Nikicio Clothing

by CH Contributor

by Ezra Natalia

Established in 2006, Nikicio is an Indonesia-based label that infuses humor into traditional menswear-inspired cuts. Creative Director Nina Nikicio's wit shows up in a quirky embroidered dress, quilted bags and a hand-embroidered blanket. Her first collaboration, called Millimeter, with Ginetta Dadia, a young talented accessories designer is also a playful approach to fashion, using colorful hand print-shaped designs.

Nikicio's anti-fashion approach, ignores the dictates of seasons, looks beyond trends and shuns the idea that fashion has to be "cohesive" or "sensible" and the unconventional thinking has paid off. After joining the Studio Prive Spring/Summer 07 collection, most recently Nikicio participated in Singapore Fashion Week for Autumn/Winter 08.

Sticking to this more authentic concept, Nikicio is personally attached to each garment and chooses smart fabrics that can be worn a variety of ways. "I want the collection to be personal," she says, "a part of a person's everyday life but we all know that people hide sometimes, and I try to bring them a comfortable place to conceal, take the load off and dress up."

Below are a few more insights from the designer.

Do you think that drawing is an innate talent or you have to learn it?
I am a firm believer that talent is meaningless without any effort and hard work.

What happened to the fashion designs you made when you were kid?
The first thing i made using sewing machine was a handkerchief when i was seven. I don't know what happened to it.

How important is illustration, music and photography to your collection and how much does it influence your work?

Continue reading (and see more images)...

Nuun Hydrations Tablets

by Brian Fichtner

Forget Gatorade. The sport drink of choice now comes in a dissolving tablet. Dropping the unwanted sugars that make Gatorade and other endurance beverages hard to swallow, Nuun delivers the electrolytes your body needs while lightly flavoring your water with a hint of lemon and lime, orange and ginger, citrus fruits and more.

Assuming you can find safe water replenishment sources along your route, Nuun's clever capsule packaging—12 tablets in one little tube—eliminates the waste from as many plastic bottles. At $6.50 a tube (roughly 50 cents per 16 oz. drink), you'd be hard pressed to find a more economical sport drink.

For a list of stockists, check Nuun's site.

The Spaceman Watches of 1972-77

by Watchismo

All obsessions have their own big bangs and appropriately enough, my own compulsive watch collecting began with the Spaceman watches of the '70s. Below is an article I wrote for QP Magazine reminiscing about going back to the future with these Spacemen.

Leaving New York one chilly winter day, late in 1999, I found myself come unstuck in time and arrive in Basel at the dawn of 1972. My time travel led me to a world filled with hundreds of Spacemen, sitting undisturbed in a Basel watch factory with no plans of visiting the moon anytime soon. This grounded crew was actually a secret stash of vintage Spaceman watches I unearthed at a former distributor of the timepieces designed by Andre LeMarquand, an architect from Neuchâtel. The futuristic watches had fallen out of style during the '80s and '90s but I was ready to fly them out of their dark Swiss graveyard and back onto the wrists of space-age sentimentalists like myself.

In the late sixties Claude Lebet, owner of the Bulle based watch brand Catena asked Le Marquand to create a timepiece inspired by man's conquest of the moon and the astronauts who made it there. Mr. Le Marquand provided him with his first wristwatch design called, what else, the "Spaceman."

The Spaceman was unlike anything seen before and Catena introduced the fleet at the Basel Fair of 1972. The large oval case appeared to be docked on your wrist held by a triple-forked Corfam strap by DuPont. The case also had a coned dome crystal half concealed by a colored metal visor that allowed viewing of the dial to only the wearer. All hands and markers were perfectly seventies orange with models in a variety of colors only possible during that special decade.

The watches were powered by automatic and manual winding mechanical ETA movements and were distributed by a variety brands, among them Jules Jurgensen, Fortis, Tressa and Zeno.

My close-encounter with the past was fueled by reading Pieter Doensen's rare book, "Watch: History of the Modern Wrist Watch." This was been my launch pad to the world of vintage-modern watch design and technology and it has been described as the "the first comprehensive study of the collectible modern wrist watch". Flipping through the book, one can feast their eyes on Richard Arbib's Hamilton Electrics of the '50s and '60s, Roger Tallon's LIP Mach 2000s of the seventies and a multitude of other horological advancements over the past fifty years. But it was the futuristic charm of Andre LeMarquand's Spaceman that first abducted my interests.

See more images of the Spaceman at Watchismo.

Fergus Brown

by Lost At E Minor

Recently announced as the support for American singer-songwriter, Martha Wainwright on all eleven shows of her Australian tour, we checked in with Sydney-based songwriter Fergus Brown to get the inside story on his wonderfully quirky and catchy pop song, "Nerds In Love."
It was was a fun song to write. Some songs can be tortuous but this was an imagined, tongue-in-cheek vignette of my life spent together with a certain girl I'd seen around. That's all it was. At least, until a friend of mine blurted to this girl that I'd written a song about her. And he gave her a copy. We're friends now. She's a very talented and successful visual artist. She was flattered. Recently, I heard that another person thinks it was written about them. I'm looking forward to that awkward conversation sometime in the future.