Street wear is a retro 80s look inspired by the sneaker culture and hipsters on New Yorks Lower East Side. With a few wardrobe essentials you can incorporate the street wear look into your own style, with tight fitting jeans, vintage-style sneakers and graphic tees. But where to find the tees?
Street and Urban Fashion, with a touch of red
StreetWear-And-Red.com, which has also the domain StreetWearAndRed.com, provides cool designs for the urban and street fashion along with elegant ideas for the modern gentlemen.
The nice thing about this website is the idea behind it. It is not just a virtual shop where you can find tshirts, sweatshirts, jerseys, polos and jackets, it is also a fashion mark, red and scratchy, a perfect mark for this kind of wear!
We have found the best design to be the “Legend” one. It’s based on a funny phrase but the graphics and the idea are superb!
There are other interesting designs like the vintage ones but seems that there will be tons more in the next days… so it’s better to check this website daily to see what’s new and what’s changed, the website is growing fast and changing daily!
Today we interview Justin Hoehn. Justin manages LEADapparel.com, providing a broad range of apparel brands at the lowest prices possible. With 27 warehouses covering all regions of the U.S. LEADapparel.com has the ability to ship customer orders quickly to anywhere in the country and worldwide.
Fashion, internet and our society
Manuel Marino: The styles you present are sporty but also with an elegance touch, we can say unique looks, right?
Justin Hoehn: Absolutely. We try to give our customers diversity. We believe that the stylish consumer has different needs for different occasions. You might want to dress in an urban influenced t-shirt when bumming around town but tomorrow, you might have a tee time & need a nike dri-fit polo.
What can you tell me about your latest alternative apparel line?
We recently added alternative apparel to our product line and are extremely excited about the response we’ve had from our customers. Alternative apparel is in the same mold as american apparel. The line is made from high quality fabrics, fitted and fashion driven. They focus on core prodcuts and do a wonderful job at expanding on colors and certain fits. You’ll see awide range of celebrities sporting the line (Pitt, Timberlake, Leonardo, Clooney, Fergie, Walberg, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera, Eva Longoria) this is just to name a few.
What do you think about fashion in 2008?
Fashion is always changing, sometimes for the better / sometimes for the worse but at the end of the day, we like the classic / minimal look to pass the test of time. Although everyone appreciates a saville row tailored suit, the reality is you have more people working from home or in a casual office enviroment. They’re more comfortable in a tee & jeans, tee and designer sweats or some sort of combination. It’s no longer a sloppy look since designers have tightend up the fit & color options and it’s become more acceptable in the office, especially at younger companies.
What about fashion and internet, is it a good alliance?
The web has obviously been a wonderful alliance for all business. The consumer has more choices in a matter of minutes than they would in an entire day of shopping at the malls and you don’t have to pay for gasoline. The knock has always been that you need to try on / see in person what your going to buy. At leadapparel.com, we have made it a priority to make this a seamless process. The addition of images for each color and sizing charts for most products elminates the risk of ordering something that doesn’t fit or not the exact look the customer was expecting.
It’s only going to grow into a more sophisticated shopping experience. We’re looking into video displays for certain products and I’m sure by this time next year there will be a must have for online stores such as ours.
Is it really so important appearance in our society? is it really a good thing?
Appearance and style has always been important and always will. Call it vanity, expression or necessity, we all have style, whether it’s bad or not is up for debate. But there is no doubt in my mind that style is an important aspect in for living a more exciting and interesting life. People with a great personality seem to give off more style even if they are wearing the same get up as the next guy with a bad attitude who thinks style will carry him alone. If you are constantly following the crowd, it can become mondane but if you are diverse and comfortable with your style, it’s a major plus on how it comes off to others.
I think it’s only smart to keep your appearance looking good. Sure, there might be too much focus on “appearance” in some circles but I think there’s no doubt that someone’s overall appearance is a direct reflection of a person’s vibe and personality.
Paul Baines is a T-shirt Designer and Blogger. Read his popular t-shirt reviews blog and read also about his highly original t-shirt designs. You can vote now on his latest Threadless.com submission or purchase pieces from his collection at Retrogod, Redbubble, Zazzle. This is his exclusive article for us, a kind of diary, where he talks about tshirt designing, internet and shopping.
The life of a T-shirt Designer
I’m a t-shirt designer, in fact I’m simply a designer, but I’ve found myself straying from the rather bland world of graphic and web design to the glitzy and glamorous world of fashion without even realising it.
I can’t say I’ve made a fortune from t-shirt design, but I will say it’s one of the most rewarding career shifts I’ve taken in my life so far. My time is split between conceiving and designing unique and original ideas for new t-shirts, and reviewing new and established t-shirt fashion labels on the Net.
My consumer market expands daily, these days savvy fashionistas realise they can make an immediate impact in any wardrobe with a few choice artistic tees, a frugal yet fashionable way to stand out from the crowd.
The beauty is there are so many sources for t-shirt design these days that you are bound to find a design you love, a design that no one you know and perhaps not even friends of your friends have yet discovered. Impact and individuality, artistic style and originality, these are the watchwords of the t-shirt fashion industry and its consumer base.
One explanation for the ‘t-shirt boom’ is a revolution in Internet technologies, with the arrival of Web 2.0, more and more websites, stores, business and consumer networks, search engines and directories realise they have to keep their audience engaged, and consequently interactivity has become the name of the game. It doesn’t really matter what you create or sell, if your potential buyers are bored they will leave.
Unlike the ‘real world’, the online shopping experience cannot rely on the vitality of human senses such as taste, touch, smell to inform their choices. Perhaps we’ll find a way in the future to replicate these essential components of the human and therefore shopping experience. Until then we have one vital advantage on the Net and that is the interactivity of community. Something unheard of in the modern world, a concept one might even describe as old fashioned, has created a revolution on the Web. The explosion in user-rated and user-generated content has changed shopping online forever.
Amazon.com and Ebay.com are the most likely pioneers in this way of selling, consumers turning to the opinions, comments and reviews of past buyers and contributing their own. The difference is that this methodology has moved far beyond seller ratings and book reviews, and I’m proud to say that the t-shirt fashion world is leading the next stage of the Internet’s development as a fully-rounded experiential shopping platform.
Until recently t-shirt designers had two choices, firstly they could set up their own independent store with ecommerce capabilities and secure hosting and hope and pray they can cover their costs. The second choice was Cafepress.com which has been running for over a decade now and provided designers a way to economically begin to sell their unique t-shirt designs to a worldwide audience, whilst keeping costs as low as possible for their consumers. The problem with Cafepress.com and Spreadshirt.com (a later arrival offering higher quality screen printed tees) is that neither offers any real quality control. Yes Cafepress.com still sells a basic white t-shirt with the design of your choice from only $9.99 but they have serious limitations on the size and placement of any contributed image. Essentially you’re talking a 10″ square box in the middle of your t-shirt, no matter what the design may look like.
Some years back a new company, formed originally as a thread on a t-shirt forum burst onto the scene, and it completely revolutionised the way that people buy fashion. Threadless.com introduced the idea of totally empowering the customer, not only enabling them to rate the current collection on sale and communicate personally with each designer, but more so, the customer can decide if a t-shirt is ever even made! Yes, before a new design is printed users of Threadless.com can vote through a 7 day process that defines the fate of every t-shirt they sell.
I can imagine a bright future for the online consumer, more and more choice, variety, control over design and production. The only problem is the rising cost of fuel. The ‘virtual shopping’ experience may always be able to compete with smaller items, but as the world runs dry, shipping expenses will become highly prohibitive. The future may be far less complicated than any of us can imagine.
Today we interview Oliver Aigner, owner of CarTFT.com. His business is very particular and I’m sure you’ll love to read about it. They offer people a cheap way to integrate computers into cars.
A beautiful Car-Pc
When did you start your business?
We started in May 2003. (You can read this page).
How did you have the idea to start it?
I personally installed my very first car-pc in 1996. At this time a mp3 player was very expensive and I wanted to hear mp3 in my car. So I took an old big desktop PC and put it into the car. Later I also added a GPS receiver for getting navigation.
Why we should have a Car-PC?
When you want to have a very own customized system with all possibilites in your car, then a car-pc is the only way to go. And especially if you are a PC enthusiast, nothing comes around a car-pc. You will be able to stay fully updated with all latest technologies and possibilites.
Is GPS really useful?
I would never take a printed map again :) A map can not show you the nearest rest station or restaurant. And a map does not tell you where to drive and when you will arive there. GPS simply adds a lot of comfort to your life.
How do you see the future of technology?
There recently are a lot of approaches from the industry to fully digitalize our lives with total networking, internet & digital services everywhere. Best examples are ViiV or MID units. However I guess people either are not ready yet for all the new possibilities or they simply do not want to go this “next step”. So actually I am not sure about the future.
What are your next projects?
As we know that the topic “car-pc” is not so easy to understand, we currently work on a new improved systembuilder which will guide our customers to the best configuration based on their needs and not on their knowledge. We also will add new techniques like Geotracking for parcels and PayPal Express checkout. And we will more and more use Ajax on our website as this brings a lot of comfort for the visitor.
