Snake America 60
Snake is a bi-weekly email newsletter covering other-market items for sale. This week, a Nike belly tee and a baroque Versace pillow. Please subscribe if you haven't: it helps me.
eBay: Nike Blue Tag crop-top shirt, $39.99/BIN $70: There are very few situations where it pays to not be obese. But there are fewer shirts like these. The blue-tag, blue swoosh, grey shirt that isn't cut off at the belly is a fast way to spend $80. But here you save $10. These grey shirts have always sold well, and there are as few of them on-line now as 15 years ago. Nike used these tags between 1984 and 1987. The design before these blue tags was white and spelled Nike in navy, with an orange swoosh. The one before that had Knicks colors, too, and a logo of eight swooshes, north, north-east, east, etc., with their tails at the core, checks out and facing clockwise, all forming a circle called the pinwheel, 1978-82. The design that followed the blue tag until 1992 spelled Nike in red on a grey and white background. The navy one is simpler than Nike tags before or since. I remember a photo of someone wearing a shirt like this Nike and with no belly, in Born in the Bronx, the coffee-table book about rap in New York in the 1970s, published by Rizzoli in 2007, but I can't find the photo online. A cursory google search for a Nike crop-top yields a photo of Instagram user @dollahr wearing one in Carolina blue with a white swoosh, and with a mini-skirt or culottes. The photo is on wheretoget.it. There's that part in Space Jam (USA 1996) where Michael sends Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to his house from Space to get him his customary North Carolina shorts to wear under his game shorts against The Aliens. They get them. One wonders if Doug Flutie wore Nike half-shirts under his Boston College jerseys when he was quarterback there. His jerseys exposed his bellybutton and so does this shirt. You could see his whole business when he throws The Pass. But since the blue tag shirts run from 1984 to '7, he probably only wore them his senior year. We can't know if he told Michael Jordan to do the same thing or if Jordan just read about it.
Versace Barocco pillow, silk, $200, eBay: The best part in the Bill Cunningham movie (USA 2010), even though I am not into her home decoration, is when the rich woman is discussing Mr. Cunningham's charitable photographs of her, while her dog rolls around on the floor. That is the best part of a very good documentary. It raises so many questions. Did she adopt the dog, or is his manginess a breed quality? Where can I get a mangy dog like this? Would her dog eat a Versace pillow if he felt like it? Has he? Is pillow-eating an acquired taste for rich dogs? Does she have a guy who just walks it for her? Does anyone get confused when people in workout clothes walk their dogs in midtown during the day? I'm scanning the movie to find her name ... the guy from the UN who wears the shower curtain suits has a couple of similar pillows to the Versace on his couch ... Pillows are a hard thing to find ... they are all awful. Her name is Annette De La Renta and I wish there had been more of her in this documentary. Barroco is Italian for Baroque. A triumphant extension of Renaissance themes (naked angel babies, spires) with extra gold, black, marble. That's the pillow here. De La Renta's apartment in New York isn't wildly outside the definition of baroque. That link has some photos. It looks terrific. Maybe the very rich know what they're doing? There was this record label in the 1990s out of Chicago called Johann's Face, which didn't put out any good albums but whose logo was Johann Sebastian Bach's face. I'm not sure what they were thinking. What a stupid logo. I wonder if there was a funny joke behind it. It had to have been funny for them to have run with the face like that. They were still using it a few years ago. I like Versace pillows more than his jeans(1). Or any of his other clothes. Anything he did. The pillow would work in both Mr. Cunningham's apartment/studio, formerly in Carnegie Hall, in in the film, but he doesn't live there any more, but when he did he slept on a cot. Or it would work in De La Renta's apartment. I wonder if Oscar De La Renta, Annette's widow and a designer, and the deceased Mr. Versace had beef, and whether Oscar drew the line at outfitting his home with his rival's throw pillows. "No way," he said. "Not here." But this pillow works everywhere. None are like that. Can you set a Dieter Rams clock by the Louis XIV? Doubt it. Also, check the seller's other items because they are retty good.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Heaven's Gate Nikes, $200 sweatpants (for sale; sold)
Snake Before That: Ended items (ended!)
(1) A post from five years ago about this guy's Versace jeans collection. This seemed really out there at the time. What a sick collection. A lot of people's schtick right now is doing a bad job of catching up to what this guy did half a decade ago. Just trying to catch up. This is like Pushead's top 100 records list or something. What a pulverizer.