Wear Tweed

It's turned chilly at last make the most of it winter is the time for creative dressers to go tweed hunting -big trousers (must be lined), traditional single breasted two vent jackets jackets, coats, bags, owls, deerstalkers they 're all out there. Proper Harris Tweed (with the orb symbol) is what you really want, hand woven in the Outer Hebrides. It's got to be wool no synthetic mixes. The traditional tweed we like best is a bit rough and scratchy and the colours are mossy and Autumnal. There's a lot of fake rubbish on the high st. at the moment, not a good investment but no worries if you can't run to brand new, secondhand is as good or even better.

Mr Samson Soboye of Shoreditch

This week we breezed into Shoreditch with photographer Ivan Jones to capture super stylish stylist and designer Samson Soboye for our forthcoming book and portrait project.
 Samson owns Soboye an inspiring luxury boutique at 13 Calvert Avenue E2 where he stocks exciting fashion accessories such as embroidered leather bags from Buba, jewellery by Fiona Paxton, shoes by Finsk and coming soon Erickson Beamon jewellery and Vivienne Westwood wallpaper by Cole and Son.
The Autumn light was a gift and Samson worked a Burro striped bamboo polo neck to perfection then we retired to Shoreditch House to put the world to rights and drink tea on raspberry velvet cushions... very posh.

Nothing in the World But Youth, Turner Contemporary Margate

Teenagers lives have changed a lot over the years but society's attitude to them is consistent, whilst their youth and energy is valued and envied their unpredictability and explosiveness is often feared and they are often viewed in a negative light. Nothing in the World But Youth at Turner Contemporary reminds us that being a teenager whether you know it or not at the time is an important and highly creative period of your life.
Margate with all it's seaside town associations inspired this show it's long been a place where young people have gathered to have fun, dress up, mess about and experiment.
 There is work from a diverse selection of ninety four known and lesser known painters, photographers, writers, film makers and so on and there is even work by the teenage Turner himself.
We particularly liked: Mark Leckey's 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore complied from found footage taken the inside clubs in the 70s,80s, and 90s, David Haines pencil drawing Nike Air Sneakers vs Colonel Sanders, Julian Germain's classroom portraits and the photographs and the piece in the fanzine-y style catalogue by Margate born writer Iain Aitch called Can't go on no more:A personal history of Margate's youth culture.

There is loads to see so you might have to have more than one awayday, but that's ok because the light over the sea keeps changing, the local chips are cheap, it's free and it's on until 8th January 2012. Get down there.

www.turnercontemporary.org

The Orphans Arms

This week we took tea with Jay Shipley of The Orphans Arms. Jay used to be an intern and occasional model for Burro. Now with business partner Josh Wilks he's capturing the spirit of old Shacklewell with dark and twisted graphics on perfect T shirt shapes. Spot on for for the bicycle riding hoards of East London......and other people of course.

Jocks and Nerds in print.

Last week photographer Ivan Jones shot journalist and photographer Marcus Ross for Burro's book project. Marcus has just published his online magazine Jocks and Nerds in print, we would say go out and buy it but it's free from independent menswear retailers and other special places so get your skates on.

http://jocksandnerdsmagazine.com/

Get the look: Boiler Suits

We stumbled upon these spooky minimal scarecrows in Suffolk, we don't know if the crows are worried but we were, nice colours though. 

Ivan Jones for Burro

We are shooting a series of portraits with photographer Ivan Jones for our forthcoming book. All the subjects are wearing a bit of Burro and they are all people who have played a part in Burro history. Last week it was time to focus on spec King Jason Kirk. 

Burro's Britain 1-folk

Ai Wei Wei- free at last... last chance.

We have to admit to a slight obsession with Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, he most famously of the ceramic sunflower seeds at the Tate.

He's just been released from being held for 80 days by the Chinese authorities on charges of "tax evasion". Hmmm... Anyway, he's out and despite losing about a third of his body weight (he had a lot to lose) he's looking pretty good.

What better time then to visit his installation at Somerset House. It's strangely moving and impressive. Huge bronze Chinese Zodiac heads around a fountain-filled courtyard. Lovely!

If you're in central London this weekend make sure you go and have a look. It finishes this Sunday on the 26th so get your skates on. It's on the Strand just past Waterloo Bridge.

Burro on The Fashionisto

One of our favourite menswear blogs is the rather inspired The Fashionisto. They've done a nice posting of the Burro SS11 shoot by photographer Ivan Jones. Check it out here:

http://thefashionisto.com/burro-ss11/

http://www.ivan-jones.co.uk/

Turner Contemporary Margate

We own up to not being that crazy about Turner as a painter but we're glad he has inspired the building of the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate.


On our first visit we liked.....
The big north facing window with Daniel Buren's work in situ Borrowing and Multiplying the Landscape part of the opening show Revealed:Turner Contemporary Opens.

The celebrated Margate light.

The space and height.
The way view of the building from the end of the harbour wall makes sense.

The gallery staff are excellent well trained, knowledgeable and engaging.
The cafe, the menu, the terrace and the staff.
The mix of visitors- the obvious arty types and lots of interested local people who are probably not regular gallery goers.

It's free !

Our  misgivings were that...
The opening show did not seem big enough there is feeling of emptiness and unused space.
The building feels a bit back to front we found ourselves hoping for a balcony overlooking the sea.

Overall we reckon it's fab we'll be checking out the next show in September -Nothing in the World but Youth.

Samson Soboye in www.fantasticsmag.com

We don't usually like online magazines we like to turn a page but this one is a visual treat.

Long time Burro collaborator, super stylist and lovely chap Samson Soboye has pointed us in the direction of new(ish) online magazine www.fantsticsmag.com. Forget big names and dull celebs this is about inspired concepts and quality photography.Check out Samson's latest work with photographer Curtis Benjamin here http://fantasticsmag.com/stories/bright-idea
www.samsonsoboye.co.uk

Where Are They Now? part 2

Way back in 2000 Burro collaborated with young musician Jim Wood. We first heard him through his bedroom window (which was in our street) playing Jimmy Hendrix guitar solos. We got Jim to put together the soundtrack to our 2001 Paris catwalk, he played live at the show.....

and contributed a track to the 7” single we put together as a giveaway at the show under the name Jinyl Vunkies alongside Hefner, Murray the Hump and long time Burro associate “Electro Bizarro” aka Justin Anderson.

Later Jim modelled for some of our photoshoots and became something of a fixture in our studio. Much tea was drunk.

We were really pleased to encounter him again the other day playing guitar with “post-dubstep”(!) sensation Jamie Woon. To avoid confusion he’s playing under the nom de plume Royce Wood Jr. . We sneaked onto the guestlist for Jamie’s show at the Scala which was quite frankly splendid. We couldn’t help but think of the rambling vocal and minimal electronic sound of early Fingers Inc., which is a good thing in our book.

Our only gripe was that Jim (Royce) was sitting down for the whole gig so we couldn’t get a decent shot of him!

The debut Woon album has just been released to general acclaim, we’ll definitely be putting it on our Christmas list. As ever, if you fancy a freebie in these straitened times you can get the track "Blue Truth" for free here: http://www.jamiewoon.com/news/2010/12/blue-truth-(sc)

or there's a nice house remix of "Night Air" here: http://www.phuturelabs.com/word/chatter/jamie-woon-night-air-real-rmx-free-download/

Open your Eyes to Pope Joan....

We first stumbled across Brighton based “Art-Pop” band Pope Joan at last summer’s Hop Farm festival in deepest Kent. Playing on one of the small stages, their angular, stylish sound reminded us of a slightly 80’s/early LCD Soundsystem/Micachu/maybe a bit of Roxy Music (all in a good way) and was a refreshing contrast to the folksy stylings of Laura Marling, Mumford and Sons etc. ,the sing-along rambling of Pete Docherty and the disappointing croaking of Dylan (Villagers were good though).

Since that first encounter they’ve been gigging sporadically, recorded some new tracks and a video or two, and we’re pleased to note have just released a single “A Drowning/I Can’t Stand You At All” with a rather lovely video for A Drowning you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee-S_Nbiu6s

We’re reliably informed that you can download it from i-tunes should you feel inclined.

If you’re not feeling flush and fancy a free track from the band you can download an earlier song “Matthias” here: http://soundcloud.com/popejoan  

They’ve got a couple of gigs coming up too, one on 31^st March at Bread and Roses in Clapham, London and their first gig outside the UK on 6^th May in Tours, France supporting “Publicist” a side project of one our other favourite bands-Trans Am. Should be a good night.

Yohji Yamamoto at the V&A

Yohji Yamamoto is one of our favourite designers, not just for his innovative cutting and detailing but also for showing up in Paris in the early eighties and shocking folk. Daft as it seems now the the things that upset people were big shapes, head to toe black and flat shoes on girls!
 At the V&A's Yamamoto exhibition you can watch videos of his early Paris shows, the clothes are unconventional (particularly for the time) you can see that the models of the eighties don't quite know how to deal with them. In later shows Yohji starts to makes his mark and soon hits his stride with non models and unconventional catwalk presentations- a celebrated one being AW04 featuring Madness doing a bit of a dance and Terry Hall looking pretty cool and very grumpy.
 Very little is in a vitrine here so you can get up close and examine how the clothes are put together. We love Yamamoto's use of "crafty" methods like tie die, hand knitting, stencilling and felting, the results are highly engineered and thankfully not hippyish. Take pleasure in the plain trims: buttons, YKK zips and the total lack of branding and bling. Although dating back to the early eighties many of the garments are timeless, go with a friend and play guess the year- we were wildly out with some pieces.

 The only disapointment for us was with some of the menswear exhibits - there were not enough of them and some had aged badly (nasty embroidery on suiting!). One of the other things we love Yohji for is black and navy our iconic Yamamoto men's look would be a big navy suit and there isn't one here. Every man in the "creative industries" in the 80's had one as far as we remember.

We like new designer Enya Mooney

One of our more random jobs over the last couple of years has been running a BBC competition/project called “Your Label”. Basically it was to give young designers the chance to show a capsule collection during LFW. The whole thing was shown on BBC2 at some ungodly hour.

One of the designers we encountered through Your Label was Enya Mooney whose youthfully sophisticated collection was one of our favourites so we were pleased to receive an invitation to Enya’s first “proper” show, an off schedule catwalk at Fashion Mavericks in the Strand.

Working under the name “Enya Patricia” (not sure why) Enya showed a compact and assured collection, it’s not usually our sort of thing but we rather liked it. Have a look at the whole thing here:www.enyapatricia.com and see what you think.

Keep up the good work.

Lou Goes To The Opera

Lou Dalton is one of our current menswear faves so we were pleased to find ourselves on the front row at her Royal Opera House show last Wednesday sitting opposite 80’s superstar Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes To Hollywood fame.

Lou says of her collection “a feeling of discomfort often drives an individual to look inwardly or to look for acceptance from others who have fallen from the conformity of the world around them”….. and cites the Seattle scene and the Russian criminal underworld as influences.

We say…. lovely knitwear as ever and the best wide trousers we’ve seen in a long while. The show had a really nice “salon” atmosphere and reminded us of our first ever show in our Floral Street shop in 1996 which was all gold chairs and Kraftwerk.

Here’s a few shots from Lou’s show to keep you going until she gets round to posting the full set on her own site.

www.loudalton.com

Letters from Edinburgh

Edinburgh band Letters rather appropriately sent us a letter here at the studio. The envelope also contained a copy of their first single The Grand National/Pipe Dreams.

They describe themselves as “dark cello pop noise” and we can’t think of a more appropriate description. They seem to have a penchant for playing gigs in book-strewn flats and standing moodily in black and white on spiral stairs looking literary. We thoroughly approve of this type of behaviour

You can download the single for your very own by visiting their website.

They’re playing a few shows in Scotland in March with a full tour to follow (hopefully) so keep an eye out in the listings or sign up to their blog…

http://www.wewriteletters.co.uk/music/

Juliana Sissons: Knights & Knits at the V&A

We were recently working on a project with knit designer (and original Blitz-Kid!) Juliana Sissons who has been filling her time lately with an “artist in residence” slot at the V&A. She was given a studio space in the museum and full access to all the collections to use as inspiration for a “couture” collection, lucky girl.

Last Saturday she showed her “armour” inspired women’s collection in the Museum’s Medieval and Renaissance galleries to a mixture of invited audience and slightly bemused foreign tourists. The models suddenly appeared amongst the crowds and took their places on pre-placed podiums, looking a bit like those “living sculptures” you see on London’s South Bank and trying not to be put off by the constant attention of a thousand camera phones.

The outfits were lovely, somehow soft and strict at the same time. Marvellously complex knit structures and great use of colour too.

Can’t wait to see what she gets up to next.

Jean-Pierre Braganza catwalk at LFW

Much against our better judgement we have been to a few London Fashion Week shows this season. All that queuing and unseemly scrum whilst being screwed-out by overdressed fashion students really isn't our scene. However we are fans of Canadian designer Jean -Pierre Braganza so we took the plunge and rolled up in Northumberland avenue to see what he'd been up to.
For AW11 his continuing themes are sci- fi, anatomy and rock and roll. His techniques are: complex cutting, layering and panelling. Highly structured with interesting use of quilting, leather and jersey.

J-P has translated some of his ideas into fairly avant-garde menswear we particularly liked the red suit.
We thoroughly approve of his wilful refusal to follow 'trends'. This is the way to genuinely innovate.
He says he's thinking about "clothes for a future world", we would happily wear them now.

We find we rather enjoy all this fashion stuff. More to follow.

http://www.jeanpierrebraganza.com/

When in Paris Burro likes....

Paris seems ridiculously expensive at the moment particularly if you go to the posh places. However even in the Marais you can still get a not too pricey cup of coffee avec croissant with the required Parisian atmosphere at Au Petit Fer a Cheval, 30 Rue Vielle Du Temple. Hits the spot if you want a piece of old Paris.

What we don't get is the apparent popularity of Starbucks, there seem to be branches everywhere, do French people really like the yukky coffee ??

Where are they now? Graeme Sinden.....

                                                                                                                                             

In the dim and distant early part of this Century the lovely Graeme Sinden was a shop assistant in our flagship store (which was then at 29 Floral Street) during the day whilst honing his DJ skills at night. Indeed he DJed at Burro's now-legendary "Summer Fetes" at 333 in Old Street and provided music for most of our in-store events (when we let him!).

His musical career has taken a decided upturn since he left us and he's now half of "Count & Sinden" who have a great album "Mega Mega Mega"out on Domino and collaborated with the Mystery Jets on last Autumn's ubiquitous single "After Dark".

Here's a picture of Graeme in his Burro days hanging around outside the changing rooms in the shop which for some reason appeared in the Japanese magazine Jille in May 2004. If we could read Japanese we'd tell you what they had to say about him!

There's a free mixtape from Graeme on his myspace with remixes from a load of artists including one of our favourites These New Puritans.

Click this link to download the mix: http://www.teenagespaceship.com/sindenpresents/

                                          
                                                                                                                            

Vintage Find

We have been going through our archives recently as we are currently working on a book about Burro that will be published in the Autumn. A friend dug out this grey leather jacket that he bought from us "years ago",well it's nineteen years to be precise, it was from winter 1992 and was called the Paul Newman jacket, it is still in remarkably good nick.

Black and Navy ? Yes please.

Black and Navy is without doubt one of the sharpest colour combinations for winter, from uniforms to nineties Gucci ,Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons it's invariably cool and moody. Amazing then that people still take the time to ask if it's ok to wear them together- don't bother googling the big question we've wasted time doing that and there are 9,170,000 results !

It's an easy look to put together, more interesting than head to toe black but equally slinky. Think stormy seas and midnight sky, try indigo jeans/ black jumper, black shirt/navy cardigan ,black suit/ navy shirt and tie.

Band of Horses

We've been loving Seattle's Band of Horses since coming across them at All Tomorrow's Parties Festival a couple of years ago. Their look is "country-rock" bearded with a touch of "Deliverance" and their first two albums "Everything All The Time" and "Cease to Begin" have become favourites on our studio sound system. We were really looking forward to"Infinite Arms" their third album when it came out last year and whilst it felt a bit too slick for us on first listen, it's really grown.
They've just put out  one of the album's best tracks as a single with a fab video which is a sort of 70's biker homage with a really cool twist. They're touring the UK from the end of January:

26th January / Newcastle Academy 

27th January / Glasgow Academy 

28th January / Birmingham Academy 1 

30th January / Bristol Academy (sold out) 

31st January / Leeds Academy 1 

1st February / Manchester Academy 1 

3rd February / London Brixton Academy 

4th February / Bexhill De La Warr Pavilion

We're thinking that the deco splendour of the Bexhill Pavillion might be a good option if juxtaposition is your thing. Click here to see the video:  Band of Horses