Coming into Las Vegas at night, the desert goes dark first. Then the city appears all at once: a grid of light laid across the valley, with one bright line running through it. That line is the Strip.
For generations, it has shaped the image of Las Vegas.
The Stardust
The Stardust opened on the Las Vegas Strip on July 2, 1958. Its scale and its enormous neon sign made it one of the city's defining landmarks. The resort also became associated with the era of casino skimming and organised-crime investigations later brought to the screen in *Casino*. The Stardust closed on November 1, 2006, and its hotel towers were imploded on March 13, 2007. Parts of its visual legacy survived beyond the building itself.
The image
Las Vegas has always been an image first. Signs built to be read from a moving car. Façades made to be photographed. Hotels named after somewhere else. The image travels further than the city does: most people can picture the Strip without ever having stood on it.
From above
From above, the image falls away and what remains is structure: streets laid out in a grid, blocks of houses stretching to the edge of the valley, the Strip as one bright seam through the middle, and desert in every direction. The neon is what people remember. The grid is what it sits on.
The city at night
VENT D’HIVER comes from the booth: DJs and producers in Paris, then Toronto, and the hours those rooms keep. Cities at night are the subject: where people gather, the signs above the door, and the way a name on a building can outlast the building itself. Las Vegas is the extreme version of that idea. A city built for the night, continually remade around the image of itself.
Two tees
The STARDUST TEE looks at Las Vegas from the street: a neon-inspired graphic built around a field of stars and the VENT D’HIVER™ name, with a seasonal graphic on the back. The SIN CITY TEE looks at it from above: the city reduced to its grid of light at the front, with a graphic on the back. Same city. One is the sign, the other is the map. Both are cut in 425 GSM heavyweight cotton, with an oversized fit and dropped shoulders.
STARDUST / SIN CITY TEES
Available now at VENT D’HIVER™.
*VENT D’HIVER is an independent brand and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Boyd Gaming, the former Stardust Resort and Casino, or the Neon Museum.*