Recommended Reading

Blogs:
Fashion Nation, a fashion blog that delves into the world of independent fashion sites, blogs, magazines and forums as well as providing insight into the local Singaporean fashion scene.






Multifaceted:
Common People, a media platform that engages creatives that reside, pass through or are working on something related to the creative field in Singapore. Content is wholly video interviews, providing an interest peak into some of the creative individuals, collectives or entities that reside in Singapore.



School of Thought, a collective behind the food joint, Food for Thought and the publishing company behind " " (Quotations) the literary magazine that is slowly making its way to eyes across Singapore. Keep a lookout for these guys to shake some more things up in Singapore.

Gitman Vintage

We're proud to say that Gitman Vintage will be one of our new labels arriving at the store this summer. It's parent company(Gitman) has roots in NYC and is based out of Ashland, Virginia and has been in operation for the last 4 decades. All Gitman products are made in America. Gitman has raised an artisan craftsmanship culture around the Ashland area for quite a number of years now specializing in shirt making where it has employed families for years.

Gitman Vintage(American heritage inspired) is manufactured at the Ashland factories from scratch. Thread is developed in house and then used to manufacture the beautiful shirts, from start to finish, the whole process is handled in house with over decades of experience. The label takes cue from, "fabrics culled from late 1970s and early 1980s line-books (as well as current fabrications) and includes authentic details such as double-track stitching, chalk buttons and locker-loops. The collection is reissued with the original "Gitman Bros. Est 1978" label."

Our first order will be from their second season, FW2009

Debuting its second season, the Gitman Vintage Fall / Winter 2009 collection pays homage to Fall / Winter 1980. In addition to selecting perennial favorites, such as washed oxford and pinpoint, gingham check and small colorful plaids, we also selectively appropriated for this collection some of our favorites from the past: multi-toned flannels, snap Western shirts, one-of-a-kind university stripe oxfords, herringbone twills, beefy oxfords and a variety of chambrays. All available in our classic button-down, round or key collar.

Stocks should land in store mid August.
Stay tuned.

Gitman Vintage featured in Details

S***R Footwear A/W 2009

A feature on the up and coming AW collection from S***R Footwear came up on Selectism about 2 weeks ago. Some interesting styles coming up.

Click the shoe to view more photos.

A Flashback Production Post, Shenzhen – Guangzhou: Part 1

About to take the Guangzhou airport shuttle

The following paragraphs are being written from memory, pre active blog, before we decided it would be wise to document and share our journey of many paths.

Cross walk by the place we stayed at, Tianhe Bei Lu

The basic itinerary of the trip went like this:
Day 1: Arrive in Guangzhou, rest up and caught up with our friends in the city.
Day 2: Travel to Shenzhen by train early in the morning, we visited several fabric companies in the morning then had some great lunch. The remainder of the day was spent viewing our main production factory and then late afternoon to late at night was spent editing garments in the meeting room.
Day3: Back in Guangzhou, visited several fabric store/market areas.
Day4: Checked out some of the regular garment markets to see if there were any B-Grades around, suss out the production scope around there.
Day5: Guangzhou textile center, too big to describe, just huge, overwhelming.
Day6: Relaxing before we leave back to Singapore.

Throw some drinking and crazy cab rides in there as well then sprinkle some good eating and parties around too.

Train station at Guangzhou

Our production centers are in Shenzhen and Bangkok; Shenzhen is where our wovens get made and Bangkok is where our jersey pieces get made. Shenzhen plays a very important role with sifr since the majority of our first collection is wovens. I know a lot of people mention about the stigma that goes hand in hand with production in China but believe us we tried to find the best possible production for our garments without compromising one of our core values, accessibility. We’ve done our research on production in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, and Indonesia so far. If we went with production out of Japan or Korea we’d have to move our price points up 150 –200% at the least. With currency exchange rates and cost of labor there is a reason why companies end up charging the consumer $250 onwards for a garment that is made in Japan. Southeast Asian textile and production industry exists very much so but in terms of quality control, communication and finding solid production centers we were out of luck. We’ll continue to keep searching the region as we delve deeper into our sourcing investigation leads. As our never ending sourcing quest leads us to the production center of the world at the moment, China.

Street busker with child

To be continued in Part 2.

Slipmat Contest!

We had blogged about our man Daryl joining in on a slipmat contest called, "A Nice Set" several weeks back. A project between Plus et Plus, reed space, and idN magazine. Thanks to our combined support and his own skill and hard work Daryl has come out as the contest winner in Singapore and will have his work on tour with the other 30 or so slipmats. Daryl's work will also get published in an art book in conjunction with the contest.

Thank you for spreading the love.

Drops from S***R Footwear

Dylan 10 and 11. Black and White. Tumbled synthetic leather footwear from Swear now in store.

Twitter!

We're not trying to flood you. It just seems everyone nowadays has a twitter, we're riding the wave of change. An article in Time magazine recently cited twitter had a growth of over 1200% in monthly visits during the past year.

However the bottom line is that Oprah has a twitter, we're interested in following her. We'd like to use the term ambient awareness with our new move towards twitter, we'll know what you guys are up to and you'll know what we're up to. We've decided to take a more personal route and give our updates alongside store updates because we're just that interesting(6) (Sarcasm meter).

Here it is, the KIN Twitter!

and here is the Time article: "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live"

Pretty heavy duty if you ask us, but hey, there was friendster, myspace, facebook and I guess twitter is the next wave.

(On a personal note I was asking myself the question, "Why would anyone want another stream of information on top of facebook, email, tv, magazines, ads, ect?" I guess my question is semi-answered by the above Time article. All I'm going to say is that there's only 24 hours in a day.)

Stay tuned for some flashback production trips!