Cordarounds is in every sense a global enterprise -- well, excluding the World Music sense. So while we're a humble, two-man business making clothing in San Francisco, the fact that we only sell online means that you, dear customer, must compete for our latest styles with the likes of fashion-conscious Belarusian mobsters, Papuan New Guinea tribesman and members of the Easter Island Elks Lodge, to name just a few.

Today we're embracing our World Wide Web identity by renaming our company ÇØRDÅRØÜÑDS, a name that's appropriately international, but one that we have no idea how to pronounce.

To celebrate, we're selling these attractive t-shirts for men and for women. We've also produced this particularly unhelpful ÇØRDÅRØÜÑDS pronunciation video.

So if you're in search of a conversational summer shirt, proceed immediately to our store. And if you happen to be good with languages, please help us crack the linguistic code of our new name, as we sincerely look forward to saying it ourselves.

Posted by cordarounds at 11:44 AM | Permalink

Cordarounds, famed purveyor of horizontal corduroy pants, today launches a daring initiative to sew seersucker in directions once thought impossible, namely checkerized, puckerized, and side-to -side.

El Maestro: Precisely 90 degrees cooler than traditional seersucker pants.

Specs: Plain green 5 pocket horizontal seersucker pants with Evil Eye slit rear pockets.

Unlike vertical seersucker puckers, which whisk radiant heat from asphalt to crotch to form an uncomfortable and possibly incendiary column of superheated air, Lindland's horizontal ThermoSucka technolgy creates a 462-pucker barrier from heel to crotch (504 for longs!), safely insulating natures' most precious equipment from the ravages of summer swelter.

And with the seersucker puckers aligned horizontally, wearers will enjoy extreme aerodynamic advantages over vertically-oriented adversaries. You will become widely known as the Green Flash -- a rare, quick-as-a-wink phenomenon.

E-check, B-check: More Pucker for your Sucker.

Specs: Gingham check 5 pocket seersucker pants with Evil Eye slit rear pockets.

Not so fast! Test after test of the advanced aerodynamics of our horizontal seersucker trousers leads to behavior, perhaps, unbecoming of a seersucker wearer -- our customers moved a bit too fast.

While the pants perform marvelously, cutting the wind like samurai swords through sweltering tofu, the aerodynamic seersucker has the unintended consequence ofspeeding up their entire lives. Southern gentlemen spin yarns too quickly. Kentuckians shoot, not sip their mint Juleps. Grooms speed-read their vows. And a Nantucket yachtsman clocked a 9.8 second 100 when stumbling home from Stiffy McCorkle's Tavern.

We went back to the drawing board, and rather than commit the sin of making our seersucker vertical, our engineers came up with a clever solution: More Pucker for your Sucker.

To counteract the phenomenon known as The Quickening, our engineers created checkered seersucker, boosting our pants pucker by a full 1 mm to affect a parachute-like slowdown. While trapping heat on the way up, they billow slightly more to catch the wind as it races around the seersucker grooves.

Fashionable? Yes. Functional? But of course. Dangerously high speed? Only if you dare.

Southern Gentleman Approved: Our Trusty Khakis

Specs: Classic, sideflash horizonta seersucker pants with patch rear pockets.

A team of scientists from SuckerLab traveled to the famed leisure proving grounds of Worthington P. Chesterfield’s wide and gracious front porch to put our classic horizontal seersucker pants to the test -- the Southern Gentleman test.

Under rigorous analysis, they scored high marks in all manner of Southern Gentlemanly arts (see findings on right). And why shouldn't they? After all, these pants were sewn in San Francisco's South of Market district by ladies who hail from southern China. And you can acquire a pair for well south of $100. It doesn’t get much more Southern than that, does it? Until our pant scientists figure out how to fabricate them out of sweet tea, we don’t think so.

Our seersucker pants have been engineered specifically for casual use in hazy, lazy days of summer--on porches, on beaches, on stoops, preferably with an iced beverage in hand. In test after clinical test, our spring khakis are precisely 90 degrees cooler than tradition vertical seersucker. A fact not lost on Worthington himself, who declares, “ and I do declare…you’re far cooler in suckers whose puckers go‘round."

Posted by cordarounds at 02:57 PM | Permalink

COUNTY KERRY, Ireland (Feb. 5, 2008) -- Angry, naked and cold, several hundred sheep gathered today in the Beaufort town square to protest the recent loss of their resplendent ebony wool, a situation organizers have called nothing less than a total fleecing of their basic ovine rights. Amid a chorus of bleating and chattering teeth, the so-called "Frozen Flock" claimed that overwhelming demand for Cordarounds authentic black sheep crewneck sweaters has robbed them of their fine black coats, leaving them, quite literally, out in the cold during the icy Irish winter.

"Bah! We thought these sweaters would finally give us the respect we deserved," said mighty Orion, King of all Black Sheep. "But Cordarounds keeps taking our wool, month after freezing month. Bah!"

Bah, indeed. Since Cordarounds released its black sheep sweaters last November, the San Francisco-based online clothier has experienced insatiable demand for the finely woven figures of speech, forcing the company to deprive Orion and the rest of his friends of their highly coveted coverings. And with the fourth production run of sweaters, there's sure to be more wool on the backs of Cordarounds customers than Kerry's entire population of black sheep, making for some very unhappy ungulates.

"The other farm animals now shun us more than ever," said Orion, nude and shivering. "If we black sheep are ever to graze the paddock in peace again, the shearing simply must cease!"

And it will. This is the last batch of black sheep sweaters Cordarounds will offer until next autumn. They're available now at Cordarounds.com. But with only 70 in stock, customers need to act fast. Before the sheep do.

Posted by cordarounds at 12:45 PM | Permalink

At long last, Cordarounds has a drug subculture to call its own. We'd been holding out for Shoe Goo sniffing, but according to the latest edition of Details Magazine, our pants are the hottest look in opium dens from Rangoon to Richmond, VA.   Read for yourself in expose.  Yes!

So today, we proudly announce a strategic partnership with opium lord Baron Chou to explore synergies in the pant and poppy trades.  Together we can stimulate the Afghan economy and deliver best-of-breed corduroy solutions wherever his ilicits are solicited.

Note: the gentleman in this photo is not wearing Cordarounds, he's wearing our Summerounds seersucker pants, which are now on sale in our store.

Posted by cordarounds at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Congratulations to Sioux Bonforte and Olaf Pitz, who wore reversible smoking jackets to victory in last weekend's World Synchronized Mountain Dancing championships, held in Interlaken, Switzerland. The couple performed these death-defying stunts to Ravel's Bolero, receiving perfect 10s in presentation and technical merit.

Posted by cordarounds at 08:39 AM | Permalink

Cordarounds are as counter-cultural as it gets when it comes to corduroy -- precisely 90 degrees different from the norm.   So it comes as no surprise that they would be worn to victory in the Fringe Festival by Laurent Martini, frontman of Live Evil.  

Note the effect the horizontal cords have on women, a species that nobody understands better than Martini, who penned such sexually astute songs as Blow Me as a teen, and now performs them to adoring adult audiences worldwide.

 To listen to Live Evil, visit their Myspace page.

Posted by cordarounds at 12:32 PM | Permalink

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 3 – In a landmark climate-change study conducted jointly by the National Weather Center and Cordarounds, makers of casual, horizontal seersucker pants (now on sale in our store), researchers have determined that increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will fuel scorching summer weather nationwide until at least mid-October. As a result, the Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Fashion has taken the unprecedented step of calling for an immediate and indefinite suspension of the so-called "No White After Labor Day" law.

“In light of significant climatic change over the last century, amending this woefully outdated legislation could spell relief for millions of Americans,” said Dr. Reginald Kaplan, lead researcher in the groundbreaking study.  “This law was passed as a public safety measure in 1910, when September storms regularly assailed the Eastern Seaboard with gale-force winds and up to 10 feet of snow a day, making wearers of white summer garments shiver – and worse, invisible.”

Continued Kaplan: “However, global warming, and the corresponding rise in global crotch-heat indices, has made it a cruel September indeed for the citizenry and its countless pairs of federally mandated woolen trousers.  The time to get rid of this law – and introduce in its place a decidedly cool and casual pant – is now.”

Stated Cordarounds founder Chris Lindland: “We are proud to have funded this important study, if only to give our marketing efforts pseudo-scientific credence.  So when the fashion calendar says it’s time to put away the white pants, but the thermometer says otherwise, put on a pair of our seersucker Summerounds, which are only half-white anyway.”  The other half is blue, tan or brand-new green. 

Lindland concluded by saying, tearfully: “Although I and the rest of the Cordarounds family remain steadfastly opposed to global warming, I am so very pleased to turn lemons into lemonade and state, unequivocally, that this is the year of ‘Endless Summerounds.’ In fact, from here on out, we shall call them exactly that.”

Posted by cordarounds at 06:58 PM | Permalink

Ever heard of Yahoo.com? It's a plucky young Internet company that's hot on the Cordarounds trend. Now you can outfit Instant Messaging avatars in the latest Cordarounds fashions (as well as dinosaur feet and menacing robotic hands.) With this ambitious Internet partnership, they hope to Rock the Rounds all the way to the top of the Internet food chain. Well, we invite Yahoo to dream big and invite Cordarounds customers to visit their Website en masse.

Caution: Please don't hit their site at the same time, as you may overwhelm their servers.

Click here to enter the Cordarounds Avatar World.

Posted by cordarounds at 08:25 AM | Permalink

Newsweek magazine reported that buying a pair of Cordarounds is like joining a weird club. Which got us thinking: In our haste to produce the world’s finest horizontal corduroy pants, had we forgotten to offer our customers a sense of esprit de corps? While our engineers work tirelessly to devise a proper fight song and Latin motto, there’s one thing we can give you that’s sure to impart an immediate sense of camaraderie.

Introducing the official Cordarounds handshake:

Consider this the key that opens the door to Club Cordarounds. When you spy a Lindland’s pant wearer working the door at a popular night spot, extend a hand and in you go. Apply it when interviewing for a job and say no more (particularly within the military industrial complex).

Yes, the benefits of Cordarounds ownership are vast and real. Here are but a few:

-The eternal enmity of zebras and striped bass.
-A standing $5 discount at San Francisco's smallest Pub, the Blackhorse.
-If you spot the Cordarounds prize panther (and it doesn’t maul you) you can win up to $1 trillion dollars.
-A certain optimism.
-When arm wrestling, a certain over-the-toptimism.
-Guaranteed favoritism when applying for work on the Cordarounds Zeppelin
-Shave .003 off your personal best in the corduroy pants 100M dash.

Know that when you buy a pair of Cordarounds, you’re joining a worldwide fraternity of pant wearers with an eye for fashion and a taste for adventure. You’re forging a lifelong bond with the likes of Kip McCorkle of Duluth, Minnesota, Prime Minister Renaldo Orio of the Republic of San Merengue, Inuit shaman Taqukaq, and the entire roster of the Yotohiro Stink Dragons of the Japanese Baseball League.

If you have any suggestions, whatsoever, about how to make this a club that rivals the Freemasons or Skull and Bones in global influence, by all means, let us know.

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Posted by cordarounds at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 21 — Say farewell to Metro. All hail the dawn of the Cromagnosexual. This fall, the most stylish men on the planet are wearing Cordarounds’ hearty horizontal-corduroy pants ...and "suffering" moderate to severe cases of cauliflower ear.

The medical community calls it "destruction of cartilage due to trauma that results in a thickened and deformed ear," but leading fashionistas from New York to Shanghai report that these funky lobes will be cruising the runways in ’06. Accompanied, of course, by pairs of Cordarounds, long recognized as the perfect pant for today's hottest rugby injuries.

Famed trend seer Coco Pitts explained the new Cromagno look thusly: "A pair of Cordarounds trousers not only looks scrum-ptious, the meshing, horizontal corduroy wales reduce crotch-heat friction, sending sperm counts skyrocketing to caveman levels. Combine that with cauliflower ear -- a trademark occupational hazard of the Neanderthal -- and you’ve got a hot look that says, 'I'm a hunter-gatherer who works hard – and plays violently! I'm Cromagno!"

Indeed, the formerly Metro are hurrying to join the maul in the hopes of getting that perfect, mangled ear to complement their new pair of Cordarounds. What’s more, plastic surgeons are reporting a sharp increase in the number of patients requesting cosmetic cauliflowerings. Says Cordarounds founder Chris Lindland: “Naturally, the rough and tumble will be drawn to our hearty trousers in 2006, creating a style combination that’s going to be hard to beat -- even with a caveman's club.”

Lindland then removed a pair of earmuffs to reveal his own swollen and malformed ear stubs. "Cromagno," he declared, briefly wincing at the pain.

*If you have a photo of yourself wearing Cordarounds and would like to complete the look with a rugger's cauliflower ear (but want to spare yourself the dangers of the scrum), write us and we'll send you a Cauliflower ear of your very own.

**Your comments are always welcome.

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Posted by cordarounds at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)