Cool Hunting

Yack Fou Tees
Perhaps a play on the French Connection's "fcuk" line, Yack Fou is a playful Berlin label making tees and hoodies imprinted with their deceptive-looking name. Printed on 100% cotton, they're definitely eye-catching. Some of the designs even stand on their own without the gimmicky name, like the lego design (pictured), which also happens to look a lot like the album art on Beck's latest...

Print Liberation
Philadelphia-based design studio Print Liberation carries a line of tees, prints, and accessories that will make any font nerd swoon. Printed on American Apparel, we like the layout and concept of the "Don't Give Up" tee, which avoids the bumper sticker-like pitfalls of other message shirts by using non-centered and so-clichéd-it's-meaningless text and was also one of Print Liberation's wheat paste campaigns. The same...

Rock N' Clothing Tees
The collectable desirability of vintage Rock and Roll t-shirts nears that of sneakers. In the case of the Rock shirts however, the thinner and closer the garment is to the end of its life the better. A Mötley Crüe tee, owned by a slightly chubby and sadly misunderstood teenager, only to be used later by her mother to clean toilets, simply adds to the...

I Heart Guts
The latest from the Los-Angeles-based label I Heart Guts (covered over in Spear-land earlier this month) is "Don't Lose Your Lunch" (baby style pictured). Like the rest of the I Heart Guts line (the brainchild of a designer/former teacher with a penchant for Japanese pop art), this tee anthropomorphizes organs and pairs them with puns in both English and Japanese. The upshot is a...

I-Manifest Tees
New York-based tee-shirt maker I-Manifest has a new line out for spring, including "create sound," with a neo-19th Century design, a collaboration with the Santa Cruz, CA electronica group Sound Tribe Sector 9. (Pictured.) Other designs include "wood type" that uses a font based on woodgrain and available in nine different colorways, as well as "day after," which features trees-and-castle vector art. All of...

Welcome Squid Overlords
Take me to your leader. Monday night I heard the most esteemed and funny neurologist Oliver Sacks speak at Columbia (he is a super naturalist: into ferns, squids, cuttlefish and stereopsis). It was a fascinating lecture, but his Welcome Squid Overlords shirt transfixed me. It was so strange, I had to find its meaning. Was it from an episode of Star Wars that I...