Bow Ties Made In Australia - Le Noeud Papillon Of Sydney

 

www.lenoeudpapillon.com

Cashmere Reverso Cushions 60 x 60 From Le Noeud Papillon Sydney

 It has been such a delight to see these printed velvet and pure Scottish cashmere reverso cushions come together. We sold so many last week that I had one of those moments where I had to check myself so that I didn't get too overwhelmed in the moment and start buying up more fabrics to make them. They are so so unique. The velvets we sourced from the UK and the cashmere from Scotland. They offer you the chance to have a feature cushion on one side when you have guests (though you can lie on the printed side I do believe you would want to dry clean these as infrequently as possible) and then the cashmere on the reverse which is a delight against the head. The best news of all is that we can only make a few of each, which means once they are gone, they are gone, never to be repeated again. Before they go, come and see them at www.lenoeudpapillon.com 

Where To Buy French Linen Sheets In Sydney ?

 There are some things which are hard to get right and the way you want them exactly. I have struggled over the years to find sheets that are to my taste. Once I was only ever interested in finely woven Egyptian cotton and I would try to find the highest thread count and the best price but it was always a compromise / trade off. The right price but not the design or details you want. The right product but not the fibre you wanted. Over the past few years I have been far more interested in linen than in cotton. In the Sydney summertime it just gets way too humid for cotton and it becomes uncomfortable. Anything against your skin makes you sweat until you get to 3am when finally, somehow, in the wee hours, you pull your sheet up unbenownst to you and you find yourself under the covers when you wake up.

Then I discovered linen, which is slightly less crisp and far more relaxed which means you don't quite get the Ralph Lauren 'home' look when you finish making your bed, but what it doesn't give you in terms of aesthetic it makes up for in practicality and breathability in terms of getting a good night's rest. I am now sincerely a converty and even in winter, I still prefer linen. In fact, I am quite particular with my sheets and the layers on my bed, such that I would rather have a quilted coverlet on my bed and no duvet and no blanket, using throws that I leave at the end of my bed in case I get cold. That's about all you need for a Sydney winter save the coldest month between late July and late August.

We have teamed up with Ginger Dream - a company which specialises in bed linen. They have certified French linen which gets shipped to their workroom in mainland China. The sheets can be custom made to your size and colour specifications and finished with your own embroidery so that they are uniquely yours. I will add one other benefit of embroidering your sheets - you don't forget which end goes where! 

I hope you have a chance to look at our new selection of linene sheets and if you are searching for bedding that is affordable, comfortable and chic, plus it's personalised so that they are most definitely your sheets, consider our new line at www.lenoeudpapillon.com . And one other thing, they won't go missing when they have your name on it!

Crazy Rich Australians

I don't know Mike Cannon-Brookes nor his business partner Scott Farquhar though in fact Cannon-Brookes is my alumni and perhaps I passed him once when I walked past the computer room not looking back. I love computers but I also loathe them because you can get lost in them and the kids that were in the computer rooms were often lost in computer world. I can recall one time a kid in my class who was into computers being asked by a teacher to solve something that was going wrong with a computer and he sat down next to the PC, pushed his glasses back and said with great relish "welcome to my world now" and the comment never left me. He is probably hacking somewhere today as I write this, I hope it all went well for him.

As for myself, I have a relationship with computers that reminds me of marriage. You would love to break free of them but you know you need them so it's a bit of tough titties, you just gotta suck it up and get on with it. 

Yesterday I was moving stuff around my studio when I saw an old copy of GQ magazine and I only keep the copies where we are mentioned. I opened it up and I found this article which was on the two friends from University who started a computer software company that's been so successful that nobody can make a decision in our fair country now without asking them their opinion. Energy, finance, technology, science, government debt, covid - they seem to be the go to guys with all the answers. In fact, I feel sorry for them. I could not think of anything worse than having to shoulder all that responsibility and field calls from every journalist looking for a quip. I just hope they have built themselves some zen room in their houses that shuts out absolutely every sound and visual with a sentinel on the outside just so that nobody can get to them for meditation time.

I'd invite them down for a morning swim at Bondi but I wouldn't want the publicity and then they'd be ask by the press as to how to clean up Bondi and make it carbon neutral. 

In my own way though I am super proud of their achievement. They did it from a country that's often referred to as the 'arse end' of the world. They did it from a 10k investment, according to one article. And they are world renowned. They remind me of my own struggle, only they really did make it. Like really.

As a journalist wrote the other day on the rise and fall of the Packer dynasty and the unfortunate demise of James Packer and his mental health, challenging his right to govern or influence a corporation applying for a casino license (of which my personal opinion is give it to him but with handcuffs on as Crown is a good brand for Australia and did wonders for Melbourne), the journalist suggested that Packer was out of touch and should be more like the Atlassian wonder kids. I have to agree. Like I said, I have never met Mike Cannon-Brookes, but I have heard friends say they see him round the local shops in bare feet. That's a tick for me. And they don't seem to rub all their wealth in your faces with Kardashian chicks drinking champagne off the back of their boats with nighttime condiments below deck. 

In fact, it's kind of nice that two of the richest Australians in history are nerds from the computer room. It's much less aggressive than newly minted property developers and the like. 

In fact, who better to own the new Sydney casino than these guys. Perhaps they should do some meditation with James Packer and come up with a solution. It would kind of be nice to know there were bean bags in the breakout area between black jack and poker. 

Could The Kevin Durant Shoe KD13 Be The Next Air Jordan?

 Any of you who have read this blog will know I have been a lover of Air Jordan shoes since I was a kid and couldn't afford a pair. To this day when I think about my childhood I can always recall my best friend's bedroom with that looming poster of a young Michael Jordan travelling through air with the flash bulbs of cameras going off and a beautiful pair of, now let me think, I think they were Air Jordan 3's. Fastforward 30 odd years and now I have more Air Jordans than I will ever admit to, especially my mother. It is an indulgence that sometimes comes over me. Buying Nike products is my weakness. I love everything about Nike. Firstly, it is attached to my name. Nicholas. The name Nicholas is derived from two words - Nike - and - LAOS . It means victory of the people or something quite similar. Nike was the embodiment of victory, a goddess no less. Sometimes when I am doing anything well, from throwing a strong punch with my boxing trainer Les, to striding out on my evening run as I hit my groove, well then, I sometimes feel like a goddess (wink emoji). 

But in life, anything of the same thing done over and over, eventually tires us. We are all looking for the next thing. I don't think I will ever grow tired of Air Jordan shoes, it's just that now and then you just want to try something else. The jumpman symbol is now everywhere, it's been done to death. It's not that I don't still appreciate the creativity, the use of new materials or the changes in details, it's just always going to be an Air Jordan attached to Michael Jordan, who, one day soon, will age like the rest of us.

I must also be honest here and say I know little to nothing about basketball. I haven't played basketball since the mid nineties. I have no desire to play basketball and I don't really wear my basketball shoes for sport unless I am doing weights training. For me, basketball shoes are an aesthetic shoe for casual wear - nothing more. I train in running shoes and when I am dressing up I wear penny loafers, chelsea boots or whole cuts. But what a good basketball shoe does is make a funky outfit come together. It allows you to wear some velvet tracksuit style trousers with a hoodie, a pair of Nike running pants with a t shirt etc etc. 

As I have often said on this blog, when I am cutting silk I am not interested in dressing up as a tailor. When you cut by hand using a rotary cutter you get fabric everywhere. It's not glamorous, it's not the prestige of chalking up a suit on the cutting table of a Savile Row tailor wearing a three piece. So athleisure is perfect for it. You have unrestricted movement, you have materials that don't seem to hug bits of clothing like wool does and you can add and remove layers as needed. As for how basketball shoes fit in to that analogy, well here's the thing. If you unfasten the laces you can get the shoes on and off very quickly. Which comes to the next point, I like to spend as much of the day as possible in bare feet. From the moment I get to the beach in the morning my feet love touching the earth as much as possible. And the same goes for when I am cutting silk, if I can avoid wearing shoes I will.

All this leads me to telling you about the Kevin Durant KD13 shoe I was shown the other day by a friend. They seemed to be a wonderful segue from the Jordan range, a really charming shoe that I hope has a strong life. And I hope that Nike pushes other lines of their shoes, especially in basketball, to experiment with new distinctive materials that have no reference to the Jordan. There is something about buying into a new story that is always exciting. The good thing about Nike is that they are probably already ten steps ahead and have thought this out themselves. I was so impressed with the company after watching the Tinker Hatfield episode on the exceptional series ABSTRACT on Netflix. 

New Printed Velvet Cushions With Cashmere Reverse By Le Noeud Papillon

 The pandemic has been for us a very interesting year. I loathe the word 'pivot' and I have done my best to avoid using the 'soup du jour' terminology that spreads just like a virus each year. Last year the world was 'disrupting' and 'reaching out' . It's global vom - and unfortunately we are all supposed to eat it.

But the pandemic did present a challenge. If nobody is getting married this year and if our surgeons are not wearing bow ties to the office - what then is my relevance to society? Things so often wax and wane in fashion but I always relied on the bow tie not fading. Silk neckwear had survived 400 years, why should it suddenly be done away with ? Wait it out, they'll be back... But what if they don't come back? And then you start to sweat at night wondering if everything you had set about doing over the past twelve years was meaningless. 

That's when you really have to get creative. In March a lady who ordinarily spent her time in casinos playing black jack was found shut out of her favourite pass time and was upsetting her husband because she was getting cabin fever sitting at home. Through a common friend an introduction was made to me asking if I would be interested in getting her to do some work in sewing, as she had run a small fashion company twenty five years ago. I said ok, but at the time I wasn't sure if I would have anything for her to do at all - we were suffering at the time and concentrating solely on face masks. 

There was one product I'd always wanted to do but never had enough silk to commit and nor did any of my other sewers (I feel seamstress is a word that might be needing an overhaul since males who sew don't fall under that umbrella - we need a unisex word that adequately conveys people who sew for a living with either machines or their hands) want to take on that work. 

The first cushions we made were below par. I wouldn't write them off, they just didn't have the benefit of experience and the number of iterations it takes to get a product right, the same which could be said of our first self-tying bow ties. I think in life everything is a function of the refinement of process - which is why I have always loved the Japanese and especially their woodblock artisans.

So as we went along we experimented with materials, with piping, with linings, with zippers and more. What an enjoyable experience it has been to see it come to fruition. The first time I sold one I rang my seamstress and she was in a boutique in Sydney's Double Bay and she started crying. She went home and told her husband, I think he started crying too - now that he knew she was off his back and had something to put her hands to! And that was it - we didn't look back. 

We have now added to our product range scrunchies, new kerchiefs, cushions, pillow cases and soon we will have poker table covers. This year we have also added into the website cashmere scarves, cashmere jumpers and hoodies, umbrellas, shoe horns, bomber jackets, dressing robes and more. But the push from now one, I hope, is that aside from our core business, self-tying bow ties, we will push for products that have a practical application in people's lives, ones that they can use everyday, like our silk eye shades, or as yesterday I was negotiating, lovely French linen sheets embroidered with our customers details.

And all of this I write because I want to tell you about the product below, the first of the new printed velvet cushions featuring a cheetah in the jungle with a bird perched on a branch which we then reversed with Scottish cashmere to make a dual tone on the reverse. It is in line with what we do, the same way we reverse silks in our reverso model bow ties. It is made of exquisite fabrics, made by hand as I pick up my left handed gingher rotary cutter and set a clear pattern over the cushion so that we find the exact spot required, and then once cut it goes straight to my seamstress (sewer) who then finishes it with a lining that is often used in ties and jackets which gives it a very robust body. For the inner we use a goose down that we can source locally and it gives it such a plush Old World feel about it.

We now have a comprehensive range of products we can offer you and unlike most other companies in the world, we can cut and make it for you in 24 hours (save the bomber jackets) and ship it to you anywhere in the world 4 days later. That's a good reason to engage me if you want something different, something for yourself, something that will stand the test of time. Whatsapp +61413140994 .