The Urban Clothing Shop – Street wear for the Urban Jungle

Every environment has its own clothing. The jungle requires tough shoes, socks, khaki. The urban jungle requires something a little more good looking – but just as functional in its own right. Welcome to the idea of the urban clothing shop – which, in strict keeping with its modern image, is of course found online.

Urban clothing is funky, fashionable and loud. It nods its many hats to street culture, street music and the languages adopted by the younger generation; the words by which they communicate that set them apart from the generations that came before them. At the moment, then, urban clothing is all about hats (caps, mainly), bright t shirts, hooded sweat shirts and jeans with patterned pockets (for the men); and bright t shirts and leggings for the ladies. The online urban clothing shop (like the UK based Urban Couture) supplies all of these items direct to the door of the lucky boy or girl – ensuring that the very latest trends are always on hand at the touch of that much loved mouse button.

It's interesting to note that most urban couture has its roots in two very old forms of music – hip hop, which is responsible for the baggy jeans and sweat shirts so beloved of today's street smart kids; and punk, which has been appropriated to bring us the tight jeans and loose tops favoured by all the kids who aren't wearing the first lot of gear. Nice to see class distinctions disappearing in the blend of hip hop and punk: pseudo punk style clothes were always the preserve of middle class kids, while hip hop threads, with their street connotations, were more prevalent amongst inner city trendsetters. These days, of course, as the online urban clothing shop demonstrates, everything is pretty much of a muchness – the fashion of late is to combine the softer edges of the post punk drainpipes and animal picture tops with the harder core of the hip hop kit.

Hip hop gear, which in its modern form is still pretty much the same as it always was, revolves around caps, baggy jeans and sweat shirts. The online urban clothing shop now displays lines that have taken this trend and refracted it through a more modern and comfortable lens, allowing fashion followers to adopt the look in a fresh way.

This other strand, this punk strand, is a little stranger. It seems to have fused a mishmash of genuine punk (the skinny jeans in particular) with a kind of retro 90s grunge or almost "geeky" look. That takes the male fashion items, particularly, over into the realms of the looks that inspired the looks – those 1950s public schoolboy outfits that punk ripped off when it tried to hide its middle class roots with safety pins and ripped sleeves.

The online urban clothing shop, in catering to everyone, is helping to foster an already growing trend for "togetherness" – where aficionados of one type of street couture mix with aficionados of the other in a way they never used to. The Internet was always supposed to make the world smaller – maybe it finally is.