My good friend brought me yesterday to Mortimer Snodgrass in Old Montreal, where he showed me a T-shirt company that takes packaging to another level.

T-box from Istanbul compresses T-shirts and other apparel into tiny boxes the size of a palm. The only hitch is that you don’t know how the tee fits and can’t return it if it turns out to be the wrong size. But it’s a cool concept nonetheless.

Labelled as Montreal’s urban operator, MadeinMtl culls the best places for fashion, booze and poutine, one of Quebec’s “delicacy”.

The site also features vignettes, narrated mostly in French, on themes germane to the city’s character like the Underground City, the Montreal stairways, multiculturalism and Cinema L’Amour. I strongly recommend a visit (the MadeinMtl site of course).

Like any big city, New York has its fair share of high street shops. But if you go south of 14th street, tons of hip, independent stores are waiting to be discovered. Here are some of the cool places that I saw:

Uniqlo

The “Japanese American Apparel”, Uniqlo has made New York home to its flagship store – a towering repository of colourful, mass-produced items. The design of the retail space is quite impressive, but I wish I could say the same about the T-shirts.

Sure, Terry Richardson, one of the world’s most coveted photographers, “designed” a whole T-shirt line for them, but it seems to me that the work was a result of a long 10 seconds of reflection: How about if I just stick a random photo on a tee? Maybe that’s what makes him a genius, but I just don’t get it.

Reed Space

The way I see it, Reed Space is what you get if Colette listened to hip-hop. A minimalist decor seeps through this Lower East Side Shop with streetwear magazines carefully arranged along the corridor and Graniph T-shirts neatly folded at the back.

Groupe 16 sur 20

With a Lotus Turbo Esprit parked at the entrance, this urban chic store is hard to miss. They didn’t carry many T-shirts (if any, can’t remember) but that car inside a shop thing was just too cool.

Roasting Plant

This was the coolest thing that I saw in NYC. Yup it’s a coffee shop but with one kick – the coffee beans are stored in tubes and, à la Willly Wonka, get sucked through the pipes all the way to the counter to give you that much needed caffeine jolt.

Addresses:
Groupe 16 sur 20: 267 Elizabeth St., NoLIta, website
Reed Space: 151 Orchard St., Lower East Side, website
Roasting Plant: 81 Orchard St., Lower East Side, website
Uniqlo: 546 Broadway, SoHo, website

Photo credit: Reed Space and me

A must-see for design junkies, Magma is a cool indie shop in London that sells books, magazines and also T-shirts. With a shop near streetwear central Seven Dials and a bigger one near the famed school of art and design Central Saint-Martins, it was the only place I found that carried T-journal, the trade magazine for the tee industry.

The shopping areas in Madrid seemed quite simple to categorise. All the high street shops like Zara, Mango, H&M are huddled around Sol, the Old Town. Most upscale and designer brands are in Salamanca for the business people and the pijos (posh) who hang out there. Finally, the cool and trendy shops are stacked in Chueca, the gay district (becoming more and more mixed) especially on calle Fuencarral.

Best place in Madrid I found for T-shirts and streetwear? Hands-down, the Mercado Fuencarral, a grungy, two-floor mall (akin to those in Ximen) in Chueca.

Image courtesy of Florencio Sanchez