When Kevin Garnett was traded to the Celtics, this became my favorite jersey:

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Hmm …

I think one modern day dunk from any number of current players would smash this apparatus to bits.

If you hate the N.B.A.’s dress code on shorts, at least consider that you didn’t have to wear these.

How they looked in real life, as modeled by Howard University’s first varsity basketball team Read the rest of this entry »

Superstar hip hop artist Ludacris has had nothin’ but love for Black Fives.

This is something about how I got my Black Fives retro gear placed in a classic episode of Pimp My Ride, along with clips of Xzibit wearing it.

I’m sharing your replies to my questions from the other day, that I sent out via email.

Thank you very, very much for creating the time to reply. Your reply provides Read the rest of this entry »

If this is your first time seeing Black Fives and you wonder what it’s all about, then this short video clip might help. It’s a brief introduction that I pulled it off the shelf — about 30 Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of UniWatchBlog.com, a blog devoted to the obsessive study of athletic aesthetics (in other words, sports uniforms), I am sharing a series of posts I call “Logo C.S.I.,” which stands for Logo Creative Scene Investigation.

The Independent Pleasure Club of New Jersey.

These posts will be about logo forensics — how me and my company, Black Fives, Inc., went about finding, identifying, tagging, bagging, dissecting, storing, and bringing back to life the previously unidentifiable remains of the many dead or missing logos of the Black Fives Era.

Until I visited their site for the first time last year, I didn’t realize how close I am to being a sports aesthetic fetishist myself.

A closeup of the IPC logo.

My first logo “episode” is about the Independent Pleasure Club of Orange, New Jersey (IPC). The IPC possessed the most titillating basketball team name ever. I had to resurrect this logo.

I discovered this team late one night working in the Black Fives creative lab examining microfilm of old Negro newspaper sports pages. I loved the name but wanted a
team photo so I could see their logo.

After some digging I found a team shot (the only known photograph in existence) in an obscure dust covered publication from the basement catacombs of the United States Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. This logo had been missing since about 1912.

Stock colors from a vintage Spalding catalog.

The IPC was formed in 1908 in Orange, New Jersey at a time when sport was still considered a “pleasure.” They stood for “uplifting the colored athletic standard” and staged social events — including picnics, cigar “smokers,” music recitals, dances, poetry readings, and theatrical plays — to raise funds and build camaraderie among athletes.

After procuring special Library of Congress researcher’s credentials to gain limited access to the logo corpse as well as authorization to do an autopsy, I made an image of the published team photograph, which revealed the team logo in a monogram style, possibly hand-sewn by someone’s mother.

IPC game jersey.

I took the images back to the lab, where I used Photoshop to digitally zoom and isolate the logo, and Illustrator to place it into a digital workspace where I could trace its outline. I further isolated each letter of the monogram, then compared these to existing typefaces in order to choose a matching font.

Using this procedure as well as trial and error, I finalized the black and white version of the logo and its corresponding team font.

To determine a color scheme for the logo and uniform I reviewed census records of the individual players to create a psychological profile of the team to get a sense of which color scheme they would have selected from one of the vintage sports equipment catalogs that existed in 1912.

The leading sporting goods manufacturer was the A.G. Spalding Co., and its catalog included blank woolen jersey-knit sports tops available in a limited set of basic athletic colors.

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Certain principles of life and business never change. Like with the law of gravity, for example, its just plain better to know how it works even if you’re not sure why.

I was reminded of this last week when the men’s fashion clothing trade magazine Daily News Record (DNR) ran a story (”Retail Graveyard,” October 29) about a guy named Peter Divietro in Sloatsburg, N.Y., who annually for Halloween decorates his front yard with tombstones to commemorate dead retail stores.

That in turn reminded me of a failed chain of hip-hop clothing stores in Chicago called The Lark. Do you remember The Lark?

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