Hawaiian Shirts Are Dead In The Water
The kind of gear that surfers and snowboarders wear these days puts the past to shame. Surfwear has been particularly bad in the past, there was the retro period, the day-glo era, a dragged-out obsession with big-panted Australian fashion, and a few other humdingers, but now, even if you’ve never stood on a board in your life you can easily find boardwear that will put even the most niche and clique urbanwear to shame. Take Kamikaze Boarding from Brighton UK for example… Ah Brighton, I “studied” my arts degree there, alongside class C narcotics and sexy babes, but that’s another story. Kamikaze definitely have a slick operation going on here, their site is super savvy, some nice little Flash movies and some very tight designs in their collections.
I’d have liked a zoom navigation on the product images, but then again I may just be picky, what do I mean “may”! Still, the thing is their designs look even better really close up, but sticking my nose to the screen isn’t my favourite of pastimes. What impressed me most about the collection is that it managed to throw a few surprises at me, for instance their Ride T-Shirt takes me back to the beautifully minimalist design ethic of magazine layouts in the early 80′s, you know iD, Face and so on. Although I’m not keen on all the logos everywhere, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The thing about fashion logos if you have to be really really big, I mean to the point you have factories and international distributors before you can plaster it over everything in your collection. Nowadays even the (evil) mega-global corporate brands out there have realised the public are sick of advertising their wares, almost to the point where they’re begin to hide the logo, or at least secrete it somewhat.
Talking of evil corporations, Kamikaze Boarding are what you might call their nemesis when it comes to business practice, I mean these guys are greener than green and fairer than fair. They use fair trade manufacturers for their shirts and the whole process of production from start to finish has a 90% reduced carbon footprint – which is kind of amazing really. Then again you could say that their business relies more heavily than most on us having a clean environment, who wants to surf oil or board down a dry mountain?
Ride Tee
Boneyard Tee
Hot Chicka Tee
See more of Kamikaze’s slick boardwear at www.kamikazeboarding.com
