Stag Blog

We like moccasins. We like boat shoes. We like distressed (but not overly distressed) suede. Somehow, London’s H by Hudson mashed up all three successfully and came to the table with 3 great looking styles that we just brought in for Fall ’10. The Mesquite, the Rafferty, and the Utah.

The following titles showed up this week: Prefab Houses, Max’s Kansas City – Art, Glamour, and Rock and Roll (friggin amazing book), and The History of Surfing. Come and get ‘em:

Run by the brothers Corsillo, The Hill-Side is based in Brooklyn, New York and specializes in making neckties, handkerchiefs, and scarves out of utilitarian fabrics not commonly found in neckwear. Some are made of selvedge chambray, some of hemp/cotton selvedge denim, left-hand twill, cotton duck, and waxed canvas. Dress them up or down. We recently got a hundred or so pieces in for our first Fall shipment. Some of the styles are featured below.

All 5 of us STAG partners frequent flea markets, junk shops, antique malls and the like in our free time, so we stay in pretty good stock with things like old postcards, vintage westerns, antique furniture, weird taxidermy, etc.. Recently we’ve amassed a pretty good collection of vintage postcards featuring Native Americans in various regalia and costumery. A few from the batch below — all available for sale at the store:

We’re just back from 5 days of Vegas trade shows and have a ton of photos of possible Spring ’11 STAG goods. One of the labels we were really impressed with was CXXVI out of New York. Small brand. Amazing graphics. Check out these close-ups of some of their screen prints.

Matt Baldwin is a mash up. A Midwesterner by birth, he headed out West to carve lines in the Colorado mountains for a while before getting serious about clothing design and attending LA’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in the late 90′s. With Cali-surf accent in tow and design chops aplenty, he eventually hauled back to Kansas City, MO where he and his wife have steadily built their Standard Style empire over the last decade. And now with that business on cruise control, he’s pushed out with his own line of denim called, logically, Baldwin Denim. The line, like Baldwin himself, mixes Midwestern roots (all his jeans feature a triple-stich yoke influenced by Kansas City’s Lee Jean pedigree) with a twist or two of Californian, clean-lined modernism. The result is one helluva good-looking and great-fitting jean. We’ve had the slim, straight Baldwin “Reed” in a dry indigo wash for several months now and just added another Reed in a perfectly distressed “Colorado” wash this week. They’re both the only yellow selvage denims we’ve ever seen, and their fits are by far and away our best selling slim, straight jean. Do come and see.

Running a successful, family-owned business for 127 years is no easy feat (at all), but it’s exactly what the legendary Hamilton Shirt Co. out of Houston, TX has accomplished. Since 1883, they’ve been crafting some of America’s finest custom shirts – each painstakingly designed and constructed in their Houston workshop from Italian and Swiss fabrics. Four generations and a paper pattern or two later, the new “off the rack” 1883 Collection reinterprets timeless Hamilton styles at a price far removed from their custom brethren. And while the price is a bit different, the shirts are made from the same fabrics, by the same hands, in the same shop, with the same craftsmanship. Hamilton sought out a few stores across the country to carry the 1883s, and we’re very proud to be one of the chosen few. The shirts are here, and their as good-looking as they come.

Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and the thieving Robbie Robertson made up, in some of our minds at least, the greatest band of all time. And thanks to their mentor Mr. Dylan, that’s exactly what they were known as. The Band. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

Levi Strauss hopped the pond from Bavaria in the 1840′s and started his eponymous brand in 1853 – producing the first pair of denim overalls in the 1870′s and later patenting the rivet that became the lynchpin for the modern jean.  More than 150 years later, the company has weathered several ups and downs and has found a sweet spot of late with their Best of Red Tab line.  A couple of weeks ago we brought in the BRT Hesher “Rigid Indigo” to rave reviews and today the Hesher Wide River and Matchstick Selvedge made their way into the shop.  The Hesher and Wide River sell at $98 and the selvedge Matchstick goes for $128.  Go forth.