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.

West-coast boutiques are getting in on the online game too. The latest is Seattle’s Blackbird, which has brought some of our favorite brands to its new online storefront, including Opening Ceremony, Rag & Bone, and Acne Jeans. Of course, you could find most of these brands elsewhere online if you looked…but it’s always nice to have a well-chosen selection.

See our favorite items»

Having already enlisted Tim Hamilton, Loden Dager and creepy retail mimes, Uniqlo is setting their sights on one of New York’s finest: Opening Ceremony.

Opening Ceremony’s light kitch and occasional summer-in-Stockholm vibes should fit well with the Japanese megabrand, and it’ll be nice to see them get a little more recognition. For now we’ll just cross our fingers and hope it’s a men’s line.

Opening Ceremony

Uniqlo has a remarkably catalog for a down-market brand, but even more impressive is how many upscale designers they’ve managed to tempt in for collaborations. Alexander Wang, Loden Dager, Tim Hamilton were all on last year’s list, but apparently the ‘qlo has a few more in the works.

Over the next few months, they’re rolling out two new men’s collections from Opening Ceremony and Gilded Age respectively. (Shipley & Halmos, sadly, stuck with womenswear.)

Gilded Age acquits themselves fairly with a set of baggy, nautical gear, but we’re more partial to Opening Ceremony, not least because of their electric blue suit that looks like it could have come right off Pete Campbell’s back.

See the suit, and Gilded Age’s contribution»

The waist-length coat is a rare beast these days—especially now that the military look has ebbed—but after seeing this, we aren’t sure why.

This one comes from Opening Ceremony, and it balances the militant vibes with a few surprisingly homey touches, like braided grandpa buttons and a scarf-replacing shawl collar. You might not guess it from the silhouette, it should be downright snug.

And after all that stiff wool, we were looking for something a bit more accommodating.

Another beloved boutique is going online. This time it’s the bicoastal Opening Ceremony (hat tip to Men.Style), who bring together their house label and international trinkets like this tool kit from Postalco.

Best of all, the site itself is bright and, aside from a few artfully angular background shapes, remarkably pleasant to look at. Compared to the usually dour boutique sites—we’re looking at you, Odin—it’s positively summery.

The New Girl: French editrix and Wintour-to-be Carine Roitfeld is getting the bio treatment from CBS. Revelations include her youthful foxiness. [FashionIndie]

All in Knots: A new multimedia path to the perfect knot. [NotCouture]

Nice Corpus: Our friends at Corpus get the interview treatment via New York Magazine, and reveal their secret Ralph Lauren obsession. [The Cut]

High/Low: Uniqlo and Opening Ceremony deliver on the perfect cheap linen suit. [The Moment]

America in 3D: A few of the more ridiculous pictures from Obama’s first 100 days. [Gawker]

Two Tone: The case for black and white spectator shoes. For advanced students only, natch. [A Suitable Wardrobe]

Cocktail Commentary: Vanity Fair combines its two biggest strengths with a series of cocktail recipes cheekily named after current events. Think of it as urbane wit in liquid form. [World’s Best Ever]

The Newest Latest: Opening Ceremony’s latest lookbook inspires envy and desire. [SwipeLife]

That 70s Spread: Mila Kunis graces the pages of DETAILS. [FashionIndie]

Gimme Shelter: Esquire digs up their piece on Altamont, in honor of the Woodstock movie seeming insufficiently badass. [Esquire]

Go, Joe: The G. I. Joe movie merits its first musical parody. [Ad Freak]

Dead Man: Opening Ceremony’s New York branch gets a cadaver on the roof. [Gawker]

Cardigans have always walked the line between being a casual outer layer and downright outerwear, especially as weaves get looser and wools get chunkier.

Pendleton’s latest cardigan (by way of Opening Ceremony) complicates things by bringing in one of our favorite professorial affectations, the elbow patch. That little tough of ruggedness puts it in the company of any number of fall jackets—at least, the non-weatherproof ones—and removes a sizable chunk of twee from an otherwise twee-packed item.

Well played, gentlemen. And as a late October boutique arrival, extremely well timed.

Schott’s Perfecto motorcycle jacket is in the midst of quite the revival lately (it’s better known as a Ramones jacket, if that’s not ringing any bells), but the biggest surprise of the movement has been the non-leather side-zips popping up in its wake.

This Haversack knit, for instance, takes the style to the twee confines of the cardigan, swapping in a shawl collar for the Schott’s iconic notch collar, and ends up with a light jacket that looks considerably more rugged than it is. It won’t stand up to any wipeouts—even if you’re on a Vespa instead of a Harley—but if you’re looking for a clever twist on biker style, it’s the best one we’ve seen so far.

More fuel for the flecked sweater trend: They keep popping up at the world’s cooler boutiques.

Opening Ceremony, for example, just dropped the price on this speckled knit from the Tokyo-based Sabatino. At sale prices, it’s a good deal cheaper than the APC equivalent, and if you’re moved to jump on this particular bandwagon, it’s a pretty good place to start.