Blackbird Spyplane | Unbeatable Recon | Style•Culture•Travel

Blackbird Spyplane by your side again and always. In today’s sletter we’ve got:

An up & coming line doing Made in USA natural-dye tees, cool wide-leg easy pants, nice boxy jackets, and other roomy slappers, cut from deadstock linens and crinkly Japanese cottons — for less dough than you’d think
Notes on navigating a style transition with grace
One of Japan’s sickest shoemakers just dropped some great new styles
Summerweight knits
And more!

Let’s get to it —

A reader wrote in the other day asking about graceful “style transitions.”

How does one navigate a style transition without engaging in acquisitive, vapid consumerism? — stromburgagram

Switching up your style is acquisitive by definition. You could trade clothes with friends, or put bygone bangers from deep in your closet back into rotation. But there’s no real way to reinvent your whole s--t without acquiring anything — unless you move off the grid, spin your own hemp, and craft your own crunchy slappers, achieving a level of swag too beautiful and too advanced to count as realistic for most of us at the current historical juncture.

That’s just the nature of the beast. This brings us to the “vapid consumerism” part of the question. Not unreasonably, some people are prone to feel a nagging sense of decadence and wastefulness when it comes to copping new clothes and jettisoning old ones, in a way that doesn’t happen with most other interests. If I’m heavy into one genre of fiction, or music, and now I want to explore elsewhere, the books and records I already own tend not to become “worthless” to me, much less actively repulsive, in the way that, e.g., a pair of very skinny pants or Nike Roshe Runs is liable to become. Not unrelatedly, books and records don’t require nearly as many resources to produce as clothes.

The obvious way to address this is by buying secondhand clothes. Always good advice. But I (Jonah) want to dig a bit deeper into what a “style transition” can mean in the first place.

It could be a long, smooth merge from one lane into an adjoining one. It could be an ongoing process that unfolds across decades of your life and, quite possibly, never ends: a constant state of becoming, rather than a few hinge moments. It could also be a slam-on-the-emergency-brake-and-yank-the-steering-wheel whiplash maneuver that sends you hurtling off in a totally different direction.

If you dressed horribly and you suddenly start dressing cool, more power to you. Edging into more pathological territory, though, we might be talking about a higher-twitch situation where, every several years, if not months, you seem to shed your skin and put on a new one, pinballing between personas, costumes, looks and vibes. Maybe there’s some sense of organic connective tissue between them all, maybe there isn’t.

Change is more common when you’re younger, because that’s when you’re neck-deep in the muck of “figuring out who you are.” The fact that you typically have less bread when you’re young also forces you to get crafty, to develop taste and ingenuity without shortcuts. There can be awkwardness along the way, but it’s a healthy awkwardness, to the extent that it bespeaks an openness, curiosity and appetite we’d all do well to keep alive in ourselves as we age — especially since “figuring out who you are” never really stops.

Dramatic shapeshifting at any point in life can be exhilarating. All outfits are costumes, all selves are performed, we’re never set in stone. But going Pinball Mode with your style can also suggest a disquieting jitteriness. Switch up your s--t for the third time in a calendar year and people might start to shiver in the cold, swagless winds they feel howling at them from the void at your core… Those same winds might make you shiver, too. No one believes your performance, you included.

Frenetic style transitions, in other words, carry a greater risk of failure and dissatisfaction than gradual ones, so err on the side of moving slowly and deliberately.

And yet! You also do gotta leave room for spontaneity, for lightness, for epiphany, for doing things for no good reason.

In On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle’s series of novels about a woman who finds herself stuck in a repeating day, the protagonist discovers that the food she eats does not replenish itself when the day resets. She’s a “monster,” she realizes, devouring her world little by little. She takes careful steps to mitigate this monstrousness, but accepts it as an irreducible condition of being alive. That might be the best any of us can do.

Meanwhile —

We walked into a clothing shop we f--k with a few weeks back and saw a little flotilla of pieces by a small, unisex line whose name was new to us. The clothes were a mix of natural-dyed organic-cotton shortsleeve & longsleeve tees … roomy shorts … wide-cut easy trousers … boxy jackets cut from salvaged linens, crinkly Japanese cottons and other natty fibies … all of it made in the USA:

Summer Songs Supermix 2026

Blackbird Spyplane — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:03:41 GMT

Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8B. How good of a person do you expect her to be? Read our Spyplane Deep Dive.

Our Definitive Guide to Japan’s Best Clothesmakers is here.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

We don’t run ads, and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay, and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

What does it mean to be the western world’s most popular style & culture sletter?

Among other things, it means we publish profound pieces about…

Also? Every year, right around now, we put together a Summer Songs Supermix for Spy Nation, the most musically open-eared readership across all media.

We proceed genre-agnostically, combining new songs we’re feeling with older songs whose excellence airlifts them out of strict linear time.

We’ve found that the juxtapositions, adjacencies and resonances in these playlists have a way of smudging the edges of strict linear time even further. The more you listen to a Spyplane-caliber supermix, the harder it becomes to discern what’s new and what’s old, and the line between familiar and unfamiliar wobbles, too. You will hear a song for the first time and feel déja vu. And you will hear a song you’ve played hundreds of times and detect all kinds of new things in it, to the degree that you might wonder if it’s a different recording than the one you know… Possibly “Spyplane’s Version Pt. 2.”

Today, we’re dropping our Supermix for Summer 2026. It’s 25 songs long, 2 and a half hours in all — though the last “song” is actually an hourlong composition. (It’s not Sleep’s “Dopesmoker,” though you should always feel free listen to that.)

Each of these artists has gems where these tracks came from, so please treat this mix not only as a self-contained collection, but also as a cluster of rabbit holes to tunnel down in 25 different directions…

Our last mix, from December, was (unintentionally) themed around memory.

In today’s mix, the theme of time’s slipperiness (unintentionally) recurs throughout the whole thing…

The playlist is on Spotify here
It’s on Apple Music here

(Yes, streaming remains an affront to god, but it is unparalleled for sharing playlists with large groups of people circa 2026, so we hope god will forgive us.)

We kick things off with the fantastic, dazed “Just Talk,” by AC Marias, a Wire spinoff project. This song came out 40 years ago, in 1986, but when Erin and I heard it in a shop earlier this year, we couldn’t immediately place it, and wondered for a moment if it was by, e.g., some band we’d seen open for Beach House at Bowery Ballroom circa 2012 and forgotten about.

That segues into a 2020 song by Oklou, which, like the best Oklou songs, sounds like it was recorded underwater. It also sounds like a refinement of ideas on Oklou’s excellent 2025 album choke enough — which is to say, like a new Oklou song, except it came out 6 years ago.

Toward the end of Björk’s ecstatic “Big Time Sensuality,” she sings, “I don’t know my future after this weekend, and I don’t want to.” It came out in 1993, and it came on at a pizzeria two weekends ago. It was playing, anachronistically, in a mix of 1980s pop hits — it followed Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” which we did not include here, and segued into Talking Heads’ totemic “Once in a Lifetime,” which we did.

“Letting the days go by,” David Byrne repeats. “Same as it ever was.” We leap from there into Jay Z’s “It’s All Right,” which centers on a “Once in a Lifetime” sample, and which came out in 1998, 17 years after the original. That gap seemed chasmic at the time. But 😰 damn it if 28 years haven’t elapsed since then and now 😰. As it happens, Jay Z is spending this summer selling out stadiums as part of a global nostalgia tour.

Larry June, a contemporary Bay Area MC, comes through very nostalgically himself with “Organic Motion,” a 2026 song that pays homage to synth-heavy, rubbery, laidback & tasty ‘80s R&B-funk-soul sounds that already sounded retro when Jay Z was young.

“My watchie is platinum,” Larry raps, “but I don’t know the time.” Leila Bordreuil & Kali Malone hold the penultimate spot with a song about “eternal joy” that lasts a minute and a half.

I didn’t go into this playlist intending to theme it around time melting. Maybe, since 2020, that theme has been increasingly impossible to avoid in any arena of life. Or maybe it’s simply the case that so many songs touch on the slipperiness of time, explicitly or implicitly, that when you string enough of them end to end, you are bound to encounter this theme.

Plenty of songs here have no relationship to temporality. When I recently wrote about whether or not Ambient Music is Evil, I mentioned what I hear as an element of ambientness in a lot of ‘90s-era Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep production. I included Ghostface’s wonderful, woozy 1996 album cut “Marvel,” here. Its second half is instrumental, and its beat captures what I was getting at, though it’s much more percussive, not to mention much more horny, than any ambient song.

Thomas Bangalter’s new post-Daft Punk solo track “Mirage Part VI” starts off sounding like an electronic rainstorm and morphs, almost imperceptibly, to my ears, into an electronic sunrise. Ketty Lester’s “Love Letters” (1961) is here because it plays in a Brian Eno documentary we watched a few nights ago. We love Eno, we didn’t love the documentary, and we love this song: It was formative to his youthful musical awakening, and it’s a standout on this fantastic Cairo Records double-vinyl comp of “cosmic & earthly doo wop” we own & cherish.

One last note: Despite the opening art on today’s post, there is no Bob Dylan in this year’s summer mix. But we do close things out with another midwestern musician, Michigan’s Erik Hall. Specifically, his 2020 recording of Steve Reich’s 1975 postminimalist classic Music for 18 Musicians — the twist being that Hall performs all 18 parts himself. In the spirit of pointing outward to analog rabbitholes, you can find that one on vinyl here, and the amazing ECM original here.

In any event, it feels strangely appropriate to illustrate this incredible, undulating, repeating piece of music with a photo of 6 stacks of undulating pizza boxes.

Spotify link here
Apple Music link here

The songs are listed below for reference, too. Enjoy!

And P🎹E🍕A🎹C🍕E til next time,

— J & E

AC Marias, “Just Talk”
Oklou, “fall”
Björk, “Big Time Sensuality”
Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”
Jay Z f. Memphis Bleek, “It’s All Right”
Larry June, “Organic Motion”
Ghostface Killah f. RZA, “Marvel”
Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes, “FIEFDOM”
John Carroll Kirby, “Suntory”
Thomas Bangalter, “Mirage: Part VI”
Aiden Ayers & Yu Su, “It’s Not Enough”
Aldous Harding, “I Ate the Most”
Bladee, “Versailles Flow”
Anna Domino, “The Land of My Dreams”
This is Lorelei, “But You Just Woke Me Up”
They Are Gutting a Body of Water, “sour diesel”
YHWH Nailgun, “Changer”
Porches, “SPRING”
Ketty Lester, “Love Letters”
Betty Hammerschlang, “Circlesss”
Lana Del Rey, “White Feather Hawk Tail Deerhunter”
Smerz, “Its here”
Yu Su f. Seefeel, “One Place After Another”
Kali Malone & Leila Bourdreuil, “Endless Dance of Eternal Joy”
Erik Hall, “Reich: Music for 18 Musicians”

Nobody's born a minimalist

Blackbird Spyplane — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:01:45 GMT

Welcome back to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical” that the fellas love as well. Every edition is archived here.

These are the sickest hiking-style sandals.

The best natural fiber activewear is here.

Check out our monumental list of the 50 Greatest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.

We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our anti-spon position here.

Women are taking notes on sauce from the wrong person in this photo: CBK and JFK Jr. in 1998. Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald

Over the past year, I (Erin) have been nurturing a theory: No one’s born a “minimalist.”

Our urge toward ornamentation is innate. It is closely connected to our urge to create pure, senseless joy. Our countervailing urge to strip away and simplify, meanwhile, is learned. It’s a reaction to a culture of noise, decadence and excess.

This reaction makes sense. There’s something obviously appealing about trying to pare down, streamline, de-clutter, and thereby come into more aerodynamic alignment with “what really matters.” But A) this impulse is destined to fail, because ornament always finds its way in. And B) over the past few years, “minimalism” has ossified into a uninspired, preset look: easily graspable, readily starter-packable, and a supposed cure-all for the anxiety that perennially online folks feel about how photos of themselves will age.

I get the power of a white tee and jeans, or a LBD. Looks like this have a spot in my rotation, and I know that, in the throes of decision fatigue, trust-falling into what some putative majority has deemed “tasteful” can feel like a balm.

But where’s the joy in playing it safe? The soul wants more! I remain a firm believer that we all need a splash of bad taste. A little can go a long way — but please, give me a glimpse into the life of your mind! Let me know the lights are on upstairs… Tell me you have a sense of humor… That you have an imagination, an appetite, a respect for the mess and brutality and humility of life…!

Even fashion’s most hallowed “minimalists” aren’t really minimalists. Jil Sander used decorative prints and fasteners as far back as the ‘80s. The Row has been making novelty hats for years. Everyone trying to do a copy-and-paste on Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s famously minimalist style, as captured in the pic above, would do well to take a page from JFK Jr., with his headfirst approach to color — and his gorpy jester hats!

In that spirit, today I’m leaning into the pleasure, humor and absurdity of surrealism. We’ve got:

The often-misunderstood genius of designer Elsa Schiaparelli, as captured in a new museum exhibition…
(… which unwittingly highlights the lameness of the current billionaire-backed Schiaparelli reboot.)
Contemporary designers with new work, out now, that’s keeping fun and fantasy alive, along with similarly vibed vintage finds.
An up-and-coming NYC jewelry designer; the best sandal collab this summer; reworked vintage tees; a leather craftswoman who makes beautiful objects for you and your home…
& more !

Let’s get to it —

Last fall, after catching some whiffs of tradwifery and misogyny on the SS26 runways, I had a conversation with Spyfriend Stella Bugbee, the Styles editor at The New York Times, about whether fashion hates women.

This question returned to my mind earlier this month, along with a new one — Should men even be allowed to design clothes for women?? — as I took in the big new Elsa Schiaparelli exhibit at the V&A in London. Schiaparelli was an early 20th century Italian designer who embraced avant-garde ideas. Some were as seemingly innocuous as trousers for women. Others were as outré as a hat that looks like an inverted high heel, or a cellophane-wrapped dress. Her influence is enormous: Without Schiap, we wouldn’t have Margiela, Bless or Kiko Kostadinov, to name just a few.

The V&A show, up through early November, pairs her groundbreaking clothes and accessories, mainly from the 1930s and ‘40s, with “new” Schiaparelli pieces — she died in 1973, but the label was resuscitated in 2014 by a luxury-goods billionaire who bought the name and, in 2019, put Daniel Roseberry in charge of design.

Elsa Schiaparelli means a lot to me. Back in 2003, my parents, who always encouraged my interest in clothes, took me to an exhibit on Schiaparelli at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the first major retrospective of the designer.

At the time, I wore thrifted handmade sweaters (my favorite had been lovingly embroidered with strawberries, I assume by someone’s grandma). I sewed red rickrack along the pockets of the cropped zip hoodies I’d bought in the boys department. I hot-glued found objects — shells, buttons, vending-machine toys and puzzle pieces — to barrettes and pins, and I called it jewelry.

And so even though I didn’t know who Schiaparelli was, my folks thought I’d dig her sense of humor and eccentricity. And they were right. Schiaparelli’s work was, and still is, extremely my s--t:

Some of my favorite Schiaparelli designs, clockwise from top left: a printed skirt suit with beetle buttons; a clear cellulose acetate choker with metal bugs; evening jacket decorated with a drawing by Jean Cocteau; Peggy Guggenheim wearing a cellophane-wrapped dress; black suede gloves with red appliqué “fingernails,” inspired by Picasso via Man Ray; whimsical buttons. Inset: Dalí’s rotary-dial powder compact from 1935.

I loved her collaborations with artists like Meret Oppenheim, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí — with whom she famously made an evening dress featuring an erotically charged lobster print, a powder compact that resembled a telephone dial, and the high-heel hat.

Since the bizarre quotient in Schiaparelli’s designs tends to get foregrounded, though, what lots of people are prone to miss — and what the V&A exhibit does a good job of emphasizing — is that the majority of her clothes were deceptively practical:

Schiaparelli got an order from a US retailer for the embedded bow sweater she’s wearing in the photo above right, from 1927. Above left, Schiaparelli, wearing a belted jacket and cropped trousers in 1931, pic by Fox Photos.

Like Concorde icon Claire McCardell, Schiaparelli prioritized a woman’s comfort and freedom of movement in her designs, opting for exposed plastic zippers that were easy for a woman to get on and off herself. She designed sportswear sweaters and trousers for women in the early ‘30s (she created a scandal in 1931 by dressing a Wimbledon tennis player in culottes instead of a skirt). She gave suit jackets big honking pockets that let her leave the house unburdened by a handbag.

That attention to practicality is there even in her most outlandish designs. Her 1938 skeleton gown, another collaboration with Dalí, below left, is a second-skin slink of silk crepe, embellished with seemingly exposed bones, quilted into the fabric. It’s an extremely covered-up garment — high neck, long sleeves, extended hemline — and yet it manages to create definition, without the pain of a corset. It’s elegant and macabre at once.

And that brings us to Roseberry, several of whose designs for the New Schiaparelli were on display at the V&A show. The side-by-side comparison didn’t do him many favors:

Left column: Schiaparelli’s Skeleton dress and Tears dress, both from 1938. I especially love the matching veil. Right column: Roseberry’s Lungs dress from 2021 and new Tears dress from 2026.

Take his humorless riff on the Skeleton dress, from 2021. He completely cuts out the bodice, exposing the breasts, then cages them in a lung-shaped brass necklace with the texture of a ramen brick. Not only does it look wildly uncomfortable, but it totally misses the point: it takes what was a trompe l’oeil trick and moves it into the realm of the literal.

Her Tears dress, created between World Wars, was meant to invoke open wounds — provocative, but not in any remotely straightforwardly “sensual” way… Yet that’s how Roseberry interprets it, above right. He dumbs down her complex idea by making it “sexy,” and just exposes the skin beneath. We have exited the realm of the mind, and find ourselves entirely in an Ozempified body. This dress, incidentally, is composed of 78% acetate and 22% viscose, it costs $20K, and it reminds me of something you might find at Spirit Halloween.

As I moved through the show, I wondered why there was so much of Roseberry’s Schiaparelli work in this show, until I came across a clue. A placard informed visitors the show was “created in collaboration” with the current Schiaparelli camp. I’m not sure whether this meant they partially financed the exhibit, helped source archival material, or something else, but it does bespeak a clear coziness.

Schiaparelli once said, “When will women learn that it is better to be smart than fashionable, and that smartness makes fashion?” It’s a lesson we’re still learning.

Next up —

On the thinking that a pinch of surrealism is all you need, here are some of my favorite new and vintage pieces by designers who carry on the witty spirit of Schiaparelli:

Your exoskeleton is showing

Blackbird Spyplane — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:01:12 GMT

Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8B. How good of a person do you expect her to be? Read our Spyplane Deep Dive.

Check out our monumental list of the 50 Greatest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.

Our Definitive Guide to Japan’s Best Clothesmakers is here.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

Welcome back to Blackbird Spyplane. And first off today, shout out to Sam Anderson of the New York Times Magazine, who spoke to me (Jonah) for a piece he published earlier this week about embarking on a journey of self-discovery through swag and taking some initial steps into the strange, wonderful, contradiction-rich world of cool clothes.

It’s a funny first-person account of feeling fully “fashion”-allergic, in the way many people are prone to do, but also being curious and open-minded enough to challenge that feeling, taking a trip to a great independent clothing shop, and finding a bunch of pieces from small lines that, lo & behold, resonate with you… And then grappling with novel feelings of sauce & self-consciousness as you put on an unfamiliar exoskeleton and wear it out in the world!

In today’s Plane, we’ve got a bunch of exoskeleton-enswaggening intel for you, including:

Singular new sandals from one of Earth’s best small lines, which you can rock at home, put on pavement-pounding duty… or, if you bring them to the beach, apparently they will glide across the damn sand rather than sink into it?
Sick caps from a Japan-based headgear master who is both a veteran and highly slept-on
Roomy new shoulder bags made start to finish by a single maker in the UK we’ve admired for a minute
Unexpected color-rocking-inspiration epiphanies

Let’s get to it —

While we were doing unbeatable recon in London last month, we had dinner one night with Spyfriend (and screenwriter of the terrific The Invite) Rashida Jones, who showed up rocking a very sick unisex cap she’d just bought…

It had a detachable scarf / neck-flap, pictured A. below, which fits right in with the headwear in our recent guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot.

The hat was made by an under-the-radar Japanese headgear master with a major cosign from one of our favorite clothing labels. He has a bunch of other great styles where that one came from:

Your home is a work of art

Blackbird Spyplane — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:02:07 GMT

We just published an intel-rich guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot

Why are we addicted to standing in line for treats? Blackbird Spyplane published a profound investigation last month, before everybody else, and kicked off “The Summer of Stories About Lines.”

Sip upon The Drink of the Summer.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay, and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

We enjoy looking through an issue of T or AD or WOI and coming across gorgeous photographs of people’s dope homes as much as the next style & culture sletter — even if we can’t always get over our sneaking sense that, if you open your homes to one of these shoots, you risk vainly “doing too much” while revealing that, for you, the experience of simply occupying your dope home does not give you as much happiness, pleasure and satisfaction as you thought it would when you splashed out on the crazy architect and baller interior designer, so now you feel a(n ironically) cheap compulsion to invade your own privacy and transform the place you live into thinly veiled “flex-on-these-hoes” ammunition.

There is one particular genre of house visit, though, real & virtual, that Erin and I (Jonah) are not alone in finding especially intriguing: visits to places that artists call home. Leslie Williamson’s books, which document the cribbos of architects, artists, and designers, speak to this intrigue, as does a book like Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk, which, as the title suggests, captures the workspaces of authors. So does, e.g., the real estate listing for Robert Frank’s old East Village loft, which hit the market back in March and got shared & aggregated a bunch.

We’ve written about our own visits to artists’ homes multiple times in the Plane over the years — Donald Judd’s Soho loft; the vibiest house we’ve ever been to; the brilliant, under-the-radar woodworker’s home that inspired our “G.O.O.D. G.E.R.M.S.” (Gangs Of Objects & Décor Giving Eclectic Refined Motley Spirit) theory of home decorating, and others, all of which we’ve collected in our Home Goods Index.

What we love most about houses like this is when they undo any clear distinction between The Place the Artist Lives and The Work the Artist Makes, thereby 1) helping the rest of us to shake up the way we see our quotidien surroundings and 2) offering us nuts-and-bolts inspiration for ways to enviben our own living spaces accordingly…

Case in point:

The ground-floor dining room at David Ireland’s house

A few weeks ago we popped in on the very insane, very cool, onetime home of the late San Francisco artist David Ireland. Ireland was a key figure in the Bay Area’s ‘70s-era conceptual-art scene, known to chill with such Spyplane GOATS as Bruce Conner and Terry Riley.

At this point Ireland is likely best known for the 19th century Victorian he bought in 1975 at 500 Capp Street, in the Mission. He paid $50,000 for it, purchasing the house from an accordion maker whose logo still adorns a parlor-floor window.

He proceeded to turn the place into a sick and singular hybrid of Home & Sculpture, spending the following several decades working over every square centimeter of the house…

From top: a gleaming, curvaceous hallway wall upstairs. Two “custom” light fixtures, including a chandelier fashioned from two propane torches. The view down to Capp Street. A stainless-steel sink tucked into the corner of Ireland’s bedroom.

We got a tour of 500 Capp from Spyfriend David Wilson, a great Oakland artist who did a residency in the house a few years back and is now on its board.

The first thing we noticed was the intense, pleasant, golden glow emanating from all directions in the late-morning light. David explained that Ireland had worked assiduously to strip untold strata of paint and wallpaper from the walls, then coated most of them with layer upon layer of glossy polyurethane. The bare, f--ked-up walls could feel punishingly austere and crumbly on their own, but instead, they’ve been suspended in a state of permanent warmth, made to shimmer, encased like a picture under glass…

“I reached a philosophical point where I realized that the lively presence I was looking for in my art was here on the walls, as I stripped away and cleaned off the surfaces,” Ireland once said. “Why do we have to fabricate a stretcher, a canvas— why not just make art out of an environment? I couldn’t go back to normal work.”

That motif of stripping-away persists throughout the house, in a way that goes well beyond minimalist and edges, compellingly, into obsessive-compulsively destructive … although in a way that feels leavened by a sense of slyness and humor, i.e. the little Sistine Chapel postcard that Ireland (or a buddy) strategically placed on a wall in his office, turning a real crack into a trompe l’oeil painterly gesture and then back into a real crack again…

When Oakland artist David Wilson (in the cap above left) did his residency at the Ireland house, he installed a little seat on the roof so he could sit and draw various views from on high. We’re looking down at the backyard, which includes curving metal benches Ireland designed. Immediately above are two views of Ireland’s office.

Ireland’s own art shares space on the floors, walls and ceilings with that of his friends, and with that of more contemporary artists as part of an ongoing curatorial program overseen by the house’s current stewards.

A “chandelier” fashioned from two propane torches hangs in one room… 9 identical jars full of sawdust line a closet shelf, collected while Ireland sanded the floor … The trim has been removed from several doorways, leaving its ghostly imprint… Scrawled pencil marks on the plaster harmonize with spidery cracks and Ireland’s twisted-metal sculptures… A pair of non-Flavin fluorescent bulbs stand sentinel on either side of a pocket door… Post-it Note reminders stuck up by the home’s entrance have long since transformed from utilitarian to decorative…

Throughout, it becomes impossible to identify what’s an intentional intervention, and what’s a “natural” sign of wear & tear.

The overall effect feels crazy, but invitingly so, airy, bright, and clever, rather than oppressive — the space doesn’t feel hostile to human life and comfort, even if “livability” clearly meant something different to Ireland than it likely does to you or me. (He apparently spent years obsessively digging a cave in the basement, creating a massive structural weakness that has since been fixed, at enormous expense.)

Post-It Notes at the entrance now feel purely decorative. Pencil scrawls on the walls look beautiful. Non-Flavin fluorescent bulbs are tucked into pocket doors, and 9 jars of sawdust, collected as Ireland sanded the floors, are lined up in a closet. The book pictured above depicts the house as it looked when Ireland was alive — not much different. Above left is the intentionally unremarkable gray façade, and above right is a little kitchen shelf.

It’s especially wild to think about Ireland’s house in relation to San Francisco’s gnarly contemporary housing market: For a bunch of reasons, it’s hard to imagine anyone deconstructing a piece of “prime real estate” as giddily and as thoroughly as this today. (Except, I guess, someone like Kanye West, who as far as I know never cited David Ireland when he set about painstakingly dismantling a multimillion-dollar concrete Tadao Ando mansion in Malibu, but he kinda could have?)

“Creation” and “destruction” are closer than we sometimes realize. You don’t need to go as far as Ireland to feel emboldened by his work at 500 Capp and embrace aspects of it when it comes to your own home. We talk all the time in the newsletter about the virtue of not just getting nice clothes but then wearing the hell out of them, confident in the knowledge that the more you wear a garment, the better it looks and the less off-the-rack and fugazi you look.

Why not apply a version of this mindset to the place you live?

A doorway at my parents’ place in New York, where they’ve been marking the heights of friends & family in pencil since they moved in.

This doesn’t just apply to homeowners: My parents are lifelong renters, and they’ve been extreme “patina” creators & honorers in every single spot they’ve ever lived. Above is a doorway in their home in New York, where they’ve been measuring and marking my height in pencil, along with their heights and those of other friends and family, since they moved in back in the ‘90s. The initials, names, numbers and other assorted scrawls have long since coalesced into a beautiful piece of “organic” décor… a “durational”-style site-specific installation… both of and about the passage of time??

Look around your place, at those sections of mismatched touch-up paint and plaster on the walls, those chips in your doorways, those cracks in your ceilings, those gouges in your floors… Instead of seeing these as flaws to be irked by, and to eliminate, why not look for the beauty in them and seek out ways to actively honor it, and thereby make your home that much more yours?

The David Ireland House, at 500 Capp Street, is open to visitors every Friday and Saturday, for both guided and self-guided tours. It’s in our Ultimate Bay Area Guide, alongside a bunch of other local treasures.

Is Ambient Music Evil? A profound new Spyplane Essay.

Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8B. How good of a person do you expect her to be? Read our Spyplane Deep Dive.

Our Essay Archive, a curated selection of our Most Major Thoughts, is here.

Our interviews with Cameron Winter of Geese, Ryota Iwai from Auralee, SC103, Nathan Fielder, Michelle Williams, Sarah Squirm, Evan Kinori, Adam Sandler, Brendan from Turnstile, MJ Lenderman, André 3000, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Father John Misty, Steven Yeun, Clairo, Pusha T, Conner O’Malley, Christophe Lemaire & more are here.

What your city needs to be truly "up"

Blackbird Spyplane — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:04:03 GMT

We just published an intel-rich guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot

Why are we addicted to standing in line for treats? A profound Spyplane investigation.

Our travel chat is bustling. But Spyfriends need fresh recon on Bordeaux, Toulouse and Ireland!

Sip upon The Drink of the Summer.

New York. People look at Zohran Mamdani, they look at the Knicks, and they say that, these days, the city is epochally up. They aren’t wrong, and as a born & bred New Yorker, I (Jonah) love to see it.

However, I do gotta note a glaring absence in NYC’s tapestry, which proves that the city is not as up as it could be: There is no cool new restaurant in NYC that has no name, zero Google Maps presence, and hosts avant-garde puppet shows put on by beautiful young people.

Until the cultural and economic conditions align for NYC to have a cool new restaurant with no name and zero Google Maps presence which hosts avant-garde puppet shows put on by beautiful young people — a scenario last plausible circa 1983 — it will not be truly, funkily, deliriously up.

And you know what city does have exactly this? Antwerp.

Erin and I had heard great things about Antwerp but never been there until earlier this month, when we swung through for 36 delightful hours after our week in Paris (collecting intel on cool clothes and the people making and wearing them) and our 72 hours in London (collecting intel on horizon-expanding Dieter Rams collectors, delicious food, gifted independent bag-makers and more).

Antwerp’s ~3 hours on the Eurostar from each of those cities, and it rocks. We came out of the trip feeling All-In On Antwerp (A.I.O.A.) and Majorly Twerped Out (M.T.O.). What truly sealed the deal is that, on our last evening in town, the designers behind the fantastic label Unkruid, who call Antwerp home, took us to a great new restaurant, where we had an excellent dinner together. The restaurant has no name, and it’s not on Google Maps. But it does have an IG page, where I saw that, the very next evening, it was hosting avant-garde puppetry by beautiful young people.

That, to me, is a sign of robust civic health, and profound civic swag, that New York sadly lacks. The jaded attitudes and punitive cost of living simply don’t allow for “cool unnamed restaurants that aren’t on Google Maps” + “avant-garde puppetry” + “beautiful young people” to occupy the same chunk of the NYC time-space continuum these days.

Antwerp is sick in ways that will have you contemplating what other, better-known cities lack sicknesswise. The architecture is awesome, the energy is mellow, the food is great, the rents are low, the people are warm, mad spots are chill, and unsurprisingly, given the city’s history, it’s got a God-tier cool-clothes ecosystem, including:

a Spyplane Top 10 clothing shop globally
a Spyplane Top 5 most exciting clothing line globally
the most beautiful dressing room on earth??
a newly opened store where they’ve got eagle eyes for high-craft under-the-radar labels
and more!

We’re getting into all this & more today, starting with the young local Antwerp label whose unisex clothes are beloved by Mach 3+ garment enthusiasts worldwide — and whose dopeness is a big part of why we wanted to hit Antwerp in the first place…

Is ambient music evil?

Blackbird Spyplane — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:03:35 GMT

We just published an intel-rich guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot

Why are we addicted to standing in line for treats? A profound Spyplane investigation.

Sip upon The Drink of the Summer.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

Can music be evil? I never really thought about it until a few years ago, when I listened to an interview with Nick Cave during which he asserted that it cannot — “that music in itself has a moral dimension. That it’s essentially good. That it works to improve matters.”

Cave argued that this is true of music even at its most hateful, violent, inflammatory, abject, nihilistic, etc. — true, for instance, of the misanthropic music he himself made early in his career. Starting out, he explained, he’d sought the “transcendent impulse in chaos.” He’d been “a drug-addicted young guy” with a “jaundiced, contemptuous view of humanity,” and although this view was “extreme,” it was “also the way a lot of young people see the world, and in many ways, from their perspective, quite rightly so.” Jaundiced and contemptuous music, Cave said, contains the same “potential for doing good” as any other kind.

I think back to this interview whenever I encounter music that seems saturated with malevolent energy. Filosofem by the Norwegian neo-Nazi black-metal band Burzum… “Happy” by Pharrell Williams… brat by Charli xcx … I hear music like this and I wonder if, in its foul and airless vision of the human soul, it counts as evil. But I return to Cave’s absolutist stance, that there is a radical, salutary potential in the act of making and listening to music, and that even the most antisocial, insipid, cynical, narcissistic, and otherwise evil-seeming music is, for that reason, good at its root.

I do think it’s possible to affirm this essential goodness, however, while allowing for cases where music can be twisted to evil ends. And recently, I’ve been wondering whether one of my favorite genres — ambient music — is especially well-suited to evil purposes, albeit in a banal and sneaky way that has only become clear in the past few years.

Ambient music, both the style and the term, was famously pioneered by Brian Eno on Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a 1978 masterpiece he put out after some preliminary explorations on Discreet Music, Another Green World, and Before and After Science.

In interviews, Eno has acknowledged ambient’s debt to the Muzak corporation and, more nobly, to Erik Satie and John Cage, who worked decades before him to investigate the idea of background music that was, as Eno defined it, “as ignorable as it is interesting.”

He’s also acknowledged a debt to post-minimalist classical composers like Terry Riley, Steve Reich and La Monte Young, though their music tends to be more droning, rhythmic, polyphonic, and/or psychedelic than ambient, which in its textbook form aspires to a smoother, simpler, cloudier drift.

Ambient music, and music that behaves in ambientish ways — blurring the distinction between a groove, a drone, a melodic figure, and a single sustained tone — is extremely my s--t. I love Eno, I love Satie, I love Cage’s proto-ambient Satie homage “In a Landscape.” I love canonized ambient albums by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Laraaji, William Basinski, and Aphex Twin, and I love more obscure ones by Satoshi Ashikawa and Warren Sampson.

I love ambient-adjacent compositions, old and new, by Roedelius, Manuel Göttsching, Joanna Brouk, Tim Hecker, Oren Ambarchi, Nala Sinephro, and Laurel Halo. I think a big part of what I’ve always loved about ‘90s-era Wu-Tang and Mobb Deep production has to do with an element of ambientness in it, too: “Shook Ones Pt. II” revolves around a distorted tape loop as transfixing as any William Basinski ever constructed.

Marquee names, like Eno and Aphex Twin, are the exception in ambient music, a genre that privileges background over foreground. Almost by definition, most ambient artists are obscure.

This has remained true despite ambient’s explosion in popularity over the past few years, transforming from a heads-only niche into a post-pandemic streaming-era phenomenon. Ambient compositions rack up millions upon millions of monthly listens across the major platforms, on playlists themed around varieties of healthful innocuousness: “focus,” “meditation,” “relaxation,” “sleep,” “cognitive calm,” and “mood.”

If the walls between ambient (rarefied, philosophical) and New Age (woo-woo, naff, hucksterishly oriented toward “self-actualization”) were always porous — as a proliferation of hit ‘90s-era mail-order CD compilations from “Pure Moods” and Windham Hill Records demonstrated — today’s streaming playlists have all but demolished the boundaries. If your primary goal as a listener is to achieve a semi-aware state of sonic relaxation, after all, then Eno isn’t much different from Enya.

And neither musician is much different from, say, “Victor Mancuso,” one of a disconcerting number of artists with zero detectable presence outside of ambient playlists, leading some to theorize that these artists don’t actually exist, and were in fact created by streaming platforms in cahoots with stock-music companies to save money on royalties, as Andy Cush has reported at Pitchfork. Not unrelatedly, it’s hard to imagine a genre more vulnerable to AI grifters than ambient.

Which only becomes an issue for the listener, of course, if you bother to look at the artist name attached to the music shimmering through your headphones as you preoccupy yourself with other things.

This brings us to ambient’s unique amenability to evil, which I see arising out of 3 interconnected truths…

1. Streaming is an affront to God. I continue to believe that, for all its convenience, streaming threatens to wipe out a rewardingly inefficient, friction-filled, locked-in, ritualistic mode of engaging with music — a mode by which people have long opened themselves up to transformative experience. I continue to suspect that when music is compressed into the same omnipresent and infinite digital non-time as every random piece of internet garbage, we’re left feeling incomplete on a deep level.

2. No musical genre has proven better suited than ambient to the fundamental logic of streaming technology, where the wallpaper of “vibes” has proven as good for business as (if not better than) the discrete and oblong contours of “songs,” much less “albums.”

3. I’m all in favor of artists deconstructing the conventions of songcraft, but the streaming-era triumph of “vibes” over “songs” feels less about deconstructing conventions and more about creating and maintaining a potent, profitable, addled passivity in the listener.

I feel myself beholden to this passivity in my own relationship to ambient music. I routinely find myself turning to it not in the hopes of traveling somewhere new and compelling but, rather, in the hopes of “turning off my brain.”

Or even worse, “soundtracking my productivity.”

Or — worser still! — soundtracking prolonged bouts of braindead scrolling, melting down my capacity for attention that much further, in a way that feels not just inane but annihilating.

There’s an interesting parallel here with weed. People used to get zooted off mids in order to pry open a little woozy horizon of weirdness in their world — to proverbially lay back on the hoods of their cars, gaze up at the starry night sky and pontificate on some cosmic, outré and/or absurd classic stoner s--t.

But right around the time THC was legalized, its potency went weapons-grade, and the whole prying-open-an-imaginative-horizon thing was replaced by an anesthetizing mind-wipe.

More and more, I feel myself drawn to ambient for its own anesthetic, mind-wipe effects. And I find myself less willing to deal with music that challenges me, that asks something of me other than that I sit back and vibe out.

Which makes sense. Who voluntarily opts to feel discomfort when comfort is a click away? I think this helps to explain ambient’s post-pandemic ascendancy: It is music thoroughly equipped to soothe us, offer us solace, and set us in a warm bath, when the times feel as anxious, fragile and uncertain as ever.

But I’ve grown mistrustful of my own attraction (addiction?) to this swaddling aspect of ambient. Operating on a sort of autopilot, I’ll put on a beloved ambient piece — say, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Water Copy” — then let the algorithm take it from there, generating a playlist of music it deems similar. An hour or so later, I realize I’ve entered a sort of fugue state, and I’ve long since stopped being a remotely active participant in the creation of the music’s meaning.

I’m not alone in my distrust of this placid, foggy, eerie feeling. The music writer and Spyfriend Philip Sherburne has written about a new wave of “dark ambient” musicians working to unsettle listeners, to challenge ambient’s “stereotypically analgesic ideal.”

“Spyplane,” I can hear you saying. “Your analysis is sharp as always, and I’m so grateful the sletter exists. But is weed the best metaphor for what you’re describing? What about the natural-wine craze, where something that started off meaningful grew so hyped and lucrative it created a pretext for all kinds of opportunists and amateurs to dump their funky subpar product on the market, giving the entire scene an undeservedly bad name?”

Thank you — this is the kind of astute observation I’ve come to expect from the most trenchant readership across all media. Yes, the best ambient music, whether it’s “dark” or not, transcends the anodyne stereotypes that the lesser work common on streaming playlists reinforces.

But even so, I think the issue goes deeper, and that we are seeing something come into fuller flower that’s been in ambient’s DNA from the very start.

Consider Music for Airports, the genre’s foundational text.

The potted history of this album is that Brian Eno set out to create reassuring music for a stressful environment. That isn’t wrong, but it risks making his ambitions sound more milquetoast than they were. Here’s how Eno put it in an interview on German TV decades ago:

“When you went into an airport or an airplane, they always played this very happy music, which was sort of saying, ‘You’re not going to die, there’s not going to be an accident, don’t worry!” And I thought that was really the wrong way around, that it would be much better to have music that said, ‘Well, if you die, it doesn’t really matter.’ I wanted to create a different feeling: that you were suspended in the universe and your life or death wasn’t so important. Rather than trivialize the thing, I wanted to take it seriously.”

This is a great explanation, borne out in the music’s profound ambivalent power. In hindsight, though, Eno misidentified the true nightmare of the airport, which is not dying in a fiery plane crash but, rather, finding yourself squeezed tight between overlapping layers of price-gouging cartel commerce, punitive class stratification, ever-worsening services, omnipresent surveillance, and the near-total subjugation of the self to an unaccountable amalgam of state and private-sector control.

This nightmare only compounds when you realize that there are very powerful people trying to turn the airport into the unholy blueprint for contemporary life at large!

Considered in this light, the idea of music that says, “If you die, it doesn’t really matter” takes on a different, more demoralizing flavor.

What is music for airports, circa 2026, if not music for softly succumbing to the prerogatives of a seemingly genteel yet seethingly hostile environment? What is it if not music for submitting to that hostility, and doing your best to cushion the psychic fallout?

Drawing a line from Music for Airports to other ambient touchstones, you can chart the way the genre has always paired smoothly with a kind of undead corporate liminality, offering a lulling accompaniment to the encroachment of cold, globalized commerce into our lives, long before the streaming era.

Think of Haruomi Hosono’s (incredible) “Watering a Flower,” which he composed around 1984 as part of a soundtrack for shoppers at Muji stores. Think of Yasuaki Shimizu’s TV commercial jingles. Think of Suzanne Ciani’s miniature synth compositions and “audio logos” for brands like Coca-Cola and Energizer.

And think of Eno’s own iconic, 3.25-second-long Windows 95 start-up theme: The operating system, like the airport, represents a cursed site of concentrated corporate power that Eno, in his techno-optimism, saw as a place of wonder, and gave an ethereal score.

The best ambient music is complexly beautiful, deceptively simple and, very often, soothing. Increasingly, though, I fear I’ve been treating this soothingness less as a recuperative force, and as something more along the lines of a hospice-care palliative.

Contemporary life is full of mounting existential horrors, but nothing is to be done, the music seems to assure me. The horrors don’t matter anymore. The situation is terminal. Just put on this playlist, and close your eyes. Float off on a warm dissociative current as the future slowly but surely consumes you.

I didn’t realize quite how dependent I’d become on these dissociative currents until a few weeks ago, when I saw that a new album had dropped from YHWH Nailgun, a fascinating young post-punk band with a sparse, jittery, singular sound.

They formed in Philly before moving to NYC, which is tight, and I thought their 2025 single “Sickle Walk” was awesome. So I eagerly threw on the new album — and found myself fighting a powerful impulse to turn it off less than a minute in, despite the fact that the whole thing is only 11 minutes long.

The music felt too rough and scaly. Too spastic, too hoarse, too heaving, too misshapen. I reflexively longed for the pillowy feel of an ambient fugue instead. Thankfully, I pushed through that reflex, and let the YHWH rock on its own crazy terms.

The band helped shake off some of my stupor, and its strange intensity has stayed with me. We come to art, after all, to feel things besides “soothed” — and to encounter futures that haven’t already been written.

P☁️E☁️A☁️C☁️E till next time,

— J & E

Enjoy our Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.

Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8B. How good of a person do you expect her to be? Read our Spyplane Deep Dive.

Our Essay Archive, a curated selection of our Profoundest Thoughts, is here.

Party clothes

Blackbird Spyplane — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:00:51 GMT

Welcome to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical” that the fellas love as well. Every edition is archived here.

This how you pack swaggily without ever checking a bag.

These are the sickest hiking-style sandals.

We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our anti-spon position here.

Enter the Paris Travel Chat

Pics from our Party in Paris last month: Floortje wearing Camiel Fortgens & color-matched Camper sandals; a cute Spyfriend and her denim-like distressed Balenciaga Le City bag; Body of Work’s Brittney and Dwayne flank Wanze Song, all wearing their own designs.

To break bread is a civilized way to make someone’s acquaintance — but to break a sweat with strangers? That’s a lifelong bond.

This was my (Erin’s) takeaway after our recent stint in Paris during an unrelenting heatwave (~104°F). Grumpy as I felt at times, the optimist in me tried to take comfort in the fact that we were all in it together.

Every year I question why we attend Paris Fashion Week, and this year was no different. But I returned from this trip inspired by the richness of intel I gathered from conversations with buyers, designers, and other people I respect. We all know too well that just looking at clothes on a screen is a dead-eyed experience that keeps them entirely unknowable, so I will never pass up the ability to see, touch and try on new clothes designed by the small makers we started this newsletter to salute!

With that in mind, today we have The Concorde Paris Awards, featuring the very best news, small makers, accessories, shoes and artisanal details I gleaned during fashion week, from insiders and out on the street. This is not a SS27 preview — most of what I’m sharing can be acted on today, including:

Dainty-dialed watches, spotted on the fellas, just right for the ladies
The women’s lines that buyers I trust say are consistently excellent
The shoe most likely to replace Aurora’s Middle English, from a freaky-deaky comfort brand GOATS respect but the masses have been sleeping on?
Who’s making the best party clothes — it’s what I’d wear as a wedding guest
A visit to jewelry designer Zoé Mohm’s new appointment-only atelier
& more!

BTW, if you’re planning a trip to Paris, you’ll find all of our guides to the city, along with superb reader intel, in the Global Intel Travel Chat Room:

Let’s get to it —

• The Award for “Most Covetable Low-Tech Accessory” goes to…

The hand fan. Guests at the Lemaire runway show — one of my favorites of theirs from the past few years — were given black lacquer & cloth fans at the door. We put them to such good use that, by the end of the week, we’d mastered the ‘50s greaser switchblade-style one-handed flick to open them.

Fans were also in high demand at the party we threw with Neighbour and Lady White Co. (the high that day: 102°F). I photographed a bunch of partygoers carrying fans, as seen above in the header art: Camiel Fortgens women’s designer Floortje Wijnands, and designers Wanze Song and Body of Work’s Brittney MacKinnon and Dwayne Vatcher.

• The Daintiest Dials Award goes to...

Petite watches. Throughout the week I clocked dudes sporting the kind of delicate cases I could see wrapped around my own wrist. I’m always looking for style ideas I can steal back from the fellas, so I snapped pictures of the best ones — by both high-end makers and virtually unknown names alike — and am sharing them here, along with a bunch of similarly slim vintage finds:

Systems-level swag

Blackbird Spyplane — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:00:51 GMT

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.

We just published an intel-rich guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot

Why are we addicted to standing in line for treats? A profound Spyplane investigation.

Sip upon The Drink of the Summer.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

Longtime Spyfriends know that when Erin and I (Jonah) travel, we adhere to an A.C.A.B. (Against Checking Any Bags) policy. We achieve this feat using wise luggage-packing methods we outlined here.

Increasingly, though, we also try to adhere to a T.O.P. (Trains Over Planes) Policy. If we take a plane to and from somewhere, in other words, and wish to visit other destinations while we’re abroad, we overwhelmingly prefer do this additional travel by train, not plane, because the one is so much more pleasant than the other.

After our recent week in Paris, gathering intel for you on Cool Clothes & More, we split a second week between London (72 hours) and Antwerp (36) — an itinerary made not just doable but fleet & breezy thanks to the Eurostar, zero flights required.

London was honking, full of discoveries & epiphanies. In today’s Plane, we’re serving up gems from that trip, including intel on:

a gifted dude who makes sick, sporty bags in tiny runs that sell out instantaneously — so we visited his studio to learn more
a brilliant dude with a vast collection of Dieter Rams Braun devices and a unique POV on design
a restaurant we’d heard only takes reservations by postcard (!) and even though that is not true, it was idiosyncratic & excellent
a breakfast spot that Spyfriend Matty Matheson put us on to, which felt like a TV show, and which we will never forget

Our previous London City Guides are here and here.

Let’s get to it —

On our first full day in town, we tapped in with a fascinating guy. He’s one of the world’s foremost authorities on the work of Dieter Rams, with a wild collection to match.

We emerged from our time with him thinking about design in entirely new ways…

The drink of the summer

Blackbird Spyplane — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:01:18 GMT

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.

Our Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report is here.

We just published an intel-rich guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot

Why are we addicted to standing in line for treats? A profound Spyplane investigation.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

Since I (Jonah) was a kid, I’ve been watching French people pour themselves glasses of Pastis on hot days.

Pastis is a liquor made from star anise, cheap, with high alcohol content. It’s historically produced in the south of France, but popular in unpretentious bars and cafés all over. In its undiluted state, the liquor is a vivid greenish-yellow, and its flavor is too strong to even think about drinking. So you pour a finger or two into a glass, add some ice cubes, and then, like a gardener, you water the drink, then water it some more, until you’ve achieved a lopsided ratio in the neighborhood of 1:5. The water and Pastis swirl, the color changes from standoffishly lurid to calm and cloudlike, and the taste becomes mellow and crushable. In July and August, circa 4 p.m., few things taste better.

I was either in Paris or Cannes the first time I encountered Pastis, visiting with my mother’s side of the family. I was in my teens when one of them first gave me a taste, and I was in my twenties, living in Brooklyn, when I first bought a bottle for the crib. In the summer, when friends came over, we’d sit on the roof, or in the backyard, and make ourselves glasses. Right now, here at Spyplane HQ in California, there’s a big bottle of Ricard — the classic brand, though Pernod has its devotees — sitting on top of our fridge. If there are “elevated” Pastis brands out there (perhaps with millennial branding), I’m curious to know about them, but haven’t ever felt compelled to seek them out, because Ricard’s Pastis is as good as Pastis ever needs to be.

Late last month, Erin and I went to Paris to conduct recon on the cool-clothes frontlines, gathering a tight edit of intel for you on which colors were smacking, which great pants swaggy people were wearing, what our favorite small makers have cooking, and more.

Early one evening, we rode bikes with some buddies to À La Renaissance, our friend Josh’s restaurant and bar in the 11th. Josh is an American whom Erin has known since college. He’s lived in Paris for ~15 years, and has opened several beloved restaurants, among them the seafood spot Le Mary Celeste and the taco spot Candelaria.

À La Renaissance is an old-school all-day bistro he took over last year and remodeled with a very light touch, intent on keeping the place feeling authentic, rather than “authentic.”

That difference is captured perfectly for me in a decorative piece of frosted glass, below top right, which came with the place. Rather than replacing it with something more straightforwardly tasteful, Josh clocked the way its ambient ‘90s-ish semi-tackiness helps to ground and enliven other, more familiarly beautiful details of the room, like the mosaic floor, marble bar and brass-railed oxblood-leather banquette…

Erin first wrote about the place last fall, in Concorde, saluting the delicious Mini Martini they served her. I went myself for the first time in January, grabbing a delicious lunch with author and Spyfriend W. David Marx.

This was our first time there in the summertime, the weather was historically hot, and we arrived with a diabolical thirst.

One very dope thing about À La Renaissance on that score is how, in addition to a mini-tini, they serve a mini-Guinnie — a.k.a. a very small glass of Guinness — along with medium & regular-sized options, meaning you can do this:

Also? Their cocktail menu is yanking.

And that brings us to a beverage we loved so much — and which did so much to soothe us amid the heatwave — that we are ready to name it Blackbird Spyplane’s Drink of the Summer: À La Renaissance’s namesake cocktail, “the À La Renaissance.”

It is simple, crisp, balanced, and powered at its core by the humble yet mighty Pastis.

Photo by Mickael Bandassak

À la Renaissance kindly shared the recipe with us. Before summer gets a day older, we’re excited to share it with you.

20ml Ricard
10ml Campari
20ml fresh lime juice
10ml simple syrup
15ml orgeat syrup
3 slices of cucumber

Put all ingredients in a shaker, fill with ice and shake hard. Double strain into an ice-filled rocks glass. Garnish with another cucumber slice.

Let us know how you like it in the comments.

If you don’t drink booze, enjoy our pick for 2025’s drink of the summer, an understated n.a. banger whose recipe we got from the Spyfriends at Lemaire, and which remains sublime.

And if you’re feeling peckish, you can whip up one of the two fantastic, exceedingly easy pasta dishes we’ve named The Recipe of the Summer in past years, in collaboration with two of our favorite cooks: Alison Roman’s is here, and Mina Stone’s is here.

P☀️E🇫🇷A🥒C🍹E til next time.

— J & E

Check out our monumental list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.

Enjoy our Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide, too.

Our Cool Mom Style Guide is here.

Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8B. How good of a person do you expect her to be? Read our Spyplane Deep Dive.

Our Essay Archive, a curated selection of our Profoundest Thoughts, is here.

What the future holds

Blackbird Spyplane — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:03:37 GMT

Twice a year, a ton of our favorite clothesmakers from around the world fly to Paris.

They come loaded down with duffel bags and roller cases stuffed with samples from their forthcoming collections. Their primary objective is to present these samples to buyers from cool stores, in hopes the stores will place orders. The designers arrange their work in rented showrooms. They augment the fundamental purpose of these spaces, which is sales, with décor that will ideally add some context, some personality, some ambiance, some aura. Certain designers stage a runway show, too — adding styling, spectacle, theater, and 6-foot-tall baddies to the equation — though that’s less common among the smaller lines we tend to write about at the Plane.

This process is known as “men’s market,” or “Paris men’s fashion week.”

For the past 3 summers, Erin and I (Jonah) have been among assorted members of the media who come to see the clothes, too, talk with designers about them, and file dispatches, columns and reviews. From a designer’s point of view, buyers are the week’s core economic engine, and media help get the word out. From our point of view, it’s a pilgrimage to the cool-clothes frontlines, to see what the future holds.

We went again last week, and got more than we bargained for. A brutal heatwave sent temperatures soaring to ~104°F/40°C for four days straight.

The weather made everyone sweaty, tired, loopy and loose. I think it heightened the sense of camaraderie, on some “we’re all in this together” s--t. But it also made the notion of spending a week looking at racks and racks of garments feel even more farcical than it usually does. When you’re that hot, the last thing you’re inclined to think about is layering your body with fabric — this was weather to make you reappraise the essential purpose of clothes. And since the apparel industry writ large is a major polluter and contributor to the climate crisis, the heatwave also lent a palpable, pre-apocalyptic urgency to a question Erin and I found ourselves periodically asking throughout the week, not for the first time: What are we doing here?

There are numerous knotty contradictions between the slow, artisan-leaning model of clothesmaking we value here at the sletter, and the global context in which that approach necessarily unfolds circa 2026. As the most popular style & culture newsletter in the western world, we embody some of these contradictions ourselves, sending out intel on small makers to a worldwide readership who can theoretically cop the clothes thousands of miles away from where they were made. Even when there isn’t a heatwave, these contradictions come into sharp relief at Paris.

A small number of designers we f--k with simply give fashion week a miss. I admire the Spyfriends at James Coward, for instance, for managing to sell their clothes to several of the planet’s coolest shops while never coming to Paris once. They mail out packets with pictures, descriptions, and fabric swatches, and it works.

For the first few years of this newsletter’s existence, we skipped Paris, too. We came close to skipping it this year, and in some absolute sense, maybe we should have. But we decided that too many people we’ve come to love would be there, bringing too much great work they’d spent months devising. If we stayed in California, we sensed, we’d regret missing the opportunity to see them all in one place, and to meet clothesmakers whose work we’ve never seen before.

Also? We threw another party in the street with our friends at Neighbour and Lady White Co., open to all, where we knew the vibes would be mellow & sublime. We emerged from the week fried, tired, and stoked, eager to fill Spy Nation in on:

Important developments in swag footwear
Staying compliant with the rules & regulations of Cool Shorts Rocking
Colors that are popping
Cool people wearing cool pants
Jacket news
Collections from Spyfriends including Evan Kinori, Man-tle, Unkruid, Yoko Sakamoto, Tender Co., Small Talk, Auralee and more
The most ghoulishly depressing garment of the week
And more unbeatable recon.

The full report is a ‘xclusie for our Classified Tier Subscribers, who enjoy a better life in the Inner Sanctum, and whose support we depend on as an independent media miracle.

Let’s get to it —

KEEPING THE OLD WAYS ALIVE — MYSTERIOUSLY

This is the enigmatic designer Yoko Sakamoto’s hand…

At her excellent eponymous label, Sakamoto works often with natural-dye experts around Japan. Not long ago, she launched a semi-pseudonymous sub-label called Mark.S — we wrote about it last fall, here — with an emphasis on natural fibers and dyes. Whereas the clothes under the Yoko Sakomoto shingle tend to apply these techniques to clean, understated, modern styles, Mark.S can get a little crunchier with it.

Sakamoto likes to stay out of the spotlight. She asked that we not take her photo, nor that of her husband and co-designer. She asked that we not photograph any of the clothes nor the extremely dope footwear on display, either. And after telling us about the unlikely path she took to designing clothes and launching her own line, just over a decade ago, she asked that we not print any of it.

“I want to put the focus on our clothes, and on the people who make them, not on myself,” Sakamoto explained through a translator. Then she played us the video above, shot at an indigo-dyeing operation she works with just outside Tokyo.

LONDON’S SICKEST SMALL BRAND WHIPPED UP A GREAT NEW JACKET… AND NAMED IT AFTER YOUR BOY?

• London’s Sono, whose co-founders have designed for places like Lemaire and The Row (you can read our interview with them from earlier this year), developed a capacious new stand-collar jacket using a papery, high-density cotton, pictured A. below right. It was inspired by a piece of ‘80s era USSR Olympic Gymnastic Team kit. When Sono name a piece, they do so alliteratively: “Bo Bomber,” “Dora Dress,” etc. And wouldn’t you know it, they named this new style the “Jonah Jacket.” It looked fantastic, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that ~every store that came through their showroom had it among their selects. Jonah approves 😌.

NO GRUNGINESS = DIMINISHED SAUCE

• When you think of Auralee, you might envision a certain pristineness, because of their beautiful, tasteful, put-together-looking clothes. But don’t get it twisted: When we linked with Auralee designer Ryota Iwai one afternoon, pictured B. below left, he was looking great in a tattered vintage Interview tee and cut-off chinos (plus a tiny vintage women’s Cartier Baignoire). A little grunginess is your friend.

THE RULES & REGULATION OF COOL SHORTS-ROCKING

Fortify your mentals

Blackbird Spyplane — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:03:39 GMT

Our Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report is here.

Here’s what you learn about getting dressed when you wear black for a month straight.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

Blackbird Spyplane coming to you from Day 4 of a historic triple-digit Parisian heatwave. We’ve been deploying multiple cool-keeping techniques from last week’s visionary guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot —not least among them some Radical Expectation Setting and Mental Conditioning.

Before leaving California, I steeled myself for multiple 204°F days of brutal, nonstop sweating. I imagined wearing a wool suit doing cardio in a sauna. And so on. Compared to that abject nightmare, the abject reality of multiple 102°F days feels like a breeze, to the extent that, yes, I have been wearing 2 shirts, as seen above, with the cool blobby 1970s Gérard Singer mailboxes.

I never wore a dusty pink long sleeve under an ecru tee before, but it’s such a pleasing, sorbetto-like combination that Parisian strangers have been stopping me to say, “merci monsieur” because the mere sight cools them down. That’s just the kind of thing you can do when your mentals are fortified.

Today we’ve got:

Dope, clean, gorpish sneakers, made in France, from a brand no one is checking for
Handwoven kitchen textiles from London
Mad vibey home-goods from Copenhagen
The hallucinatorily slapping, rarely heard debut album from a towering NYC minimalist-music legend, reissued for the first time on vinyl
And more!

Let’s get to it —

We just caught wind of some very cool French-made, Vibram-soled sneakers we’d never heard of before, thanks to a big cosign from a Japanese artisan-clothes luminary…

Does everything in your wardrobe work together?

Blackbird Spyplane — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:03:56 GMT

Our Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report is here.

We just published an intel-rich guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot

Why are we addicted to standing in line for treats? Explaining the rise of the QTBAT

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

Spy Nation! Party tomorrow in Paris!

It’s become an annual tradition: we’re co-hosting a party in the Marais with our friends at Neighbour and Lady White Co. Chris Kontos of Kennedy Magazine will be playing music, and we’ll have refreshments from Novice and IESSI.

The party is tomorrow, Wednesday, June 24th at 51 Rue Volta, 6 pm - 9 pm. Pull up if you’re in town.

Now for today’s Plane —

When you’ve been blessed with the No. 1 most erudite & curious readership across all media, you receive fantastic reader questions on the reg.

Four such questions recently came in from Spyfriends on topics including…

My favorite type of clothing as explained by science
How to deal with dry cleaning
The (impossible?) dream of total wardrobe coherence
Sartorial pathways to blessed eco-terror

In today’s Plane we are answering these questions — with rare wisdom.

“Is it realistic for an entire wardrobe to all work together? Even from one brand?” — _brahm

If you go “uniform mode,” then the answer is yes by definition: When you wear the same thing every day, after all, it’s because you’ve identified an outfit’s worth of things that go well together and you’ve rid your closet of everything else.

Some people might allow for a slightly looser definition of “uniform mode” where, instead of literally repeating the exact same garments, day in, day out, they allow for variation within a tight set of rules. Spyfriend Salehe Bembury told me he aspires to rock this more flexible type of uniform, where the constituent colors and textures of a given outfit might change, but the fundamental form (in his case, a 6-panel cap, big t-shirt, cropped tapered trousers, sneakers) does not.

Here, again, the idea is that the entire wardrobe will work together. “It’s what I feel comfortable in, it feels somewhat elevated but casual,” Salehe said, “and all the pieces are very interchangeable.”

Let’s move past uniforms, though. Only wearing clothes from one brand — or from a small handful of simpatico brands — should translate to a wardrobe where everything “works together,” too, if we’re talking about labels whose designers have cohesive visions, and who consider each piece they make in relationship to the pieces they’ve made before, the result being a line that doubles as a kind of internally compatible slapper system.

That kind of compatibility and cohesion marks a bunch of small lines we like. Man-tle, Comoli, Evan Kinori, Lauren Manoogian, and definitely Sono spring to mind. So do Auralee and Lemaire, though they also illustrate the obvious point that, even when a designer’s vision is highly consistent, the more styles they produce over time, the likelier it will be that some shapes / colors / looks simply will not harmonize with every other shape / color / look in the catalog.

I’m talking purely on the level of physics here, i.e., a dope cropped & fitted Auralee jacket might simply be too short to rock with a dope long & billowing Auralee button-up. (You can read more from us about the “Jacket-Aperture-Waist-Shirt” Interface and how to not wear cool jackets wrong here.)

However! Since our readers ask us questions in the knowledge that Blackbird Spyplane is uncommonly craggy-brained and therefore given to mind-expanding insights, I do want to quickly interrogate two interconnected unspoken sub-questions beneath this question:

A) Whether it’s even desirable to have a wardrobe where everything “works together.”

B) What “works together” actually means, at its best.

Because, financial ruin aside, you could just say, “F--k it, A. Presse’s lookbook styling is awesome, I am going to cop a boatload of A. Presse pieces and wear nothing but A. Presse for the rest of my days, comfortable in the knowledge that, a few outlier garments notwithstanding, basically everything I wear will always work together, forever & ever.”

There are far worse fates. A. Presse clothes are beautiful and their lookbook styling is excellent, ipso facto, you might likely look good if you went this route.

And yet — would you have sauce, exactly? Would your outfits be “working together” in the thrilling, creative, rarefied sense that you dipped into the kitchen, got busy at the stovetop, brought together a gang of unlikely ingredients, and came out with a delicious, distinct recipe you can call your own? Or would the garments be “working together” in the (totally fine but far less thrilling) sense that you’ve just decided to stop cooking and eat dinner at Altro Paradiso every night, outsourcing all sauce-related decision-making, discovery, creativity, and surprise to someone else?

You’re eating good, no question. But you aren’t cheffing.

“How do you manage dry cleaning all the items that need it?” — maggie_reiter

For starters, both Erin and I tend to avoid copping “dry-clean only” garments.

When it comes to the clothes we do own that say “dry clean only,” there’s a tiny cluster of very fancy / delicate / special-occasion gems where we don’t wanna chance it. These get dry cleaned. But we’re talking about an easily manageable minority of the Spyplane closet.

Mostly, we tend to ignore “dry clean only” tags altogether, put a little prayer up to G-d, and just machine-wash the s--ts on cold / delicate and then hang dry them.

Your results may vary, but in all our years of doing this, we’ve only tasted disaster on a mercifully small number of occasions. To the contrary, we’ve actually been rewarded time and again by the discovery that washing a beautiful garment often makes it doper — suggesting that an abundance of “dry clean only” tags are for simps, marks & busters.

“What is your favorite type of article of clothing (pants, jacket, etc.) and explain why with science” — teknicolorgreen

The most important type of garment, for reasons I spent an entire New York Times Magazine cover story exploring, is pants.

My personal favorite garment, however, is the jacket. This is because:

Pants are incredible, but so important to the success of a fit, and the appearance of the wearer, that they can stress me out, whereas with jackets I rarely feel anything but pure pleasure.
Jackets have a nuts & bolts utility, when it comes to carrying stuff in the pockets, that other garments lack, i.e. if you fill up trouser pockets you can mess up your silhouette and your stride, whereas jacket pockets are far more accommodating to cargo. Especially jackets with award-winning pockets like these.
Like Erin, I love layering, we believe it is key to true sauce, and jackets are key to layering.
In the context of a relatively muted wardrobe such as my own, there are two places where I feel comfortable letting a garment get relatively spicier, designwise: footwear and jackets. A spicy shirt or spicy pants can be beautiful and dope, no doubt, but isn’t really my thing. And when I was a teenager I would have told you footwear was my favorite clothing article, but with time, age and maturity, jackets took the top spot.
2025 was the jacket’s year, and all signs suggest that 2026 will be, too.

And finally —

“How do you dress well in hot and humid weather? When I feel like I’m gonna melt?” — its_becks
“Layering in the heat in general, how to pull it off without overheating” — hendrick_hataaja

These are two of the many heat-related questions that inspired us to publish last week’s visionary & holistically conceived How to Dress When It’s Too Hot Swelter-Weather-Swag Guide to Great Shorts and Beyond.

Put bluntly, climate change, among its far more cataclysmic effects, threatens to kill dope outfits as we currently conceive of them. An entirely new understanding of swag will have to arise as a function of human adaptation to increasingly extreme heat.

Yet one more reason to embrace smart, principled strategies of climate action like, say, those explored in How to Blow Up a Pipeline — both the Andreas Malm book and the fantastic 2022 film adaptation, in which everyone looks great while doing extremely blessed eco-terror.

P🦦E🦤A🏞️C🐊E🐟 til next time,

— J & E

Check out our monumental list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.

Our Cool Mom Style Guide is here.

Enjoy our Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.

Our Essay Archive, a curated selection of our Profoundest Thoughts, is here.

Wearing color is a community service

Blackbird Spyplane — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:02:08 GMT

Welcome to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical” that the fellas love as well. Every edition is archived here.

Our guide to how to dress when it’s too hot and achieve Swelter-Weather Swag just dropped.

I recently saluted a trove of outstanding hiking sandals.

The best natural fiber activewear is here.

We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our anti-spon position here.

David Hockney in 1972. Photo by Peter Simins

I (Erin) kicked off this year by wearing black for a month straight. Over that long, dark month, I realized how deeply color affects my mood. And I’m not just talking about the clothes I wear: Seeing someone dressed colorfully walk towards you on a dour city sidewalk is like stumbling on a Helen Frankenthaler in a parking garage — you thought you were one place, but suddenly you’re in another.

As the world becomes increasingly grey-toned (a phenomenon we first reported on in 2022), wearing anything other than black, grey or navy has come to feel like an act of community service. Like planting flowers in a median, dotting our environs with color is a pro-social move. So I’m committed to wearing even more color this year than I normally do — and I feel compelled to get ‘Corde Nation to join me.

Summer is the best season to experiment with color. My own hot-weather vibe takes no small inspiration from the late, great David Hockney — the most summery painter of the last 50 years? — pictured above in a glorious red, yellow and blue fit. Look at that sly smile… Hockney knew joy was not made to be a crumb.

In today’s Concorde I’m breaking down the ways I’m adding color into my outfits right now. We’ve got:

How to embrace unadulterated primary colors and make them work
The secret chromatic weapon that is a metallic accessory
Photo-print garments — a one-and-done way to add color
Some of my favorite books, artists and color systems to consult when putting palettes together

Let’s get to it —

There are colors you look great wearing, and there are colors you feel great wearing. I probably privilege feeling over look, but never want to sacrifice the latter. (As Jonah wrote about earlier this month, neither of us puts much stock in the pseudoscience of “color analysis,” and yet we both manage to look fantastic all the time… 🤔)

Right now, I’m feeling primary colors. These can trip some people up because of their perceived “unsubtlety.” But primaries are, quite the contrary, an excellent launch pad for a chromatic journey….

Let’s start with blue:

Truman Capote photographed in 1970 by Slim Aarons

A/C made us soft

Blackbird Spyplane — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:03:01 GMT

Our Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report is here.

Here’s what you learn about getting dressed when you wear black for a month straight.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

How to Dress When it's Too Hot

It’s Swelter-Weather Swag Week here at Blackbird Spyplane.

On Tuesday, we published Part 1 of our guide to “How to Dress When it’s Too Hot” — too rich & robust to contain in an email, so you can find it in full here:

As we put it in that post, “in the kinds of heatwaves we’re seeing more and more these days, it’s increasingly impossible to be comfortable while simultaneously Putting That S-- t On — at least not in the ways we currently conceive of comfort or putting that s--t on.”

We focused Part 1 on:

A celebration of dope shorts, new & vintage
A taxonomy of the 3 major shorts archetypes, with notes on how to style them
Sick shoes to rock with them
Tips for short~leg~sock~footwear harmony

And today?

A/C made us soft

We’re psyched to drop the ephiphanic Swelter-Weather Swag Report finale, crackling with insights & intel into:

How Shorts Agnostics can avoid wearing shorts
Heatwave headgear
Shirts with cooling properties and other swelter-ready slappers
Powerful hot-weather mindset changes and their pleasant physical effects
How air conditioning turned America into a soft, b-tchmade nation as far as our capacity for scorcher tolerance
The path toward a societal-level swelter-swag overhaul

Enjoy Blackbird Spyplane’s “How to Dress When It’s Too Hot Guide: The Finale” here:

The Swelter-Weather Sauce Report Finale

Thank you for rocking with the Plane, stay breezy, and…

P🍹E🍹A🍹C🍹E til next time.

— Jonah & Erin

Check out our monumental list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.

Our Cool Mom Style Guide is here.

Enjoy our Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.

Our Essay Archive, a curated selection of our Profoundest Thoughts, is here.

How to dress when it's too hot

Blackbird Spyplane — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:50:53 GMT

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

Since Blackbird Spyplane is well established as the most sagacious style & culture sletter across all media, and since it’s getting too hot everywhere, readers write in often asking us about how to dress well despite the heat.

We could respond by doing some trademark unbeatable recon into a gang of extremely sick shorts, toss in some flowy, breathable shirts, and call it a day.

But despite the abundant utility in that kind of roundup, we are simply too craggy-brained to stop there. Instead, we’ve meditated on the topic of dressing for the heat in a far more expansive manner.

In the kinds of heatwaves we are seeing more and more these days, it is increasingly impossible to be comfortable while simultaneously Putting That S-- t On — at least not in the ways we currently conceive of comfort or putting that s--t on.

With this in mind, we’ve developed a guide to Swelter-Weather Swag that leads with an intel-rich Shorts Report, and then expands its gaze to try and meet the immensity of the subject at hand more squarely… more holistically… more visionarily… more Spyplanishly.

Yes — it’s Swelter-Weather Swag Week at Blackbird Spyplane, where today and Thursday we’re serving up a two-part guide consisting of…

Abundant intel on very cool shorts, both new & vintage
A taxonomy of the 3 major shorts archetypes and notes on how to style them
Sick shoes to rock with them
Tips for short~sock~footwear harmony
Ways that Shorts Agnostics and outright Shorts Haters can avoid wearing shorts entirely
Heatwave headgear, shirts with cooling properties, and other swelter-grade slappers

But also??

Powerful hot-weather mindset changes and their highly physical effects
The path toward a societal-level swelter-swag overhaul — because dressing well in the heat, much like the climate crisis generally, is much more than a question of Individual Consumer Choices

Let’s get to it —

Great Shorts Report

A plea for justice

Blackbird Spyplane — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:02:40 GMT

The Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report is here.

We just dropped the smash-hit Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay, and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

It’s become an annual tradition — we’re throwing a Party in Paris with our friends at Neighbour and Lady White Co. in a couple weeks. Chris Kontos of Kennedy Magazine will be playing music, and we’ll have wine from Novice and n.a. drinks from IESSI…

The party is Wednesday June 24 from 6 pm - 9 pm. Come through.

In today’s Plane we’ve got:

Dope non-crazy-priced natural-dye button-ups from some under-sung Japanese goats
New big jeans & new big pants in lovely fabrics from 2 of our favorite small lines
Did we find the only tiny-mic front-facing-camera IG style advice guy worth watching?
Our front-runner for the Best Album of 2026 just came out on Friday, the result of a mysterious legend switching up his style…
And more unbeatable recon!

But first —

We’ve published many interviews over the years with people whose work we admire across creative fields. A very select few have been actors — Steven Yeun, Seth Rogen, Maya Hawke, Rashida Jones, Adam Sandler, Michelle Williams, John C. Reilly and Nathan Fielder foremost among them. (Tyler, The Creator and André 3000 sort of count, but while they were great in Marty Supreme and Showing Up, respectively, they are not actors at this point so much as brilliant musicians who have acted.)

This relative under-representation of actors in the Spyplane Interview Archives is mostly attributable to the fact that actors are, per capita, some of the worst-dressed famous people alive.

As we told France’s Fédération de la Haute Couture and de la Mode when they interviewed us last year: You should ignore the way 99.5% of actors dress, 99.4% of athletes, 96.2% of musicians, and 100% of “influencers.” (Directors, photographers and artists are worth a gander.)

What confuses matters here is that, despite dressing poorly, actors tend to be easy on the eyes. This means people are prone to misguidedly treat them as style north stars, paying their street-style & red-carpet looks entirely too much attention.

This broad saucelessness among actors was not always the case, as demonstrated by countless documents of off-duty dressing from the Hollywood golden age to the ‘90s “airport fits” era. But it has been true since the ~2000s, as the explosion of the paparazzi/tabloid ecosystem gave way to the broadband-internet-era hypersaturation of our culture with images. Actors, on the frontlines of the image business, reacted to these changes by no longer shooting from the hip when they put together outfits. Instead, they became way too calculating, whether it meant extreme risk avoidance (in an attempt to never get caught bricking) or extreme O.D. goofball s--t (in an attempt to court attention).

All of this is to say that, despite these headwinds, there are a few actors perched high in the Spyplane Pantheon of Talent & Clothes-Rocking. Zoe Kravitz comes to mind… Jessie Buckley… LaKeith Stanfield… Charles Melton… Sandra Hüller… Franz Rogowski…

And one dude whose elusiveness is particularly painfully to us: Josh O’Connor.

Erin and I have been singing O’Connor’s praises since we saw him in Alice Rohrwacher’s brilliant La Chimera, a Top 5 Cinematic Achievement of the 21st Century, during which he delivers an indelible, haunted performance while looking great in clothes. That same year he co-starred in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, was scoundrelish and funny, and looked great in clothes in it, too.

He’s since done a bunch more excellent work while continually looking great in clothes. Unfortunately, the two times we’ve reached out to “his camp” to invite him to come on the Plane — first with La Chimera, and then when Spyfriend Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind came out — word came back that the timing wasn’t right.

We know the universe is working toward a happy resolution here, because the other day we saw pics of him wearing the remarkably Spyplanesque outfit above, tucking a black E.T. tee into pleated Studio Nicholson pants with Marsèll derbies, a bootleg Cannes cap, and a baggy suede-collar work jacket that isn’t Ssstein but could be.

So here’s a plea for justice. There are many tied-in readers in Spy Nation. If any of you are friends with O’Connor, please pass along our invitation for him to come enjoy the breeziest & most delightful conversation across all media… on Blackbird Spyplane. 🙏

Meanwhile —

When it comes to rhetorical formats for working through ideas about clothes that are more involved than “this is fire / this is trash,” the ~3-minute front-facing video is, obviously, suboptimal. TikToks and Reels are fine for punchy provocation but also highly susceptible to inanity and hogwash, and far less conducive to nuance and complexity than, say, the essay.

That said: Have we found the one tiny-microphone style guy worth watching? He has fewer than 3,000 followers on IG, a major love of secondhand clothes twinned with respect for garment repair, a charmingly stoic demeanor, and a zero-bogosity POV we f--k with:

Analyze this

Blackbird Spyplane — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:03:41 GMT

Here’s what you learn about getting dressed when you wear black for a month straight.

Enjoy our extensive new Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report.

We just dropped the smash-hit Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.

We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and Etsy, and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin

Two readers recently wrote in asking about different approaches to styling clothes.

Question No. 1 takes a bird’s-eye view —

“How often do you trust your intuition (in styling and love)?” — k3elinrose

As far as love: Rules have no dominion over the heart, baby. Lead with intuition as tempered by equanimity, patience, and past lessons in heartbreak and joy.

As far as getting dressed: Strangely enough, even though Blackbird Spyplane is a vocally pro-rules sletter, Erin and I (Jonah) personally tend to rock the clothes we rock rules-free, guided by an inchoate mixture of enthusiasm, openness and, yes, intuition. If there are rules undergirding the way we style a given outfit, it’s rare that either of us explicitly formulates them as such — we’re moreso reflexively referring to a kind of “precognitive pattern language” we’ve built up over decades of just wearing & looking at s--t.

The way I square this circle is that we find cool people who do dress according to rules fascinating, and when the results are inspirationally swaggy, as opposed to deadeningly stiff, we admire these rule-followers precisely because of the distance between their approach and ours.

This brings us to Question No. 2, which is more granular, invoking specific guidelines for dressing that have become increasingly voguish online —

“How much weight do you give to color analysis when it comes to picking fire garms?” — troyjanikowski

I am gonna keep it real: Until a few weeks ago, when we published our delightful new report on How to Wear Colors Well, I’d never heard of “color analysis” at all. A Spyfriend brought it up in the comments on that post, and Erin kindly filled me in.

As I roughly understand it, color analysis is the name for a confusing ~century-old pseudoscience, with earlier roots in painting, that took hold to a degree in 1930s-era Hollywood as a way to taxonomize actors’ complexions and dress them on-screen accordingly. But color analysis really blew up in the 1980s with the publication of a bestselling how-to book, aimed at women, called “Color Me Beautiful,” which Erin’s mom owned.

Today, color analysis aimed at women & men alike has grown popular across the IG & TikTok explainersphere…

Some of the thousands of reels that show up on Instagram when you do a search for “color analysis” for the fellas

When you perform a color analysis on yourself, you enlist an “expert” to help you identify the combined chromatic effect of your eye color, hair color and skin (under?)tone. This triangulation is known as your “season.” Once you know you are, say, an autumn, you consult seasonally organized charts of the colors that purportedly suit you best. Most color analysts divide the 4 seasons as we know them into 12 sub-seasons or more, i.e. you are not merely an autumn but a warm autumn, your friend is not merely a summer but a cool summer, and so on.

Seen charitably, this is sort of like Myers-Briggs personality-type indicators, except for having fair skin, green eyes and dark hair. But one supposed benefit of color analysis that boosters repeat is that dressing for your “season” as a man will somehow help your jawline look more defined — tying color analysis directly to the Incel Phrenology of looksmaxxing.

The reason I’m not ashamed to admit I’d never heard of any of this s--t is because, even though color analysis seems like the kind of thing I should know about as the co-creator of the western world’s most popular style & culture newsletter, with an avowed interest in Looking Great in Cool Clothes, it strikes me as 99.999999% hogwash.

Naturally, the supply-side endgame of color analysis is $$$: If you see one of these videos and find yourself intrigued, you can book a session with an analyst, you can download an AI-powered analysis app, or you can just smash the fave and share the clip, helping a would-be influencer monetize.

My ignorance of color analysis, then, simply attests to the exalted plane of craggy-brained consciousness that Erin and I call home. This is one of the many things that separates Blackbird Spyplane from all the bozos, charlatans, bogosity merchants, and well-meaning dum-dums out there — and friends, we will never apologize for being “deaf, dumb and blind” to the bulls--t.

“But Jonah,” you might be thinking. “Aren’t you being overly dismissive? Some colors suit certain people better than others. Surely it’s worth thinking in a systematic way about which ones suit you and dressing accordingly?”

I guess so. I’ll concede that what I feel first and foremost when anything like color analysis comes up is antipathy towards its proselytizers. There has long been an abundance of confused and anxious people who wish that some benevolent authority would come “unlock the codes” of self-improvement for them. And the supposedly benevolent authorities who typically slither forth to answer that call have long been malevolent hucksters and/or deluded souls.

This predatory dynamic has gone super turbo in the social-media era. It’s never been easier and cheaper to prey on people’s feelings of isolation and insecurity at scale, and I’d wager that those feelings have never been higher, too.

That said, sure, take some time to feel out which colors you look particularly good in, and which seem to work against you. The thoughtful reader who brought up color analysis in the comments the other day told us, “I love an earthy vibe, but dusty and washed-out colors, especially with orange, yellow, or green undertones, don’t look great on me, so I look for deep purples, saturated forest greens, and greige-y taupes,” adding that “learning about color analysis helped me figure this out,” even as they recognized that the concept is “primarily used by cursed TikTok influencers to make people spend money and buy stuff.”

We’re glad this reader found some utility in color analysis, and we’re glad the utility didn’t erase their fundamental skepticism. This seems like a healthy way to treat color analysis, besides ignoring it entirely: as a wall you can throw different hues of mud at, seeing what sticks.

The color-analysis procedures that proliferate online tend to consist of someone draping swatches of ugly-looking fabric under a client’s chin and extrapolating from there to overarching rules for building a wardrobe. They’re trying to make the process look more “clinical,” I suppose, but the s--t is so aesthetically gross as to torch its credibility as a putative strategy for maximizing beauty…

Instead of going that route, why not base a color analysis on normal lived scenarios and feedback? For instance: compliments you receive from others, and your own sensation of hotness or lack thereof when you catch your reflection (wow I look positively radiant in this burnt-orange hoodie, whereas the kelly-green tee I wore yesterday washed me out). Jot these reactions down in a notebook, if you like, and once you’ve amassed a sufficient “data set,” feel free to draw some broader conclusions for the colors you wear. That sort of ground-up methodology strikes me as immensely superior to a top-down approach.

Case in point: When the talented & saucely Robert Pattinson was doing press for Mickey 17, he didn’t just talk to me about the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Bong Joon-ho’s directorial approach for a Times Magazine profile of Bong I wrote.

Insanely, Pattinson also agreed to sit for a “Personal Color Analysis,” shot in Seoul, for the movie’s official TikTok account:

The analyst shows Pattinson colors that supposedly make him look worse. She shows him colors that supposedly make him look better. “Do you see the differences?” she asks him. “No?” he replies, game but skeptical.

She drapes a bunch of lighter colors on his right shoulder and, although they look totally fine, she informs him they are sub-optimal. “That’s not fair,” he says, laughing. “I like these ones!”

I interpret this as his polite way of saying, “FOH,” and I don’t think you need to be Robert Pattinson to reach a similar conclusion for yourself. There are any number of videos of non-famous dudes undergoing color analysis where the “findings” seem just as arbitrary and do not really move the needle one way or the other re: how attractive they look.

Here at the Plane, we’ll continue to do what most people do and take it case by case. Pull on a shirt you’re thinking of buying, make a decision based not on spurious taxonomies but, rather, on how you look in it. Then live & learn. If you really love a certain color but the dictates of color analysis determine that it conflicts with your “season,” you could try wearing it away from your face, in the form of pants, or socks, or a shoulder bag — or, alternatively, you could say f--k it, wear it against your skin anyway, and see if you don’t manage to look good regardless.

Our interviews with Cameron Winter of Geese, Ryota Iwai from Auralee, SC103, Nathan Fielder, Michelle Williams, Sarah Squirm, Evan Kinori, Adam Sandler, Brendan from Turnstile, MJ Lenderman, André 3000, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Father John Misty, Steven Yeun, Clairo, Pusha T, Conner O’Malley, Christophe Lemaire & more are here.

The Blackbird Spyplane Profound Essay Archive is here.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

Hiking-sandal realness

Blackbird Spyplane — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:01:31 GMT

Welcome to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical” that the fellas love as well. Every edition is archived here.

The Blackbird SpyBookshop rounds up books we love.

We just dropped a new guide to How to Wear Colors Well.

Our Global Intel Travel Chat Room is always bustling: Spyfriends recently came through with recs for San Sebastián, Boston and Marseille.

We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our anti-spon position here.

Pic via Toro y Moi

Last month, Jonah and I (Erin) quietly celebrated 6 years spent publishing the rare miracle that is Blackbird Spyplane. Prominent among the things that make this sletter so special is the fact that we’re blessed with the greatest readership across all media. And in addition to trading Mach 3+ city tips in the Travel Chat, and posting thoughtful gems in the comments of every sletter we send out, the people of Spy Nation have also been known to ask for intel on slappers they’re seeking — and share it — in our “Classified SpyTalk Chat Room.”

Unlike other online chats, ours is focused entirely on recommendations. It is also singularly janky, because we basically hotwired a comment section into a “forum.” As a pro-friction sletter, we see this as a feature, not a bug.

Recently, several Spyfriends flowed through the chat with intel requests that inspired me to dig deep. Today I am sharing the recon here, including:

Outstanding hiking sandals, from elevated styles to swagged-out orthopedic energy to vibey vintage treasures & beyond
Unisex summer-weight button ups whose time has returned
A newly reissued non-wack tabi sneaker keeping the Tabi Wave alive
A chill, packable linen suit I wore to a friend’s birthday in NYC

Let’s get to it —

“Erin, I always love your shoe input. Any recs for elevated Teva-ish sandals? My reference point is Phoebe Philo’s Pace Runner” — Alena

Alena is referring to the new, preposterously $1400 platform “hiking” sandals from Phoebe Philo (pictured 1. below)… The antipathy I feel toward this shoe is not solely based on its price tag (although, c’mon) but, more so, because there is truly no shortage of real, performance-driven, orthopedic-vibed hiking sandals that you could wear while getting vert on dirt but which also just look sick in any context. The outdoor-footwear world is full of gems!

We are, to be clear, fans of “elevated” takes on “regs” styles. But as a fairly serious hiker, and as someone who consistently puts in 20K+ step days when I’m traveling, I know we can do so much better in terms of comfort, without sacrificing style, well below the $1k mark.

I much prefer the hiker realness of the 10+ (mostly unisex) pairs I’ve sourced below — including a couple of legit orthopedic sandals that I suspect might have been in Philo’s references:

They say you can’t get in

Blackbird Spyplane — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:03:10 GMT

The Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report is here.

We just dropped the smash-hit Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.

This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.

— Jonah & Erin