The response from the industry, athletes, and retailers has been tremendous. A unique look & feel to the spreads that allows athlete and product performance to merge with dynamic action photography for this emerging category at Under Armour. Featured athletes include Bobby Brown, Jen Hudak, JP Tomich, Chas Guldemond, and Ahmet Dadali. Let it Snow!

Business, social and personal success depends heavily on one’s ability to communicate effectively. Indeed, language is the catalyst for all of our internal or external success. In a world of increased insecurity, hyperbole and distortion, it is absolutely crucial to keep channels of communication open between brands and people. We talk a lot about translating a brand’s message into a compelling story at Soldier and using a defined narrative to create a true journey of the client with greater ease and confidence.  When ideas are expressed more effectively they are deeper and more dynamic. Creating enticing connections with the intended audience.

A Child Of The Jago is an East London Men’s shop on Great Eastern St in London, which opened this summer.  Perhaps making some nods to Vivienne Westwood’s World’s End Shop once inside.  They seem to keep their English sensibilities, punk rock roots and Neo-dandy-esque irreverence. The great Great Eastern St. shop bears the title of a 19th century novel about the slums, crime and violence of east end life.  And who best to tell us more about the story and it’s twisted captivating step into the past?

Let me reintroduce you to Liam Maher, who I mentioned in my Rendering Authentic Experiences post last month.  Liam and I have been having the pleasure to shoot-the-shit with over the last couple days at the Soldier Studios.  Chatting and sharing about many things from Yankee Ingenuity to how to find value in timepieces or vintage eyewear frames.

For those of you who did not get my hack of a bio for in the last post, here is another.  Liam is currently heading up design for Denham the Jean maker out of Amsterdam,  responsible for the creation of the Young Meagher collection and the Militant Guild of Rural Tailors Research Group. Prior to moving to Amsterdam he directed creative services at Burton Snowboards, where Liam, myself and a couple other heads at Soldier worked together such as Andy Lubets our Product Design Director and Barry Dugan our Business Director out of our Vermont offices.  Liam has also co-created on projects with Visvim,  Confederate Motorcycles, Legion Los Angeles and case-in-hand A Child of the Jago.

Check out the following stream-of-consciousness, tirade or what Liam would say just plain “Going off” on behalf of the folks at A Child Of Jago.  It’s truly an experience.

A CHILD OF THE JAGO

A Child Of The Jago is a child of the street. The destitute and illegitimate progeny of a hopelessly rundown environment.

In the case of Joseph Corre and Simon “Barnzley” Armitage, the street is Great Eastern and the physical environment is a former Victorian slum in East London where the alley wise hero of Arthur Morrison’s book, A Child of the Jago takes place. But the spiritual environment that has catalysed Corre and Armitage’s enterprise is an even more threatening and sprawling slum, that of the creatively impoverished and commercially corrupt homogeny represented by the menswear status quo.

Corre and Armitage are acutely aware that the world their new child is entering will offer it no sympathy and give it no quarter. A Child of the Jago isn’t being raised to expect a warm welcome. It’s being brought up to cause trouble while it contrives to raise the bar.

The zeal for agitation is a natural extension of the pair’s stylistic inspirations. The attitude reflects the sartorial excesses of the original dandy and the raw unpredictable razor’s edge of Rock & Roll stitched together with the excruciatingly rigorous standards of the Saville Row tailoring tradition. This all makes for a volatile cocktail of no-rules merchandising. Milkman jackets reminiscent of work wear’s golden age are presented alongside Scottish cashmere and fine shirting crafted in Jermyn Street factories. At the same time the tyranny of forced fashion “cycles” and industrially contrived “trends” receive a brutal Liverpool kiss-off, neutralised and dismissed as waste-creating crutches habitually brandished by brain-dead corporations well and truly only in it for the money.

But neither Corre nor Armitage are interested in disposable rebellion or a shallow veneer of style. They don’t believe standards of quality have been lost so much as they have been stolen, kidnapped, hijacked and brutalised by the mainstream fashion system. And they clearly don’t care how much shoe leather is worn away in their efforts to free quality from its current confinement. They have wired together a clandestine alternative network that unifies select Saville Row tailors with irreverent young talents from Japan’s best fashion academies. They have identified hole-in-the-wall suppliers of ultra-premium deadstock menswear fabrics and implicated them deep within their plot. Maneuvers that combine with their abandonment of artificial fashion cycles and grant them access to the best pure wools, rich silks, sharp gabardines, rugged twills and a host of one-of-a-kind yard goods of unrivaled quality that can otherwise stack up in the dust left by built-in-obsolescence and an inefficient and cynical marketing system.

Almost by accident their provocative approach ensures their own product, the dangerously named “Terrorist” collection, bares certain highly desirable market characteristics.

Intentionally Local and Accidently Sustainable

It is good for the ecology if folks are granted access to quality and discontinue thinking of clothing as disposable. Garments created with care from the best locally produced material the way Corre and Armitage are making them get better with age, not worse. The notion that waste could be dramatically reduced merely by a systematic revolt against the calculated cycling of prepackaged trends is not theoretical, it’s very definitely real. Not afraid to antagonise a bully, their child of the Jago is doing its part right in their own backyard. If customers adopted this attitude en masse it would doubtless herald the end of waste in fashion altogether. Goliath would fall and David would remain standing and David would be better dressed than ever.

Exclusive and Richly Storied

It is also good for customers to gain access to something genuinely unique. As individual as a human heart, Corre and Armitage’s designs are rendered in fabric combinations that could literally never be reproduced. So if desire for exclusivity and products with real narrative are on the rise, then A Child Of The Jago is stomping impertinently in the right direction.

The highly combustible flashpoint of the concept is the store itself. Designed after scenic illustrations of Hogarth’s Gin Lane, the finished space provides a languid and lurid framework for the full Terrorist collection as well as a dedicated bespoke tailoring service that employs the same remarkable dead stock fabrics.

The basement houses a lush gallery of carefully curated vintage that is treated as a purebred cousin and sold right alongside their own creations. One can expect to see everything from Napoleonic uniforms to antique French work wear along with complimenting curiosa like the leather-and-brass artificial leg of a long dead Hell’s Angel gang member, classic Rock & Roll 45s and 12” disco singles and an extensive library of out-of-print outré literature and underground artifacts from all across Europe. There is a bit of the feeling that you’ve stumbled across some nameless nobility on the downslide, who has been forced to sell off the family silver.

A Child Of The Jago’s concept and Corre and Armitage’s Terrorist menswear label carry the distinct odour of something incendiary and there’s a chance something really might burn. But the most flammable materials in its path seem to be the creative mediocrity and depressing absence of quality that have grown like dry weeds across the current fashion landscape. If this detritus burns off it will only serve to enrich the earth and ensure the new soil is fertile enough to nourish the stylistic bravery and deep quality that their new vision proposes.