This week: peak magnolia season, a library in the woods, fashion-forward utility wear, and the ethereal art of Christopher Burch. Also, local designers partner up with the NFL, the artist behind the Super Bowl 60 art, the return of Falafelland, and commemorating beans.

Field-ready type

Prior to kickoff, local artist Erin Fong’s hand‑printed artwork sets the tone for Super Bowl 60. Her bold letterpress designs now anchor the game’s official theme art, from digital tickets to printed programs, alongside a larger suite of hand-printed works honoring 60 years of Super Bowl history.

Fong produced the pieces by hand on a vintage Vandercook press, layering vivid color with wood type that carries its own quiet lineage. The full collection is on view at Moscone Center North during the Super Bowl Experience, running through Saturday. — 7x7

From trunk to sidelines

Nostalgia, the Bay Area streetwear brand co-founded by Jaden Yo‑Eco and Humbert Lee, is collaborating with the NFL for its Origins collection, timed with Super Bowl LX festivities. The duo went from selling T‑shirts out of a car trunk to designing pieces that reflect their Asian American heritage and Bay Area upbringing, blending cultural symbols with modern streetwear.

The collection highlights just three local brands. A handful of the new pieces will be available through the NFL Shop and pop-up events around San Francisco. — KPIX

Many-eyed stories

Christopher Burch’s portraits sit in a space between realism and folklore, grounding the viewer before slipping in something uncanny — extra eyes, symbolic hands, moments that feel both personal and mythic. Working across drawing, painting, sculpture, and music, the San Francisco artist uses these figures to explore shared memory, spirituality, and lived Black experience.

His new show, I’ll Be Back This Way, opens Saturday at Arcana with live music by The Revenge of the Four Fives, and his murals can be found around the city, including near Turk and Leavenworth and the African American Arts and Cultural Center. — Broke-Ass Stuart

Utility and craft

Shopping at Paloma SF in the Outer Richmond (formerly Hayes Valley) feels like stepping into someone’s well‑curated closet. Founder Laureano Faedi handcrafts leather goods under the SF Breakers label and designs the Gangs of San Francisco line, while also showcasing his favorite Japanese denim, workwear, and home goods pieces.

One standout includes a chore coat from the brand Tellason with a pocket that fits a full wine bottle — it definitely caught SFist’s eye on Instagram! Stop by the shop to see the pieces in person or explore custom items and accessories made on site. — Paloma SF/Instagram

Tenderloin homecoming

Billy Alabsi has worn many hats—limousine owner, blockchain developer, and restaurateur—before landing back in the Tenderloin with a new Falafelland. After losing his first restaurant and spending years traveling the country, taking odd jobs, recovering from car accidents, and even staying in a Los Angeles shelter with his family, he returned to San Francisco to open a small storefront.

His menu blends old favorites, like avocado-blueberry falafel, with new experiments, including a Dubai-inspired chocolate he’s been refining all morning. The shop carries ieces of Yemen and Alabsi’s boundless energy, while a city grant helped make this comeback possible. — Mission Local

Legumes as a lifestyle

In Berkeley, Madeline Schapiro, who goes by Bean Supporter online, has turned a nine-year obsession with beans into a public experiment. From her apartment kitchen to social media, she tests recipes ranging from red-lentil “gut bowls” to beanut butter cups, sharing both results and self-deprecating humor with her followers.

Her focus is practical, consisting of affordable, fiber-rich meals that support health and sustainability. Schapiro also hosts bean-centric meet-ups in Willard Park and partners with local organizations to encourage more plant-based eating, including work with Berkeley schools. — The Oaklandside

Magnolia season in bloom

The San Francisco Botanical Garden has entered its most colorful stretch of winter, with more than 200 magnolia trees flowering across the grounds. From the Himalayas to Mesoamerica, the garden’s collection spans dozens of species and cultivars, including rare and historic specimens like the Magnolia campbellii planted here in 1940.

Visitors can wander through the Camellia, Moon Viewing, and Garden of Fragrance areas while catching peak bloom, which the Gardens expect to last through early March. Sketching workshops and field guide sessions are happening this weekend and next for those who want to linger among the petals. — Secret San Francisco

Literary refuge in the redwoods

Tucked into the Big Sur forest, the Henry Miller Memorial Library feels like a place out of time. Visitors move from the art-lined path outside to shelves filled with books that were once smuggled into the country, settling into velvet chairs or petting the resident cat while the world slows down.

Sculptures like the “Technological Crucifixion” jolt you out of scrolling habits before you even reach the stacks, and inside, the quiet of reading takes over. The library welcomes families and travelers alike, offering a chance to linger among Miller’s works and the surrounding redwoods. — Travel Realizations/Instagram

Top image: Christopher Burch

Previously: Field Notes: Free Trinkets, Wild Garlic Season, Oscar Grant, and ‘Taking a Knee’ During the Anthem

This week: a trinket box in the Sunset, a coyote in Japantown, a denim design legend, a local inventor, and a one-day artist talk on “taking a knee” activism. Plus, remembering Oscar Grant on his 40th birthday, catching crab right off the boat, foraging wild garlic, and protecting the snowy plover.

From boat to pot

On Saturday mornings at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, customers can purchase live Dungeness crab directly from individual fishing boats, then carry it to a dockside popup where it’s cooked — or cooked and cleaned — while they wait.

The market also sells whole fish and fillets from the local fleet, an effort to broaden what people associate with Bay Area seafood beyond crab season. The popup fish market runs Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. through the end of March at 101 Al Scoma Way. — Chronicle

Happy 40th Birthday, Oscar Grant

The Black Panther Party Museum is marking Oscar Grant’s birthday with a new exhibition, Happy Heavenly Birthday, Oscar, celebrating Grant’s life through sound, images, and participatory ritual as part of the 1-800 Happy Birthday project.

Grant, who was killed by a BART police officer in 2009, would have turned 40 this year.

The exhibition runs February 1 through February 28 at the Black Panther Party Museum in downtown Oakland, with an opening reception February 1 from 6 to 9 pm. — San Francisco Bay View

Little treasures

At 48th Avenue and Moraga in San Francisco, a tiny junction box has become a weekend destination. Sunset Trinket Trade overflows with friendship bracelets, claw clips, and tiny ceramic frogs, all curated by Deanna, who cleans, repairs, and sometimes reimagines items to make them swap-ready.

Neighbors and visitors line up to trade, chat, and leave little surprises for one another, turning a street corner into a small, shared celebration. The project has inspired people beyond the Outer Sunset to start their own trinket exchanges, and Deanna reminds participants to keep the goodwill going without disturbing nearby homes. — Mission Local

Side routes around the big game

Super Bowl week doesn’t require a watch party. Around the Bay Area, a handful of low-key options offer a different way to spend the weekend, from ice skating in downtown San Jose to a Bad Bunny lookalike contest at San Francisco’s Tacolicious.

Museums lean in too, with family craft sessions at SFMOMA and a one-day screening and talk by German artist Kota Ezawa at Santa Clara University’s de Saisset Museum on the history of taking a knee during the national anthem, spearheaded by 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016. — KQED

Love, Melody

From a pile of salvaged Levi’s to the suits of Elvis and Tina Turner, Melody Sabatasso built a career stitching together recycled denim into finely crafted, iconic outfits. Her early days involved hitchhiking across the Golden Gate Bridge, arguing for fittings, and discovering her own worth alongside Hollywood legends.

Today, her Greenbrae studio is a working archive filled with machines, studs, and memories, where past creations sit alongside new projects. She still collaborates with musicians, filmmakers, and collectors, keeping her decades of denim craft alive. — SFGate

Windows without walls

A San Rafael filmmaker stepped into the national spotlight this winter, pitching LiquidView — large-format digital windows that stream continuous outdoor scenes — on a January episode of Shark Tank. The idea grew out of years spent working in windowless rooms and gained wider notice after a feature on the Today show, helping the screens find homes in hotels, offices, and memory care spaces around the Bay Area.

Though he didn’t land a deal on the show, the appearance brought a surge of attention and new leads. LiquidView launched in 2021 and now displays places like Rodeo Beach, the Farallon Islands, and Venice in installations across Marin and San Francisco. — Marin Independent Journal

Foraging fever

Three-cornered garlic is spreading fast across Bay Area parks and can be harvested straight from the root. This pungent and flavorful vegetable grows abundantly, so don’t plant it at home since it’s invasive.

Forays organized by local foragers such as Cindy Doe Dee are teaching participants how to identify and gather plants safely, turning the hills and edges of the city into hands-on classrooms. — Cindy Doe Dee/Instagram

Snowy morning

Along Ocean Beach, Western Snowy Plovers make their home for most of the year, delicate birds eking out a life on shifting sand. Fewer than 2,000 adults remain along the Pacific coast, and simple habits — sticking to marked paths, staying near the wet sand — help them thrive.

Observers can watch without disturbing, keeping the upper beach clear for nesting. — Bird Curious SF/Instagram

Courtyard visitor

Amid a string of recent animal visits — from a mountain lion at Lafayette Park to a coyote swimming to Alcatraz — another young coyote, likely from the Presidio, spent three nights quietly in Hotel Kabuki’s garden in Japantown this week.

Onlookers were urged to give it space and to keep pets at a distance while it gathered some respite before disappearing back into the urban wilderness. She’s quite a beauty. We’d love to see some paintings of her! — Hotel Kabuki/Instagram

Top image: ‘National Anthem’(2018); Kota Ezawa

Previously: Field Notes: Ancient Star Map, New Cat Cafe, San Jose’s Batman, and Disquiet in Suburbia

When vintage store the Future Past in SF’s Inner Richmond put Gap Inc. on blast, accusing its Banana Republic brand of blatantly copying owner Lindsey Hansen’s original upcycled jeans design, the company removed the jeans from its store and website.

As Mission Local reports, shop owner Lindsey Hansen created the custom jeans in the spring of 2024 while repairing a pair of threadbare Levi’s 501s. She hand-sewed several scraps of denim patches to the thigh and knee on each leg using traditional Japanese sashiko cross-stitch and then sold them for $288 through Levi's social media two days later.

Per Mission Local, Future Past employee Jenna Giusto first spotted Banana Republic’s identical jeans on Instagram last week, retailing for $180 and featuring what appeared to be the exact same stitching and patch placement.

“When I initially saw the stolen design my stomach sank,” Hansen told the Chronicle. “I immediately knew that it was an almost identical copy of a pair that I had repaired last year.”

Guisto told the Chronicle she was furious. “Our whole ethos is slow fashion,” she said. “To see that exact design of a pair of jeans that we specifically took to save and repair and thoughtfully craft and hand-stitch, for that to be replicated by this company that’s just pumping out thousands of this same jean that obviously doesn’t need repair … it’s just so backwards. It makes no sense and it’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do.”

Hansen voiced a similar perspective, calling it problematic of Gap Inc to make new garments look distressed — and turning it into a trend — rather than focusing on recycling and reducing waste, per Mission Local. “It’s not a trend,” Hansen said. “We need to repair our clothes, because we just can’t keep consuming clothes the way that we are.”

Per the Chronicle, Gap Inc has since pulled the jeans from its store and website. “We take their concerns seriously as a brand that supports the local creative community,” a spokesperson told the outlet. “Our team is looking into this matter and will handle it as appropriate.”

Image: Banana Republic's jeans (left); Lindsey Hansen's jeans (right)/Lindsey Hansen

Folsom fashion, Litquake’s parade of words, Michoacán flavors in Redwood City, Black woman-owned cafe in Mission Bay, Lassen’s open trails, Betty Reid Soskin at 104, SF plates on the Top 100 list, AI art in San Jose, a love billboard on 101, and Oakland’s Tiny Plot podcast.

Inclusive fashion at Folsom

Folsom Street Fair returns Sunday with vendor stalls as vivid as the stages — from sequined kaftans and femme harnesses to hand-cut fringe and heritage leather reworked into new shapes. Five and Diamond, Love Lorn Lingerie, Bearly Covered, Krakenwhip, and CantiqLA each carry their own lineage, from pandemic sewing experiments to decades of queer craft.

Together they build a living archive in fabric and metal, where every strap and stitch carries both pleasure and defiance.   — 48Hills

Litquake season

Litquake returns, starting with the Small Press Book Fair on Sunday at Yerba Buena Gardens, where independent publishers, journals, and bookstores set up shop on the lawn. From there, the festival spreads across the city and beyond through October, with events ranging from a panel on writing about wildfire to an evening with US Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

Later in the month, Alta Journal teams up with Litquake to celebrate John Freeman’s California Rewritten, and neighborhood readings fill bars, bookstores, and back rooms. — Alta Journal

Voices in code

At the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Stephanie Dinkins has turned the gallery into a living conversation. Her installation Data Trust gathers oral histories from Bay Area Black communities, feeding them into an AI system that transforms the stories into moving, evolving projections across 14-foot walls.

Visitors can add their own memories through red rotary phones, weaving personal voices into the shifting digital fabric. Supported by the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions, the project opened to a packed crowd and will remain on view through March 2026. — Bay Area News Group

A plot of their own

In Oakland’s Union Point Park, a group of unhoused residents decided to try something different — building a community where they could write the rules themselves. The new KQED podcast A Tiny Plot follows their experiment, tracing nights in tents, clashes with the city, and the hope of shaping a model for survival.

Reporter Shaina Shealy spent a year recording the daily grind of people who refuse to be defined only by crisis. — KQED

Nation’s oldest park ranger turns 104

Betty Reid Soskin, the nation’s oldest park ranger, marked her 104th birthday with hundreds of students at the East Bay middle school that carries her name. She says her life didn’t really begin until 50 — long before she put on a ranger’s uniform at 84.

Before that she ran a Berkeley record shop and wrote songs for the civil rights movement while raising kids in Walnut Creek. Later she worked for state assembly members, pushing for what became the city of Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter Park — where she eventually took the job of telling its stories herself as a ranger. — Richmondside

Quiet season on the peak

In the far northeast corner of California, Lassen Peak rises above a landscape of steaming vents and alpine lakes. This time of year, its 10,457-foot trail is clear of snow, the days are warm, and the crowds have thinned. The climb is short but steep, with views stretching from Lake Helen to Mount Shasta on the horizon.

For Bay Area hikers, it’s about the same drive as Yosemite or Tahoe — without the long lines or packed trailheads. The park’s geothermal basins, often called a “Little Yellowstone,” add another layer of wonder to a fall visit, making the trip feel both otherworldly and close to home. — SFGate

Michoacán in Redwood City

Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum calls Redwood City home to the best Mexican food in the US, thanks to its deep ties to Aguililla, Michoacán. Families brought recipes, bakeries, and taquerias — including Carnitas El Rincón and Panaderia Michoacán — keeping traditions alive for decades.

Rising housing costs have changed the neighborhood, but for those who stayed the food remains a living connection to home and heritage. — KGO

SF on a plate

San Francisco tastes like the city itself — old favorites, new spots, and a mix of chaos and calm. At Piglet & Co, honey walnut shrimp and pork toast carry sticky sweetness, while Hilda and Jesse’s pancakes pile whipped buttermilk and blueberry syrup into a soft, messy tower.

Gola’s Tunisian deviled eggs with roasted shrimp add spice and nutty depth, and Prubechu’s ko’ko’ wings hit with a sharp, citrusy punch. All of them show up on this Top 100 list, a snapshot of a city forever rewriting its menu. — 7x7

Nirvana in Mission Bay

NBA Champ turned storyteller Festus Ezeli gives a strong endorsement to Nirvana Soul Coffee, a local Black woman-owned coffee shop, which recently opened its fifth location in SF’s Mission Bay.

The San Jose-based company recently partnered with NFL star Chidobe “Chido” Awuzie and will soon be opening locations at SFO and San Jose’s SAP Arena. — Festus Feasts

Love on a billboard

Drivers beware: Lisa Catalano is looking for love — and she’s advertising it on Highway 101. The Bay Area bachelorette has put up digital billboards from Santa Clara to the city, directing curious viewers to her website, marrylisa.com, where applicants can fill out a form and see her likes, lifestyle, and non-negotiables.

Catalano, whose fiancé passed away in late 2023, says she’s ready to love again. The billboards sparked TikTok chatter, but she insists it’s not a stunt: “This is a real endeavor. My goal is to meet the love of my life.” — KRON4

Top image: Bearly Covered/Facebook

Previously: Dancers on Buildings, Cowboys in Oakland, and Fun at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk

• California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has refused State Farm Insurance's request to raise the premiums of residential customers in California by 22%   — for now. [NBC Bay Area]
• Chase Bank alerted an East Bay woman to fraudulent charges on her account and then denied her claims for two months, until ABC’s '7 On Your Side' stepped in. [ABC7]
• Apparently California ranks the third best state in the country to be single behind Florida and New York. [Sacramento Bee]
• The high society set celebrated the history of fashion with a focus on cross-dressing and dandyism at Villa Aberdeen’s 2025 season launch at the Legion of Honor last month. [The Bold Italic]

Image: Black History Month, The Magazine, 2019; Leanne Maxwell/SFist

Google's announcement of their sartorial collaboration with Levi's — a "connected" jacket that integrates basic smartphone functions — was met Monday with countless glowing headlines heralding it as the garment of the future. And the future is apparently either filthy or wasteful, as you're only going to get to clean the jacket ten times, before it's apparently likely to crap out.

We got our first look at the garment back in March, when it was shown off at South By Southwest. Google's announcement of the $350 jacket, which is called the "Levi's® Commuter™ Trucker Jacket" — that's right, guys, they freakin trademarked "Commuter" — explains that Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group has developed a "connected apparel platform" called Jacquard that's woven into the fabric.

(It's worth noting that the word "jacquard," not unlike "commuter," was in use long before Google nabbed it: it's actually a punch card device invented in 1804 to facilitate the weaving of complex textiles.)

According to Google, "Gesture-sensing Jacquard Threads are woven into the cuff and wirelessly connected to your mobile phone using tiny electronics embedded inside the sleeve and a flexible snap tag. The snap tag also notifies you about incoming phone calls or text messages with light and haptic feedback." You can also "perform common digital tasks—like starting or stopping music, getting directions or reading incoming text messages—by simply swiping or tapping the jacket sleeve," they say.

Though the jacket, which Google says is the first Jacquard garment made, is called the "Trucker" jacket, it's not being marketed to truckers. Instead their target audience appears to be cyclists, as they say "Like any regular denim jacket, you can wash it (just remove the snap tag), it's durable, designed to be comfortable for cycling and it’ll keep you warm on and off the bike."

A Wired reviewer described the garment as "a glimpse into what might happen when we start connecting our clothes to the internet." The Verge says that " I’m impressed with the fit and look of this one." A Chron (business section) report on the jacket quotes Google’s Ivan Poupyrev, who headed up development on the garment, as saying “It’s almost like a miracle, looking back." And a second Chron report, this one in their Style section, says Poupyrev said that "making the garment washable — so that people can treat it just like any other jean jacket — was the project’s biggest challenge, and partly why it took more than two years to bring it to market."

But "washable" is apparently relative, as Google clearly states that the jacket can only be washed ten times. At most. Maybe.

That's after you remove the "snap tag," which Wired reports is "more reminiscent of a security tag someone forgot to remove" and "contains a wireless radio, a battery, and a processor." So, sure, reasonable that you have to take that off, I think we can all agree.

Less reasonable, however, is Google's warning that "The Jacket is designed to withstand up to 10 washes with the Jacquard snap tag removed but your experience may vary by usage and wash conditions." I don't know about you, but to me it sounds like they're saying that even ten spins in the washer ("It’s ok to tumble dry the Jacket on low heat (without the snap tag) but air drying is preferred," Google says) might be pushing it. It cannot be dry cleaned, they also note.

That's pretty freakin delicate for something with "trucker" in the name, huh? Or as Robyn Hagan Cain puts it on local style site rockyt , "when you build a piece of outerwear for bicycle commuting, it's going to absorb the smells of sweat and city air...If you like your outerwear freshly-laundered, this one might be a tough sell."

"In a best-case scenario, where the jacket remains stain-free, you'll at least need to spritz it with a fabric freshener," Cain writes. But even that seems like an extremely hopeful scenario, because if Febreze could actually manage the smells left behind by one's body, dry cleaners would go out of business. And above and beyond the unpleasant odors of the human condition, there's the rest of the world: Jostled lattes, not-yet-continent babies, and splashy ramen being just three of the reasons I'm doing laundry this week.

It was back in 2015 that Levi's CEO Charles V. Bergh suggested that jeans wearers only wash their pants every 10 uses as an ecological measure, noting that a pair of 501s washed after every two wearings "consumes nearly 3,800 liters of water and produces 33 kg of carbon emissions throughout its lifetime." By reducing washes to every ten wears, "it would decrease their energy and climate change impact by 80%."

Bergh is also the guy who in 2014 said he'd "never" washed the year-old pair of jeans he wore to a panel event, suggesting that he's far less messy than I am.

I certainly need to wash my jackets less often than I wash my jeans, but I also hang on to my jackets for far longer — and I can promise you, all my coats have been washed (or dry cleaned) more than ten times. It's certainly puzzling that the same company whose CEO in 2014 announced that “We are the ultimate in sustainable apparel. If you buy [our jeans] they will last a lot longer than most people’s waistlines will" is now selling a $350 item that won't retain full functionality longer than a couple years of relatively light use.

Obviously, you can keep wearing it as a jacket after its connectivity has died away, so it won't be a total loss. But as Levi's standard "Trucker" jacket goes for $70 or less on their site, you'll basically be paying $280 for ten washes of text alerts.

If you have have three and a half Benjamins to spare, you can find the jacket in "select shops" Wednesday, and purchase it online as of October 2. Otherwise, I suggest you keep on trucking in the jacket you have now, as the bike lane is no place for a garment you can't get dirty past a decuple.

Previously: Google Unveils Its Latest Wearable: A 'Smart' Levi's Jean Jacket

So much for my conspiracy theory that Google’s Nest devices are just creepy IoT surveillance technologies with marginal consumer upside. One marginal consumer got symbolically smacked upside by the video-sharing social media “fashion police” of Cow Hollow jumper, blouse, and accessory boutique ANOMIE. After getting shoplifted out of $230 worth of merchandise, ANOMIE posted their Nest surveillance video of the incident to Facebook. The Nest egged nearly 1,500 video views, and the embarrassed shoplifter promptly returned the merch, with extra cash, and a handwritten apology note that melted even my IoT-skeptic heart.

The shop and shoplifter are both chronicled in a blog post by fashion site Rockyt. These are their stories. (chung-CHUNG!)

The incident went down on Saturday, but ANOMIE posted the above video to Facebook late Wednesday morning. “Do you recognize these girls? They were in our Union St. SF store on May 27th at 4:45pm and the girl in the tank top stole 2 items,” the post says. “She said they were from the Vancouver area (Washington or Canada, I don't know) and that one maybe lives in SF currently? Reward for information that leads me to the thief!! [We are not accusing the girl in the scarf or girl in leather jacket of theft. The video clearly shows the girl in the tank top stealing twice and we want to catch HER!]”

The post is hashtagged #therealfashionpolice, so I have to admit that I brazenly shoplifted that joke up in the introductory paragraph.

But lo! Social media justice warriors did their thing, or perhaps the young pilferer simply felt guilty, because within five hours the goods were returned along with a beautifully articulated handwritten apology note according to another ANOMIE post.

“I can’t apologize enough for what I did on Saturday,” the note reads. “There are no words to adequately say I’m sorry. There is also no excuse. I realize that the honour and hard work of owning a small shop in any community is beautiful and important and should be celebrated and supported, not broken down and taken from. I don’t know what I was thinking, except that I wasn’t, and the regret and shame I feel are unbearable. Please find enclosed the items and some money to help replace the short with restocking fees. Know that this will never happen again — anywhere — and I will always be sorry.”

Please excuse me ‘cause I am just bawling over here. It’s a sweet redemption story, and all happened because ANOMIE didn’t keep any empty Nest. Perhaps BART can take a lesson from what happens when security cameras are real and not decoys.

Related: Stanley Roberts Takes On Safeway Shoplifters

The Horatio Alger story (that is, if Ragged Dick were about a 32-year-old alleged member of the Northside Gangster Crips instead of a frugal and virtuous teen) that is the life of NorCal convict Jeremy Meeks just gets more and more charmed, as less than a year after he was released from prison following a 27-month sentence for a Stockton-area gun offense, the man with the best mugshot you've ever seen has opened a runway show at New York Fashion Week.

New York Magazine reports that Meeks strutted the runway at Monday's Philipp Plein show at the New York Public Library, with Madonna, Kylie Jenner, Paris Hilton, and presidential daughter/fashion fan Tiffany Trump in the front row.

Meeks, who was arrested in June of 2014 during a gun offense warrant sweep entitled "Operation Ceasefire," stopped even the most jaded crime reporters in their tracks with his extremely attractive mugshot. (That flattering photo wasn't his first booking photo, as he had previously served two years in connection with a grand theft of an auto in Solano County.) While his case wound its way through the courts, Meeks picked up numerious folks eager to help him in pursuit of a career in modeling or acting, saying "I wish I could be on a show like 'Sons of Anarchy.'”

Apparently those people came through for him, as there Meeks was Monday, joining rappers Young Thug, Desiigner, and Fetty Wap on the runway (above) and in this slightly silly hat (below).

He also wore a jacket that I do not like at all! Here it is.

Model Jeremy Meeks poses backstage for the Philipp Plein Fall/Winter 2017/2018 Women's And Men's Fashion Show at The New York Public Library on February 13, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Philipp Plein)

Catch up on all SFist coverage of Jeremy Meeks here

When news broke that long-struggling clothing manufacturer American Apparel had been sold, it was a safe assumption that their business would face big changes — changes that will shutter the LA-based company's 110 retail stores, including the three that remain in San Francisco. The big question, as of Tuesday, is when that closure will occur.

As previously reported by our parent site, Gothamist, the 27-year-old company had been marching toward its demise for quite some time, following a high-profile split with its notoriously vile founder and multiple bankruptcies. Sold last week to Canadian retailer Gildan for a reported $88 million, the new owner says that they plan to close the company's factories and headquarters in Los Angeles, and are expected to move their manufacturing operation outside the US, removing the last reason people who make purchasing decisions based on where things are made will have to buy their goods.

Gildan also announced that they will be closing all of AA's retail locations, three of which are in SF: One is in Union Square at 363 Grant Avenue, another's in the Upper Haight at 1615 Haight Street, and the third is in Cow Hollow at 2174 Union Street. According to Hoodline, "No dates for the closures have been disclosed, and managers at both the Grant Avenue and Union Street locations said they were instructed not to speak to the press about the company's future plans," but "clothes were flying off the shelves of the two-story Union Square store, which was offering deep discounts of 40 to 70 percent on its tees, jeans, and hoodies."

The restructuring, or whatever you want to call it, by the company's new owners, is expected to cost 3,500 people their jobs, Gothamist reports, as Hoodline notes that a local AA staffer "bemoaned the fact that people don't appreciate non-sweatshop clothing." While I don't want to start an argument with someone who's about to lose their job, I don't know that that's the case — I speak with people every day who are making an effort to keep their dollars local when they can.

And would AA have staggered on as long at they had if people didn't appreciate their commitment to making clothing in the US? I really don't think so, as Gothamist notes that if you shopped at American Apparel, you did so knowing you'd drop "a little more on cotton T-shirts than you might elsewhere, but you knew your clothes weren't made by exploited children halfway around the world."

If you're a person concerned about US-based clothing manufacturing, you still have options — and by purchasing from those companies, you still have the opportunity to demonstrate that you, too "appreciate non-sweatshop clothing." New York-based Royal Apparel has a full line of US-made clothing (I should disclose here that I make and sell t-shirts and exclusively use Royal Apparel, but they didn't give me a damn thing to mention them), and Bella+Canvas has a small line of US-made goods that I suspect they'd expand if enough interest was demonstrated. So, while the AA era is coming to a close (and maybe it should), people who want American-made apparel still do have places to find it, places that (as of publication date) lack CEOs who jack off in front of reporters.

Related: National Department Store Bloodbath Leads To Closure Of Another San Francisco Macy's

As the year draws to a close, de Young Director Max Hollein is providing a sneak peek at what lies ahead for the San Francisco art museum. The New York Times reports that the first major show developed since Hollein took charge will open in the fall of 2018 and is tentatively set to be titled “The Fashion of Islam."

"There are probably people who don’t even think there is fashion in Islam,” Mr. Hollein told the paper. “But if you look at Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Beirut, the fashion is really vibrant, and it can speak to larger political and social developments, cultural understanding and misunderstandings.”

The exhibit will focus on hijabs, and follows in the footsteps of "Faith, Fashion, Fusion” — an Australian show dealing with so-called "modest fashion." This is not the first time the de Young has shown fashion, with the 2012 Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit proving the popularity of the topic.

According to Hollein, textiles curators at the museum will “put together a group of scholars and experts to develop the project, both in the area of fashion and the history of culture.” The exhibit will look at both European interpretations of the hijab, Islamic streetwear, and the history of the garment.

“We want to apply the same scholarly rigor here that we would apply to an old masters’ show,” Hollein explained.

Related: Jean Paul Gaultier Exhibit: Designer's Childhood Teddy Bear Wearing First Cone Bra

It's a Silicon Valley stereotype that putting on pants to go to work is considered a fashion statement. Though that assumption is at odds with the plenty of stylish San Franciscans you probably see everyday, perhaps even when you look in the mirror, it's nonetheless what seems to drive Silicon Valley Fashion Week, whose second year celebration was held this past weekend.

Three sold-out evenings (tickets were $20) were sponsored by Betabrand, the wacky online clothing maker with a storefront on Valencia, and Zappos.com, the Amazon-owned e-tailer. Instead of last year's venue, the packed Chapel on Valencia, this year's 3-day "week" was held in the industrial-chic, not-quite-finished ground-floor space at the NEMA apartment building, a high-end development across from Twitter HQ that probably needs no further associations with tech money to cement its reputation.

Silicon Valley Fashion Week 2016 - 30sec from Florence Lumsden on Vimeo.

At the second of the three nights, which I attended, fashionistas milled about with drinks and took in various displays like a life-sized claw machine from Zappos. Mustafa Khan took to the runway to emcee the evening (his attempts to enliven the San Francisco events scene include popular offerings like the morning dance party known as "Daybreaker," and SFist has covered another of his projects in the past), but after a kick-ass dance performance, many of the runway aspects were a letdown. Models strutted designs with LEDs and fur appropriate only for Burning Man or the apocalypse, and then Khan engaged designers in a product-launch format to discuss their work. That interrupted the flow of the evening and led to repetitive hyperbole about "revolutionary" fashion and never-before-seen, just-launched technology.

There were some fashions that stood out: A necklace that doubles as earphones called Tinsel was decidedly cool. But the evening felt geared toward the straight male gaze, with just a few guy models appearing onstage and more male designers than female ones. That sense was clearest when one male designer had two women models in extremely revealing 3D-printed lingerie while his male model donned a workwear-inspired space outfit thing.

Still, the event was mostly a success: The New York Times appeared to take it all seriously, at least as a Bay Area curiosity. Fashions may come and go, but Silicon Valley Fashion Week is likely here to stay.

Previously: Silicon Valley Fashion Week: So Hot Right Now

You aren't going to find Mr. David's clothes on a sale rack, ever. But last week, two decades of daily work putting handmade fashions on local drag queen Juanita MORE! and a bevy of her friends, drag daughters, and as well as himself — under the drag name Glamamore — was distilled into a dizzying runway show of some 200 pieces in Wilsey Court at the deYoung Museum, and the designer says that's less than 10 percent of what he's made for his drag daughter Juanita since first dressing her in 1992.

The two spent the last month editing down an archive of 3,000 looks, most but not all of them designed for Juanita, who quickly became Mr. David's muse after they both relocated to San Francisco from New York. Juanita MORE's high-fashion reputation has become an essential part of the persona, and Mr. David is as much a part of her successes as she is, as both performer and longtime nightlife doyenne who's always the best dressed in the room.

The clothes have been kept in storage in a storage space in SoMa over the years, and as Juanita explains, "They are in clear plastic bins and sorted by color. I don't have keys to the unit as it overwhelms me to go into it. But my assistants keep it in great shape."

And the editing process became a difficult one with so much to choose from, and as Mr. David told 7x7 last week, "There were things I made in ’94 that I could send down a runway today, and they wouldn’t look dated. A 12-yard ombré wrap-sari doesn’t belong to a specific year."

Mr. David's fashion career began in New York in the 1980's, and he began doing drag as Glamamore then too, which is where Juanita first saw her drag mother perform, as one of the Boy Bar Beauties. In 1990, a Mr. David creation would become part of the zeitgeist when he created the iconic patterned jumpsuit worn by Deee-Lite's Lady Miss Kier in the video for "Groove Is In The Heart."

But in Juanita he found reasons to constantly rethink and reshape the various modes of glamor. The resulting show, featuring dozens of models of all genders, some in drag and many not, was a whirlwind retrospective of a San Francisco-specific fashion career that most outside the gay nightlife arena have never seen — and stood up well against the high glamor of Oscar de la Renta, whose work was on display in a retrospective just downstairs. A Mr. David gown doesn't belong to a specific style or genre, but is always somehow unique to the moment, to that week's inspiration, and the needs of his client — or the immediate desires of Ms. More. "It was like a tidal wave," David tells SFist, reflecting on watching so much of his work pass by in under an hour. "Every garment had stories and stories. Lovers and friends, living and dead."

"I loved seeing all the dresses in motion," Juanita said following the show. "Because they are always on me I don't get to see how they move." And as she wrote on Facebook, "[Putting together the show] has been equal parts overwhelming and thrilling, but what a fabulous story... This art project we started 24 years ago, called 'Juanita,' has benefited from many helping hands along the way — but never has it meant more than now."

Mr. David's work runs the gamut from mod to Old Hollywood to avant garde to punk to disco-era sultry. I asked him how he'd sum up his own style, if he had to, and he said, "Style for me is a combination of paying attention and daring. It matters not what or whom or size or shape or race or age or gender. One can always feel gorgeous and confident."

And when I asked them both what their single favorite look was, after having to sort that vast archive and revisit so many, Juanita demurred and said, "It's always the new one." Mr. David, though, pointed to the coat pictured below. "Juany couldn't decide a favorite, but mine is that red coat," he says. "It sums up my skill and feminine ideal in one shot."

A Haight Street vintage clothing shop(pe) remains closed today after the California Department of Fish and Wildlife acted on an anonymous tip and discovered illegal animal products on sale.

Decades of Fashion, where you cannot shop today, was raided by a dozen or so agents who looked for and found retail merchandise that contained fur from endangered or threatened animals. "Our primary purpose is to prohibit commercialization of animals, which for some reason may be threatened or endangered," Fish and Wildlife agent Lieutenant James Ober told NBC Bay Area. "Or sometimes it's animals that may have been taken under a sport hunting license. And we don't want them to be something that can be done for profit."

Typical vintage store items that might contain illegal animal parts include belts made from sea turtles or coats fashioned from African lions.

Officials have yet to speak with the store's owner, Cicely Hansen to determine whether or not she knew they were offering illegal ANIMAL PARTS. But J.T. Hansen, Cicely's son, reached out to KQED to protest his innocence, saying, "I had no idea. Neither did my mom."

A 1970 law prohibits the selling of endangered animal parts, but not the ownership of them. Hansen tells KQED he believes that all of the pieces in his mom's store pre-date the law and that game agents are acting like "bullies."

Decades of Fashion will be closed until the Department of Fish and Wildlife gets to the bottom of this fashion fiasco.

San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co is well known for human rights and labor crimes allegedly perpetrated in the factories that create their goods. And now they've chosen a new target for exploitation and abuse: The crack of your ass.

You know Levi's! They have that "plaza" in San Francisco, the naming rights to the stadium where the 49ers play...the only thing they haven't had is any factories based in the US since 2003.

Even before then, PBS reports, Levi's was dogged with labor horror stories, including exploitation of Chinese prison labor to make jeans in 1992 and repeated allegations of workers forced to work more than 12 hours a day without overtime pay in factories in China, Bangladesh and nearly 50 other countries.

In fact, again according to PBS, "Sweatshop workers in Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth exempt from American labor laws that stamps its clothing with 'Made in the U.S.A.' tags, were forced to pay recruitment fees of thousands of dollars. To work off the debt, they were kept in indentured servitude at factories. When a lawsuit against 26 of America’s largest clothing retailers—including the Gap, Target and Lane Bryant—over sweatshop abuses was settled in 2002, Levi Strauss was the only company that refused to settle."

Workers in that factory made "three dollars an hour in 2001. That same year, Levi Strauss CEO Philip Marineau made 25.1 million dollars—amounting to 11,971 dollars an hour."

For their part, Levi's says on their website that they have "completed pilots for the Worker Well-being initiative in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, Haiti and Pakistan."

So, anyway, keep that in mind as you mull a purchase of the company's newest offering which is called, I am not kidding, the “Wedgie Fit” jean. Again, not a joke. I checked.

As noted yesterday by Mashable, the jeans company promises that the new design will offer "The vintage look you love, tailored to show off your best assets." Because your best asset is your ass, not your brain, sense of humor, or how you AREN'T directly responsible for sweatshop abuse. OK!

Senior vice president of Levi's Global Design Jonathan Cheung tells Mashable that "the Wedgie is inspired by girls [who] were downsizing a vintage 505 and wearing it very close and almost vacuum-packed to the rear-ends — hence the affectionate and cheeky name."

The jeans also "include a high waist," Mashable reports, perfect for that tourist just in from the Midwest look! Between that that and the line's evocation of middle-school torture, it seems clear that Levi's mission to "get women back in jeans" has hit some snags. Then again, Levi's just broke its longstanding streak of financial declines last October, so maybe there's something to this wedgie thing after all.