Posts with tag puma

Oh, yes! Our baby Christian Siriano is on fire, ladies and gentlemen.

Since taking home the grand prize two months ago, the Project Runway season four winner has created several "major" ensembles for Victoria Beckham, outfitted Kimberly Locke for an American Idol performance, and now the chic little man has been tapped to create a 15-piece collection for Puma.

According to Puma Talk: "Luke Wilson, actor and avid golfer, teamed up with PUMA golf star Johan Edfors to create a special edition range of PUMA Golf products for this spring and summer." The line will launch in April and July, respectively.

Said Wilson, "To work with a brand like PUMA – that has such innovative and versatile product – on a golf line that fits my style and personality has been a real pleasure. We had some real fun with some of the product designs including the Porkpie hat and C-hopper shoe that you can wear on or off the course by just removing the spikes."

Running against stiff competition like Nike and Adidas, Puma has been struggling in recent years. And really it's hard to compete with Stella McCartney designing for Adidas and Nike basically having the backing of every major sports superstar out there. But Puma is putting it's best foot forward. They recently decided to buy the Hussein Chalayan fashion label.

For Puma's fall 2009 line, Hussein Chalayan will supervize "the creation, design and collection of (Puma's) Sportfashion collection."

Chalayan will work out London, which makes sense since he already has a name for himself there. He's won Best British designer of the year twice.

Alexander McQueen already designs for the Puma and I don't really know how much it's done to invigorate the company. Really, Hussein Chalayan isn't a household name for people outside the fashion world. I don't know how much this is going to help the ailing Puma brand gain street cred. Although, maybe since the label is more well known in Europe it will gain some ground for Puma over there.

Good luck to Puma, but I have to say, I'll be sticking with Adidas!

Via Yahoo.

I am not the biggest fan of Mongolian barbeque; I always end up combining the wrong vegetables with the wrong meats and the results are disastrous. However a "Mongolian barbecue" with shoes is something I think I can handle.

We've seen Puma's Mongolian Barbecue shoes before. Now, Puma and the W hotel have teamed up to offer the Mongolian shoe barbecue to hotel guests, who can create their own custom Pumas in the privacy of their own rooms.

The design your own shoe concept is nothing new to Puma, as they launched this "barbeque" concept back in 2005 in their retail stores. But having the convenience of designing your own shoes without leaving your hotel room is brand spanking new.

Prices start at $100 and hotel guests will receive their custom kicks about six weeks later.

I almost never wear sneakers. I'm not a sneaker fashion girl so just about the only time I ever wear anything on my feet that lace up is when I go running, and we all know how often that is.

However, I was intrigued by the Puma Basket CC, where "CC" stands for "Color Change." The Rifle Green-Tender Shoots-White shoes are made of a heat-sensitive synthetic leather that changes color in different temperatures and environments. Granted, they don't go from black and green to oh, say pure white and screaming royal blue when the mercury starts rising, but they do change when you touch them (heat of your hand). A video over on YouTube shows you (turn your sound off - there's music).

The Puma Basket CC is $75.

If baseball caps aren't your thing, you might be tempted to resign yourself to a hat-free life. But don't give up yet, since the folks at Puma have designed a few non-cap summer hats to appeal to the otherwise woebegone and hatless.

This summer, the French military cap seem particular popular among the young, urban men I know. Similar to a regular baseball cap, the military hat has a shorter bill and cleaner lines -- both of which are more flattering to a man's face. The leaping Puma graphic also seems fresh -- and the nice part is that you don't have to put it away when your team starts to blow it.

The military cap comes in brown, green and black and sells for a cool $24. The only drawback is that you might have to use the Puma website to get the color you want. If you haven't visited the Puma site before, be forewarned, it's not the most user-friendly spot on the world wide web.

Years ago, I was fond of dying my hair every conceivable combination of loud, bold colors and spiking it as tall as gravity would allow. That, combined with a black leather jacket, big steel-toed boots, and an obsession with fast-paced, politically-charged, profanity-laced rock music made me a punk.

These days, I'm not part of the scene, but still have a healthy skepticism for authority, and a soft spot for aggressive, abrasive urban fashion.

So, while they're not exactly anti-establishment, I'm a fan of the new Schererbahn X from Puma. The dirty silver leather and heavy, baseball-style stitching give the shoes some punk rock cred. Meanwhile, they're sleek enough as not to stand out completely from the rest of my current wardrobe.

Because these days, it's important to look good while sticking it to the man.

[via productdose.com]

Can athletic fashion find a home in a luxury goods conglomerate? PPR, the French company that is home to lines like Gucci and Yves St. Laurent has made a bid for a friendly take over of Puma. The NY Times reports that PPR bid around $7 billion on Tuesday for Puma. They have promised to keep chief executive Jochen Zeitz in charge. PPR has acquired a 27.1 percent stake in Puma for 1.4 billion euros ($1.87 billion) and will offer 330 euros ($441) each for the remaining shares for a total of $7.08 billion. Zeitz is set to meet with investors today at Puma's annual shareholders' meeting. In his tenure with the company, Zeitz has taken the company in a more design-heavy direction partnering with designers like Philippe Starck and Alexander McQueen and offering a wide variety of customization options and so the company might actually be a good complement to PPR's luxury labels.

The great thing about Puma sneakers is that they come in every color and style under the sun. But if you can't find that special pair of Pumas you've always dreamed of, you can now make your own shoes at Puma.com with the new Mongolian shoe BBQ.

Like ordering a dish at a real-life Mongolian BBQ, you have complete control over which colors and what leathers go into the custom shoe. The fun part of the process is that the interface actually looks like the selection bar from a real restaurant. The only difference is that instead of picking shrimp or green peppers, you select the materials for each of the 20 pieces on a puma shoe.

My Mongolian BBQ shoe didn't quite turn out as stylishly as I would have liked, but the nice thing is that you can scrap your mistakes and start all over again.

"Running barefoot" and "wear running shoes" certainly don't seem to belong in the same sentence, but there's a whole new category of footwear designed to help runners feel like they're running barefoot. Olympic running athletes have trained by running barefoot because it forces the runner to make a soft landing on the front of the foot, reducing the possibility of knee and ankle injuries. With the exception of the shoe from Puma, they aren't all that pretty, but hey, sometimes bare feet aren't all that pretty either.

• Vibram Five Fingers, www.vibramfivefingers.com
  
• Nike Free 5.0, www.nike.com
  
• AEI, www.aeishoes.com
  
• Puma Cortlandt XC, www.puma.com
  

As far as I knew, Mongolian Barbeques were those places in strip malls where you pay $14, cook (and eat) a lot of meat and then come back home to the several antacids awaiting you.

Not so, according to Puma. You see, Puma's newest marketing concept is the Mongolian Shoe BBQ. Based on the original Mongolian barbecues (you know, the ones where Genghis Khan's warriors each cooked their own meat using their swords as skewers), Puma now offers you the opportunity to have a shoe made to your own personal tastes.

Like its strip mall counterparts, the Puma Mongolian BBQ gives you a bunch of "ingredients" (an assortment of pre-cut materials) and then "cook" them by putting them together as you like. As far as I can tell, it's the closest thing to an affordable custom-made shoe, and you won't even need an antacid when you're done.

Long, long ago, in a borough far, far away, sneakers were not worn by yuppies, soccer moms, power walkers or office casual-types in their off-hours.

No, back then, sneakers were exclusively the domain of b-boys, streetballers, graffiti kids, breakdancers and their pals. Their domain? By and large, New York, especially in the outer boroughs.

And now you can learn all about these pre-Puma-chic years thanks to Where'd You Get Those? New York City's Sneaker Culture: 1960-1987. Author Bobbito Garcia brings it all back home, from the Adidas "Ivan Lendl" (remember him?) line to the Nike Airship to Converse All-Stars.

If you can't dig up a copy locally, Amazon.com and Powells.com are where you can find Where'd You Get Those?

Nascar may or may not be cool, as I opined in a previous post.

But Formula One? Michael Schumacher? Ferrari? C'mon people -- F1 is totally, totally hot. And especially the shoes, a style I like to think of as "moon boots meet Capezios". You've got velcro straps, a non-slip sole and a mid-ankle height. What more could you want?

Adidas makes a great F1 shoe called the adi Racer. Puma (the shoe of the Mighty Schumacher), in turn, has the Future Cat. Even Nike makes a Formula One shoe.

Will they make you cooler? Definitely. And they'll definitely, definitely help you avoid slipping should any oil leak onto the tarmac.