It Can't Possibly Be Da Shoes

I remember a time in my teens when I was at a friend's house, and his mother arrived home from shopping and announced she had bought him new running shoes. I was amazed: when I bought new shoes, I needed to try on at least six pairs to find one that fit comfortably. The idea of just buying shoes based on nothing but the size and then assuming that's it, the transaction is done? That was mind-blowing.

The point is, there are two types of people when it comes to shoes: picky, and not picky. Okay, I guess "picky" then subdivides into picky for fit and picky for style, so, um, that wasn't as neat as I'd hoped.

Our current retail world is really not good for people like me. For most people and most products, ordering things online is great. Essentially, the plus is that you have incredible choice because the whole world is available to you. But the disadvantage is that you can't inspect anything before buying. Oh, there's the whole lack of human interaction too, if you're into that sort of thing. For most products, that's a reasonable trade off: you don't really need to feel a new iPad before buying. But for me, it's trying on the shoes that I miss.

If you find comfortable shoes easily, this world is great for you: type your size into Amazon and you're done. If you're in that choosy-about-styles subgroup,  it's not perfect, but you might trade the ability to try on shoes for the increased selection. But for me, it really sucks. When it comes to casual shoes, there's just Wal-Mart, Foot Locker, and a few locally-owned stores. Previously, I would have gone to Zellers, Target, Sears, Payless for the sweet spot of cheap but with some quality. But they're all gone in Canada. So I'm stuck with super cheap or super expensive. It's the first time I've come up against this problem. I've bemoaned the lack of bricks and mortar options in modern retail before, but this is the first time I've had the experience where I need to buy something, but I'm not really sure where to get it.

20,000 Leagues All Over Me

In many ways, I reject traditional masculinity, but in other ways I embrace it. One obvious way is sports. I counted it up, and I now have items of clothing to indicate my team of choice in no less than seven different sports leagues. (MLB, NBA, NHL, CFL, NFL, MLS, and the latest addition, the National Lacrosse League.)

That's nearly all of my teams. Okay, there are some leagues where I have a favourite team based on something like a weird name. (Forced to choose a team among Indian Premier League cricket teams I'd go the Kolkata Knight Riders, but I can't pretend to be passionate about them.) Among teams I truly care about the only ones missing would be the family soccer teams, Aston Villa or Birmingham City. And I point that out not entirely as a gift idea for friends and family. 

But now I realize that this manifestation of my masculinity is about to get even more complicated. And ironically, it's because of the rise of women's sports. I jumped on the bandwagon of the Toronto PWHL team, but since they don't have a name yet, I have a reprieve before buying any merchandise. But as soon as they become the Toronto Narwhals or something, I'll be heading to the stores. And now Toronto is getting a WNBA franchise, so that will need another piece of clothing with their presumably non-plural name splashed across it. 

The fact is that we're entering into a more complex sports world. The days of just hockey in Canada and just baseball in the US are long gone. We've even moved beyond a Big-3 or Big-4 team sports. I'm wondering how that's going to change fandom in the future. Because at the same time, the ways of spending on your team has increased too; clothing is just one aspect of it. Above, I was just talking about cheap t-shirts and hats, but if you're going to go for the replica uniform route, you could be spending a thousand dollars on your full collection of teams, before we even get to the jackets, lamps, novelty home scoreboards, etc. And that's before we consider how much you might bet on your teams of choice. 

So I'm thinking that sports fandom could get watered down: The days of looking into the audience and seeing half the fans in the team uniform could be numbered. After all, it wasn't that long ago when such fans were a lot less common.  Maybe we'll return to those before-times of more casually-dressed spectators, and the current era of monochromatic crowds will seem like an awkwardly-obsessed outlier.

Or, we could see fans concentrating more on individual sports. Instead of just automatically maintaining fandom of all the teams from the local metropolis, fans may choose to specialize. That would be odd, because now we just assume that teams from different sports in one town are kind of allies, since their fans are mostly the same people. But if they have to fight to be the object of local fans' obsessions, that could get ugly. You think it's hard to back a team between Lakers-Celtics or Dodgers-Giants, how about when it's Dodgers-Lakers? Rich teams fighting over entitled fans? That's no fun. I'd be willing to keep buying sports merchandise just to keep that from happening.

The Basketball Diagrams

In a recent commercial, I noticed that the Raptors’ Fred VanVleet was wearing a T-shirt with an odd triangular logo that looked like one of those adaptors they used for record holes. But after a few times seeing the ad, I realized that the symbol looked like an “F” and a “V,” so I wondered if it was his personal logo.

Years ago, I made a post about athletes with their own logos, so this shouldn’t surprise me. But still — much as I identify with VanVleet as a fellow vertically-challenged person, and admire his fighting back from many challenges to become an important member of a top team — he is the second-string point guard. In contrast, the athletes I found with symbols were among the best ever at their respective sports. But I did a little digging, and was surprised to find that most of the Raptors line-up have their own logos:

It turns out that although those earlier logos were created by equipment manufacturers to associate products with the athlete, today’s players are often taking it upon themselves to create a symbol for themselves. Indeed, Fred VanVleet will sell you one of his logo shirts, so he’s essentially doing for himself what Nike et al will do for the biggest stars in the game. Also, Kyle Lowry invited logo designs, but he’s still going with clothing that just has “7” on it at least for now.

In case you’re wondering where the rest of team is on this, Danny Green doesn’t have one, but his podcast does. And coach Nick Nurse has a hat with his initials on it, though that was supposedly a gift. I’m left wondering how Marc Gasol got left out of the fun. He’s a newcomer to the team, but he was a star for Memphis for many years, so I’m left wondering if this is unique to the Raptors.

I’m sure a star studded team like the Warriors all have their own logos. Well, the famous ones, anyway; their bench probably just has “Hello my name is” stickers. So I’ll look at Eastern Conference rivals the Milwaukee Bucks. Not surprisingly, their star Giannis Antetokounmpo has one, though it’s not real creative. And better still, I found a mnemonic for spelling his name. But what about his less-famous teammates? I went looking, and I couldn’t find one for Eric Bledsoe or Brook Lopez, though Khris Middleton has one that I don’t entirely understand.

So this is a weird Raptors tradition, like Jurassic Park or Drake. Hopefully they can spin this into a new way of winning over free agents: sign with the Raptors and no matter your role with the team, you get your own logo, and as many endorsements as you have time for.

With The Price Cut, It's Less Frivolous

Yesterday, I strolled through The Bay. Do people still call it that? The store wants to be called "Hudson's Bay," so I don't know if any normal people call it that. Anyway, I often do this, even though I never buy anything. I guess I find it relaxing; I can go through looking without pressure, knowing I probably won't find anything tempting enough to force a difficult decision.

I can't remember the last time I bought something there. For one thing, the prices are pretty high. I find that when they have a sale, all it does is reduce the prices down to what would sound like a good starting price.

And then there's the brands. I think I've made clear that I don't really understand rich-people brands. Surely buying explicitly expensive stuff makes you look desperate. Buying a brand that everyone knows is associated with wealth? That's something poor people would do. So it doesn't make sense for them to exist. But apparently, lots of people will pay big bucks for Ralph Lauren, game theory be damned.

But on this day, I did find a shirt which met all the criteria I was looking for:

• reasonable price
• looked good
• non-bourgeois brand
• doesn't make me look retired

So I took it off the last-chance clearance rack and headed for the fitting rooms.

And they were locked, with no one in sight. Of course, there's no bell like there was at Sears. I wondered around for a bit looking for an employee, but couldn't find one. In retrospect, I suppose I could have just gone back to the cosmetics department at the entrance; there's always plenty of people waiting there to pounce. But of course, that would have been futile. One of the many perks of masculinity is being invisible to them.

So in the end, I gave up and went home, with my never-buying-anything-at-the-Bay streak intact. But on my way out of the store, I happened to notice another shirt on a sale rack, which I took a photo of for posterity:

I'm sure I've seen that pattern before somewhere. Now where could it be?

Not cool, Hudson's Bay. My generation doesn't have much, don't commoditize our touchstones. I should have gone to the women's section to see if they were selling the anarchist cheerleader outfits from the video.

Hey, does this count as cultural appropriation? Excuse me while I call some human rights lawyers.

Astro Down Memory Lane

The Blue Jays' recent series in Houston didn't go well for them. But I did notice something interesting in the crowd: the preponderance of old Astros shirts.

To review: Houston's baseball team was originally called the Colt 45's. But when the city built the world's first domed stadium, it was named the Astrodome, in honour of the city's connection to the space program ("Houston, we have a problem.") Also, it was the 60's, and the future was still cool. So the team chose the name Astros. They also started taking their logos and uniforms in a bolder direction, by the mid-70's, they adopted snazzy white, orange, yellow and red uniforms, with an unapologetically modern font (Futura Bold?) Of course, traditionalists cringed.

Over the last quarter-century, the Astros have had a variety of inoffensive, but unmemorable uniforms and colour schemes. Today, their current black-and-orange unis hint at the old ones, but the traditional trim and fonts are incongruous.

But the weird thing is that you still see a lot of the gaudy old shirts in the stands. In fact, it seems like there are more of them than their current style. So essentially the fans have spoken, and whatever the marketers say, they think their team identity lies in those crazy 70's shirts.

Hopefully the team will realize this and build on it. I'm not expecting them to go back to that style, but they could come up with a design that pays tribute while looking more timeless. Essentially, the Blue Jays did this on a less extreme scale, bringing back their World Series era logo, fonts, and uniforms, albeit with some well-placed updates (it's amazing what a difference serifs make.)

I'm glad to see this. While baseball's history and tradition give it a gravitas most sports lack, it can get rather stuffy when self-appointed gatekeepers decide what is and isn't available. It's good to see that the sport still has room for a little irony.

And if there can be rehabilitation for the Astros' notorious uniforms, maybe some others have a chance. The Raptors' old purple shirts still make a lot of appearances in the crowd, despite their tasteful current red and black. The Washington Capitals have brought back their outlandish star-spangled shirts. But the ultimate would be if the Vancouver Canucks and their fans warm to their old black, red, and yellow.

Forever Disaster

Did you know that Adidas is an acronym of All Day I Dream About Sport? No? Good, 'cause it's just an urban myth. It's actually a contraction of the founder's name, Adolf "Adi" Dassler.  Well his brother, Rudolf didn't get along with him, and left to start his own company, Puma.  How about that?  You have a successful multinational shoe company, and it's only the second biggest multinational shoe company in the family.

So it's fitting that Puma has always been the poor cousin to the big boys of sports footwear. The only organized sports I ever participated in - playing soccer as a child - was in Puma shoes. So when I was entering my teens, at about the time the marketing Svengalis at Nike convinced everyone in my generation that shoes were the determiner of athletic prowess and social status. Here I was, the closest connection I had to this suddenly important world of shoes was through the ones cheap enough to be sold at Zellers, the Go-Bots to Nike's Transformers.

But now Puma is going to try constructing a bad-ass image for itself with a new ad campaign. And someone in PR decided they'd do it with athletes in hot-tubs.  In their trying-too-hard ad, you probably recognized Usain Bolt.  If you follow soccer, you recognized Mario Balotelli and possibly Marta.  And I had to look it up, and the woman who is about to take a two-stroke penalty for taking the putter in the tub with her is Lexi Thompson.  And I don't know why they have footage of Formula 1 pit stop either.

The whole thing seems like a miscalculation, even before you find out that Thompson is only 19.  Like I say, its attempt to look rebellious is really over the top.  But it's also not really believable from mostly likeable athletes. Yes, Balotelli has enough sinisterness for all of them, but that leads to the biggest problem.  The scene of him in the hot-tub is the creepiest thing I've ever seen.  There he is, with a hint of a grin of self satisfaction, with his arms around a couple of early-round-losers from a Taylor Swift impersonation contest, speaking for him in bubbly voices with Borg-like unison.  Yes, I know it was probably just something they threw together when the ad's director discovered he can't speak English, but now I'm going to go out and buy some Adidas shoes just so everyone knows I'm not involved with this.

Im-male-da

It's always bugged me that Imelda Marcos became so well known for her epic shoe collection that she can still be used as a punchline to this day, at least for people over forty. We don't even remember that her husband, Ferdinand, was dictator of the Philippines, or that her shore collection was not the plaything of a deranged rich woman, but a symbol of excess by exploitive leaders. And it's an affront to feminism of Kournikovian proportions that we remember Imelda for her stereotypical excess, while Corizon Aquino, the woman who led the popular uprising that deposed the Marcoses and brought democracy to the Philippines, is remembered only by historians.

But the reason I'm fixated on shoes today is that a rather unstereotypical thing happened to me: I found a pair of shoes I forgot I had at the bottom of the closet. Like most men, I don't own a lot of shoes. I can't speak for all men, but for me is not that I hate shoes, but I hate buying shoes. Aside from sizing problems, there's the style problem.  Most men's clothing fits into one of three categories:

• Formal, good-looking, uncomfortable
• Casual, comfortable, boring
• Sporty, very comfortable, silly

Or to put out another way, you have to look like your boss, your father, or your son. It's especially bad in shoes, where there's little choice between work and sports shoes.

But these shoes seemed to drop somewhere between those second and third groups. Clean, black canvas, they don't look childish or formal. So I wore them today. They were nice and comfortable to walk in. Though the thick canvas does make them a little warm. I feel like I look good, though my get are sweating a bit. But I do have thick socks. Okay, now the sweat is making my feet squeak as I walk. So maybe they aren't suited to summer. The shallow tread means I can't use them in winter, so I'll have to wait 'til fall to wear them. I'll just throw them in the closet for now; I'm sure I'll remember to get them out again in a few months.

Mini Makeover

I thought this shirt and pants combination seemed strangely familiar, and yet also missing something.

Well I think I've figured out what it needed.

That's better.

The Symbol Life

For a while now, superstar athletes have been adopting personal logos. You've probably seen Tiger Woods's "TW" logo on his hat, as well as a variety of Nike gear.

Roger Federer has a logo on a line of clothing too.

Tom Brady's symbol incorporates his uniform number.

Then everyone wants in on it.

It may be spreading outside of sports; Toronto mayoral candidate Olivia Chow has a logo she's using in her campaign.

So I've wondered if I could adopt a personal logo based on my initials. This was my first effort:

 

That looked a bit too phalic. I tried a simpler approach.

Then I thought of incorporating a distinctive picture.  Sort of like the Air Jordan logo, it could show me doing what I do best.  That would be, sitting at a computer:

I think that works better. It's not totally accurate, since I don't have a white hoodie.

Changing Clothes

Apparently the 90's are back. I noticed a few months ago when I passed a clothing store and realized it was completely day-glo. This after all the day-glo material in the world had disappeared, except for that little bit the Seattle Seahawks have on their uniforms. So congratulations, Seahawks, you not only won the Superbowl, you've also lived out the male fantasy of keeping clothes long enough for them to come back into style.

And I recently saw an article about the Hypercolor shirts, the ones that changed colour depending on their exposure to heat. At the time the workings of the shirts was a mystery to us all, but now such secrets are just a web search away. What old mystery will the Internet ruin next, showing us how The Noid was animated?

Hypercolor shirts weren't that great. They really just looked like moody tie-dye shirts. Of course, now that I write that, I suppose it was apropos for the times. But it seemed kind of disappointing for the latest in clothing technology. About the only time you saw the shirts do anything interesting was when you could see the outline of a chair on someone's back when they stood up. I suppose you could have done some interesting things in conjunction with the Magic Bag which came out around the same time, but we weren't that clever.

Here's the question I did have about Hypercolor shirts at the time, and I would have asked on my blog then if such things existed: why would you want people to know how warm you are? You pay money for deodorant so that people won't know that.

Japanese Restaurants, Mosques, Doctor's Offices?

So I walk into the doctor’s office, and there’s a big sign in the entryway asking everyone to take off their shoes upon entering.  They do this during the winter months, and I know from the past that people do generally follow this request.  But now it’s near the end of winter - there’s still some snow on the ground, but the temperature is above zero and the ground is mostly dry.  So do I follow the instructions?  It doesn’t get any better when I get inside: there are only a couple of people in the waiting area, and one pair of boots on the big mat where people usually leave their footwear.

So what do I do?  Kindly follow the directions of the handmade bristol board sign that someone obviously put a lot of work into and in the process timidly bend to imposed authority?  Or ignore the directions and stand up for common sense and in the process be one of those arrogant jerks who feels he’s above the rules? 

I went with the former, and took off my shoes.  As I waited, several others came in, and none of them took off their shoes, so I look like an idiot in my socks surrounded by people wearing shoes.  So when society collapses, don’t blame me: I’ve been a martyr for law and order.

Do These Pants Make Me Look Obscure?

For this week's Sunday night NFL game, the Pittsburgh Steelers wore replicas of their original uniforms.  In honour of their eightieth anniversary, they broke out uniforms they would normally never be caught dead in, with yellow and brown horizontal striped shirts and socks, and light beige pants that did not compliment an offensive lineman's physique. 

This isn't unusual.  They're usually known as "throwback" uniforms.  Throughout the sports world, fashion crimes are committed in the name of nostalgia.  Here are some recommendations to improve future throwbacks.

They should be about nostalgia, not trivia

A lot of NFL teams are guilty of this, since their histories usually started long before the sport got national exposure.  So you have, say, the Broncos showing up in brown uniforms that no one remembers.  The New York Jets had a long obsession with the fact that they were originally called the Titans.  I don't know why anyone would care: the Titan uniforms were ugly, there's already a team called the Titans, and nobody cared about the team back then.  I'm sure the Jets played a few games before they upset Baltimore in Super Bowl III, it's just that no one cares that they did.  Which brings me to the next point:

Don't Throw Back if you have nothing to Throw Back To.

Take the Pittsburgh Penguins.  Apparently there was an organization in Pittsburgh called the "Penguins" dating back to the late sixties.  But as far as anyone cares, they came into being in the summer of 1984 when they drafted Mario Lemieux.  Yet, every year they play in ugly blue uniforms that harken back to when the team was terrible and no one came to see their games.

Be Fair and Throw Back to All Eras

By exclusively using retro uniforms from the sixties and earlier, you're just indulging the Baby Boomers.  Why not have retro seventies and eighties uniforms too?  Because they're ugly, sure.  Blue Jays, Buccaneers, you've done it, now how about the Astros, White Sox and Padres.  Canucks, even I won't ask for your yellow uniforms, but how about the black "V" shirts?

Make it Worth It

My own St. Louis Rams are guilty of this, using throwback uniforms to their lone Super Bowl championship.  Thing is, that was only twelve years ago, and the uniforms they used then were pretty much the same as their current ones, but with gaudier colours.  If you don't have anything to go back to, why not make something up?   Just put together some random shades of brown and beige, and it will probably still end up looking better than most alternate uniforms.

Day One With a Mobile Phone

Lots of jackets have pockets specifically for cell phones now, but what they need now is to add weights to the other side so it won't be lopsided.

By the way, I've prided myself on being one of the few on the Internet with proper spelling, punctuation and grammar.  We'll see how long that lasts, thumb typing on a touch screen.

Final Lessons from Zellers

Target is moving in to Canada, by buying up Zellers stores.  They're going about it a weird way: closing stores, selling everything down to the shelves, letting all the workers go, only to reopen the stores under the new brand.  Wal-mart also entered the Canadian marked by buying existing stores (of Woolco) but they kept them open and just gradually changed the stores over to their way of doing things.  You'd think that if any store chain considered itself so culturally unique that they would feel the need to shut stores down and start afresh, free of the unprofitableness cooties, it would be Wal-mart.  The idea that Target is even more controlling makes me a little uneasy.

Anyway, many of the Zellers that are being re-branded are now having everything-must-go clearance sales.  After going to a couple of these, here's what I've learned:

• Zellers employees are/were really nice.  Everyone I had to interact with was very polite and patient, in spite of the situation.  You earn a tiny salary, to begin with, your job has now been arbitrarily eliminated by a foreign company, and you're expected stay at work for a few weeks to sell off everything around you.
• We have an obesity problem.  When you have to sell men's size-small t-shirts at $1.49 and still can't get rid of them, we have a problem.  Small was the only size they had left, or I would have bought the "More people have read this shirt than your blog" shirt.
• Speaking of which, why do big-and-tall stores exist?  Surely anyone who has an unusual sized/shaped body just has to wait until the end of a sale and they'll find entire racks of clothing just for them.
• A clearance sale is a time to rethink security.  You've got expensive and easily concealable MP3 players just hanging on the racks, but you're going to make me call an employee over to unlock the video game cabinets just to get a $10 copy of Gran Turismo for the Play Station 2.
• Zellers stores are more organised in a desperate clearance than ever before.  Normally you have trouble finding a price on half the items, now everything has a big sign on it telling you how much it is.  And most of the time you find merchandise just lying around in aisles yet to be sorted on to shelves, so having it arranged on haphazard clearance racks is hardly different.
• I was right not to bother collecting Club Z points.  I'd still only be halfway to that toaster oven I wanted.

The Nerds have the Screen Printer

I've been really amazed at just how many geeky t-shirts are for sale on the Internet, such as at TeeFury or Qwertee.

So who is buying all these t-shirts?  I know, geeks.  But living in a high-tech mecca, you would expect that I'd occasionally see one.  A few weeks ago, I saw someone with a "Han Shot First" shirt, but that's pretty old-hat when it comes to geek self-expression.

But it's more than just lightweight geekery that any dedicated Big Bang Theory viewer would get. Now I see that the shirts are getting to new levels of obscurity.  Take a look at this "The Angels Have the Delorean" shirt.  To bring the uninitiated up to speed: in one of the more memorable Doctor Who episodes, a character mentions having a T-shirt that reads, "The Angels have the Phonebooth" (trust me, it made sense at the time.)  Of course, someone actually started selling such shirts.  It's hard to believe that alone makes economic sense.  But then someone else said, never mind T-shirts referencing a single line from Doctor Who; that's not esoteric enough.  Let's cross that with a Back To the Future reference. 

Why stop there?  They had a phonebooth in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, can you work that into it?  Oh, you can.  Well how about Superman?  Ah.

I think the real question is: why am I the only geek who can draw yet is not designing T-shirts?

Apparently, It's Not Easy Being Green

Walking around town today, I was surprised just how many people made an effort to wear green.  I didn't personally.  No, not as some sort of statement, but because if you're not Irish, nor do you drink, St. Patrick's Day doesn't impact on your life that much. 

Most of these people were making a special effort to wear green, since they were clearly straining the capabilities or their wardrobes to fit in.  I'm not sure why - the bars will serve you no matter what colour you're wearing.  Besides, the Irish flag has two more colours in it.  Why not wear orange and white and then act all superior?

Here are some clumsy efforts at St. Patty's wear, all of which I saw today:

• Teal
• Day-glo yellowy-green that seemed to be left over from 1990.
• A store that moved the only green items of clothing to the front window, which turned out to be cheap bathrobes.
• A green shirt which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a Brazil shirt.

On that last note, bonus marks to the guy who was inexplicably wearing a Laos T-shirt.  Though he appeared to be both South-East Asian and rather confused, so I'm assuming that wasn't an ironic statement.  Speaking of which, imagine how bizarre this must seem to a new immigrant who sets up a restaurant based on their culture.  One Saturday, no one comes in, and you can't explain why.

Anyway, I was going to post a big rant about the phrase "luck of the Irish,"  since they don't seem to be particularly lucky people, so I'd just as soon have the luck of the Belgians, say.  But Mental_Floss has managed to explain how the phrase really came to be.