Muluk Ties Mexican accessories maker finds Portland awesomely peculiar

Strangers do well to embrace their strange lands, like that time Tom Cruise donned a kimono, then agreed to help some guy commit seppuku, facilitating his honorable departure from a world that would one day be completely Westernized by Tom Cruise. Fully embracing the Pac-Northwest, the immigrant artist behind Muluk Ties.

Muluk's run by a 34-year-old who moved from Mexico to Portland and found a wonderland of the "retro and weird", then decided to capture that regional zeitgeist as artists throughout the ages have done: heat-transferring random images onto vintage neckwear. Things start off sci-fi with the Star Wars series, updating bold 1970s backgrounds with the likes of Vader, Boba Fett, the Droids you're looking for, and a Gamorrean Guard, the warthog protector of Jabba the Hutt -- nerdily obscure, but then again you're the one about to buy a Star Wars tie. Another series features a menagerie of animals (some hand-drawn, others sourced from vintage magazines) like a hunched beetle on a brown-backed subtle dot-pattern, or field of swirling, forest-y green paisleys framing an elk with a very large rack, also what you get when a member of that benevolent order decides he wants to be the object of outmoded sexism for a change.

The rest of the offerings range wildly, from pork chops and gramophones, to non-digital cameras, tube televisions, and articulated modeling dummies -- throw a kimono on the short one, and you've got yourself a movie!