Apparently the new style modules introduced in Polymer 1.1 do not support external style sheets and <link rel="import" type="css"> has been deprecated. Since I'm using a css preprocessor, putting my style source into html modules is not an option and looking at
https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/issues/2429 I'm apparently not alone. Long story short, I created a gulp plugin that wraps css into style modules:
Hope some people find this helpful!