Garish Glory

There's no reason to apologize if the offense is within the eye of the beholder.

There's just something about Spandex World that everyone in my office loves. It's a playground for the eye and hand. All that stretch. All that selection. For a riot of color, it's hard to beat an emporium of brightly covered fabrics like Spandex World.

The place screams We Sell Spandex in every color imaginable. Tie dye, neon fluorescents, wild patterns, textures, effects. It's all here at 228 West 38th Street, in the heart of the garment district - the last surviving industry in New York City, smack in the middle of midtown Manhattan. Miraculous, really, to see the streets relatively unchanged in decades.

There is a time and place for hard-to-find specialized products, and New York City delivers in niche product lines. If you want a lot or even just a little spandex in your life, you're best off to go to that ultimate place - a business that has built a SHRINE to spandex*. A place that, like So Good, is unabashed, unapologetic, and proud to roll out the goods, regardless of whether those goods are outrageous, over-the-top, garish, or just so bright that they hurt the eyes.

Spandex World is the kind of business that New Yorkers love to patronize and offer up proudly and smugly as the ultimate trump card in the game of street cred. Where else will you find a shop like this, with two full floors at street level of nothing but Spandex fabrics?

This is not about feng shui, natural fibers, new age, or the soft pastel world of the French impressionist. This is SPANDEX WORLD in all its garish glory :)

*Spandex or elastane is a polyurethane-polyurea copolymer co-invented in 1959 by chemists Joseph Shivers and C. L. Sandquist at DuPont's Benger Laboratory in Waynesboro, Virginia. The invention was the culmination of 10 years of research by Shivers. It is branded as Lycra in the USA. The word spandex is an anagram for expands.

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