again - "aita" from here on out). When aita asked if they could send a shirt for review I took two quick looks at their impressive roster and said "I'll take two thanks."

To my joy the impressive nature of aita did not conclude with a lengthy title and a pretty website. The package I received contained the two shirts wrapped in the sexiest tissue paper I have ever seen (hell, I didn't know tissue paper could even be sexy until now) and a plethora of impressive marketing material that they were kind enough to send. Sure, it may seem inconsequential, but I think that a company that can get their marketing looking tight is well on the way to success.

The shirts continued to impress. The guys logo tee is so freaking soft it feels like underwear. Which is a good thing. In fact it's softer than my underwear... The softness comes via an American Apparel 50/25/25 track shirt - and because it's AA you know it's going to fit well. I'm also quite fond of the logo and the way it subtley humanizes the industrial subject. Deep right?

While the guys shirt is subtle, the girls shirt is straight-up crazy. Screenprinted front and back with catastrophic imagery, in an engraved style that you'd expect to see in a 19th century history book. Typhoons, volcanoes, tidal waves and even aliens destroy everything in sight. Sweet. I'm not sure as to the origins of the shirt itself but it's 100% cotton and comes from Peru. Awesome.

My only concern with these shirts was the slight twist in the seem (check the photo) on the girls shirt. I'm told that this is not common and is due to the shirts being "unique and individually printed," and it actually looks kind of cool when the shirt is being worn - although I'm sure it may bug some people.

Aita's other shirts also feature amazing art work and are totally worth checking out. They've just released some new one's too - be the first in town to grab them. A great range from a nice little label that sticks by it's name and produces some great artwork, hand prints their shirts and pays attention to the small details.

I was just checking out the oddly named yet well put together new blog Fat Seagull and saw this beauty from 2K by Gingham. It's by LA based artist Hersk and it's available here.

White is so stylish. Again. Is it the new black? Well I for one don't friggen care and am totally satisfied with the old black. But the new tshirts from People Like Us are all white and sure are nice. And if you've got a stylish little white iPod and are sick of being so damn slick (it's hard damn work right?) you can pick one of the sexy little Gelaskin things to make your pod less white and more protected. Kick Ass.

GraffikNoise is one year old and well on their way to mastering stylish simplicity, Check them out.