Word is... Hayden-Harnett on Gossip Girl Tonight

Here at the HH warehouse it isn't rare to find oneself in the midst of a conversation over the previous nights cable lineup. Sadly, with only 4 channels in my apartment I rarely get to join in on the fun. So this weekend when the weather looked gloomy, my roommate Ashley (a fellow HH-er) and I decided to binge on some DVDs.

As Ashley looked for deep, intriguing movies, I stood in the aisle known as 'sitcom heaven' pondering what season to add to my collection first. I decided on Gossip Girl -- I had never seen it, but had heard all the rage, seen the Times Square billboards, & even have a male friend who Tivos it religiously.

As Ashley and I settled down this Saturday afternoon we had no idea what we were in for. Needless to say, I didn't leave my house all weekend... hardly even left my couch. I hit the ignore button on my phone, neglected to study for a microeconomics test: it was "XOXO Gossip Girl" until 2am Monday morning rolled around. As we finished the last episode we sunk into a funk: what were we going to do without GG?

But there's good news: a new season has started and an episode is on tonight. And then the word came through: Hayden-Harnett will be on Gossip Girl tonight!! Serena van der Woodsen will be sporting the Corcovado Tote in Cordovan! So, at 8pm tonight, Ashley and I will be on the edge of our couch looking to spot the Wyeth on our new favorite show. Hope to see you there! -- Melissa


Serena also loves our Clara Flap Bag in Black Zeus Patent.

green is good? green is great!

Press has been all over this handy tote like butter on toast, but I thought I might contribute my 2 cents (actually, all proceeds to FarmAid, to be quite accurate) on this bag as a real live actual user.

I use this super sturdy tote for anything and everything, from carrying my yoga clothes and lunch to and from the office to saving a plastic bag and toting my groceries to packing a picnic and a book to the park. And in a pinch, it works really well as a barrier between my pants and the wet grass or a nice little pillow for naps in the great outdoors.

To top it all off, I feel good knowing that I'm spreading a positive message all over NYC and that I have contributed to a great cause.

So there you have it. My tote/my self. Don't tell my mother.

Three Chord Fashion

The Ramone Studded Cuff brings me back to the dawn of the New York punk scene, to a time when I wore a similar bracelet with leopard print T-shirt and black Levis. It's hard to believe it now, but at the time punk rock was still shocking. You could easily recognize like-minded people who were dressed as outrageously as yourself. The music was the glue. The Ramones had stripped rock'n'roll down to its three-chord roots and re-invented the three-minute song after a decade of twenty-minute guitar solos.

I was thrilled when I entered art school in 1978 and found this burgeoning music scene in progress. A scene as scary as it was invigorating. I loved the Ramones, and to this day they have remained my favorite band. That Hayden-Harnett has come out with the Ramone Cuff, the Joey, the Ramone Demi and the CBGB studded belt to their Fall collection is a very welcome tribute to a great era in fashion and music.

--John Comito (john @ haydenharnett.com)

Nomads

From our occasionally far-flung correspondent Alison, I present without comment this:

To envision the future, we must first preserve a vision of the past. We must also draw inspiration from the living cultures of the present.

– UNESCO

Bal Harbor, Florida for the weekend. I’ve come to see a friend – he’s a musician on a never-ending tour -- every day a new town, shifting Main Streets, a new crop of locals on aged bar stools. My friend shows me his cushy tour bus home, if he has a desire for domesticity, it’s on the back burner. His life on the road is a privilege; part artist, part Shaman, he is following literally, his path. Most days I find myself in Manhattan, saddled with the urge to be somewhere else; I am possessed with the nomad’s cry, her unmistakable song.

In nomadic African cultures, women are “the primary producers, the owners and users of the domicile.” Their life is a composition of survival and conviction, a grueling quest for new sources of water, livestock, and food. In most cases, it is a conscious disconnection from the modern world; described in detail in the Washington Post, they are Nomads by Choice:

Every Saturday, Inaka trudges some five miles to the village of Ber, 40 miles east of Timbuktu, to buy and trade goods at the market. One recent day, he brought with him slices of goat cheese his wife had made earlier in the week. He hoped that selling the cheese would help him buy sugar, tea, tobacco and a gerba, a water container made from a goat carcass.

When speaking of cultural landscapes and material objects, The World Heritage Centre in Zimbabwe stresses the importance culture and nature as completely interwoven; the spiritual and the sacred as heritage. Hayden-Harnett founders Toni and Ben, frequent travelers themselves, have designed their own infrastructure of a lifestyle, seeking inspiration from "the living cultures of the present," pilling heritage, politics, landscape, and fantasy like bits of fabric to create bags for the marketplace. True artisans, their work is integrated into their beliefs, and the results are thoughtful, detailed, crafted bags. The irony is not lost; the primary purpose of a bag is to transport personal items of value; the bag itself an expression of organization, and depth.

Here in a Floridian hotel, a faux Tiffany blowfish lamp casts a dense amber infusion of light. This is so non-sensible, it’s comforting. I’m bathed in notions that seem to have sprung from some remote desert landscape of the soul. Nomadic life is not romantic, it’s pure survivalist mode, moments of intense joy woven into an existence the very essence of which is disenfranchised, and ephemeral. The blowfish stares with a ruby eye; artifice of the Twentieth Century, diadem of urban living. Sometimes life too closely resembles a scavenger hunt, each of us filling our bags, collecting memorabilia, some of us in hotel rooms in search of the sacred. What we find valuable, nostalgic, are celebrations of the known, of where we’ve been. We carry this with us as talisman against the unknown, where we are heading, and what we will find along the way.

Story: Reconstruction

Now and then we like to post things we think matter; here, then, is a story from Alison.

Alice decides to buy a new computer: her Dell crashed, her relationship crashed…yet, Alice was proportional, and could hardly imagine mourning each exclusively when in fact she could accomplish both at once. Alice is a poet; aesthetics are paramount, and no one understands this better than Apple, who manages to parlay computers into a near perfect-looking package. Apple, implicating Adam and Eve, our very origins, and Alice’s plans for reconstruction.

Aesthetic, of or concerning the appreciation of beauty or good taste, derived from Aaesthesia or Esthesia, the ability to feel or perceive. This was what was she wanted; beauty, form, and function in a hard gloss white case. Its opposite, anesthesia, not feeling, is considerably more dangerous and so you see how important aesthetics are – especially as one attempts to create a new Life.

Alice is a comparison shopper; there is a sea of options out there and briefly, she became a computer-slut; touching many dark machines, for only through sensory experience would she know. BestBuy, Circuit City, CompUSA, she tried them all, nestled into kiosks, bathed in a bluish glow.

Understandably, she craved simplicity. Enter the Apple retail store in Soho: a mob at i-tunes, teams of customers in Cameras, the line to pay snakes into a dollar sign of its own. Here she is talking with Jeffrey, superior in his black “Genius” t-shirt, thick, black-rimmed glasses, a little aloof, a long-standing Apple Devotee. Alice explains she is there to make the switch, to migrate; Jeffrey nods, nothing more need be said.

Alice is looking for the prettiest notebook she can afford. Portability is going to be important. She is done with Windows (which had been revealing a filmy, unpleasant view); her life needed order, streamlining, a completely new Operating System. Quality, synonymous with beauty, was the one thing Alice could trust, and the new computer would have both; it’s the Apple way. At 3am Alice completed installation of AirPort, perfection in its sugar cube box, and quietly celebrated her newfound independence, having crossed over into a new existence, a monochromatic, mobile, realm. i-pod, i-book, i-tunes – she was embarking on a whole new i-life, and in the course of such adventure, there would be no turning back.

Hayden-Harnett's Wurlitzer Unveiled

Welcome to our semi-official blog! Beginning next week we'll post news & updates, musings, links, previews, pictures, journal-entries and anything else that occurs to us here at Hayden-Harnett. We say semi-official because... well we hate to be too official about anything. This is supposed to be fun, and a little irreverent, and more than anything we hope it's going to be a more challenging, fashionable, exciting, and poetic than any other business's blog out there; this might be the official organ of our company, but damn if it isn't going to be a Wurlitzer.