Colette isn’t the only thing that’s hip and stylish in Paris. The city’s leading patisseries (cake/pastry shops) have eschewed the traditional rustic display opting instead for a modern, minimalist look. Here are some of the sleeker ones:

Pierre Hermé
Fans of his flagship store in Tokyo might be in for a disappointment. The shop on rue Bonaparte has just enough space to queue and order. But the cakes are just exquisite and heavenly.

Fauchon
This venerable institution was the former employer of Pierre Hermé.

Gérard Mulot
His stores in the 6e and 14e (shown below) are a contrast between old and new.

Jean-Paul Hévin
He’s one of the world’s best chocolatiers and has an in impressive shop to showcase his addictive creation.

Sadaharu Aoki
His cakes are more exotic, a fusion of French and Japanese flavours, like his green tea éclair and red bean macaron.

Addresses
Gérard Mulot: 76 rue de Seine, 6e, M Odéon, website
Fauchon: 24 pl. de la Madeleine, 8e, M Madeleine, website
Jean-Paul Hévin: 6e, M Vavin, website
Pierre Hermé: 72, rue Bonaparte, 6e, M Saint-Sulpice, website
Sadaharu Aoki: 56 blvd de Port-Royal, RER Port-Royal, website

Images courtesy of: Fauchon, Flickr, Pierre Hermé, Parisist, Parisinfo.com, and me.

Tsk, tsk, I didn’t blog yesterday. The plan was to follow up on last week’s comments about T-shirt design contests but I worked instead on new t-shirt illustrations on the Eurostar .

Was great to spend a few days in Paris. It’s one of the few cities in the world, where walking from one end of the city to another is a real treat. I suppose that’s a reason why a lot of Parisians are not overweight.

Although the retail scene in Paris has less buzz and fewer store openings than in London, New York, and Tokyo, it makes it up with its abundance of independent stores, especially in Le Marais, the 6e arrondissement, the 18th and increasingly the 3rd. Here are some of my favourite ones in Paris.

Colette
It’s the quintessential concept store located in the heart of Paris on rue Saint-Honoré. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s a great video tour of this temple of design.

Le Bon Marché
Ok, it’s a department store, but like Colette and unlike other mass retailers, it infuses design carrying mainly stylish products. I used to go there 2-3 times a week, mainly to do my groceries, when I lived in the 6e. No, the cheese was not sleek looking.

OFR
It’s a small bookstore specialised in design tucked in the corner of streetwear shop Kiliwatch (didn’t realise K is Japanese). Also has a branch in London in Brick Lane.

Le Marais
This is the best area to shop in Paris on a Sunday (stores close on Monday instead). Too many independent stores to mention, but the good ones are on rue Vieille-du-Temple and rue des Francs-Bourgeois.

Note: French retailer BHV recently opened a standalone Men store. Wasn’t able to check it out as it was closed when I walked by… Spree in Montmartre is another interesting concept store in Paris. Didn’t know it also has a shop in the 6th.

Images courtesy of Flickr and Wonderwall.

Addresses
BHV Homme: 36 rue de la Verrerie, M Hotel de Ville, website
Le Bon Marché: 24 rue de Sèvres, website
Colette: 213 rue Saint-Honore, 1er, M Tuileries, website
OFR: 64 rue Tiquetonne, 2e, M Etienne Marcel, website
Spree: 16 rue la vieuville, M Abbesses, website

We’re exporting London culture with this T-shirt. Cockney rhyming slang originated in East London and was used in films such as Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ocean Eleven and Austin Powers.

We’d like to thank these sites for giving us CRS ideas for this tee: Wikipedia, Cockney Rhyming Slang, and Aldertons.

Like weekends in London, Saturday night in Paris was quiet. It had nothing to do with avoiding long queues or overly crammed bars. Since I was staying at friends of the family, I had to either retreat early or party all night. But Paris is just not the best place for all-nighters.

Cabs are nearly impossible to catch, making bar-hopping difficult to sustain. Places that close late are mostly packed with kids, especially around Montparnasse. And then there’s the awkward “what do we do” gap between the 5am closing time and the first Sunday train.

I ended up chilling in the Bastille area, chatting with a friend who’s my living encyclopedia of electronic music. Perhaps if he had assumed the decks, it would’ve been a different story.

I just can’t avoid the comparison. Dubai and Abu Dhabi remind me of Vegas, but minus the sleaze, gambling, live shows, cheap hotels and rowdy behaviour. They are luxury urban resort centres for affluent couples and families to relax and bask at the never-ending opulence of the emirates’ lavish hotels.

As I’m leaving the area tonight, I’ve jotted down a few things worth mentioning from my two-week stay in the UAE.

Dubai vs Abu Dhabi
Although Dubai is a more happening place, it’s too surreal for my taste. I’d prefer to live in Abu Dhabi, which has as many expats (80%) but more character. Then again, my brother lives in the HSBC Building.

Saadiyat Island
Abu Dhabi is playing catch up with the contruction frenzy taking place in Dubai. The most ambitious project is Saadiyat Island, which will be home to a Guggenheim gallery, a Maritime museum, a Performing Arts Centre, and a Classical Museum.

Other notable works include the Gate District, featuring a Stonehenge-like design, and Yas Island, the future site of the F1 Grand Prix (via Timeout Abu Dhabi).

Burj al-Arab
You can’t just walk in as I thought you could. You have to make reservations and dress in proper attire, meaning collared shirt, no jeans and no trainers, just to get in. Fortunately, the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi is a more inviting hotel.

Gridlock traffic
This is the bane of Dubai commuters. It took the cab driver an hour, rolling as fast as 10km/h in the congested area, just to get from one part of the city to another. Needless to say, public transportation is underway and is expected to be completed in 2009.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia and Cribs.

Size matters in Dubai. The Emirati hotspot is swelling at a blistering pace, with burdgeoning towers and colossal development projects sprouting seemingly everywhere, all in a bid to impress and become a darling of the jet-set crowd.

Shopping, a favourite Dubaian past time, is no different. Forget the quaint streets and the quirky shops (one exception). It’s all about malls and the oh-so familiar high street shops that dwell there.

Although I’m not a big fan, the ones I saw had just enough spice to make it worth checking out.

Boulevard at Emirates Towers

Top-class office building, luxury hotel, glitzy shops. Nothing more to say.

Mercato Mall

This Italian-themed shopping haven counts Hugo Boss, Diesel, Topshop, Bershka and Mango in its retail lineup.

Souk Madinat Jumeirah

A large, picturesque Arabian marketplace filled with intriguing arts and craft stores.

Mall of the Emirates

This King Kong of malls boasts all the desirable names in luxury including UK-retailer Harvey Nichols, and sports an imposing indoor ski facility.

* * *

Coolest shop in Dubai

Amid the area’s obsession with massive retail centres (due mostly to the desert heat), the concept store Five Green seems to be the lone beacon for things independent. It carries T-shirts from Yoko Devereaux, 2K by Gingham, Paul Frank, and e.vil. (via Timeout Dubai)

Photos courtesy of Emirates Towers, Wikipedia, Qualitagious, Mall of Emirates and Five Green.

Addresses
Why bother, since transportation in the UAE is all about driving or riding cabs.

We’ve been thinking about this since we started working on Swiftlabel. Should we or should we not hold a design contest?

It didn’t make sense for us to run one right away. One reason is that we espouse a particular style (very German) and actually enjoy coming up with T-shirt ideas. The other is that you need most importantly traffic, which we obviously didn’t have, and a new approach, an untapped market or more prize money (which all help generate traffic) to make it work.

But now that phase one of the site is over and our tee collection is growing, we’re mulling over ways to do things differently from others. Before I touch on this, let me first talk about the benefits of holding a design contest.

I see two chief reasons: to get print-worthy designs and/or to get traffic to the site.

Attracting Graphic Designers
A successful contest gives tee companies the luxury of choosing from a myriad of designs. It’s a lucrative model as they only have to pay for what they’ll use. For designers, it’s a different story as a lot of them will do work without being paid. But it’s not as bleak as it may seem, as I hope the experience of creating art helps them to develop.

The best known design competition are run by Graniph with $9,000 for the top prize, Threadless with $1,500 plus other incentives, LaFraise with 1,000 euros ($1,400). For Graniph, it fetches them hip designs from European artists that Japanese love so much. For Threadless and LaFraise, the design contest is more than a platform to get new product. It acts as a linchpin to build a thriving online community.

Boosting Traffic
It’s quite an ingenious business model: run a design contest to attract artists, set up a voting system that encourages them to get friends to vote (promoting your site in the process), print designs that garner a lot of votes (a gauge for buying interest), and pay well to encourage designers to try over and over again.

Threadless, the first to successfully commercialise the idea, and LaFraise, the first for the French-speaking community, are now multi-million dollar businesses by creating and fostering an interactive platform to feed the addiction of T-shirt lovers.

The Swiftlabel Design Contest
Like the two stalwarts, we’re interested in doing both – bringing in great designers and creating an online community – but have a different context in mind. I can’t reveal more as it’s really easy to copy and we want to be the first ones to try it.

I’d say we’re about 3-4 months away from releasing phase two (depending on how we allocate our capital): one month for planning, one for programming, and one for testing. We’ll see if things can go on schedule this time.

We’re soon releasing the first of our upcoming Graphi-Tee series, a tribute to Banksy, Bristol’s famed graffiti artist. Using a T-shirt as canvas, we put ourselves in his shoes and came up with lots of nifty ideas to spray paint on cotton.

On our first design, we have a graffiti artist spraying what appears to be a reptile. Although Banksy would never do such a thing, we think it’d be a cool one to wear.

To do this work, I posed as a graffiti artist holding instead a can of Axe deodorant, and used Adobe Illustrator’s live tracing tool plus some manual editing to get the stencil look.

For those not familiar with Banksy, here’s a wonderful article by The Guardian. Pictures of his work are now available in print, and there’s even a tour guide listing Banksy-sprayed locations in London.

An amusing graffiti idea, that I think hasn’t been done yet, would be to paint a bunch of urinals near a big club for those who just can’t hold it any longer and don’t know where else to go.

We’re doling out freebies through the good folks at I love your T-shirt. Submit your answer on their site to win one of 3 tees we’re giving away each week in March.

Going out in Dubai was quite an educational experience. In this land where Islamic values and a liberal attitude find a way to co-exist, weekends run from Thursday night until Saturday when giddy party-goers, mainly expats, flock the bars and clubs of the city’s plushest hotels.

Yes, you read that rightly. The dancing and drinking circuit in Dubai is confined to hotels, the only establishments granted licence to serve booze. This strict alcohol policy also means that a licence is required to drink at home, although in practice it seems that few expats do.

Arriving Dubai on a Saturday, the equivalent of a Sunday in the Western world, I knew that I wasn’t going to stay out very late. Besides hopping between hotels in a cab is not my preferred way of having fun.

I kicked off at Trilogy, one of the swankiest bar/club in Dubai. The interior reminded me of Barrio Latino in Paris, with the dance floor smack in the centre of the room and the upper floors perched around it for people watching. On that night, only the Rooftop was open. Although only a handful of people showed up, I did get to savour the stunning view of the Madinat Jumeirah and Burj Al Arab, the world’s only “seven-star” hotel.

Once the excitement waned, I headed to Zinc at the Crowne Plaza to check out the local electronic music scene. But the only sound I got to hear came from the bouncers who were firm on the couples-only policy. With no other plan in mind, I went back to my hotel and realised on the way that I had just spent more time riding cabs than drinking.

Notes: Clubs in Dubai are luring the world’s top DJs. Tiësto and Erick Morillo recently had gigs there, while French DJ David Guetta will hit the decks later this month… Shagging for unmarried people is illegal in the UAE but not really enforced, while smooching in public is frowned upon.