High Grain: Ever wonder what your leather valise looks like under electron microscopy? No? Aw, you’re no fun. [Carrying Contraption]

Newsstand Edition: An interesting Canadian charity that distributes jackets warmed by newspaper. [15Below Project]

Spring in Your Step: Opening Ceremony’s desert boots coming next season. [The Daily Upgrade]

Big Blue: Our beloved Cathy Horyn writes 1,245 words on Pantone’s color of the year. We wrote 90. Guess that’s what separates the men from the boys—so to speak. [NYT]

Here Comes the Boss: And in the continuing mallification of SoHo… [Racked]

Pretty Shocking: An appropriately colored gift for the endangered woman in your life. [Bangkok Mafia]

Track Suits: Next year’s Olympians will be battling each other (and the Beijing smog) in Gucci. [WWD, subscription required for full article]

House Bound: Yes, we would prefer a $2,000 Jay Kos robe with silk lining and piping to a pair of socks. Thank you. [NYT]

Structural Support: In the near future, girdles will actually tone your body—so go ahead and have that third brioche. [Style Dash]

Alphabet Soup: GQ + CFDA. [FWD]

H to the Izzo: Your man Sean Carter picks up another fashion label. [Female First UK]

Viva Kimmel: A less luxurious outlook from Florence. [Men.Style]

Back to The Well: More deals at Opening Ceremony. [Racked]

Legal Suit: Judge rules that prosecutor’s ascot, “borders on contemptuous,” a precedent soon to be employed in the case of Neckkerchief vs. State of Ohio. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Product Placement: Adrian Grenier pimps We Are the Superlative Conspiracy with the cryptic, “Remember… remember.” [TMZ]

Retrospective: 2007, the year tacky broke. [Electric Warrior]

Small Cap Investment: The Journal puts a “buy” order on the fedora. [WSJ]

Boy Toy: “How To Dress Like The Perfect Couple” by Christopher “Ashton” Kutcher. [Harper’s Bazaar]

“I Remember The First Time I Had Real Sex—I Still Have The Receipt”: Oh, Sebastian, you scalawag you. [GQ Style Guy]

Roger, Wilco, Out: StyleDash thinks Jeff Tweedy needs a style intervention due to his SNL appearance in a nudie suit. Similarly, we think Style Dash needs a music intervention due to their apparent ignorance of the Flying Burrito Brothers (video). [StyleDash]

Team Colors: An interview with sideline style leader and coach of the 5-and-11 49ers, Mike Nolan. [HuffPo]

Housing Futures: Figuring that all the collapsing real estate market needs is a fresh blazer, “Fashion Futurist Geoffrey Beane” (say whaa?) is teaming up with Century 21 (not the store) to redesign their iconic gold jacket. [Business Wire]

For Absolute Beginners: Buying into Mod style. [ModCulture via Retro to Go]

Best Men: Engineered Garments brings home the inaugural GQ/CFDA Best New Menswear Designers in America award (oh, and $50,000). [Men.Style]

Leading Lights: Luring men toward a new shaving cream is much like luring mosquitos to a high-voltage death. [NYTimes]

Historical Threads: Classic American style parsed. [A Continuous Lean]

It’s Not Easy Being Green: Kermit the Frog gets his slimy, webbed hands on Terry Richardson—or is that the other way around? [Skidknee]

Did you notice anything odd about the Times Style Section today? We don’t mean chicken-fashion odd - indeed, we mean good odd. Look, when The Grey Lady offers up another David Coleman piece about the resurgence of pants, a “Modern Love” entry on dead babies/girlfriends/husbands or whatever dust bunnies are rattling around Cathy Horyn’s head, we’re always the first ones to take the piss.

But today…

Gisele Wears Naught But CGI Water: Damn you, Photoshop! [Popcrunch]

Sonia Rykiel Closes Men’s Line: And we’re not going to stop her. [VogueUK]

Blue-Blood Style: 2108 Vintage releases sweaters for those Ivy League shits who’ve been making your life miserable (not that we’re bitter for being waitlisted). [AnimalNY]

Blue-Collar Style: Way on the other side of the economic spectrum, our boy at ACL revels in 1940’s workwear. [A Continuous Lean]

“Why Are Straight Men Seeing Sex and the City”: They are? Really? Are you sure? [Gawker]

Cannonball!: Finally, some good advice on swim trunks. [Hint]

Deal Alert: Get down to Opening Ceremony and Acne you dirty, dirty hipster. [Racked]

Have you ever had the feeling that the person you were speaking to was subtly mocking you? Maybe it was nothing tangible, just a touch of aloofness, a sense that everything was proceeding with a slight touch of irony…

Well, now you can get that feeling from a New York Times style piece.

The Gray Lady’s latest offense is about band aids as an accessory, pointing to recent offerings from Marc Jacobs and Alexandre Herchcovitch as examples—the latter recently featured at Opening Ceremony—and taking Mr. Nicholas James Brown as its unfortunate centerpiece.

More on the ill-fated Mr. Brown»

Apparently not everyone shares our sanguine take on Ralph Lauren’s Olympic uniforms. In fact, so far the web response to the outfits has been positively bloodthirsty.

Gawker—a reliable snark purveyor—calls out the polo logo for upstaging the Olympic rings. It’s true that the logo makes the branding play a little more shameless than it might have been, but that’s the American way. We’re building a brand here! This is for the good of the nation!

Scrambling for more angry voices, Gawker quotes a commenter on a fairly benign Project Rungay post, saying “They made the team look like a 1948 yacht club.” But, of course, that’s the whole point.

And, in case you were curious about the other, more hallucinatory parts of the pageantry, you can catch a colorful overview here.