Fader

Reebok Flash, the new pop-up store on Bowery, has sneakers galore and wall-to-wall graphics that warp the dimensions of its 3,000 square foot space in a way that pleasantly altered our minds when we stopped by the store's grand opening in November. More mind-melting though were the fashions on parade. Our contributing editor Mobolaji went in search of interesting footwear, and found amazing top hats and vintage silk scarves besides.

Reebok Flash is open through December 15th.

In our globetrotting summer music issue, Jace Clayton told us about the Cumbia explosion in Buenos Aires and Gabriele Stabile’s images proved a thriving Argentinean club life. Recently, our Buenos Aires “on the street” contributor went for a less chaotic club experience, stepping out for the launch of the El Mato a un Policia Motorizado record and snapping up some of her favorite stylish picks for the evening. more...

Shout out to F2 writers David Bevan, Daniel Arnold, Jalylah Burrell, and Eric Steuer, and also, um, us for winning the 2008 Pearl Gold Award Reflecting Excellence in Custom Publishing for our online only magazine F2 (check out the brand new New Folk issue). Shout out, of course, to Timberland for making it happen. And also, shout out to the Pearl Awards for sending us a refractive trophy.

Alabama-based designer Billy Reid brought up all the gorgeous features of his New York store right from the South, reclaiming staircases, medicine cabinets, church peeves and lining the wall with his own family portraits. We paid a trip to the cozy new flagship NY store on Bond Street last week for a lesson in fine Southern tailoring (snake guards and spiffy sport coats!). We were also treated to a special run through the new heirloom collection: beautiful suiting that is individually tailored to fit the wearer quite perfectly. Billy Reid also happens to serve the best Van Winkle bourbon apple cider we have probably ever tasted.

Over the last year, we spent a lot of time discussing how to commemorate The FADER's tenth anniversary. We had recently combed the archives for FADER 50, so we wanted to make this issue a statement not about where we had been but where we are going. Then we realized that that is what we do with every issue, so, after much debate, we decided to focus on those people who have continually served as content providers for the pages of the magazine and website: the curators, selectors, DJs, gallerists, party throwers and artists who always give us something to write about. For the last few years, no two artists have given us more to ponder than Kanye West and No Age, so why not put them both on the covers? In between, we've got stories and interviews with the Santos Party House crew, Wendy Yao of Ooga Booga, Oak's gentlemen, dancehall godfather Bounty Killer, Cipha Sounds, the minds behind Partizan and The Directors Bureau, a peek into Rare Book Room studios, and a feature on DJ/producer/label head/etc Erol Alkan. Of course, we fill the rest of the pages with more of our regular coverage of future greatness, as well. As FADER boss Julianne Shepherd wrote in her editor's letter in the issue, "We believe that no culture should be separate, that everyone should have access, that we all should be together. So let’s celebrate." Do just that by downloading FADER Number 58, our Tenth Anniversary Special, for free below, and check back this week and beyond as we put up stories from the magazine and online exclusives only on TheFADER.com.

Get Issue 58 now on iTunes,
subscribe via your favorite RSS reader here,
or download the individual F58 full-issue PDF here.

Sometimes it's so cold outside that we're inclined to wear our outdoorsy accessories indoors—woolen scarves, gloves, hats, mittens as well as a laundry bin of other accessories. In the endless putting-on and taking-off of all this additional stuff, we mourn our stray fingerless gloves and beanie hats that invariably will go missing. We'd say about 20% of all accessories purchased end up lost or in mismatched purgatory each winter—quel horreur!! The trick is to style your outerwear and innerwear in tandem, like this young lady (no lost and found business), so you never have to worry about remembering it all at the end of the night. more...

When it comes to stuff that we love from Europe, all roads tend to lead back to Agentur V, a Berlin-based showroom that houses some of our favorite labels. Obviously we were pretty excited to find out that the agency was going on a world tour of sorts and that our town happened to be right up there on the schedule this week. Pauline from Agentur V (that's her in purple dress) walked us through a bunch of new collections from the likes of Henrik Vibskov (the eternally talented Dane), Wood Wood (if you haven't peeped the FADER TV spot from fashion week then you should) and Carin Wester, the Swedish designer we profiled many moons ago who is still cranking out some amazing clothing (that's her gorgeous cropped knitted sweater after the jump).

The accessories though were some of the things we had most fun with in our ritual game of showroom dress-up. A striking red bowler by Mini Market as well as gorgeous men's footwear from Vibskov in intense blues and greens (primary colors on the horizon for next spring?). Delicate and beautiful were the fine metal masks that Canadian Arielle de Pinto has designed for spring, a kind of more elegantly mysterious Pied Piper (R Kelly we see you!). Of course, Henrik Vibskov's collections are always an unkillable one-stop shop—besides the shoes his homage to old school Coogi and grinning Cheshire Cat tee made our list of favorites, pieces that both the boys and the girls will probably cat fight over when the spring clothes hit stores next year. more...

After impersonating our favorite style icons (Monday=Francoise Hardy day, Tuesday=Bianca Jagger day, etc etc), our favorite pastime in the style department is probably shopping. But shopping is a lot more fun when you have a shop expert to help navigate the shelves/racks. Luckily our favorite stores are filled with lots of such specialists, all of whom know their German deadstock from their North American vintage.

Eddy Chai and Paul Birardi, the founders of Odin are slowly making an unofficial stylee row of E11th street between 1st and 2nd avenue. After Den comes Pas De Deux (that's literally French for "Step of Two, " but if you know your ballet lingo, it's basically dance speech for partner dancing), their new women's boutique that opened up a couple of months ago. The new women's store is just as perfectly edited as Odin, so all the girlfriends that used to take their boyfriends on shopping trips next door will be happy forevermore. The shop is a gorgeous jewel of a walk-in closet, something that could be the set of a Wes Anderson movie. We were lucky enough to have the lovely Amy, who used to work at Odin and recently made the switch, guide us through all the lady stuff that ought to be in our winter wardrobes right now.

It takes a little bit of faith and a whole lot of tenacity to casually step out in a bowtie. It’s not a style that you can change your mind about half way through the evening. You can’t just discreetly slip it off and stuff the evidence into your pocket. This gentleman approached the bowtie from a different angle, picking a smaller more subtle shape to balance out the jeans and rebel against the more dissonant bag. But most importantly, it doesn’t look like he hesitated. more...

In a Stylee Fridays segment a little while ago we featured the Fall '08 collection of designer Ioannis Dimitrousis, and talked a little about our soft spot for cobwebbed knitwear á la Dimitrousis and Rodarte. Mark Fast is another knitwear specialist that actually fell through our, erm, nets first time around, mostly because he just graduated from fashion school earlier this year and debuted his very first collection during London Fashion Week last month.

Originally from Canada, Fast's style is a touch more polished in many ways than the fairytale grunge-y looks that are in the stores right now, like this mauve sweater at Topshop. His style leans on the racier side of things, a kind of super sleek dancehall queen sexy (there are some entirely see-through pieces in his collection), dresses that could look just as at home in an old Patra video as they do slinking down the runway. We're all for the bodycon '90s references especially when they hark back to the era's masters—the likes of Azzedine Alaia—with a little flapper fringing detail to boot. How we keep our wobbly bits covered in a backless, sideless dress like this is an entirely different matter. more...

Last week we headed to The Project gallery for the opening of Ari Marcopoulos' Fear God exhibit. Fear God consists of five black and white paper prints and one lo-fi video of Marcopoulos' teenage sons lip-synching to 2pac's "When We Ride," (including a brief cameo from Marcopoulos himself). The exhibit as a whole is tranquil, from the muted colors in the photographs, to the white wall space of the gallery. The gentle bursts of video color gave off a glowing youthfulness that was complimented by the attendees, who primarily wore muted colors with subtle print flashes. Serendipitous. more...

Depending on where you are, The FADER's 10th Anniversary Issue will hit newsstands and iTunes sometime in the next week or so. Since we already did a big retrospective thing in our 50th issue, we decided to just go out and get some guys from around the way for this one: KANYE WEST and NO AGE. Both covers are exclusives, so make sure to snatch this up whenever you see it, and check back Tuesday, November 25th, when we will put the whole thing up for download and begin a series of online extras only available here on TheFADER.com (and probably Kanye's blog).

What if Tron met Japanese anime over coffee and decided to make a clothing line? You'd get Tokyo-based label, Phenomenon. The label came into being somewhere in the depths of a world where corn husks and ultra bright paint are considered plausible hair ornaments. After the initial shock of electric color and corn husk combos wore off, we noticed the adventurous ideas in the pieces. Individually, they are versatile—a green army poncho here, an elaborately patterned shift dress there—the colors are playful and the military styles are reminiscent of a more classical concept. But it’s the wearability that distinguishes it from other conceptual lines, maintaining a sense of imagination even without the red hair paint and tape shoes. more...

Browsing over the stack of FADERs we've made this year, the Africa issue (F52) definitely stands out as one of our favorites—and it's not just because it happened to be a style issue either. Re-reading it this past week reminded us of all the amazing things that are going on across the continent and made us wonder why there isn't a magazine out of Africa full of that stuff at our local newsstand every month, especially when it comes to fashion (maybe we're a little biased). Pop'Africana is a new publication we came across that will hopefully fill that void. more...

Still high from Halloween sugar rushes, we headed over to Deitch Projects last Saturday night for the opening of Brooklyn-based artist Kehinde Wiley’s third exhibit, Down. Wiley set the sartorial tone for the evening in a very dapper piped orange suit that could have been dipped in his very own paint pots. Strangely a slew of other dudes followed suit, with varying piped ensembles popping up all evening. Coincidence? Trend alert? Or did we just miss the art-appropriate dress code memo? more...

What’s so awesome about this t-shirt is that the thumb on her shirt is in motion. First, you get the front view—a fist with mid raised thumb—and by the time she walks past, the thumb is in a full enthusiastic upward spring. This is how we feel like greeting the world right now, a big goofy smile and an enormous thumbs up. more...

A little over twenty-four hours ago, this country elected a youthful, Harvard-educated black man, who listens to the same music we do, as its 44th president. Since then, we have consciously turned The FADER blog into a reflection of our appreciation of and excitement about that fact because, honestly, we weren't totally confident that it could happen until it did. We hope you have not come here expecting our regular mix of music and cultural ephemera and been disappointed by our doing so, but we feel, and have always felt that our magazine and our site is about more than just music. The FADER is also about our lives and your lives, and right now, we can't think of anything we'd rather talk or write about or take pictures of than the joy and pride we feel personally and have seen in others in our city over the last couple of days. We will return to posting music and videos and stories from each issue, but we might also change things up around here. Hopefully, you'll be into it. Feel free to let us know either way.

As an epilogue to our coverage of Barack Obama's epic victory, we have collected some of our photos and a couple videos from the celebrations around New York City on election night. Some are our amateur shots from the impromptu block party in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and others are FADER photo coordinator John Francis Peter's moving images of New Yorkers watching Obama win in Times Square and Harlem. We hope they make you feel as good as we do. more...

With President-Elect Barack Obama's public promise last night to get his daughters, Malia and Sasha, a new puppy for the White House, there has been quite a bit of speculation (at least in our office) about what kind of dog the new first family should bring to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Presidential dogs have for the most part been pure breeds: Spaniels, Retrievers, Terriers and one ridiculous Bouvier des Flanders (whatever that is). Not since Lyndon B Johnson's famed mongrel Yuki, found at a gas station by first daughter Lucy Johnson, has there been a mutt in the White House, unless you count the one the Carters gave back, poor old Grits.

In the spirit of change and unity in Washington, we fully endorse Teapot, a union of a Beagle (another LBJ fave) and a Spaniel (Bush 41), as First Dog of the United States of America. She is seven months old, slightly inexperienced in administering poop, fired up, ready to go, and can be adopted by the Obamas at Homeless Animals Rescue Team (HART) in Fairfax, Virginia—just a short, heavily-secured limo ride from the nation's capital.

Delivered to 125,000 smiling people on November 4th, 2008 in Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois.