Indigo Clothing Blog - News from inside Indigo, the promotional clothing industry and cool t-shirt sites reviewed.
Our favourite French t-shirt store, LaFraise, is selling eco-friendly, organic cotton apparel for the first time. Also, free shipping with promo code: ORGANIC.
In case you didn’t already know, Indigo Clothing offer a wide range of organic and ethical clothing which can be customsied with your logo.
Tom, Indigo-2’s new lead web developer, has noticed, thanks to the 37signals blog, that you can have fun with the CNN headline t-shirt maker thingy we posted about yesterday!
Starting to get the point of twitter - some good stuff from those I’m following:
CNN Headlines printed on t-shirts on-demand [via tCritic/twitter: karllong]
London bike shop Velorution have Bagaboo messenger bags (photos on Flickr) - designed by messengers, very tough, great colours, in stock from £100 [via Velorution/twitter: _velorution]
Also, via traditional email this time, Howies are offering free t-shirts to customers who spend over £100 at their Carnaby St, London store. Sounds like a cunning way of dumping dead stock - I like it 
P.S. Not sure what Twitter is? Common Craft have a great ‘paper’ tutorial for twitter.
P.P.S. Follow us at http://twitter.com/indigo
To carry on the vintage t-shirt theme (see last post about 1976 t-shirt from ISO50) I came across a controversial site the other day called “Stuff White People Like” (SWPL). It has been getting an extraordinary amount of media coverage in the US and it seems the reaction it has generated has been pretty heated considering race is still a massive social hot-potato in a country that had school segregation only 54 years ago. Anyway, it seems this guy has got a book deal out of his blog (see NY Times: Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal).
Trying to steer to the political aspect of the site (if that is possible), number 86 on the list is t-shirts, and in particular vintage tees. I quote:
The most prized t-shirt category is vintage. As shown earlier, white people need authenticity like they need oxygen and to have an original vintage t-shirt from the 1970s or 1980s is a very powerful social status symbol. The ideal shirt will have a funny logo, a year attached to it, and will be as thin as rice paper. In the event that two white people have shirts that meet this criteria, the superior ranking is given to the person who paid the least for the shirt.
It is certainly worth checking this site out just to see whether all the media hype is fuss over nothing and whether this guy is actually amusing or just a writer getting amazing PR by being purposefully controversial?
Vintage t-shirts are still fasionable and as usual Scott Hansen’s newsletter sparked my curiousity, his designs for both t-shirts and posters are so distinctive. This 1976 tee is available in 3 retro designs, printed on the American Apparel Heather Grey Tri-blend; just $23.
A trip to the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens tournament left me reflecting on the state of my wardrobe. Despite being involved in the t-shirt printing industry, it does not mean I come into work every day sporting a Gildan Ultra T-Shirt or whatever is lying around the samples cupboard (though I do confess I am quite partial to the Hummingbird Bakery hoodie I have)!
The forthcoming visit to Hong Kong, a city famed for being full of skyscrapers and affordable tailors, lead me to the Internet to see if I could find any good recommendations as I wasn’t keen on leaving myself to the mercy of the Lonely Planet or a street vendor with a good tip. In the end I came up with the name of Mr. Edward Tam, of E. Italian tailors, as a result of an excellent three part post by blogger Simon Compton.
He was a little tricky to find but remarkably he was only 100m from our hotel in Kowloon, which made going for fittings a piece of cake. By the end of the weekend Mr. Tam produced two suits and 6 tailored shirts (not all for me mind you) and my friend and I, who have bought tailored items before in Chile of all places, were delighted with the results, the quality of the work and the speed in which they were produced.
Hong Kong is a great city, but in you are in the market for an excellent suit, look no further than:
Edward Tam
E. Italian
Shop 117 1F,
Regal Kowloon Hotel
71 Moody Road
Tsimshatsui East,
Kowloon, Hong Kong
Tel (852) 2367 2782
As t-shirt lovers, we were excited to see a trailer for a new BBC programme on the subject, airing on 22nd April 2008!
A new four episode series is starting on BBC THREE where six young fashion lovers swap shopping for the factories and backstreet workshops of India to make clothes for the British High Street. From the press release:
The six start at the top, working for Shahi Enterprises in New Dehli, a multi-million pound factory that makes clothes for some of the biggest names on the UK High Street. They learn to sew before joining the production lines where every worker has targets to meet: for example, collars have to be sewn on to shirts at the rate of one a minute.
As unskilled workers they’re paid around £1.50 a day, a basic living wage in India. The group finds that it doesn’t stretch far – when they go to buy deodorant, it costs a day’s wages.
An accompanying online fashion magazine – Thread (bbc.co.uk/thread) – will offer tips on how to achieve an eco-glam look through a mix of shopping for new or vintage clothes, to swapping clothes with friends and customising existing clothes. The website will launch closer to the date of the first episode.
Tuesday 22 April 2008
9.00-10.00pm BBC THREE
BBC Press Release in full
I used the British Library for the first time last Thursday. An incredible building not far from the Indigo Clothing offices and near Kings Cross train station. Did you know they receive a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland and the collection includes 150 million items, in most known languages?
Trying to get a card to access one of the many reading rooms seemed harder than renewing my UK passport, so if you are tempted to use the facility make sure you have all the ID they demand, before they begin the lengthy process of taking a digital photo and checking your reading list. Then, even if you cross your fingers, join the cloakroom queue to hand in your bag and pens (only pencils allowed!), you’ll be told there are in fact no seats left in the reading room and books take over an hour to be fetched from the basement. Next time I go, I am going to arrive early and better prepared!
The BL has an excellent Business and IP Centre which is well worth using too and in the past Indigo has helped members of this department with their research. Last year we also produced t-shirts for one of their excellent exhibitions, Sacred; so it is worth visiting even if you are not going to seek a book or publication.
The famous actor and director, Woody Allen, is suing American Apparel for more than $10m (£5m) after the US clothing company allegedly used his image on advertisements without permission.
According to the Guardian newspaper:
American Apparel claimed “the image of Allen dressed as a Hassidic character alongside Yiddish text was meant strictly as a social parody”. It added that the company sometimes used billboards “for non-commercial social and political commentary.”
Indigo Clothing offer the full range of American Apparel items and t-shirts including their organic cotton collection, which can be customised with your logo or design.
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