On SPECIAL this week, Beret Casquettes or Peaked Berets!

On SPECIAL this week, Beret Casquettes or Peaked Berets!

This week on SPECIAL a large selection of peaked berets and beret casquettes: the cotton and heather wool models by FEZCO-TONAK (from $34.50/44.50 @ $22.50/32.50); 

the super-de-luxe Auloronesa Casquettes (the last few in stock, from $92.50 @  $69.00); 

the stunningly beautiful Boinas Burel from Portugal's Serra de Estrela (from $79.50 @ $39.50) 

and our own Aotearoa beret-casquettes (from $50.00 @ $30.00). 

On Special for one week only or as long as stock lasts!

The Bottle, the Glass & the Beret

Football (Soccer) and Supporters

Supporters' groups in continental Europe are generally known as ultras which derives from the Latin word ultrā, meaning beyond in English, with the implication that their enthusiasm is 'beyond' the normal. 

In English-speaking nations, these groups are generally known as "supporters' groups". Most groups in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia call themselves "supporters' groups", however some do self-identify as ultras, particularly in communities with large Spanish, French, or Italian speaking populations.  

Supporters' groups and ultras are renowned for their fanatical vocal support in large groups, defiance of the authorities, and the display of banners at stadiums, which are used to create an atmosphere to intimidate opposing players and supporters, as well as encouraging their own team.

All this I remember well from living in the Netherlands; no football match without burned out buses, vandalised trains and foreigners beaten up. 

Interestingly, I found no such supporter-behaviour in New Zealand at all. Rugby is the national religion, but excesses in violence and vandalism are extremely rare.

It's not a scientifically proven fact, but I dare say that beret wearing fans cause a lot less disruption, violence and damage too!

Berets and (or 'in') Mirrors

A mirror is an object that reflects light in such a way that, for incident light in some range of wavelengths, the reflected light preserves many or most of the detailed physical characteristics of the original light, called specular reflection.

The most familiar type of mirror is the plane mirror, which has a flat surface. Curved mirrors are also used, to produce magnified or diminished images or focus light or simply distort the reflected image. 

Mirrors are commonly used for personal grooming or admiring oneself (where they are also called looking-glasses), for viewing the area behind and on the sides on motor vehicles while driving, for decoration, and architecture. 

Mirrors are also used in scientific apparatus such as telescopes and lasers, cameras, and industrial machinery. Most mirrors are designed for visible light; however, mirrors designed for other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation are also used.

Le Laboureur

South Pacific Berets is very happy (and proud) to now be stockist of the beautiful caps and berets by Le Laboureur!

In the early 1950s , Primo Zelanti, began selling traditional work clothing at agricultural fairs and markets in Charolles in Southern Burgundy (France). His small business grew rapidly and in 1956 Zelanti created his own Le Laboureur brand ('The Ploughman'). 

Inspiration came from the oldest forms of hard wearing work clothing with locally made materials and high-quality fabrics. Gradually, the range extended from just agricultural wear to work-wear for the building trades. 

The brand's original ethos was to provide local craftsmen with everyday durable and dependable clothing, and this mission is still followed today. A family business, the company is run by Primo's son, Jean Charles.

South Pacific Berets stocks the traditional burel cap (made from the un-dyed, natural wool of the rare Ouessant sheep), fully fitted with matching satin lining and the 10p/28cm sized berets in black felted merino wool (made in cooperation with Laulhère), both fitted with what must be the most beautiful beret label ever.

Costumes of the Pyrenees

A selection of vintage French postcards dedicated to the traditional costumes of the Pyrenees. 

Mothers & Daughters

 Mothers & Daughters

Joni Mitchell

Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell, CC (née Anderson; 1943) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and long-time boinera, whom Rolling Stone named "one of the greatest songwriters ever". Drawing from folk, pop, rock, and jazz, Mitchell's songs often reflect social and environmental ideals as well as her feelings about romance, confusion, disillusionment, and joy.

 At age nine, Mitchell contracted polio in an epidemic, and was hospitalised for weeks. Following this incident, she focused on her creative talent, and considered a singing or dancing career for the first time. By nine, she also was a smoker; she denies claims that smoking has affected her voice.

Despite her prominence among the young musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and her writing of "Woodstock" (where she was prevented from performing because her manager thought it was more advantageous to appear on The Dick Cavett Show), she did not align herself with the era's protest movements or its cultural manifestations. 

She has said that the parents of the boomers were unhappy, and "out of it came this liberated, spoiled, selfish generation into the costume ball of free love, free sex, free music, free, free, free, free we're so free. And Woodstock was the culmination of it." 

But "I was not a part of that," she explained in an interview. "I was not a part of the anti-war movement, either. I played in Fort Bragg. I went the Bob Hope route because I had uncles who died in the war, and I thought it was a shame to blame the boys who were drafted." Even Bob Dylan, one of the most iconic musicians of the Baby Boom generation, has not escaped Mitchell's generational critique: "I like a lot of Bob's songs. Musically he's not very gifted."

Mitchell is the sole producer credited on most of her albums, including all her work in the 1970s. A blunt critic of the music industry, she quit touring and released her 17th, and reportedly last, album of original songs in 2007. With roots in visual art, Mitchell has designed most of her own album covers. She describes herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance".

Road Works and Alpino's

On 23 and 24 July this year I published a large selection of photo's of boineros wearing the traditional Dutch alpinopet (the Dutch name for a small diameter beret). 

These pictures were found on website dedicated to vintage trucks and showed how common it was during the 1940s - 1970s to wear a beret in the Netherlands.

These pictures are of similar origin, found on the website of a large roading contractor in the Netherlands.

Not just the alpino's are of interest, but also the beautiful vintage (and massive) machinery.

Herman Rademaker

Dutch architect/artist Herman Rademaker was raised Roman Catholic, but as an adult found his way into the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner.

As an architect, he was involved in the first construction of Eindhoven Technical University and he co-founded the basis of the Academy for Industrial Design and he built his own organically designed house on anthroposophical principles in Sint Oedenrode (Dutch province of Noord Brabant).

Rademaker’s vision on life and the world is central in all his work. He tries to always portray this vison: the coherence and unity of all that exists, the spiritual inner being that carries and makes everything alive. 

More recently he has expressed this in poetic texts that he wrote with his graceful handwriting and which must sound from a great silence to come into their own, rhythmically trickling into the soul.

Ni vu, ni connu (Neither seen, nor known)

Ni vu, ni connu is a French comedy film from 1958, directed by Yves Robert, starring Louis de Funès. The film is based on the novel L'Affaire Blaireau (The Badger Case) by Alphonse Allais.

In the wine-growing village of Montpaillard, the humorless gamekeeper Parju is determined to bring in the wily poacher Blaireau. One night, he is accidentally knocked out by Armand Fléchard, a young piano teacher, but is convinced the attacker was Blaireau and has him arrested. 

However, Blaireau knows how to take advantage of any situation, and what he makes of being arrested benefits the entire village, including Fléchard and his girlfriend, Arabella, the daughter of the local landowner.

Don Milani

Lorenzo Carlo Domenico Milani Comparetti (1923 –1967) was an Italian Roman Catholic priest. He was an educator of poor children and an advocate of conscientious objection.

His father, Albano Milani, and his mother, Alice Weiss, were staunch secularists. Alice Weiss was Jewish and a cousin of Edoardo Weiss, one of Sigmund Freud's earliest disciples and the founder of the Italian Psychoanalytic Association.

In June 1943, after a period of study at the Brera Academy, Milani converted from agnosticism to Roman Catholicism, perhaps after a chance conversation with Don Raffaele Bensi, who later became his spiritual director. He also exchanged a complacency of the economically fortunate for solidarity with the poor and despised. He was ordained a priest in 1947 and sent to assist Don Daniele Pugi, the old parish priest of San Donato in Calenzano. There he established his first "school of the people" (scuola popolare), The fact that it served children from both believing and non-believing families scandalized conservative Catholic circles. After Pugi's death in 1954, Milani was sent to Barbiana, a small, remote village in the Mugello region.

At Barbiana, Milani continued his radical educational activities despite both clerical and lay opposition.

Flying Sheep

Two French scientists introduce and explain the new Anglo-French airplane, the Flying Sheep.

Berets from 2.40...

French War Loans

This poster (depicting a Chasseur Alpin) was commissioned and distributed by a bank in Marseilles on the occasion of the loans at the end of the Great War. 

The injunction in Occitan "Marsihes, fai toun devé!" (Marseillais, do your homework!) is part of a set of motives exalting local patriotism. Occitan is used here among a set of references to local identity, in a classical dialectic of the time that extolled the "natural" love of the little homeland as a condition of love for the "Great" Motherland.

Early Boineros

 Early adapts of the beret; above in Béarn, below a Basque from Bayonne

Basque husband and wife (above) and a boinero in Bigorre (below)