Icarus Store

Holiday trading hours

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 22:33:58 +1100

Our Surry Hills location will be closed from 25 December and will re-open on 4 January. Meanwhile, you will still be able to order from our online store.

Happy holidays everyone!

End of season sale - 30% off and free worldwide shipping

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 23:22:36 +1100

Enjoy 20% off and free shipping to anywhere in the world by...

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 01:18:45 +1100

Enjoy 20% off and free shipping to anywhere in the world by entering “twentyoff” at checkout!

*This coupon is valid to 31 December 2010*

Introducing Blanc & Noir

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:51:08 +1100

The idea behind Blanc & Noir was to create quality, understated clothing with a
handcrafted look and natural feel that can be worn everyday. Simply put, designer Jean-Claude Leblanc wanted to create simply designed clothes that he and his friends would wear. Having spent many years traveling to find clothes he wanted to wear and paying premium prices for them, Jean-Claude founded Blanc & Noir on the belief that well designed, wearable clothing should be accessible. While adhering to these principles, Blanc & Noir insists on quality of both manufacturing and materials. Blanc & Noir garments feature custom treatments and hand finishing that contributes to the brand’s hand-crafted look and understated style.

View Blanc & Noir products

New arrivals: Patrik Ervell Backpacks

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:46:13 +1100

Medium sized backpacks from Patrik Ervell available in navy canvas and black leather. Features criss-crossing shoulder straps and adjustable cotton straps finished with leather tips. One main compartment and one small front compartment, both with zipper closures.

Opening for a Store Assistant

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:12:00 +1100

We are seeking a store assistant - must be available for 3 or 4 weekdays. The successful person will have previous retail experience, be friendly and outgoing, have a desire to learn about the designers and demonstrate an understanding of what Icarus Store represents.

Please email your cover letter and resume to info@icarusstore.com or stop by the store to drop it off in person.

My Days with Tony Curtis

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:23:26 +1000

By Tom Junod
Esquire Magazine, 30 September 2010:

In 1995, my editor asked me what story I wanted to write.

“Tony Curtis,” I said.

“Tony Curtis? Why Tony Curtis?” At the time, Tony Curtis was the definition of a has-been; he had gone from iconic leading man to a kind of spectacularly turned-out hanger-on, flagrantly bewigged and ultimately reduced in scale by the platinum-haired giantess he’d chosen to accompany him through his Hollywood haunts.

“Because he’s 70,” I said, “and he still gets laid.”

It was the easiest sale I’ve ever made. I went out to Hollywood, and spent a week with Tony Curtis — that almost Flintstoneian fiction of a name, the closest a human being has ever come to being called Cary Granite. I ate with him (Spago, of course), drank with him (Patron tequila, with a side of painkillers), danced with him (and with his wife Jill, the giantess), and sat beside him as he went 100 mph in his Mustang, giggling all the way (literally: “tee hee”). And I counseled him, as he counseled me in return.

You see, he was more than an avatar of a way of life and a style of celebrity that didn’t exist anymore. He was even more than what he represented — Hollywood — and even more than what he was, which was, of course, a star. He was, pardon the term, an existentialist, as unflinching in his estimation of himself as he was in his estimation of others, as he was in his conversations with me. He took himself seriously, but as a comic character. As an actor, he was never quite as convincing in heroic roles as he was when he revealed an element of cowardice, and so he was, to my mind, brave. As a young man, he was intoxicated by his own beauty, and the kind of life it would allow him; in middle age, when some of his beauty faded, he couldn’t let the intoxication go, and became an addict, losing everything, from his hair (a primal wound in a man of Tony’s dark vanity) to his son, who followed the course of his father and overdosed. When I met him, he was a man who swallowed, every morning, the full draught of regret an American life could offer, and yet went about his days (and nights: his very late nights) determined to get intoxicated — intoxicated by what was left of his beauty; intoxicated by the fantastic fact of the freedom his beauty still afforded him in Hollywood and in America; intoxicated, at this late stage of the game, by his potential, even while he was intoxicated on tequila and painkillers — and stay that way. And, yes, he still got laid, in those pre-Viagra days, with a dose of prostaglandins he injected in his thigh to give him an erection post-prostate surgery. Tee-hee!

He made quite an impression on me, Tony did. I still remember sitting in Spago with him and Jill, and what he said after Jill St. John came over to his table, with Robert Wagner, and made nice to him: “What a piece of shit.” I still remember what he said about younger women, and fidelity to older ones: “Can you imagine Tony Curtis with a woman my age?” I still remember the story he told about Billy Wilder — about what Billy Wilder said to him after Tony’s son OD’d and Tony stumbled one night back to Spago, nearly blind with guilt and grief and remorse, and wound up kneeling in front of Billy Wilder at his familiar table, asking, “Billy, how could this happen, how could my boy do such a thing?”: “You, Tony. You showed him how.” The Hollywood Tony lived in was that kind of place — a barbaric place, in which the cost of being as beautiful as Tony Curtis or Marilyn Monroe or even Jill St. John was putting your beauty in the hands of someone as merciless as Billy Wilder — and yet Tony survived it, because he never forgot that it was the beautiful ones who got laid, and never ceased delighting in the fact that he, Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx, got to fuck Marilyn Monroe.

And yet I lied, when I told my editor that I wanted to write about Tony Curtis because he was 70 and still getting laid. In truth — the kind of truth you don’t tell your editors when you’re pitching a story — I was trying to figure out the kind of life I wanted to lead at the time, trying to figure out the decisions that I had to make, trying to figure out the legacy I wanted to follow. I was casting about for a father figure. Oh, sure, I had a father, but my father wanted to be Frank Sinatra or Tony Curtis, in no particular order, and on some days thought he was. And so I wrote a profile of Frank Sinatra, Jr., to figure out what it was like to be the son of the real thing, and pitched the Tony profile to prepare for the task of profiling my father himself — Tony Curtis was the second installment in the Lou Junod Trilogy. But as a result, there was, as Tony told me the only time we met after the story was published, “always something there between you and me, from the start” — some fellow feeling, some willingness to lead and be led, and of all the famous people I’ve ever spent time with, Tony was one of the very few who let me know that I could call him, anytime, and he would be happy to hear from me. Until the day he died, my father asked, “Do you ever hear from Tony?” — last name not required — but I never did, because I wound up making different choices than the choices Tony embodied, and only once used the number that Tony gave me: when Frank Sinatra died.

Though not a member of the Rat Pack proper, Tony was a member, along with Frank, of something they called “The Face Club of America,” a society of Hollywood players who, in the late fifties and early sixties, were pioneers and champions of the pleasures of going down on women. Sinatra loved Tony because Tony, being beautiful, had license not to kiss Frank’s ass, which gave Frank license in return, not to kick Tony’s, or even threaten it. Tony even got away with calling Frank “Francis,” and when he spoke to me the morning after Frank’s discordantly quiet death, this is what he said: “Francis was misunderstood, Tom. He was known as a cruel man, and he was, he was — he was one of the cruelest men I’ve ever known. But that’s only because he was small, Tom. He was a little guy. He was cruel because he had to keep the motherfuckers away. Do you know about the motherfuckers, Tom?”

“Yes, Tony, I think I do,” and I’ve always tried since then not to be one of them, though I never called him again, and he’s gone now, along with Francis, along with my Dad, along with that whole generation of beautiful barbarians. And yet I still own some of the things he gave me: a signed print of his artwork; a restaurant napkin scrawled with the almost Gnostic design of a hand pinching an entire little world between its thumb and forefinger; a marble — a shooter — that he’d preserved from his youth; and a tape recording of the answering machine message he left me the day the story was published. The article was loving and brutal in equal measure, as unflinching in its way as Tony was in his, as merciless as Billy Wilder sitting in his throne at Spago. I’d been afraid of what Tony was going to say, and now he said it: “Tom — I read that story you wrote about me. How … kind of you.” And that was it. I’d told the truth, and that was all this American fantasist ever asked. The voice, though, was strangely reminiscent of the voice he used in Some Like It Hot, and when I first heard the message I thought it was someone trying to sound like Cary Grant. But no: It was Tony Curtis, and even at this late stage of the game he was only trying to sound like himself.

Patrik Ervell Field Coat

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 20:16:00 +1000

The piece we were looking forward to most from Patrik Ervell’s latest collection is the Field Coat which has just arrived in store. Available in light navy canvas.

Details: Ervell’s take on the iconic M-65 field jacket features a built in hood, four exterior pockets, one interior pocket, drawstring waist, metal snaps and velcro fasteners on the cuff. The jacket is made of cotton canvas and the interior features a removable wool lining fastened by buttons. The sleeves are lined with silk. Made in USA.

$900

Opening Ceremony Dip Dyed Tote Bags

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 21:41:00 +1000

Opening Ceremony dip dyed tote bags available in store. Available in navy cotton canvas, oxblood cotton canvas and army cotton canvas.

$65

Japanese trailer for Ayrton Senna documentary to be released on...

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 21:32:55 +1000

Japanese trailer for Ayrton Senna documentary to be released on 8 October 2010

Robert Geller Seconds Contrast S/S Shirts

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 21:27:00 +1000

Robert Geller Seconds is in store now and one of our favourite pieces from the collection is the contrast short sleeve t-shirt. We love the details such as the unique shoulder construction, soft washed cotton and two tone colour scheme. Available in Dove Grey x Sand, Black x Midnight and Midnight x Dark Mauve.

Details: 100% cotton scoop neck t-shirt from Robert Geller Seconds with contrasting back colour. Features standard shoulders in the front and raglan shoulders in the back. Made in Japan.

$80

Patrik Ervell Winter Buttondown

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 21:12:40 +1000

For those of you in the northen hemisphere that are leading into the colder months, Patrik Ervell has a nifty button down flannel shirt with quilted silk lining that can be worn as an overshirt.

Details: Plaid flannel shirt from Patrik Ervell with small collar, two chest pockets and mother of pearl buttons. The shirt features silk lining in the body and sleeves providing extra insulation and can be worn as outerwear. Due to the quilted lining we recommend that you wear your normal size. Made in USA.

$400

Band of Outsiders Oxford Shirts

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:55:00 +1000

Beautifully tailored shirting from Los Angeles-based label Band of Outsiders. This cult label is known for its sharp fitting button down shirts and preppy slash geeky sensibility. Available in blue oxford and white oxford.

Details: Long sleeve button down collar shirt from Band of Outsiders in blue oxford fabric with single breast pocket and box pleat back with darts. Made in USA.

$300

Patrik Ervell Winter Jeans

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:48:00 +1000

The classic Patrik Ervell jeans are back in a heavy and more substantial cotton canvas. The cut on these bad boys are amazing - they have a medium rise, tapered leg and narrow leg opening so they fall perfectly onto your shoes. Available in midnight navy canvas, faded navy canvas and khaki canvas.

Details: These jeans are made from a heavy-weight cotton canvas and feature reinforced stitching, silk waistband lining and signature grosgrain tab on the right back pocket. Made in USA.

$390

Re-stock: CB I Hate Perfume

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:30:00 +1000

Our first order of CB I Hate Perfume fragrances did so well in store and now our re-stock from the CB gallery arrived from Brooklyn today. We have added two new fragrances: Mr Hulot’s Holiday and Burning Leaves.

Mr Hulot’s Holiday ($120)

The Scent: The salty breath of the breeze off the Mediterranean, driftwood, rocks covered with seaweed and the smell of old leather suitcases.

Burning Leaves ($120)

The Scent: The smoke of burning maple leaves - pure & simple.

View CB I Hate Perfume products

Behind the Scenes at Patrik Ervell SS11

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 14:22:00 +1000

Patrik Ervell presented his new Spring-Summer 2011 collection in New York last week, and we have some behind the scenes photography via ONEEIGHTNINE. For the presentation, models walked on a runway constructed of stacks of Financial Times newspapers which wore away as the show progressed.

Patrik Ervell SS11

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 07:43:27 +1000

Patrik Ervell SS11

Introducing Robert Geller Seconds

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:55:00 +1000

Robert Geller Seconds is an elegant yet casual take on classic athletic wear, meant to be integrated into your everyday wardrobe. This cut and sew collection utilizes premium Japanese production, soft washed cotton, and a beautiful muted color palette. Robert Geller Seconds is in it’s second season as an extension of the Robert Geller collection.

View Robert Geller Seconds products

New arrivals from Band of Outsiders, Patrik Ervell and Robert Geller Seconds in store and online!

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:53:00 +1000

The Itinerant Artist

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:24:00 +1000

By Tom Chiarella
Esquire Magazine, September 2010 Issue:

Sure, he hasn’t had his eggs yet, but it’s got to be said: James Franco looks a little ragged along the seams at 8:45 in the morning. Unshaven. Inky at his edges and out of sorts. The brown T-shirt hangs on his shoulders like the wind blew it there. He’s catfooted and somehow goofy of gait. And that mustache is a wish.

He generally fits the bill of a vaguely hungover, Lower East Side, semi-academic hipster artist living the unraveling agenda of Tuesday-morning being and nothingness. He sits by a side door near a pail of mop water. There’s a paperback, palm-pinched, cover down, in his right hand, and a big plastic shopping bag full up with something he doesn’t want to show just yet. When asked what he’s reading, Franco smiles his ungrudgingly adolescent smile, a grin as terminally satisfying as the last healthy squeeze on a tube of toothpaste. He is engaging, for just a second, in the mutual diction of actor and artist — “It’s for a project,” he says. But the word — project — thumps out of him unprecious and without bluster, as if he were naming a day of the week. He’s always got something going. He flips the book over. Twilight.

Keep in mind: The position of things is such that he doesn’t have to show the book. Had he said Jude the Obscure, no one would have been the wiser. He’s a graduate student, after all, enrolled in two universities at pretty much any given moment. “It’s crazy how much sexual tension there is,” he says. “It just builds and builds. I mean it never stops. It’s sort of explosive by the end. Crazy. Like they’ll blow up with it. And of course, they don’t.” He shrugs then, a good shrug, because he is selling nothing with it. “Which is the point too, I guess.”

Sometimes Franco goes a little hypnotic with the eye contact. What starts as a steady gaze generally transmutes into the oddly pleased squint that is his war paint, a look that allows him to play both stoner and supervillain with the same incredulous vacancy. He sighs a little, apologetic. “You probably know I have a lot of projects,” he says. “But that one is way, way off. It’s just something I’m thinking about.” He whisks at something in the air then. “Off in the distance. Way off.”

These words are so bloated and vague, they almost bob in the air. Franco knows this. “Okay. I want to write a children’s book.” He guts out a laugh, snorting himself off the hook. “Someday.” This is a kind of hedge — people are constantly vetting his agenda, because it is unlike the typical high-quote actor’s, because it is puzzlingly arcane, because he isn’t notching his belt or collecting motorcycles or figuring out new enthusiasms in laboratory drugs, because that agenda appears to have nothing to do with being a rich, laconic, and ultimately free thirty-two-year-old male.

And because so far, it’s seemed like piling on. He’s already an emergent A-list movie star, a performance artist, a perpetual and enthusiastic graduate student. (Fiction writing, in the M.F.A. program at Columbia. Film student, enrolled at NYU.) He tells me he’s been accepted for enrollment to Ph.D. programs in creative writing. He recently got into the Rhode Island School of Design.

It is tempting to draw him in a series of contradictory smidges. As the ne’er-do-well Franco who routinely leaves movie sets to fly to one coast or the other to attend a university workshop or evening graduate seminar. Or as the actor Franco who tilted around the $2.5 billion Spider-Man troika, looking utterly unconvinced and just a little bit amused as he kept a ten-story-tall sandman at bay using a jet-propelled sled. The same actor Franco who made an unlikely twenty-five-episode incursion into General Hospital, playing a creepy, off-kilter performance artist named Franco.

Franco, our Franco, has an art opening tomorrow. A multiroom installation called “The Dangerous Book Four Boys” in a thirteenth-floor gallery in TriBeCa. Walls will be lined with his photographs, gritty, theatrical Polaroids and silver-etched desert landscapes. Every room will have video playback. Some will have chairs, so people can sit to watch videos that Franco made in one graduate program or another — plywood rockets burning in the desert, a man with a sledgehammer at the edge of some asphalt, close-ups of men pissing. One film, a herky-jerk seminarrative in which Franco dashes through the Louvre wearing a penis on his nose, will briefly feature the always thrilling documentation of human defecation. And there will be wine.

“I showed that last movie at NYU last month, at a faculty critique,” Franco says, flinching a little. “It’s a fairly confrontational piece, and it got a little ugly. One faculty member — she’s always tough on me, but she flat-out called me an asshole. She jumped me. She was muttering it the whole time: What an asshole. What an asshole.”

Moments like that can break grad students. One scissoring word choice from a program chair, an eye roll here or there, an exchange of withering phrasings between faculty, forever memorable for their clever cruelty — these things can be crushing enough that by the next summer the student in question is hanging decks with his brother-in-law in Skokie. It’s like American Idol for the black-turtleneck crowd. You gotta have thick skin, whale skin.

Franco has this in spades. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he’s been a working actor since he was seventeen, that he gave up school at nineteen to take on a role on the iconic and forever cult-worthy Freaks and Geeks. The guy’s been working for nearly half his life. This breeds either confidence that might be misread as arrogance, or a focus that might be misread as impudence. He leans forward. “I didn’t blame her for being mad. She’d brought her child,” he says. “But I mean, come on. Who brings a child to a graduate-school film showing?” Franco chalks it up, unhurt, undeterred. “The film fits inside the larger project anyway, this exhibit. I see why people don’t get it.”

Of course, Franco has other openings coming up, too, in pretty much every cineplex in existence. He’s got a supporting role in Eat, Pray, Love, a kind of soft porn for unhappy thirty-six-year-old women. Then he’s up for a starring turn in the new Danny Boyle film, 127 Hours, as a mountain climber who, trapped in the Utah desert, amputates his own arm to get out from under a boulder. This month he’ll appear as Allen Ginsberg in art-house sure thing Howl. Then in a Danny McBride comedy, Your Highness, about two brothers who are princes. All of this in the next year. He’s started work on the Planet of the Apes sequel, which gives hope to nostalgic forty-five-year-old fanboys everywhere. So how does he pick this stuff? What’s the plan? Did he even read Eat, Pray, Love? Later, walking to the barbershop, when asked this very question, he will laugh — at finding himself in such a movie and at the shambling Alphabet City hottie and whiny spiritualist he plays. “What can I say about Eat, Pray, Love?” he says. “Let’s see …” Then he pauses for a solid fifteen seconds. When Franco speaks, his tone is guiltless, his affect amused. “You know, in Eat, Pray, Love, my character mostly appears in the first twenty pages of the book,” he says, and now the smile is broad, inviting, self-aware. “And I can definitely say I read the first twenty pages.”

At the diner, Franco reaches into his bag and pulls out a Polaroid camera, hands it over, then pulls out one for himself. “I figure we can just shoot each other,” he says. “We’ll make a project out of the morning. We’re going for a straight shave, right?”

We are doing just that, but the cameras are hard to figure. The real photo shoot is done, days past. Whose project is this? Who set this up? Franco looks almost hurt by the question. “Me,” he says. “I just figured it would help you guys out.” He holds the bag open, reveals twenty boxes of film. “I got a lot,” he says. “You can shoot whatever you want, as much as you want.”

He stares deeply, right into the shot, then pulls the camera back and snaps one off. “You can just do it randomly,” he says, taking a picture of his toast. “Documentation.”

The cameras whirl out a storm of white squares, each fading backward into a representation of the otherwise unremarkable morning that Franco is living. He’s going to get a shave after this, to knock the scruff off, try the shop-made tonic, see where that takes him. The day is ahead. These then are lovingly random “before” shots: his toast, the floor, his bony shoulders, the pubey little chin hair, the occasional blank glance, his pale face dark against the wall of light from the street. He doesn’t care that he looks sickly in some shots or that his eyes are closed in others. He doesn’t seem to care if he’s even in the pictures at all. He likes one in which a woman carrying a Boston terrier and a bag of oranges passes by the window. He’s right, it’s pretty cool.

Steady and unpretentious in his appraisals, he regards the images with a patience one does not often find in movie stars sitting in public places. It’s clear he’d do this for days and days, purely on the compact of the assignment he’s given himself, that he’d be willing to keep snapping these images until he found what he was looking for. This version of himself, the student, is not one Franco seems willing to surrender. “Acting doesn’t do very much for me,” he says flatly. “I put off school for it, but it’s not like it was a sacrifice or anything. I really didn’t miss school until I went back. Or maybe I missed it and nobody believed that, not even me. The work of it — and I have really great teachers — that’s the stuff that adds up for me in a way that acting doesn’t.”

No matter how long you stand at the opposite corner of James Franco’s art opening, no matter how far from him you stand, no matter how thick the crowd gets, it is impossible not to see that he’s prepared, that he’s happy, that he likes the argument, the provocation of it all. He’s up to it. Whale skin. One might hasten to point out that nothing rides on this for him, and that this is the confidence-man aspect of Franco’s game, operating within the brutal, parochial Darwinism of the contemporary art world with impunity, simply because he is a movie star and he knows it.

Still, the guy works, manic and openhearted. There are five rooms’ worth of that work here, work that coalesces into a fairly cohesive exploration of boyhood, sexuality, and something that is distinctly Franco’s, a vision of a guy comically trapped in what everybody in the celebrity-mad republic presumes to be the best job in the world: movie star. And all of the exhibit, every bit, is wholly unrelated to the enervating measures of Hollywood success. These infiltrations — into the world of art, the classroom, the gallery, the soap-opera set — have to be a relief to a guy whose job as a movie star, rightly or wrongly, presents him with questions he doesn’t care about answering. The exhibit prompts the question: Who gives a shit about an image of a plywood rocket burning on a salt flat, even when that image is projected on the inside walls of an identical version of that rocket? No one profits from it. But who really cares about the weekend gross of Eat, Pray, Love, except those who stand to profit from it?

That’s why Franco greets everyone who approaches at the opening warmly, that’s why he’s a restless, resilient, and, yes, legitimate student. He likes the questions of all this. And of course he’s not afraid at this opening. He’s opening everywhere, all the time.

But no matter how many times you click play, it’s kind of hard to watch James Franco on General Hospital, playing Franco, that simulacrum of himself, a kind of Ed Wood manqué. This is the artist Franco, our Franco, using acting in a performance of the role of a performance artist. But the timing seems a little off, his tone slightly out of concert. A lot of layers of meaning. Very sticky, and pseudoacademic.

Maybe — no, surely — this is on purpose. Because James Franco is a very good actor. He stole the show in Pineapple Express, as a strangely thoughtful burnout. He nailed a supporting role lip-to-lip with Sean Penn in Milk and gave an underrated performance in Paul Haggis’s quiet triumph, In the Valley of Elah. He’s about to enter the realm of leading man simply because he does exactly what a movie star does: makes you want a lot more of him.

Before we enter Barbiere, a boutique barbershop that makes men feel like new men, where we’re set up for the shave, Franco rolls this reaction over. “Bad? You thought it was bad?” It makes him laugh, not because it’s inconceivable, more because he’s curious. There is a clarification: not bad. Uncomfortable to watch.

He thinks. “I’m glad it made you uncomfortable,” he says. We enter the barbershop. “The point was, I was uncomfortable. It’s a very different world, different style of acting. And we knew people would recognize me, that they wouldn’t accept me as Franco. In some ways, I can’t be anyone else but James Franco. That can be uncomfortable, too.”

In the shop, Franco politely introduces himself and doles out his cameras once again. “That project began a long time before I went on the soap opera. The truth is, on General Hospital, everyone recognizes me as the movie actor. That’s the thing. I’m kind of stuck as myself.”

The barber twirls a towel down over his face and James Franco, our Franco, disappears beneath it. Minutes later, lotion is applied to his cheeks, and the razor laid against the soft flesh of his neck. The barber asks him not to talk while he works with the blade. The barber takes his pulls. Eventually a new Franco emerges. This Franco rubs his own face with just a little wonder, as if his were the skin of an exotic, cool-blooded animal. He likes it. He wishes the mustache away. Sometimes even he wants to see the movie star.