Premium Goods

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When Clarence Nathan was in his second year of public-health grad school at Columbia University, he started designing T-shirts—and the rest, as they say, is history. Nathan finished the master’s but opted not to use it, instead, continuing to create shirts and distributing them to stores around the world. In 2002, he opened Premium Goods in Fort Greene, selling his own tees as well as the silk-screened wares of other small or local apparel vendors. In 2005, the store moved to this cubby hole of a space on Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, where Nathan brings in the latest (and, more often than not, limited edition) styles from Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and Vans, plus a collection of Umbros created by hot British designer Kim Jones. The shoes come in unusual colors and materials—Adidas in a pastel rainbow, Nike high tops in Harris tweed or paisley—and cost, for the most part, fairly modest prices. Rarer pairs, which can run into the triple digits, are kept in the store’s glass display case, under a wall-mounted flat-screen TV. — Andrew Sessa