The Shophound

JON CARAMANICA GOES SHOPPING: Brooklyn Dream Edition

This week's Thursday Styles readers will find a Critical Shopper column that is based in part on a fantasy. In an extended opening section, shopper John Caramanica expounds on the idyllic life he imagines among the quiet, serene side streets of Greenpoint, Brooklyn which he calls "the Via Condotti of fourth-wave Brooklyn redistricting". His dream home is so placid and, more importantly, imaginary, that we can't help thinking it must be right around the corner from The Shophound's football-field-sized Tribeca loft —geographic specifics being essentially irrelevant when we are talking about living in fantasyland.

Here, everything is still, on streets populated by people who mostly seem to stay in their homes. This spit of town is so isolated that it bears little relation to the aggro-hip clusters in next-door Williamsburg, to say nothing of the melting-pot bustle just a block away, on Manhattan Avenue, which practically constitutes a different borough.

Anyway, his dream has inspired him to showcase not one but three stores from the neighborhood's Franklin Street corridor, Alter, Raised By Wolves and Kill Devil Hill. Each is little independent gem of eclecticism, some even selling goods made right in the neighborhood. They are untouched by the corrupting masses of nearby Williamsburg or, god forbid, Manhattan.
Until now.
Yes, now that they have been featured in the New York Times, these stores are no longer anyone's best kept secrets, and before you know it, the charms of Greenpoint will probably be high-rised and yuppied away.

Oh well. We hear that the South Bronx is still relatively untouched. Go colonize, brave young hipsters.

Critical Shopper: Basic to Eccentric and Eye-Opening By Jon Caramanica (NYTimes)
Alter 109 Franklin Street, Raised by Wolves 174 Franklin Street, Kill Devil Hill 170 Franklin Street, all in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

ALEXANDRA JACOBS GOES SHOPPING: Brooklyn Weekend Edition

In this week's Thursday Styles, Alexandra Jacobs retakes the Critical Shopper mantle and takes it to the Dekalb Market in Brooklyn, on of the borough's proliferating flea markets. What we took away from her report was that she doesn't seem to care for flea markets that much. At the very least, she is not an eagle eyed devotee who will waake at the crack of dawn to get first pick of whtever unknown treasures are hidden amongst the offerings. She can take them or leave them, and while she doesn't discourage the casual browser, she is not particularly compelled to buy anything herself.

There is also what seems to be a glut of merchandise destined to end up at ... well, dirtier flea markets. Shearling gloves without fingertips, so you can manipulate a smartphone even in the dead of winter; Moleskine notebooks ($32) for scribbling one’s increasingly rare offline thoughts. And far too many Etsyish souvenirs of the borough’s transformation, like Fort Greene-“flavored” cleansing gel, and ceramic coffee cups reading, ho ho, “I Got Mugged in Brooklyn.”

Well, that doesn't really sound like anything worth running to Brooklyn for, does it?

Dekalb Market 138 Willoughby Street, downtown Brooklyn
Critical Shopper: Brooklyn’s Dekalb Market: A Tidy Flea, but What to Buy? By Alexandra Jacobs (NYTimes)

JON CARAMANICA GOES SHOPPING: Heritage Hangs On Edition

Ths week, Critical Shopper Jon Caramanica is back in his element in the Thursday Styles. Having seen him get extra critical in recent columns, we (and he as well, actually) were expecting him to go to town on the newly opened shrine to American Heritage brands and the craze they have inspired, Hickoree’s Floor Two in Brooklyn. Admitting that the movement to revive dusty but classic and sturdy labels or invent new ones that look that way has started to veer toward self-parody, he is surprisingly charmed by the new shop presented by one of the trend's most admired practitioners,

The intrepid explorer half-expects to climb the stairs and stumble into an orgy of cobblers, loom-weavers and readers of A Continuous Lean. But there’s absolutely nothing trite about Hickoree’s, where everything is just a little bit better than it needs to be, full of items that are one iteration beyond the sharpest one you’ll find elsewhere, and full of brands that will show up soon enough at other like-minded stores around the country...

Caraminica finds much to like as he makes his way through the store, and most astutely notes that the entire trend, despite its fierce defense of American-made products, has its roots in the Far East where the enthusiasm for what he calls "America-as-reimagined-by-Japan" has been entrenched in the region's fashion vocabulary for decades, now.

So there's life left in the heritage trend, which should be a relief to those who still haven't quite broken in their Red Wing Shoes.

Critical Shopper: On the Bright Side of Heritage By Jon Caramanica (NYTimes)
Hickoree’s Floor Two 109 South Sixth Street, Second Floor, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

SPRING 2012 PREVIEWS: Project Favorites Part II: BROOKLYN BOOTWORKS

This week, The Men's Spring 2012 trade shows happened. The Shophound made it to (capsule) and Project before we succumbed to sensory overload. While an exhaustive review of the shows would be, well, exhausting, we'll be posting what caught our eye from our favorite designers throughout the week.

The most interesting labels at Project were often the newest, so it's not surprising that the only-a-few-months-old Brooklyn Bootworks caught our attention. Inspired by a pair of 35-year-old boots that one of the brand's owners still wears, the line came about in an effort to produce the best boots possible. Founding duo Jess Draper and Mike Chamberas discovered that as much as they wanted to manufacture their boots in their home borough, Brooklyn's manufacturing capabilities are now too limited to allow them to produce the kind of product they wanted. Rather than looking to China or South America, however, they turned to Italy for production so they could ensure the best possible quality. Seeing the finished product, you can't dispute their decision. They have smartly kept their debut line simple and classic incorporating top quality Italian cordovan leathers. Taking all that into consideration, the prices, falling in the $400 to $600 range are still lower than we would have expected, and these boots look like they could easily last for 35 years themselves.

Brooklyn Bootworks (Official Site)

ALEXANDRA JACONS GOES SHOPPING: Favorite Haunt Edition

In today's Thursday Styles, this week's Critical Shopper, Alexandra Jacobs travels what sounds like a well trodden path to 1 Of A Find, a Prospect Heights vintage store that is clearly one of her personal favorites. That's fair game, certainly, but espite the obvious bias, it sure seems like there is an exceptional vintage store hidden away in Brooklyn that falls somewhere between the rarefied couture boutiques like Resurrection and the dusty racks of lower end resale stores. Jacobs is particularly taken with owner Honey Moon's discerning eye for the kind of old stuff a certain type of New Yorker will covet.

For those who believe vintage (another pretentious euphemism, meant to give castoffs the cachet of fine wine) means clawing itchily through rack after rack of stuff, there is within a mile the Salvation Army on Atlantic Avenue, Beacon’s Closet on Fifth or the cheerful but chaotic Hooti Couture on Flatbush. OOAF showcases rather an awareness, whether instinctive or studied, of current trends.

Sounds like a little gem, and we certainly hope that Jacobs hasn't ruined her favorite shopping excursion by sending throngs of vintage loving Times readers scrambling to Prospect Heights to clean the place out. That kooky column can have all sorts of effects on a store.

Critical Shopper: Not So New, but Not Forgotten By Alexandra Jacobs (NYTimes)
1 Of A Find 633 Vanderbilt Avenue, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn

JON CARAMANICA GOES SHOPPING: Big Words For Streetwear Edition

Today's Critical Shopper, Jon Caramanica, takes on two streetwear stores that seem to have little to do with each other aside from being streetwear stores. The Hundreds is based in California and now has an outpost on tony Grand Street not far from the new Alexander Wang showplace, and Mishka (which is usually written in cyrillic type as Мишка) is in Williamsburg, which is apparently still going strong as the center of the city's youth culture for at least a few more minutes. Caramanica describes the store's slickly rendered presences thusly:

They’re two solutions to the same problem, the collision of hip-hop fashion, skateboarding gear and work wear that’s generally called street wear. It’s a neat trick of deracination, or post-racination. As rap music seeps more and more into the fabric of pop culture, its accouterments become more familiar. In these lines, lessons drawn from the 1990s explosion of brands like Phat Farm, Fubu, even Karl Kani are mixed with the lessons drawn from the ’90s appropriation of Polo and Tommy Hilfiger. The results are tough but relatable, a style that connotes insiderdom while excluding no one.

So, apparently, deracination means:

1. To pull out by the roots; uproot.
2. To displace from one's native or accustomed environment.

according to the American Heritage Dictionary via the New York Times' handy onscreen dictionary function. We hope this service remains available after the Times enacts its much talked about paywall next week in case we run across another word like deracination. For post-racination, sadly, there were no results. We wish we could use the function for the entire paragraph above, but it only seems to work on individual words. Pity.

Though we hear a lot of description of the respective brand's logos, we aren't feeling to intrigued by this week's column. Perhaps it's because The Shophound is old enough to remember "Rapper's Delight" and therefore too old to attempt to masquerade as a teenage skater boy. There will be no pixelated camouflage baseball hats with flat visors and bloody eyeball embroidery for us no matter how much it might express our state of mind at the moment. It would just be embarrassing for all involved.

Critical Shopper: Two Riffs on Street Wear Gone Fusion by Jon Caramanica (NYTimes)
The Hundreds 96 Grand Street (between Greene and Mercer Streets)
Мишка 350 Broadway (near Keap Street), Williamsburg

CINTRA WILSON GOES SHOPPING: Happy Homemaker Edition

After a week's break, today's Critical Shopper Cintra Wilson starts off with a memory of a meticulously arranged clothesline she saw once in Poughkeepsie NY.
Poughkeepsie?
Well, if she says so. Anyway, this is all to introduce us to Williamsburg's Brook Farm General Store, which sounds like the sort of place that stocks itself with merchandise that's been made the same way for decades but costs a whole lot more now than it used to in the '50s. There's even a friendly beagle on site. The whole thing sounds adorable, and Cintra seems surprisingly charmed. And yet, already, we hate it a little without ever having been there.

It sounds like the Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP of home stores —the kind of place that fetishizes humble workaday items and reprices them for rich folks,

There is an excellent selection of blue-collar lunch-break items — goods once carried by 1950s building site supervisors with crew cuts and pocket protectors. There are Sigg metal lunchboxes, not unlike oversize anchovy tins ($29), and classic green Stanley thermoses ($30) that are a throwback to someone’s dad’s clean garage. I had never seen a Stanley flask ($20) before, but I reckoned that many a factory worker pocketed them in their coveralls until too many industrial accidents happened.

That's $79 worth of lunchbox and accessories and there's not even any food in it yet! Of course, a fancypants like The Shophound has no business criticizing such a place without having had a visit, we just don't like to pay retail. Come to think of it, we can work up a hankering for porcelain measuring spoons or linen tea towels pretty damn fast.

Sorry, we need to get to the "L" train...

Critical Shopper: A Primer for the Wholesome, Happy Home By Cintra Wilson (NYTimes)
Brook Farm General Store 75 South 6^th Street, Brooklyn

CINTRA WILSON GOES SHOPPING: Misplaced Military Edition

The blog coverage of Brooklyn's brand new Barneys Co-op has been so breathless that one would think the store had been imported from Paris instead of a just few miles across the East River. It is with impressive speed that Critical Shopper Cintra Wilson weighs in with her take in this week's Thursday Styles, and refreshingly, she quickly dispenses with the significance (or lack thereof) of Barneys' acknowledgement of Brooklyn's status as an upscale shopping destination.

No, Wilson is more interested in what she finds inside the new store, specifically the way military gear has become nearly fetishized by so many of the designers carried there.

Something was rubbing me the wrong way, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then I put my finger on a prewadded NSF shirt, a garment affecting all the “realness” of a Vietnam veteran camouflage jacket, replete with a living-under-a-freeway patina ($195).

And one after another, she ticks off the surplus-inspired looks but goes much deeper than simply pointing out the irony of expensive clothes patterned after cheap, durable ones. That would be to easy and obvious. What piques her the disconnect between the pervasive military chic and the fact that our country continues to fight a prolonged war.

Yeah, she went there. And what's more, she managed to focus her judgement not at the war or the government, but at the customers who blithely snap up pricey camouflage print leggings without a moment's thought for the people who sport the very same pattern on their clothes not by fashionable choice but by occupational requirement.

...I am not sure it counts as sociopolitical consciousness to pay too much for workless work shirts (for all the ditches we won’t be digging) or warless war shirts, for all the fights we keep forgetting are still happening over there. Can luxury combat fatigues really camouflage the fact that the falcon cannot hear the falconer? What rough boot slouches toward $2,000, waiting to be born?

At least you many think twice before you take home those designer combat boots.

Critical Shopper: Where the Well-Heeled Dress Down By Cintra Wilson
Barneys Co-op 194 Atlantic Avenue at Court Street, Brooklyn

JON CARAMANICA GOES SHOPPING: Brooklyn Pacifist Edition

This week's Thursday Styles sends Critical Shopper Jon Carmanica to Boerum Hill (or Cobble Hill, or someplace in between. Who the Hell can tell the difference anymore?) to focus on Epaulet, one of a group of boutiques in the area who cater to the hipster-preps of Brooklyn. He certainly doesn't bury the lede, initially proclaiming that he walked out of the shop with a smile and a full shopping bag, which pretty much tells you all you need to know. But no, there's more. Jon imagines a fight between the boutique and a more ruggedly stocked neighbor a few steps away,

Down the street from Epaulet is Smith & Butler, with its surlier take on masculinity: broader shoulders; angrier, more abraded fabrics; a more rugged décor. In a fight, Smith & Butler would wallop Epaulet, but be thoughtful enough to not bruise the face.

It makes us wonder if Atlantic Avenue's Hollander & Lexer played a grizzled old referee in the scenario. Once again ignoring that the store also sells women's items (including an extensive selection of rubber shoes from Melissa), Caramanica zeros in on Epaulet's strengths, accessories and shoes by the likes of Alden and Mark McNairy and continues to catalog the shop's various items, noting that however classic the style may be, the clothes are cut for the youthful and slender of arm and thigh. We are still left with that image of brawling boutiques, though we think it would have wound up more like a Smith Street style-off. Not so macho after all.

Critical Shopper | Epaulet: Cutting No Corners on This Side of the Street By Jon Caramanica (NYTimes)
Epaulet  231 Smith Street between Douglass and Butler Streets, Boerum/Cobble Hill, Brooklyn

OUTER BOROUGH EXPANSION: Barneys Co-op Confirmed For Brooklyn

After much speculation and breathless predictions from hopeful real estate brokers (really, Williamsburg?), Barneys is finally confirming that a Co-op will rise in Brooklyn -Cobble Hill to be precise. The new store will open this September at 194 Atlantic Avenue near Court Street which, as those familiar with the neighborhood will know, is right by Trader Joe's, so the new location will not want for foot traffic. No more details have been released, so we presume that this will be a full men's & women's location.

In addition to the Brooklyn announcement, Californians will be happy to learn that another Co-op will be opening a few weeks before that at the Santa Monica Place Mall, making it the fifth Southern California location for the spin-off chain.

Barneys Co-op to Launch in Brooklyn, Santa Monica (WWD)