Welcome back baseball! A whole new season of hot dogs, freshly cut grass, and larger than life personalities to worship and despise.

Nothing captured baseball’s modern myths and legends like the Costacos Brothers’ posters of the 1980s. John and Tock Costacos were a couple of t-shirt manufacturers who transformed athletes into pulp fantasy heroes.

Their posters were hung with scotch tape and awe in bedrooms across the country.









(All images: SI Vault)

A good flag design says a thousand words, whether it’s on one of JACK SPADE’s new Nautical Coal Bags, or in the National Maritime Museum’s collection in Greenwich.


Constants, Ltd., London


Jack Spade, New York

Deutsche Afrika-Linien, Germany


Ostasiatiske Kompagni A/S Det, Copenhagen


Jack Spade, New York


Pirate Yacht Club, Bridlington

Jack Spade’s first London store is located on the edge of Piccadilly Circus, in the newly redeveloped Regent Palace Hotel building. We couldn’t ask for better digs. This site has accumulated plenty of character over the years.

(photo: Chez Coup via Patrick Baty)

The Regent was built in 1915 with over 1,000 rooms, making it the most massive hotel in Europe. It was connected by a secret tunnel to the Café Royal across the street, where Winston Churchill hung out.

(photo: Flickr)

During WWII, the hotel’s art deco bars were a big hit with soldiers on shore leave. The Regent was also literally hit with a V1 rocket, just as one of the topless dancers down the street revealed herself in a Spanish-style pose, according to one historian.


(photo: Picadilly 1970s via Flickr)

In the 1970s, the neighborhood struck its sleazy stride. William S. Burroughs was a frequent visitor to the Regent, for both the neighborhood’s gentleman’s shops and its young hustlers. The Sex Pistols got drunk and beat each other up there during a press conference.

But throughout the century, the Regent Palace Hotel provided an affordable, clean, central place to stay. It solved a problem with style. Jack Spade is excited to be part of the building’s ongoing story.

So-Ho! The area gets its name from this old rabbit hunting cry, which rang out on the regular back when London’s West End was all about fallow fields and turnip patches. These days, Soho Square Garden is the neighborhood’s token green oasis, where Londoners lounge en masse on the grass, and chivvy each other instead of the rabbits. (photo: Flickr)

Soho’s most venerable hardware store is filled to bursting with a century’s worth of functional ephemera and galvanized gizmos, and the shopkeepers somehow know the location of every screw. Gould’s has managed to stay in business by continually adapting to the times, but the shop still elicits a feeling that’s as old as the satisfying thwok of your first well-placed hammer. (photo: Flickr)

The white marble pool in this art deco swimming palace was built for the public in 1931. Opulence came standard back then, and the Marshall Street Baths echoed with the splashes of Soho kids and chorus girls. A cool £25 million restored the building to its former glory in 2010. Sunlight streams through the barrel-vaulted roof once again, and anyone can pay-to-plunge. (photo: Westminster City Council)

Jammed onto shelves amidst the ornate Victorian interior are silver-tipped canes, bubinga swordsticks, and some of the best umbrellas ever made. James Smith & Sons has blended practical design with a highly personalized attention to detail since 1830, and they have an umbrella for every unique customer’s style and price range. You’ll need one when it rains. And it will rain. (photo: Flickr)

Pastries here are best enjoyed on a perpetually rickety table, with an ancient teapot steaming close at hand. No menus, though. The bakery has a sort of haughty indignation towards the very idea of them. Maison Bertaux also has pink walls, 150 years worth of mismatched furnishings, return customers of all ages, and specialties ranging from éclairs to the inexplicable dijon slice. (photo: Oola Moola)

Eternal wealth. This the legendary prize for discovering all seven of the Soho noses, an arcane series of sculptures attached to buildings throughout the neighborhood. But which of the noses are frauds, and who’s paying, anyway? These are the sort of questions an amateur Indiana Jones must ask themselves as they wander the streets of cafes and x-rated book stores, necks craned towards the rooftops. (photo: Secret London)

Some books are so beautiful, they’re worth buying a coffee table for. Koenig sells hardcover art and design monographs, obscure magazines, and releases from indie publishers across Europe. It has the well-organized feel of a museum. Except that here you’re actually allowed to pick up the art, buy it, and take it home to the bathroom with you. The basement is where the bargains are. (photo: Flickr)

Historic Soho is the perfect neighborhood for JACK SPADE’s first European store. Our products are inspired by traditional craftsmanship, innovative design, and a mix of high and low culture, all of which abounds around Brewer Street. Bespoke tailors next to trendy cafes next to peep shows? We were sold.

JACK SPADE is excited to offer Londoners a way to dress with classic American style, without compromising their sense of humor or individuality.

Once upon a time, in a New York City not so dissimilar to this one, there was a special breed of shady character.

He wore a trenchcoat, and it was lined with everything from counterfeit watches to cigarettes without tax stamps. Whenever he wanted to open up shop, he just flashed the trench coat to whoever was passing by. It was a very mobile business model.

You saw him on Canal Street, in Times Square, and sometimes he’d pop up when you least expected it. This guy used to be all over New York. He was such a common character, he even made it onto Sesame Street. (And in the the video above!)

Today he’s as extinct as the guys who wash your windshield at stop lights, and men laying their jackets down in puddles.

Which is why this illustration in the new issue of NY Magazine caught our eye. Dustin Summers, one half of the Heads of State design house responsible, reminisces: “Seems like they’ve been replaced by the endless supply of knock offs on folding tables… I want to believe though, that the trenchcoat henchmen are behind both of these endeavors, maybe keeping the supply chain running, funneling fake rolexes from port to card table.”

They might be gone, but their legend lives on. And the trenchcoat is still the one of the most dapper ways to stay dry.