Johnny Cupcakes Is Coming To London

admin    T-Shirt News     British t-shirts, Johnny Cupcakes, London fashion, exclusive t-shirt, graphic tees

To mark the opening of their new London retail store on Saturday the 12th of March at 1:00pm in 10 Fouberts Place, Carnaby, London, Johnny Cupcakes is pulling out all the stops with an exclusive London tee and a fab toon to keep you occupied until the big day!

Brimming with Yank clichés of London like the word ‘shoppe’ which hasn’t been used in London for a few hundred years and a guy in a top hat reading a newspaper which is more suited for Newmarket or Aintree racetracks than the capital, the design is still rather sweet.

Still, I’m sure Johnny will see how much we’ve all moved on since Charles Dickens wrote ‘A Christmas Carol’ when he steps ashore this septic sceptered isle of ours. Johnny, just a warning, don’t give beggars less than a quid (if anything) or they will shout abuse as they set their rabid dogs on you, apologise for George ‘W.M.D’ Bush before Obama ‘bamming strangers into a brief coma,  and don’t cite Dick Van Dyke as your favourite actor or someone will surely kick you in the nuts. All that asides, have a nice stay!

In the meantime Johnny will keep you occupied with this cartoon, hey, it’s like being a kid on a Saturday morning all over again =}

For the rest of the world who can’t make it to London here’s a few of their non-exclusive tees :p

See ‘em all here.

20% Off Brat & Suzie

admin    T-Shirt News     Brat and Suzie, London fashion, ladies tops, womens t-shirts

Cockney Empire Online

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     British t-shirts, Cockney Empire, London fashion, cockney tees, gangster t-shirts

It’s been a long old wait, at one point I and Cockney Empire were in discussion to do a few creative collaborations, but with commitments both sides that’s been shelved. My gf has been hassling me for almost a year to get a freebie of fCE but I doubt that will come around either. The thing is that Cockney Empire are busy, not just mildly occupied but absolutely snowed under with work, and now they’re about to find out exactly how a successful t-shirt label has to adapt and adapt quickly to survive.

They’ve just opened their new online store at www.CockneyEmpire.com and the punters are pouring in, this really will be big, perhaps the most exciting new t-shirt brand this side of the water since Chunk, with one ex-Chunk designer and a ream of great designs under their belt, you have been warned, this is the beginning of the British Invasion!

If you want to know more about this fascinating brand then check out my original feature on these guys here. It’s been around 8 months since I first mentioned CE and they’ve been proverbially leaping from strength to strength with another 10 new designs on offer as well as reprints of all their best sellers, you are assured of a treat and a half. There are various collections on offer including Anti Heroes, Pop Art, and Limited Editions. So get down those apples and pears, plonk your plates of meat under the table, and treat your peepers to a feast of London art fashion, the likes of which you’ll not see in a month of Sundays anywhere else in the world. read more

Soaring Through The Ivory Skies

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     Ivory Skies, London fashion, ancient, classy tees, historical t-shirts, history, ivoryskies.net, myth, mythology, posh t-shirts

Ivory Skies is a rather elegant t-shirt label offering a unique twist by combining ancient designs, emblems, talismans as it were, with ultra modern designer cuts. It’s a new angle in the market as far as I am concerned and this British (London) based company have put a great deal of research in to what they do, be it source materials or their choices of tees for printing.

The site looks posh to say the least, their products are a cut above the average, aimed at the discerning t-shirt lover looking for something a little more classy than you might be used to and they’ve kicked off the proceedings with their first collection ‘Ebony and Ivory’ – which is nothing like the track by McCartney and Jacko – I promised myself I wouldn’t mention that but what can you do – this brain is just too impulsive for its own good.

The store is smart and simply presented, everything before you laid out in black and white like a shiny Steinway, and what sticks with you above all else are the rather exotic and in some cases completely forgotten images of the ancient past on offer. I have to admit I had to do a little research myself when it came to the titles, if Chris was around I am sure she’d have given me a few pointers, being a hippie in a former incarnation and up for anything mythological, and no we’re not talking unicorns and faeries here, this is the real deal, or rather it was for historical eras such as Ancient Greece and Egypt.

I did think the actual store was something of a let down – presentation wise that is – they should fix up their template if they want to build a reputation as a label for the ‘smart set’. The theme rapidly degrades to a bog-standard white/orange affair and each product description has a page title as thus “<ekm:pagetitle>”. But I’m in a forgiving mood so we’ll put that down to ‘teething troubles’ for this new label. What I can’t let pass by is the lack of background information for each t-shirt design, we’re not all historians, well actually probably none of us, and so to keep my and everyone else’s brain and pulse ticking over I’d recommend something of a potted history for these rare images, rather than letting the more obsessive of us get sidetracked at Wikipedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica. It’s not just about presentation in this case, it’s a matter of not frustrating or confusing the more inquisitive of your customers, and let’s face it, they are most likely to buy the t-shirts.

Still, those technical details asides, I very much doubt you’ll come across another label quite like Ivory Skies. Their vision of their world spans millennia as they endeavour to fuse the past with the present, and I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised when you see what I have selected for your perusal. So make sure you have your divining rod at hand, don your best toga, borrow a pair of wings from Icarus and set your psychic GPS for the stratosphere of taste as we take flight through the clean and crisp rarefied airs and graces of this near haute-couture high brow label. read more

King Apparel – Tees That Reign Supreme

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     British t-shirts, London fashion, London tees, UK, UK designer t-shirts, UK tees, king apparel, king-apparel.com, streetwear, urban

King-Apparel.com based in Stratford East London offer some of the slickest, soundest, graphic savvy tees in the streetwear market. If you’re looking for a label that delivers without question, has it’s finger on the pulse and can even tout its own branding without leaving a bad taste in your mouth then it has to be King Apparel.

It’s great to be reviewing another East London label, I really think something massive is happening down that way, both for arts and fashion, for a start Black Rat Press and a whole gang of great graffiti artists work down that way, and then there’s Cockney Empire I featured a while back. Of course just like many successful London labels, KA have a massive appeal around the world, partly down to their amazing marketing know how. Take a look at this poster for their next campaign, it takes its inspiration from the classic cult movie The Warriors (which you have to see if you love gritty 70s B-Movies – it’s required watching mate).

Anyway let’s take a butchers at their top-notch tees… read more

A Rendezvous With The Affair

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     London fashion, T-Shirt Designers, T-Shirts, UK tees, affair, edgy, intellectual, intelligent fashion, street wear, the-affair, the-affair.com, urban wear

Back in 2007, somewhere amidst the grimy boozers and back alleys of London’s East End, began a secret exchange of ideas and broken dreams, a contract of substance over style, a pact was made between Zoltan Csaki and Dave Black. Two intellectual fashion renegades, who vowed to change the face of street wear forever, they made a promise to themselves and the neglected savoir-faire of the urban wear industry that things must change, and thus The-Affair was born. An artistic partnership that has gone from strength to strength, as each new design is release under a cloud of mysterious expectancy, raw talent and shameless egotistic aspirations bucked the trend and defied logic, creating what maybe one of the most intellectually inspiring collections I’ve ever come across.

Inspired by a plethora of influence, deep within the left-field of political and social unrest, classic style and edgy post-modern whim collide in a spectacle of high-brow t-shirts that punch and kick our complacent C21st society below the cerebral belt. Delving deeper than the usual gamut of pop reference, into the nether regions of lost kudos, salvaging the best of the worst in life, turning diatribe on its head, formulating without a formula a series of head-turning, head-scratching t-shirts designed to shock and inspire in equal measure.

Each shirt is made as a limited edition run of 200, screen printed on succulently soft American Apparel tees for a luxurious and stylish cut to suit the most discernible of t-shirt aficionados, veritably the thinking man’s t-shirt designer. read more