Fashion Blogs

That's So New York - Cheap Monday have always been a brand which I've admired; just the other day I decided to have a flick back through a couple of the collection archives and just ponder over the development of the brand throughout their now almost eleven year legacy; you may be thinking "Cheap Monday? they haven't been around for eleven years!" and yes, you would be kinda correct (emphasis on the KINDA,) yet after reading the Cheap Monday About page on their official website (which insists on hiding itself always at the very bottom of the homepage) I learnt an awful lot which lead me to ponder something along the lines of "Why the heck have I not even been on this page?" followed by "How is it possible that I seem to know nothing about this label?" - I do have a reason behind my eleven year reference (don't worry!) and my slight flip out at the fact that I clearly have not been educated enough in that of which is Cheap Monday (I'm thinking that teachers should most probably reconsider their curriculum; who's with me?) 

Okay, to begin, did you know that before the Cheap Monday label was officially thrown together, in 2000 Örjan Andersson, Adam Friberg and two of their friends owned a secondhand store in Stockholm? If you didn't know that then you most probably will also not be aware that the store was titled Weekend as it was only open on Saturday's and Sunday's (you wouldn't have guessed, would you?) and then you will most probably not have guessed that the store was actually quite a success which lead the team to move location from their original remote setting and into central Stockholm where they teamed up with Lasse Karlsson and renamed the store Weekday as it was open every day of the week from then on (due to it's increasing popularity.) At first the store carried a high-end (expensive) selection of denim garments (jeans) which Örjan considered to be a little too expensive, which lead him to develop a cheaper selection of his own jeans for retail among the higher-end; he named this selection Tight and consequently the Cheap Monday label developed. Moving on a little, in 2009 Cheap Monday teamed up with H&M (really?) after the Tight collection proved to be a success and this is when the first Cheap Monday store opened in Copenhagen; from then on the label continued to grow and is now retailing in over 35 countries and throughout around 1,800 international stores (just a tad ridiculous, right?)

It's strange what a two minute reading session on a labels website can do; in this case, educate you in relation to pretty much everything related to the label, its history, the entire team behind the label and the initial concept (I can conclude that Cheap Monday are clearly much larger than I initially thought and are not just an excuse for me to head over to Alex & Chloe on a regular basis.) I was going to make an attempt at rambling a little less than usual during this post and simply making it a little more visually favorable in addition to making you read through paragraphs of text, yet as that is failed, I'm going to state that this was a little more of an educational session; ah, I do feel clever, I do. Moving onto my original concept behind this post; that being the recent release of the Cheap Monday Fall/Winter 2011 collection. I'm just a little astonished in regards to the fact that Cheap Monday developed from a single selection of jeans into a full fledging progressive fashion label; despite the fact that I could most probably never pull off one of their low-cut tee's or a pair of their skinny jeans (not yet anyway ... give me a couple of months in the gym or something) I do admire the Fall/Winter 2011 collection and its mix of urban and military-type aesthetic.

We have leather, transparent netting, more leather, canvas tee's, more leather, worn jeans, fur sweaters and lastly, a little more leather (okay, so you may have guessed that Cheap Monday has a thing for leather.) I'm a little surprised by this collection in relation to the fact that everything is very layered and ... (CONTINUE READING)