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

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— Jonah & Erin

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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:

How to Dress When it's Too Hot

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.

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.

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

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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

Read more

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

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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:

Read more

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

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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…

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.

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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.

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.

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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:

Read more

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

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Blackbird Spyplane back once again. In today’s NYC-centric recon dispatch:

• One of the country’s best men’s stores just opened an archive outpost where everything’s half off

• 3 new labels to watch, as spotted at a revered slapper mecca

• A Top 5 NYC Destination that ~no one cool will tell you is popping

• A brand-new cocktail bar that people will tell you is so popping you can’t get in, but I believe you can, and it has the wildest interiors I’ve seen in a minute

• The city’s buzzingest young chef, the delicious food he cooks, and his tremendous clog game

• And more unbeatable recon!

Let’s get to it —

The other day a Spyfriend wrote in with a question on the theme of discovery:

“What do you think is the perfect balance of exploring new things vs. enjoying existing things?” — mlacayo1

Since the Plane is all about exploration and enjoyment, this topic has come up a few times before, in various forms.

Last fall I (Jonah) wrote about engaging with new music versus washedly shutting yourself off to it, and argued that the best m.o. is to proceed with a combination of Curiosity, Confidence & Confusion: You have to keep your curiosity alive, along with your capacity for a kind of productive confusion, which means actively seeking out potentially bewildering s--t you haven’t encountered before. Since your time on earth is limited, however, confidence is key as far as determining which new culture is worth engaging with. The “perfect balance” here can shift, but it’s never bad to err on the side of curiosity.

Relatedly, in January I wrote about how we need to “bring back real obsession” — to actually dig into things, rather than just smashing the fave on an IG clip, declaring “I’m obsessed,” and moving on.

And as far as copping new clothes versus enjoying the clothes you own, I wrote an instant-classic sletter a few years ago about the virtues of “Enjoyment Mode” — actually rocking your clothes — as opposed to getting lost in the itchy, unsatisfied, swag-averse zombie state that is “Acquisition Mode,” where you just keep compulsively amassing new things.

As chance would have it, I’m writing today’s sletter at the tail end of a week spent in NYC, my native soil, where Erin and I have been busy doing recon for you. We’ve amassed a wealth of intel that spans “exploring new things” and “enjoying existing things.”

But here’s the twist! “Existing things,” much like you, are themselves subject to constant flux and renewal, and so the line between new and existing is itself unstable. You can’t step in the same river — or restaurant, or museum, or clothing shop — twice.

Case in point —

Over the weekend we spontaneously hit up a place we had not been in ages and are now ready to name a Top 5 NYC Destination.

Statistically speaking, ~zero “cool” people will tell you this place is “popping.” But damn it if it didn’t make our whole trip:

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

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

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I (Jonah) did something stupid two weekends ago: Stood in line for an hour and a half to buy 4 pastries.

I used to do this kind of thing much more often in my twenties and early thirties. I loved riding bikes with friends out to Di Fara Pizza in Midwood, back when Domenico Di Fara was still alive, in his eighties and making every pie himself, cutting basil leaves and sloshing olive oil over each one from a spouted metal can, extremely slowly, like a gardener tending flower beds. On weekends, the wait for a slice could last an hour easy. This was both ridiculous and part of the appeal.

The early 2000s into the early 2010s were, in hindsight, the Dawn of Waiting in Long Lines to Buy S--t Nobody Used to Wait in Long Lines For. I never joined the legendarily long lines at Magnolia Bakery (don’t like cupcakes, didn’t watch Sex and the City) and I never camped out during the Cronut craze either (the concept didn’t appeal, the goofy name was prophylactic). I did wait in line for Pinkberry when they first arrived in NYC and people went cuckoo over them, ditto Mission Chinese Food, when they first opened on Orchard Street. On multiple visits to Portland, I waited in line to eat at PokPok.

I did not wait to sit and make eye contact with Marina Abramović at MoMA, but I did queue up several times to see Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” during its first U.S. run at Paula Cooper Gallery. Less flattering to my self-image, I once waited in line to get into the Union Square Trader Joe’s: Insanely, when that location first opened, in 2006, people were so stoked on the novelty of cut-rate peanut-butter pretzel nuggets they formed long, headline-making lines to enter the building.

Hordes queuing to get into a “buzzed-about” discount supermarket felt like an inflection point at the time, like society was crossing an obscene new Rubicon — or, I guess, waiting in line for the opportunity to cross it.

Today, the Queue to Buy a Treat (QTBAT) has become a pervasive and entrenched feature of civic life.

As uses of our precious time on earth go, the QTBAT remains patently dumb enough that it hasn’t yet grown entirely unremarkable. The other day I saw a new IG carousel of doomscroll_forever memes making fun of people who line up outside okonomiyaki spots drinking iced matcha lattes they waited in line to buy somewhere else.

But the QTBAT is absolutely commonplace. Want a bagel from Courage, or a slice from L’Industrie, or a smashburger at Dumbo, or a pour-over at La Cabra? Literally, get in line. Notorious non-food-related QTBATs include the lines to buy new iPhones, the lines for Supreme drops, the lines for bars of soap at Buly, and the lines for The Row sample sales. In recent years, more and more clothing shops have started limiting in-store capacity, even when there are no sales nor special drops on offer. This forces would-be shoppers to create a line down the sidewalk like it’s the Louvre and not the Stüssy store. When certain dark stars align — say in the case of a limited-edition Audemars Piguet x Swatch collab — the QTBAT can become a riot.

The queue becomes part of the broader experience of the treat for those waiting in it. For those walking past, the queue serves as a lure, or a red flag, depending on one’s disposition. As I write this, I’m visiting New York, where half of SoHo is people standing in lines. Yesterday morning I saw people lined up outside a Korean skin-care brand pop-up in Chinatown, a few blocks from people lined up outside a Nolita shop that seems to sell streetwear-inflected NYC-themed merch. Today I saw a line outside a lingerie pop-up on Mott, and I saw two separate lines outside Kith on Lafayette: one for gen pop, and one for an apparently elite tier of Kith shoppers called “Voyage members.”

The last time I was in town, I happened to be in midtown around 10 a.m. and saw a doorman at the Louis Vuitton store directing visitors to line up down 57th Street. This seemed to reflect an untenable degree of contempt toward the “luxury” customer, but then again, a company like LVMH is nothing if not fundamentally contemptuous of its customers.

Let me quickly sharpen the edges of the QTBAT concept. There have probably been lines as long as there have been people, and it’s worth emphasizing that not all queues to buy things are QTBATs — not in the way I’m using the term.

A line of shoppers waiting to check out at the grocery is not a QTBAT. Nor, of course, is a line of drivers waiting to renew their licenses at the DMV. Nor is a line of sedans waiting to pull into the car wash. Etc. Those are just normal lines.

Importantly, a line outside a small neighborhood bakery that people enjoy and which has been around for years consistently baking delicious croissants isn’t necessarily a QTBAT, either.

What distinguishes the QTBAT is that it takes that kind of normal, annoying line and introduces a crucial element of hype to the equation. It infuses a regular line with the sort of eager anticipatory energy that was once restricted to actual events — lines of giddy fans camping out to buy tickets to Radiohead concerts or Star Wars sequels; lines of hot clubbers dressed up and waiting to get into a cool party; lines of artgoers waiting to get into an Andreas Gursky retrospective at MoMA; lines of tourists waiting to get into the Vatican or Katz’s Deli.

The cursed innovation of the QTBAT, then, is that it takes a bagel and frames it as an Event. In the QTBAT logic, every place is Katz’s and everyone is a tourist. Even — especially! — in the city they call home.

Who is to blame for all these stupid lines?

It’s tempting to say that Millennials invented the QTBAT. But it’s more precise to say that QTBATs were invented by market forces during the rise of Millennial purchasing power, in tandem with a historic flood of economy-reshaping zero-interest-rate-policy funny money.

Zoomers, who have never known any other way, inherited QTBATs from Millennials and, using social media, spread them everywhere like dandelion fluff. Any business that sells treats and looks cute is one hit TikTok away from QTBAT Valhalla.

By contrast, stereotypical Gen-Xers never wanted much to do with lines, insofar as lines bespoke popularity, inauthenticity, and an overall unpalatable normie cheuginess back when it was still called “being square.”

Since Erin and I are mongrel Gen-X Millennials (formatively ~12 years old when In Utero came out, formatively ~27 when Obama bailed out the banks) we find ourselves split between worlds, alternately seduced and repulsed by QTBATs. The older we get, the more repulsive they seem. And yet here we were the other day, spending a gorgeous springtime Saturday morning standing in a QTBAT for the first time in ages.

I’ll avoid the particulars except to say that, after a hike up in the hills that made what followed feel like way less of a waste, we decided to check out a hyped Oakland bakery currently in “soft launch” mode. The locale, as seen above, was picturesque in a grungey way. There was shade. And the pastries were — thank heavens — so smacking that we quickly updated the Food section of our Ultimate Bay Area Guide in order to salute it.

It was a perfectly charming place to stand around for 90 minutes, exactly once, and never again. And as I waited to enjoy baked goods with zero urgent demands on my time, I was able to ponder the weird ascension of the Queue to Buy a Treat into a pillar of contemporary urban existence.

While in this mode of pleasant contemplation, four main reasons for the QTBAT occurred to me:

1. The QTBAT is egalitarian. You don’t need a ton of money or elite connections to score a Japanese-style Basque cheesecake “everyone is talking about.” You just need to wait your turn. There are people who pay other people to wait for them, and there are entire resale economies centered on coveted non-perishable treats. But while that is bleak, it doesn’t undo the intrinsically egalitarian nature of the line. (At least until the airportification of all life is complete and they figure out how to put “platinum-tier” expedited lines everywhere.)

2. We aspire to spend our time meaningfully. And the QTBAT confers an aura of meaningfulness onto the experience of, e.g., buying a delicious frozen yogurt. What was once mind-numbing garbage time becomes an activity. You stood in line for that frozen yogurt for 32 minutes, coursing with frustration, impatience, excitement and purpose, the purpose being: To eat the treat so many other people clearly hold in such high esteem that I must wait in line behind them in order to eat it. That this aura of meaningfulness is so often a mass hallucination — self-evidently perverse, circular and illusory — is clearly not a deal-breaker.

3. The QTBAT is not virtual. It emerged in the early 2000s, coincident with the rise of the broadband internet and the profound changes it wrought on life. During the same stretch of time when “Third Places” and other ways to enjoy physical space in the company of others came under mounting threat, the QTBAT came into being and thrived. Even when we can join a hyped new ramen spot’s check-in list remotely, on Yelp, plenty of us neglect to do that and just show up and wait instead.

In a QTBAT we can see the beautiful human impulse to be out in public around other people. But we can also see the torched market prerogative that seeks to funnel all human interaction into vectors defined above all else by opportunities for commerce and extraction. Sitting in a park with friends doesn’t put money in anyone’s pocket. The QTBAT is business-friendly hanging — loitering with intent to purchase.

Dizzyingly, the distinction between virtual and IRL can blur in the QTBAT. How many people in line to buy a bagel from Apollo choose to pass the time on their phones, where various entities pop up on screen and try their best to get them to buy other things while they wait? And how many line-waiters feel compelled to open up Twitter or IG or TikTok and 🥴 whip up a little content about how they are waiting in line at Apollo 😵‍💫? (No shots at Apollo — truly excellent bagels.)

This blur notwithstanding, I think the QTBAT is at root a reaction against the rampant virtualization of life. And this leads into the final and most powerful reason, as I see it, for the power of the Queue to Buy a Treat:

4. The QTBAT speaks, however poorly, to our ancient desire for community, for gatherings, for pilgrimages, for fellowship. When I mentioned this to a friend the other day, his thoughts immediately turned to the decline of religious life under the secular neoliberal order. “People used to wait in line at church to take the Eucharist,” he noted: The weekend came, people gathered in a house of worship to pray, to sing, to ponder the eternal, then they got in a long line and waited for someone to serve them a baked good, which was a wafer, which was the body of Christ.

There is no singing and no praying at the new bakery downtown which sells the cute tote bags. The eternal we ponder as we wait in line there, if we ponder it at all, is a murky morass. At the end of the line, if we’re lucky, a perfectly laminated, perfectly photogenic salted-cherry kouign amann awaits us.

Who leaves which line hungrier?

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Let’s say you want to hear some music you’ve never heard before. And let’s say that, rather than unfamiliar contemporary music, which will connect you to the present moment, you want to hear some unfamiliar old music, to open up a little wormhole you can wriggle through between present and past.

Jonah and I (Erin) talk about this all the time: how amazing it is to discover a fantastic song that someone recorded ages ago, to fall in love with it, and to know there’s so much else lying there in wait, unenjoyed, just out of sight on the menu.

It happened the other day when we saw a marg.mp3 interview with james K, who shared her love for the eccentric NYC art-rock act Anna Domino’s 1984 single “Land of My Dreams,” built around endlessly descending guitar riffs, a dinky drum machine and a hypnotic, slightly amateur-sounding vocal….

We’d never heard of it, it’s fantastic, it turns out it’s an Aretha Franklin cover, and we’d never heard that version, either!

The same holds true with books, movies, and, of course, clothes.

There are all kinds of things we would love to hear / see / read / wear, if only we could figure out what they are and, to use the techspeak term for it, “surface” them.

The dominant, dubious technique for surfacing is, of course The Algorithm, an ostensible tool for discovery that, we’ve come to suspect, forecloses more than it opens up.

The much doper technique is when a person you trust tips you off and sends you spelunking.

Which brings us to today’s Concorde: whether it’s at thrift stores, vintage shops, or the chaotic garage sale of online platforms, I will never stop digging for vibey secondhand treasures. Today I’m sharing some beloved vintage troves, a bunch of which I’d never heard of myself until recently, and which I unearthed through pure unadulterated expert rummaging. Including:

• Great designers whose names have largely been lost to time

• Under-the-radar jewelry makers

• A huge edit of vintage scarves

• Y2K designer hiking boots, slim-soled sneakers, and the shoe that inspired Marc Jacobs’s mouse flat?

• Rare unisex workwear from the ‘40s and ‘50s

• & more!

Let’s get to it —

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Our new guide to “How to Wear Color Well” is here.

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

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

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Wow. In today’s Plane we’ve got:

• Looking hot vs. looking cool

• A perfect gift to give a Mach 3+ person if you are also Mach 3+, and it costs ~nothing

• Are non-dope light switches quietly sapping the joy from your home? Check out these home-enswaggening switches.

• Excellent new music from a gifted chune god,

• And more unbeatable recon!

Let’s get to it —

The other day we got a compelling reader question from a Spyfriend about 😮‍💨 swag as relates to 🥵 sex appeal…

“How do you consider looking cool vs looking hot?” — ryscottcam

For my part, I love hot people, deeply, but hotness is not foremost in my mind when I personally think about which clothes to wear. It has never (well, rarely ever) been.

I’ve long aimed to look good in clothes and — as this reader anticipates — I’ve aimed to look cool in them. But while “looking good” and “looking cool” can, under the right circumstances, bleed into “looking hot,” the relationship between them is never 1:1:1.

The hottest I ever look might well be when I am not thinking about clothes at all, e.g., when I climb a ladder up to our roof in some old jeans, a thrashed t-shirt, and hiking boots, and put in some f--king work cleaning our gutters.

The closest I come to a more-routinized relationship to hotness is: For several years now, in addition to riding a bike and hiking, I’ve been on a very light daily “strength-building” regimen where I alternate between sets of push-ups, bicep curls, military presses, squats, sit-ups, lateral dumbbell raises, and kettlebell rows.

I do this because it feels good, it’s a nice way to break up a day otherwise spent writing and because I’m motivated by a not-unvain sense that I will be more fit, ipso facto look more fit, and ipso facto look perhaps subliminally hotter while looking cool in cool clothes.

While I never try to “dress hot,” more power to you if you do. However, while hotness is wonderful, it is not the end-all, be-all when it comes to how you look.

Consider these variables…

As I see it, someone could theoretically look beautiful, hot and well-dressed — bless their souls. Someone could look hot and badly dressed, which, hey, it could be worse, though I think their bad-dressedness will likely diminish their hotness.

Someone can look beautiful, well-dressed, cool, chill, and not hot. Hardly a tragedy. Someone might look cool, well-dressed, and vibey. That is very tight. Someone else might look vibey, chill and, though not hot, like a lil cutie pie. Also tight.

I don’t think it’s possible to be both busted and well-dressed, because the well-dressedness will recuperate, re-articulate and transfigure the bustedness. It is, vexingly, possible to look well-dressed yet wack. And so on. (The graph above does not include traits such as “funny” or “intelligent” or “kind” or “charming,” which are important but not readily apparent on a first look, and this is a graph about appearance.)

On a typical day, I guess I go for a combination of well-dressed, cool, chill, vibey, and handsome. In the darkest hour of a very bad day I might feel busted and badly dressed, while in the magic hour of a very good day I will feel the light of god shine from within myself and know that I am beautiful. If I’ve spent the day sharing moments of tenderness & laughter with loved ones and/or doing more push-ups than I have ever done before, I might look a wee bit hot — or like a lil cutie pie.

These categories are, fascinatingly and liberatingly, in flux. Some great news for you is that, by definition, no one in Spy Nation is wack nor busted.

Meanwhile —

Erin just received a perfect gift. It probably did not cost much in terms of actual money, but it definitely cost the equivalent of $1,000 minimum in coolness and ingenuity:

Read more

Our new guide to “How to Wear Color Well: Vehicular Swag Edition” is here.

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

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 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

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Blackbird Spyplane back with you once again. Today we’ve got:

• Swaggy ways to carry your s--t around in hot weather sans jacket pockets,

• A beautiful moment in sneakers where “cool rare collabs” and “cool general-release regs” are in equilibrium,

• 2 fantastic lamps,

• Sniff pon the smoky tendrils of great incense,

• & more unbeatable recon!

But first —

Last week we sent out a revelatory sletter about online explainer-influencers who purport to know the meaning of “quality” and the signposts of a garment’s “true” worth. The day we published it, I (Jonah) went on a hike and kept musing idly on the topic… before long, my thoughts turned to the depths of human deviousness.

You know that thing about how some online scammers will intentionally riddle phishing emails with obvious typos and other glaring tells, in order to weed out recipients who know what’s what, and focus their scammy energies, instead, on people gullible enough to take the low-quality bait? The rationale is that the scammer will enjoy a much higher R.O.I. from a target pool that self-selects for the credulous and under-informed.

I got to wondering: Could an IG menswear-explainer-type dude ever be so diabolical as to intentionally create a bunk set of criteria for adjudicating garment quality, in order to weed out followers who have too much taste / know too much about clothes? This way, when the explainer pivots to selling things — a standard influencer arc, whether it’s nutritional supplements or clothing lines — they’ve culled the swaggy and the knowledgeable from their audience, leaving behind a concentration of people who are more prone to cop whatever dubious wares they’re peddling.

I share this scenario not because I believe in it, exactly, but rather to offer a little peek into the Spyplane cerebellum — and to talk about something much more important: the Grace-Based P.O.V.

It’s no surprise that the apparel biz is full of unsavory hustlers. But one of the patternmakers I spoke to emphasized the importance, for him, of adhering to what he called the “grace-based P.O.V.” not despite but because of the prevalence of these bozos.

There’s never been a time in history when being grace-based — kind, patient, magnanimous — has been a bad thing. But these days we find ourselves under an unprecedentedly high-volume, multi-pronged assault of garbage “content,” AI slop, mids creative output, mild hucksterism, faked expertise, outright scams, loneliness masquerading as misanthropy, loneliness masquerading as dead-eyed cheer, rentseeking companies intent on squeezing every dime they can, normal people trying to eke out whatever income they can against a backdrop of extreme precarity, etc., etc.

The lines between these categories can blur. And in reaction, it’s all too easy to find oneself becoming hard, uncharitable, and mean.

The grace-based P.O.V. is, of course, a superior path. Better for your health and happiness in a way that helps increase the general health and happiness in the world, too.

What really recommends the G.B.P.O.V. is if you read it as a hybrid of graciousness and basedness, with one informing and counterbalancing the other.

Because the thing is, we do need to be based, clear-eyed and critical. We do need to call out bad arguments and bad actors. We should defend standards of excellence in the disciplines and art forms that matter to us, rather than devolve into a milky-brained “let people enjoy things” haze.

We don’t want to lapse into a state of pure anodyne “positivity,” because that isn’t actual positivity, just a positivity-colored version of “lol nothing matters” cynicism.

Yes, for our own sanity, we should probably ignore ~95% of the odious and insipid s--t we come across and keep it pushing. But that leaves the ~5% of odious and insipid s--t that’s worth actively challenging.

How do we tell one from the other? Even more crucially, how do we do it from a place of grace?

Wow —

As long as we’re bringing up life’s big questions: How do you carry all your s--t around in hot weather, sans jacket, without resorting to “stuffing your pockets full of every damn thing you need?”

Here are 3 very fire answers —

Read more

We also just dropped the smash-hit 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.

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

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Let’s answer two big questions about color up top.

• “How do you wear color well?”

Many people — especially but not exclusively the fellas — find color challenging. Rather than risk failure and embarrassment, they avoid the matter entirely, closing the door on a universe of sauce and delight.

Thankfully, Blackbird Spyplane has a powerful remedy. Erin started her career as a color forecaster, she’s worked closely with Apple’s industrial-design color team over the last decade-plus, and she’s a certified color super-perceiver, blessed with the equivalent of perfect pitch.

She poured her abundant wisdom into a handy guide for Mach 3+ color-rocking: Part 1 establishes some basics, while Part 2 reveals a simple yet sophisticated color-layering technique we call “Tonal Swag,” which will change the way you see your clothes, and which you can deploy today and immediately look ~73.3% more wavier.

• “OK — here’s a tougher one — why do we wear the colors we wear?”

The propagandists of corporate America want you to believe it’s because they say so. That’s the lie they’re trying to spread in, for instance, the original 2006 installment of 20th Century Fox entertainment property The Devil Wears Prada. In a pompous monologue that has become famous, the Anna Wintour proxy character tells a subordinate that she thinks she came to the office wearing a “cerulean” blue sweater because of a deliberate, non-fashion choice she made, but that the sweater was, in fact, “selected for you by the people in this room.”

This monologue is often held up as a pulling-back-the-curtain-on-how-things-really-work type moment. Hogwash. The monologue is simply proof that we live in a profane and godless culture.

The real reason we wear the colors we wear is, simply put, because of sacred confluences of chromatic vibrations that issue from the heartbeats of complex deities, travel acoustico-prismatically through the vastness of time & space, then reach our retinas and explode into ecstatic being.

Any person or conglomerate who claims credit for those vibrations is a blaspheming charlatan.

Erin and I (Jonah) are finely attuned to these confluences, however, and to the cadences in which they slip in and out of phase, i.e., we know which colors look particularly excellent at any given moment.

The vibrations are everywhere for those with eyes to see, which is why our color coverage over the years has drawn not only from, e.g., the films of Wim Wenders and Abbas Kiarostami, but also from the handsome interior of a fantastic taverna in Athens.

In that spirit, today we’re dropping a 2026 Color Inspiration Blowout inspired by sick & charming vehicles we’ve flicked up here in California, where cars are observably more beautiful than those you’ll see most other places.

Below you will find color combinations whose resonances are extremely harmonious. You will find standalone shades that are hitting especially pleasantly right now, too, with tips for other colors that go great with them. You will also find styling ideas, and intel on new and old pieces in these colors.

This is an exclusive for our Classified-Tier Subscribers. Enjoy!

Read more

Enjoy our extensive new Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report.

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 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

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Ancient paradigms… Contemporary breakthroughs… Blackbird Spyplane has it all, and we are back by your side.

In today’s sletter:

• Confidence is overrated

• “Sick Striped Longsleeve Tee Watch” continues with three new gems,

• Now that’s how you freak a 1/4-zip, a.k.a. the power of styling…

• …plus: Clothes that style themselves for you??

• And more unbeatable recon!

Let’s get to it —

We got a compelling comment from a reader on last week’s sletter, in which we argued that Rules for Getting Dressed are, in fact, Cool:

“I love fashion rules. The whole ‘wear what you love’ and ‘the most attractive thing you can wear is confidence’ advice just doesn’t cut it for me.” — Mary

It’s a counterintuitive take, and we’re inclined to agree. So many style bromides like these ones are unsatisfying, if not outright misleading.

We’ve argued, for instance, that “Be yourself” is bad advice for getting dressed. We’ve written about how people will tell you that “If you feel uncomfortable in a garment you will ipso facto look bad in it” — but this is a simplistic falsehood that sets you up to walk around with your pants looking like Centaur Haunches, among other pitfalls!

“Wear what you love” and “The most attractive thing you can wear is confidence” are, of course, big fat clichés. They contain inarguable truths, which is why people repeat them like gospel. And yet they don’t actually illuminate much about the art nor science of Putting S--t On, and that’s why you can hear them a million times and still… want some good style advice.

You are a very important judge of what you look good in. But the vexing truth is that — since clothes are a social language — other people are very important judges of what you look good in, too. What’s more, we are notoriously unreliable narrators, and unreliable perceivers, of our own appearances, vulnerable to the distorting effects of our own funky moods and of funky psychological phenomena such as pants dysmorphia, where trousers we could have sworn were enormous 3 years ago strike us as slim-fit today. Etc.

What these style-advice bromides do have to recommend them is that they can assist us in achieving a kind of oblivious happiness as relates to clothes. On one level, that’s great. We’re a pro-happiness newsletter, and there are instances where we’re pro-obliviousness, too.

But if you care about clothes, and if your aim is to be happy while also dressing well, then “Wear clothes that you love” and “Make sure you feel confident and the rest will sort itself out” might put some wind in your sails, but they aren’t gonna get you past the finish line. They might even lead you off-course.

You could say that love and confidence are necessary but insufficient conditions for sauce. Rules — even rules you wind up rejecting — can help you to figure out the rest.

Speaking of which: Now this is how you wear a 1/4 zip —

Read more

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

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here. Spyfriends just came through with recommendations for Puglia and Dublin. We need intel for Beijing, Mérida and Cannes!

Give a gift subscription

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

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The first time Instagram showed me a video from the semi-anonymous garment reviewer known as the Fabricateuralist, I was intrigued. A self-professed apparel expert who says he’s spent 20 years visiting factories and workshops, he’s won a following — or the fleeting favor of the For You algorithm, anyway — with a series of hands-on, point-by-point assessments of whether a given garment justifies its price tag.

People who call themselves things like “Fabricateuralist” tend to approach clothes with a different set of interests than I do, operating in a fine-tailoring idiom I respect but don’t get too excited by. There is a robust corner of the menswear internet devoted to this idiom, exemplified by sites like The Rake (“the modern voice of classic elegance”) and Gentleman’s Gazette (“website and shop for classic gentlemen”). You will enter this zone if you do a search for, e.g., “How to Fold a Pocket Square” or “King Felipe VI of Spain’s best bespoke suits.”

And yet, “quality” can be a maddeningly vague term, subject to debasement by under-informed enthusiasts and marketing con artists alike. So I’m always curious about anyone who promises genuine, insidery, nuts-and-bolts bywords of top-notch garment construction.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of this particular poster. His reviews start with an overhead shot of a gridded cutting mat, as though we’re in a patternmaker’s atelier. The garment under scrutiny flops onto the mat, its price flashes on screen, he names the brand and asks, “Is it worth it?”

To produce videos at the volume demanded by circa-2026 social media, the Fabricateuralist (who gives his name as Marc in interviews, declining to share his surname) has developed a standardized checklist he deploys in every review.

If he’s inspecting a shirt — a process he likes to illustrate with footage shot, impressively if incomprehensibly, through a microscope — he will add points for features like a high stitch-per-inch (S.P.I.) count, button shanks, split yokes, side-seam gussets, horizontally sewn bottom buttonholes, and so on.

He docks points for seams that show puckering, ditto underarm seams whose junctions do not form a perfectly aligned “+” — except in those cases where the sleeve has been purposely rotated forward using a Neapolitan tailoring technique he refers to as scarto manica.

Some of the Fabricateuralist’s criteria, like handwork, are intuitive. Many, like rotated sleeve-heads and split yokes, are much more arcane. For this reason, watching one of his videos might remind you of listening to an investment banker recite a barrage of dizzying lingo and acronyms for supposedly complex financial instruments whose meanings are the domain of putative specialists.

But it’s fully debatable what each factor on the Fabricateuralist’s checklist actually contributes to the worth of a shirt. For instance: Go check out your three favorite button ups. It’s likely that one, or all three, lacks button shanks, side-seam gussets and horizontally sewn bottom buttonholes. And it’s equally likely that you do not care, and that you have never once thought about whether your shirts have these things or not.

When you’ve appraised a shirt, consciously or otherwise, you’ve probably weighed things like fit, silhouette, hand-feel, drape, color, and comfort — considerations that the Fabricateuralist is prone to avoid in his videos, because they blur the line between objective and subjective in a way his review format isn’t equipped to handle.

Instead, he emphasizes visual markers of labor. “Every detail costs money,” he recently told an interviewer, “and the fewer details you find on a shirt, the cheaper it is to produce.” You might associate “fewer details” with clean design, and therefore avoid shirts with locker loops and contrast cuffs. But in his calculations, those details add to the objective worth of a shirt because they required extra steps during construction.

I don’t find this a satisfying measure of worth. And, even more unsatisfying, his formula has no room for an array of other important, thoroughly objective factors, such as the cost of fabric, the wages paid to garment workers, the import tariffs paid by designers, the rents and utilities paid by stockists, and so on.

Finding out those things would contribute to a far more meaningful understanding of a garment’s worth, but it would also require reporting.

All the same, confronted with one of these videos, you might find yourself at a crossroads: If you discover that one of your favorite shirts has misaligned underarm seams, should you re-assess its worth?

It’s tempting to just say, “of course not.” But the question is deceptively tricky, because when we receive new information about something we like, it can and does affect our feelings for that thing, all the time.

This helps explain why the Fabricateuralist strikes a chord, and why he has 86k followers on IG and 73k on TikTok. He frames his videos as neutral rundowns of objective metrics, but what he’s really doing is starting a provocatively messy argument about what constitutes “true” value.

I call it messy because he doesn’t always apply his criteria consistently and clearly, and because his conclusions are contestable. According to one gifted veteran patternmaker and sewer I consulted, misaligned underarm-seams can actually offer evidence of a higher grade of work than perfectly aligned ones, because it “means you are setting the sleeve after sewing the side seam, which is technically more difficult.” When the Fabricateuralist criticized a pair of Lemaire trousers because the bottoms of its belt loops weren’t tucked into the waistband, designer Antonio Ciongoli, of the brand 18 East, correctly pointed out in the comments that the trousers had Hollywood waists, meaning there was literally nowhere to tuck the bottoms of the belts loop into — a strange mistake for a would-be tailoring expert to make. The Fabricateuralist has since removed that video from his IG feed, though it’s still on his TikTok.

“Wise King Spyplane,” I can hear you saying. “This has been a fantastic sletter as usual. But there are tons of menswear posters basically putting out explainer content like this — why spend so much time talking about this guy?”

It’s a fair question. I don’t mean to single him out. Quite the contrary, his popularity reflects 3 broader phenomena that I find fascinating and worth contemplating.

1. Lots of people who don’t care much about clothes believe that expensive garments are a rip-off by definition. It flatters their biases to encounter “proof” that a $500 shirt “isn’t actually worth it.”

2. Expertise is in a crisis. We’ve reached the point where a well-packaged performance of expertise can do the trick: You can hit record on your phone, recite some quick, AI-summarized, half-understood research, and if you’re sufficiently skilled at navigating the specific conventions and incentives of a platform, the algorithm will reward you with views.

Your ideas might even trickle upwards to legacy institutions. An article published at The Cut in March posed the question, “Is Auralee Worth It?” and, in attempting to answer that, used several Fabricateuralist criteria, checking for stitch density, side gussets, button shanks, and underarm-seam alignment.

There are, to be clear, interesting things you can learn about garment construction from a Fabricateuralist video. But speaking generally, clothes have proven especially susceptible to ersatz expertise.

Which brings us to the third and, to me, most fascinating phenomenon:

3. Alluring clothes are full of ineffables. These include brand halos and other abstractions, such as nostalgia, status signaling, etc. Many people are content to pay some premium for these ineffables, but they don’t want to pay only for ineffables, because that would transform them from connoisseurs, enjoying rarefied artisan products, into marks, forking over good money for undiluted snake oil.

Instead, they want a garment’s ineffables to coexist with materially grounded excellence. Certain clothes are provably better-made than others. Who wouldn’t want to wear those?

Adding to the mindf--k, though, is the fact that good craftsmanship can indeed produce materially observable effects, like fit, drape, and durability, but it can also yield an aura of “intentionality,” an appearance of “elegance” … in other words, good craftsmanship can produce its own ineffables!

Anyone who claims they can machete through this material~semiotic jungle with authority stands a good chance of finding a following.

To sharpen my own machete, the other day I called up the Big Homie Spyfriend Keith Henry, of the great Toronto line Henry’s. Keith is a self-taught designer, patternmaker, cutter & sewer. He has a deep knowledge of 20th century workwear and militaria, and he keeps up on the construction techniques of top-tier contemporary lines like Comoli, Margaret Howell, Evan Kinori, and Man-tle.

Keith wouldn’t call himself an expert, but I will, because he’s spent years hunched over cutting tables and sewing machines, making sick clothes and amassing hands-on expertise.

Crucially, Keith also has great taste, and is opinionated yet extremely chill. So I wanted to know what he thinks about side gussets, underarm-seam alignment, S.P.I., and what makes a garment “worth it.”

For starters, he helped me put stiches-per-inch in perspective. A higher S.P.I. does tend to “show a higher level of skill and care on the garment,” Keith said. “With something more mass-produced, you’ll see lower stitch density, whereas greats like Margaret Howell talk about, like, ‘beautiful close stitching.’ It comes from when everything was hand-sewn back in the day. Stitches that are wide and loose don’t look as cared about, but really close stitches look more professional and crisp.”

He noted, however, that different materials warrant different S.P.I.s. “Denim tends to have a wider stitch per inch,” Keith said, “while dress shirts have closer stitches per inch.” Some particularly fine fabrics won’t sew well at very high stitch-densities and will instead look terrible. So it’s a mistake to think that higher stitch-density necessarily equals higher quality. “A tighter stitch might hold better, but it’s not really about durability,” Keith said. “Workwear generally isn’t sewn as close as a dress shirt, because a high stitch-per-inch is more of an elegance thing.”

He also sent me pictures of a Comoli shirt he owns, above, whose shoulder construction and thin, gusset-free side-seams he admires. “There are brands like Niceness that do a hand-sewn gusset, and it’s cool, but it’s not for me,” he said, adding that there’s zero structural need for a side gusset.

Similarly, while it’s technically easier for un-shanked buttons to come loose, he explained, he sees “no real need for a button shank unless you’re working with really thick materials.”

Keith brought up labor costs, too: “You gotta keep in mind that if the maker is paid by the garment” — in a wage-theft arrangement known as piece rates — “they’re not gonna pay as much attention as if they were paid by the hour.”

Also? “I have vintage shirts where the underarm alignments are absolutely atrocious,” he said, “and I’ve never noticed.”

This led to his overarching point, which was that “a shirt should feel comfortable on the body and make you feel and look good — and that’s all it needs to do. Tailoring is a punishing world of rules and regulations. Knowing rules is cool, but sometimes I don’t agree with them, and I just think it looks funky and weird. Ultimately I go off what I feel is visually pleasing.”

I can’t think of a better way to put it. We are a pro-rules newsletter, and we believe that knowing more about the ins & outs of construction can help you deepen your appreciation of a piece. But there’s something irreducibly alchemical to our relationship to clothes, and to our sense of their true worth. Holding a ruler to your shirts and counting up the stitches is never gonna capture that.

P📐E⚖️A📊C🧵E✨ til next time,

— J & E

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Every Mother’s Day, I (Erin) share the picture above on IG, and it does numbers. Everyone — the moms and the child-free, like me — gets a kick out of it. I hope you do, too.

Speaking of moms: Last fall I published a smash-hit Guide to Cool Mom Style, where I interviewed 5 friends of mine who dress great, and happen to be moms. They told me about how having a kid changed their style, the clothes that made them feel like themselves, and calling bulls--t on the pressure to “bounce back” & “mom” as an aesthetic generally… It’s a great sletter to gift:

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In today’s Concorde:

• A sick workwear-inspired line for women that everyone has been sleeping on just dropped at one of our favorite shops

• Why the coolest designers are all (still) coming out of Belgium

• Intel on walkable-yet-chic Mary Janes — that aren’t Nike Air Rifts — as requested by a new-mom friend of mine but rockable by anyone cool. Plus, non-corny knitted ballet flats

• A fantastic poem to send to your mother (or any mother you love)

• An under-the-radar NYC woodworker making great pieces whose vibey “functional craft” style is in conversation with one of my all-time favorite woodworkers (what, you don’t have one?)

Let’s get to it —

A couple weeks ago I was out to dinner with my friend Dana, who had a baby last year and is currently settling back into her big Boss Lady job after what I deem to have been a criminally short maternity leave. She wanted to treat her postpartum body right and appease her podiatrist, so she asked me for some recon on walkable Mary Janes.

The catch, she said — after asking me to be her “shoe angel” — was that they needed to look stylish and pulled-together enough for meetings with the honchos at work. Do you have any ideas for me? she asked.

Two sprang to mind that I, a woman who also enjoys the marriage of comfort and style, could personally vouch for. I found some great ortho-adjacent ballet flats, too:

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

Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet is here. Spyfriends just came through with recommendations for Puglia and Dublin. We need intel for Beijing, Mérida and Cannes!!

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

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— Jonah & Erin

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In today’s Plane we’ve got:

• A new made-in-NYC line designing clothes from beautiful fabrics for men & women under the radar

• A great new documentary about GORPY death-drive excellence

• Very clean walking shoes from a Tokyo artisan-swag-orthopedics (!) footwear brand whose newest release sold out instantaneously and yet, in a paradox, people are still sleeping on them

But first —

Rules get a bad rap. On one level: Of course they do. You know who likes rules? Hall monitors. And who disobeys rules? Swaggy renegades. When you frame it like this, the implication is clear: Rules are for pedants… scolds… NPCs…

You can see a positive expression of the cultural aversion to rules in the wonderful phrase “Let ‘em cook.” In this construction, swaggy renegades = chefs freaking it at the stovetop. Whereas hidebound rule enforcers = no-imagination, no-sauce dullards who do not cook and, what’s worse, try to prevent others from cooking, too.

When it comes to clothes, the hall monitors (restaurant inspectors?) can be especially obnoxious: “Wearing black with navy? Hmmm you’re in trouble, sir.”

And yet!

While I (Jonah) absolutely roll my eyes at all kinds of so-called rules for dressing, as a general concept, I love and am fascinated by Rules.

This is a topic I’ve touched on a few times over the years. I’ve written, for instance, about the rules that circulate among extremely judgmental in-groups, like cyclists, surfers, and skaters — rules that describe arcane standards of excellence, and establish the boundaries between those who are part of a given community and those who are outside of it.

Not unrelatedly, I’ve also written about how Erin and I are inclined to salute anyone who Lives By a Code. If you insist that the drawstrings on drawstring pants should always hang inside the pants, and that they look goofy when they dangle outside the pants, I can’t say that I care quite as much as you do, but brother, I respect your conviction. If you insist that a jacket that has epaulets or diagonal non-hand pockets would look much less stupid without them, you’re speaking my language.

Last week I got to thinking about rules once again, when we published a sletter about Core Tenets of Good Design as put forth by Jasper Morrison, a revered industrial designer. Morrison draws clear lines between Right and Wrong, not only for himself but for other designers, too.

A big part of why I like that is because, doctrinaire or no, it reflects a smart, strong POV. And yes, Blackbird Spyplane is a pro-nuance publication, but amid all the mystification and squishy relativity of modern life, we believe that a smart, strong POV is something to celebrate, especially in a designer. And celebrating it doesn’t mean you can’t argue with it, too.

So what does this have to do with you, a wearer of cool clothes?

As an outfit assembler, you engage in an act of design daily: You “design” a look, that is, every time you get dressed. And while you might get dressed intuitively, you also might do so with reference to some Rules of Harmonious Dressing that you apply to yourself and to others.

I may find your rules onerous, stifling or inane. But here’s the thing: I might also find them revelatory. Even if I disagree with them, your rules might help me focus my attention on some dynamic, at play in my own outfits, that I never considered.

To illustrate this with a well-known Dressing Rule that is correct in ~99.9% of cases:

• Let’s say that you never button the bottom button of your suit jackets, and you insist that people who do button the bottom buttons of their suit jackets look bad.

• And let’s say I have always buttoned the bottom button of my suit jackets because, without giving it very much thought, I just kind of assumed it made me look that much more put-together.

But then you tell me about your Rule. And suddenly my attention is directed somewhere it wasn’t previously. A chunk of my outfit that was previously opaque, and perhaps even functionally invisible to me, snaps into focus. Now I’m thinking about how the fully buttoned jacket interacts unpleasantly with my hips when I walk; how the fabric folds, strains and/or bunches up when I sit down; about how rakish I would look if I unbuttoned the bottom button; etc.

Like the interiors expert who steps into a room armed with a set of principles, shifts a chair from one corner to another, and immediately, intelligibly improves the atmosphere, the Dressing Rules Espouser can help you to see your own outfits more clearly — and improve your understanding of an outfit’s “flow.”

It’s an obvious truth, and yet the kind that hides so effectively in plain sight that it can feel epiphanic. I liked the room fine the way it was before. I was ignorant of its infelicity, even if on some level my experience of the room was worsened by that infelicity.

Now my eyes are open. I might decide I can move the chair back if I nudge the coffee table next to it and place a large rug underneath both. Before, I wouldn’t have thought about any of that s--t. My relationship to the room has gone from arbitrary to considered. And I have a rule to thank.

Next up —

Here’s a guy making very handsome clothes in NYC from beautiful natural fabrics, and very few people are checking for him: He has 6,000 IG followers as of the time of this writing, and mostly sells his pieces — men’s, women’s & unisex — direct.

But he’s on the radar of some other designers and cool shops we respect, making him a perfect…

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

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

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

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

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Is there a more perfectly, mythically American way to travel than The Road Trip?

You’ve got The Car… a supposed instrument of unbridled freedom that, despite its genuinely liberatory powers, is also an isolating, antisocial, crazymaking prison-cell on wheels that poisons our mother, Gaia.

You’ve got The Open Road… a miraculous network of highways crisscrossing the nation, hugging its coastlines, encircling its cities, built at the behest of the automobile and fossil-fuel industries at the expense of walkability, good mass transit, and strong civic bonds.

You’ve got The Gas Station… a cursed Temple of the Petrodollar where you can nonetheless enjoy Flamin’ Hot Limón Doritos, Good Humor Cookies & Creme Ice Cream bars, and dope crappy sunglasses.

But add up the pros and the many, many cons, and damn it if the Road Trip doesn’t remain a romantic, deeply alluring way to hurtle yourself through time & space.

Back when Erin and I (Jonah) still lived in New York, we planned numerous vacations around driving different chunks of unreal Southwestern desert or the justifiably legendary coastal Highway 1. A few weeks ago, feeling nostalgic for those trips, we decided to road trip it north from Oakland, CA, up into beautiful British Columbia.

We plotted a route that would tie together many Pacific Northwest marvels, including:

• gargantuan redwoods;

• untamed Pacific Ocean panoramas;

• a little-known riverfront oasis in southern Oregon we first stumbled on 15 years ago;

• an undersung stretch of coastline that rivals Big Sur in rugged beauty;

• delicious food and more in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver;

• the greatest clothing shop in the world, which just got even greater;

• a long, gorgeous ferry ride to a remote corner of Canada that so many homies told us was fire that we knew it was time to visit — and it did not disappoint, featuring not only 3 of the best meals we’ve eaten in recent memory, but also an inspiringly chill dude and, for good measure, the least cynical place on Earth.

Along the way we saw great friends, made new ones, and took many nature baths. It was a trip, in other words, that honored our love of people, food, trees, birds, and very good clothes. The cost of admission was hours upon hours of sitting in a car.

Our itinerary is easily replicable, and modifiable as needed. We suggest you read this post in a web browser by clicking here. Enjoy!

For this trip, we set an alarm for 5 a.m. and were on the road from Oakland before sunrise. If you want to fit in some extra splendor to this trip up top, spend a few nights on the Sonoma coast, in and around the amazing…

Sea Ranch, CA

Our fondness for this 10-mile stretch of coast is no secret. It was founded in the mid-1960s according to a strict set of constraints, architectural and otherwise, meant to honor the landscape’s woolly natural beauty. There’s a bluff trail, a lodge, you can rent very special houses, it’s ~3 hours north of the Bay, and the drive there is gorgeous.

There are beaucoup tips for Sea Ranch, and some gems due north of it, from us and Spyfriends alike in the Travel Chat, here.

From Sea Ranch, you continue north on Highway 1, getting drunk off ocean vistas as you wind your way through Mendocino and into Humboldt County. There, you curve inland and link up with Highway 101 and the itinerary we took this time around.

On the 101 north, our pulses quickened when we spotted signs for…

Avenue of the Giants

Our cameras didn’t do the giants justice in the least, so I’m using an old postcard (above) to illustrate them, and leaving the rest to your imagination. This is a 31-mile, two-lane road that effectively parallels the 101, but bisects an epic, enormous, old-growth redwood forest. We stopped at various spots for nature walks, there’s some vibey little towns with funky diners and thrift stores, and if it was late summer, we could have gotten homemade honor-system blackberry popsicles at this farmstand. A strong sense of The Eternal prevails throughout. Platonic-ideal American Road Trip s--t.

Hwy 1 and the 101 are one & the same here. They led us back out to the Pacific, and after a picnic lunch at Clam Beach, just north of McKinleyville, it wasn’t long until we rolled into southern Oregon, where we checked in for a couple nights at one of most special & restful places we’ve ever stayed.

Thanks to its relative remoteness, it isn’t on a ton of people’s radars…

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This is the new ugly shoe.

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

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Erin back with you once again. In today’s Concorde we’ve got:

• Summery cotton knits: tees, tanks, shorts & dresses

• I talk to a single maker who crafts clothing, bags and hats — inspired by his hometown’s fishing trade — out of nothing but hard-wearing waxed cotton

• A trove of vintage woven straw bags

• A Slapper Swarm of new (and newish) good reads, including a zine for people who care about clothes and the people who make them; a photo book with inspired workwear looks; and a fantastic, very short novel…

Let’s get to it —

What is it about waxed cotton I find so magnetic? My hands are drawn to its paradoxically slick grip. Manhandle it, and you create a constellation of beautiful creases in the fabric. Color-wise, the cotton can appear fully drenched, yet as radiant as stained glass.

Also? It’s a durable, proto-“technical” material that’s the result not of advanced polymer chemistry but of bees and flowers linking & building. I appreciate waxed cotton’s tough utility, which, for centuries, has made it a great choice for gear — camping tents, ship sails, military uniforms, etc. — but never once at the expense of flyness.

This isn’t the first time I’ve waxed poetic. And I was psyched to tap in recently with an under-the-radar designer who makes everything from fine dry wax cotton. In his hands, that humbly miraculous material is transformed into cute hats in snappy colors, clever bags and, for the first time this season, ready-to-wear clothes:

Read more

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

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

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

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

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There’s been a Design Theme underlying the Plane this week without our intending it….

Yesterday we published an intel-rich report from Milan design week, in which Spyfriend and MillerKnoll creative director Kelsey Keith shared fantastic tips for things to do, see, eat and drink in Milan — not just during the annual, increasingly swarmed Salone del Mobile furniture fair, but year-round.

In Tuesday’s sletter we took a detailed look at the hotly contested yet symbiotic relationship between Ornament and Utility when it comes to design, and we teased out some implications for Cool Clothes…

And today we’re kicking things off with 3 gems for the home in which ornament and utility coexist harmoniously, in an appealingly funky, G.O.O.D. G.E.R.M.S. kind of way.

One of these home-goods creations is a new, just-released design from a one-man maker we’ve been shouting out since Spyplane Year One. The other two come from what we are confident in naming one of the Top 5 Most Delightful Shops in the World.

Also? We’ve got:

• A line responsible for a wealth of great footwear that is, finally, getting easier to cop…

• Fantastic new zip hoodies with a cut like none other on the market …

• Visionary new music for the weekend from a reigning Spyplane Chune Genius…

Let’s get to it!

Firstly…

Imagine envibening your kitchen counter or dining-room table with one of these:

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We just dropped the smash-hit 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.

The Home Goods Index is a compendium of house-enhancing heat including lamps, ceramics, rugs and furniture.

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here. Spyfriends just came through with recs for Albania, New Orleans and Manchester.

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

— Jonah & Erin

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It goes without saying that we care a ton about design here at Blackbird Spyplane. Yesterday’s sletter was about the decades-spanning war between Ornament and Utility, and what it has to tell us about the state of Cool Clothes today.

As it happens, hordes of design wizards, experts, swag lords and hangers-on descended on Milan last week for the annual, increasingly buzzy Salone del Mobile furniture fair.

We were not present among these hordes. But Erin used to hit up the Salone every spring when she worked with Apple’s Industrial Design team. Over the past few years she’s been amazed to see it steadily transform from a bustling industry trade show to what we’ve called the Coachella of Chairs.

It’s still a bustling trade show… but interwoven with an ever-expanding maze of mind-numbing see-and-be-seen “content opportunities.” Luxury brands fly out an internazionale cabal of clout demons. You can’t throw an 🤌 Alessi cucchiaio 🤌 without hitting a torched “activation.”

Amid it all, though? The Salone remains powerful, and features a ton of cool stuff, and as a result, many people we love and admire show up.

Last year, Erin asked 5 of our favorite industrial designers to share the best things they saw.

This year, MillerKnoll creative director and Big Homie Spyfriend Kelsey Keith (pictured in the rooftop garden below left) kindly offered to bless us with an Intel-Rich, Real Ones-certified Insider’s Report on Cool Things to See, Do & Eat in Milan — and not just during the design fair, but any time you visit.

Kelsey, who writes the design newsletter Ground Condition, came through with a wealth of tips. This Milan guide is an exclusive for our Classified-Tier Subscribers.

Enjoy!

For ease of use:

A 🍝 indicates a great food spot
A 🍸 indicates a great bar
A 💶 indicates a great shop
A 🎨 indicates a great museum or gallery

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We just dropped the smash-hit 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.

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

— Jonah & Erin

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A few weeks ago, the dudes behind the NYC clothing line Small Talk Studio went on Throwing Fits. Toward the end of the conversation, they gave a candid answer to a thorny question: “What are you sick of in menswear right now?”

Small Talk, a.k.a. Nick Williams and Phil Ayers, design and produce their clothes in New York’s garment district. The line feels like a product of contemporary NYC in more philosophical ways, too. Their vision is expansive enough to allow for subtle, classically indebted details, like a slight cowboy curve on the hand-pockets of a no-nonsense zip jacket, alongside bolder, you might even say sluttier, flourishes, like lace-crochet vents aerating the upper thighs of split-seam short-shorts. They use drapey brown wool gabardine here, lime-green linen-rayon mesh there. They’ll style a lordly double-breasted linen suit with a hot-pink cap modeled on Times Square gift shop junk. Walk past any number of quirked-up downtown crews and these are the sorts of signifiers you’re likely to see in play.

Small Talk are interested, across it all, in scrambling together the “refined” and the “tasteless.”

So I understood where Nick was coming from when he replied that, when it comes to menswear these days, he’s sick of too much refinement, and wants more tastelessness. He lamented what he called “this residual, quiet-luxury narrowing of people’s conception of what looks good. I feel like a couple years ago, people were a lot freer and looser with how they were getting dressed,” whereas now they’re drawn to “stuff that’s a lot more monochromatic and minimal.”

“I definitely look up to some of those brands,” he said. “There’s things that are great achievements in fabric development or silhouette and feel great to put on.” But he didn’t like seeing a pared-down aesthetic become dominant to what felt like the exclusion of other, wilder approaches to style. He praised the brilliant cacophony of New York’s SC103, whose designers work with “a much freer, more expansive template, that doesn’t have as many codes,” he said. “Whether I’m wearing it or not, it’s exciting to see.”

Which brands was Nick thinking of? I haven’t called him up to ask. But several may readily occur to you as representative of the aesthetic he’s referring to, among them designers whose clothes Erin and I love, wear, and write about a lot, e.g., Lemaire, James Coward, Lauren Manoogian and Comoli. In addition to making excellent, fabric-forward pieces that broadly fit the muted / minimalist bill, these lines have lately become more popular than ever, inspiring copycats and eating up enough of the “cool clothes” discourse that they can feel not simply ascendant but (in our little slice of the universe, anyway) hegemonic.

My own excitement about these clothes derives from the lived experience of rocking them for years, talking to the designers behind them about how they make them and, most importantly, feeling good when I wear them. So for me the unprecedentedly loud buzz around them — positive, negative, imitative, aggrieved — can feel strangely disconnected from the garments themselves. And I can imagine that, if you care a lot about clothes but “muted” isn’t your thing, then the buzz could feel annoying… possibly oppressive… or at the very least boring.

I bring this all up because Small Talk has been one of our favorite lines since before they started designing their own clothes, when their stock-in-trade was hand-drawn customs— and because Nick was pointing to a broader shift in values across the Cool Clothes Landscape that we’ve been trying to suss out ourselves.

Back in February, we wrote about the transition from a recent era marked by “a prevailing interest in what’s on the cloth” into our current era, marked by an emphasis on what’s in the cloth. That’s one, granular way to make sense of the swing from, e.g., logomania, bright colors, tie-dye, graphic tees and lavishly embroidered shirts (which ruled from roughly 2017-2023) to unadorned, utilitarian-minded garments cut from natural fibers knit and woven in arcane ways (anno regni 2023-present).

But a great little book just came out that provides another, much bigger-picture way to understand this swing, and why it matters.

Going back at least as far as the Arts & Crafts movement of the 1850s, there’s been a war in design between champions of Ornament and champions of Utility, with one periodically rising up to repudiate the other.

You may yourself be a hardliner, or you may find your allegiance distributed across both camps, valuing utility in design, but stoked on some ornament for ornament’s sake, too.

It’s an engrossing debate either way, because its combatants have very different, equally impassioned answers to a fundamental question the rest of us don’t always think very clearly about, if we think about it at all: What Should Good Design Do?

The new book is The Unimportance of Form and Other Arguments…, a collection of short, snappy writings by the immensely influential British industrial-design GOAT Jasper Morrison.

It was published by Apartamento and edited by industrial designer and Spyfriend Sina Sohrab, who kindly sent us a copy. I grabbed it before Erin did, and read it in three sittings, cerebellum crackling.

Lots of gifted designers, like so many other creative people, aren’t great at talking in especially illuminating language about what they do. But some, like Morrison, are gifted communicators, too. Since their métier is “the made world” itself, they can help us better understand not only their work but the garments we wear, objects we live with, and spaces we move through more generally.

Morrison, by his own description, “declared war on ornament” at the start of his career. People have called him a Minimalist, but while he appreciates “the visual economy of Minimalism,” as he put it in 1992, “I’ve always denied that label.” He loves curves and “strange” details, for instance, and “a curve is not Minimal, because a straight line is more easy to achieve,” and “a strange detail is not Minimal, because it’s an addition to what is more minimal. Minimalism is much too hard-edged to be applied to useful objects.”

He prefers a term along the lines of “simplism,” which reflects his belief that “simple things are much easier to live with,” “communicate their purpose more easily,” and “tend to have a character and charm which complicated things don’t have.”

A designer shouldn’t go to the trouble of designing a door handle, Morrison argues, if it “doesn’t in some way simplify the process of opening a door.”

Morrison’s design thinking was born in a context of scarcity. He graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in the 1980s, and had to figure out how to pursue industrial design in “Thatcher’s rapidly deindustrialising Britain,” as Sina writes.

He tackled that problem with youthful optimism, recombining existing industrial processes and products in a way someone today might call “hacking.”

Morrison contracted with a laundry-basket factory to help him make chairs. He glimpsed a stack of terracotta flowerpots in a hardware-store window and came up with his “Flowerpot Table.” He tucked two sets of swivel-chair legs into either end of a long, slender air-conditioning duct to form a coat rack. Inspired by Duchamp’s Readymades and Breuer’s bent tubular steel, he fashioned a table out of bicycle handlebars, a diagonal slab of wood, and a circular tray:

Rather than kitsch, “upcycled” novelties, these early creations have an appeal that outshines any gimmickiness. Even as Morrison’s designs and his interest in “strange details” grew more refined, he was never a dullard. Which comes in handy when you want not only to design things, but to devise and proselytize for fundamental tenets, like he did.

Morrison defines design, crisply, as “an equation for getting more from objects.” He notes that usefulness is what “separates design from art.” But for a piece of design to be good, he adds, it must also “provoke desire,” the “single most important ingredient in the creative mind,” because “it is in satisfying this desire that we are able to perfect a design or harmonize a structure.” He suspects that “it must be very similar designing hats, shoes, and clothes. Just as a painter tries to reinterpret what he sees, a designer attempts to reshape his desires.”

Elsewhere, in a similar register, Morrison describes design as the “pursuit of rare exuberance brought on by the strange completeness of a moment or place.”

How fantastic is that! He believes a good designer should remain sensitive not just to the specific material form of a given object but also to the “quality of atmosphere” that the object enmeshes within and contributes to. To that end, Morrison has little interest in “innovatory design.” He’s argued that materials should be used in their “self-colour” whenever possible, because “there are very few colours for a given material that will not destroy its integrity.” His ideal objects are the often-anonymous kinds “that came to exist through genuine utilistic development.”

In his own work, he’s aspired to eliminate not only the distracting effects of authorial ego but the “slightest hint of conscious design” itself. One of Morrison’s proudest achievements was to simply remove travel-company stickers from the window of a bus-station café in Graz, Austria, so passengers could enjoy the café free from anxiety that their bus was about to pull off without them being able to see it. With this project, “the driving force of our thinking was the human experience of the situation.”

That aliveness to presence, strangeness and human experience underscores the fact that while Morrison values simplicity, he isn’t an ascetic. He’s attuned to our emotional relationships to things, to the texture of a vibrant social fabric, to the vital services of “winemakers, cheesemakers, and restaurants.” He salutes “the poetry of thought involved in creating a useful thing,” and how that poetry “lives on in the use of it.”

So what’s poetry, and what’s “mere” ornament?

This brings us to Morrison’s bête noir. Today there’s a widespread appreciation — which Erin and I share, even if we don’t necessarily want the stuff in our house — for the geometric, squiggly, colorful, ultrawhimsical 1980s design of the Milan-based Memphis Group.

Morrison loathed it from the start.

Ditto flashy ‘80s spaces like Café Costes, Phillipe Starck’s buzzy, coked-up-proto-Saved-by-the-Bell-looking Paris bar, and what Morrison calls “grotesque postmodern furniture” coming out of America at the time. He criticized the work of Memphis and its broader cohort as “highly decorative and unambitious,” embodying a “reckless uselessness.”

Uselessness, for Morrison, is a grave sin. And “decorative objects are useless,” he writes, “because they seek to disguise their own purpose, pretending to be something they are not.” He abhors “dishonesty” in design, and Memphis was Exhibit A.

“Long live the practical people and down with decorators,” he wrote in 1993. Rather than get on board with postmodernism’s outright rejection of modernism, Morrison wanted to find ways to reinvigorate what he saw as the inherently honest principles of modernist design.

He was inspired in his thinking by the pioneering, Eurocentric, sexually deviant Czech-Austrian architect Adolf Loos, whose landmark 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” rejected the decorative excesses of Art Nouveau. In prose that is very funny, even as it captures its author’s baldly racist and elitist attitudes, Loos argued that “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects” and that “ornament does not heighten the joy in life of any cultivated person.”

Here in 2026, Loos’s basic framing still holds sway. We’re inclined to read mutedness and subtlety as dignified, cultivated, evolved. Loudness and ornament, by contrast, are gauche, unrefined, stunted.

Also — while this isn’t how Morrison ever talks about design — there is obvious overwhelming potential for a certain kind of gendered thinking here, casting good design as a serious, utilitarian, masculine pursuit, and implicitly dismissing mere ornamentation (embroidery, quilting, filigree, color, etc.) as zesty, frivolous, and feminine.

But the divide between utility and ornament turns out to be an impossible one to keep from collapsing in on itself. And over the years, a long line of perfectly cultivated designers have explored strategies of intentional collapse. A piece of art on a restaurant wall can improve that room’s atmosphere — why shouldn’t the staircase banister at that restaurant be art, too? Why shouldn’t a mirror-frame ripple? Why shouldn’t a designer get a little Auntwave with it and render something as prosaic as a cord cover in electric-blue organza?

I don’t think this weakens Morrison’s arguments. Quite the contrary, the Quest for Purity is almost always more about establishing and trying to adhere to a firm set of values than it is about actually realizing the supposedly perfect state those values point toward.

Morrison is talking, like any good prescriptivist, about ideals — breaking design down to component principles, developing a code amid all the squishiness, and sticking to it. You can disagree, you can argue, you can call it doctrinaire. But another way of describing this is “having a strong perspective.” And that’s what you want in a designer.

What does this have to tell us about the current moment in Cool Clothes?

42 years after Morrison declared war on ornament, and 118 years after Loos did the same in “Ornament & Crime,” the war between ornament and utility is still raging. When it comes to clothes, this helps us contextualize the recent menswear pivot from cool, ostentatiously decorative lines like Kapital, Online Ceramics, and Bode to cool, rigorously restrained ones like Margaret Howell, Evan Kinori, Auralee, and Man-tle.

And if the ornament / utility binary wobbles when you’re talking about industrial design, the wobble is seismic in the case of clothes. After all, once you get past the rudiments of “protection against the elements,” clothing’s primary function is aesthetic.

We want different things from a great pair of pants than we do from a great coffee maker. We want the coffee maker to make good coffee with a minimum of hassle while beautifying our countertop. We want the pants to beautify us.

This connects to another important distinction, between the public and the private. It would be ridiculous to carry around our appliances to announce our discernment and broadcast our flattering tribal affiliations, but we do use garments for those purposes.

Is an extravagantly roomy drop-shoulder sleeve functional, because it allows for ease of movement, or ornamental, because it creates a useless yet pleasing sculptural form? Is that crocheted insert on the Small Talk shorts decorative Sexy Boi s--t? Or is it a utilitarian ventilating feature, perfect for a hot summer night cycling across the Manhattan Bridge while the Q rattles beside you?

That’s a physical-world use-case. Increasingly, though, the social internet has moved the site of much clothes-rocking to IG and TikTok feeds, Discord servers and other virtual spaces. In response to this reality-warping de-materialization, we’ve seen a contravening emphasis on material surge up — a desire for things that exemplify their physical (as opposed to symbolic) thingness in the extreme. A few years ago there was a bizarre microtrend where cryptocurrency collectors became obsessed with amassing ultra-dense, ultra-heavy tungsten cubes. Does some similar impulse underlie my appreciation for an ultra-dense cotton?

There’s another crucial set of concerns at play here, which Morrison didn’t begin to grapple with until later in his career: obsolescence and waste. In 1993 he passingly invoked “the ecological argument” for good design, bemoaning products with “disposability designed into them.” In the early 2000s, he observed that “marketing is often the motor of unnecessary change, replacing satisfactory products with products which may be less efficient but which are easier to sell.” As a result, “the experience of living with an object seems to have cheapened.”

Morrison worried that even if designers proceed “with the best intentions,” they are, “in a way, just glamorising the ownership of things.” And he argued that, with the rise of globalism, “we are losing the sense and meaning of local activity, of the carpenter who makes something for his neighbour.” The remedy he suggested was “doing less things but doing them better, and with a care for detail.”

“Fewer better things” has by now become a familiar mantra for the conscientious clothes-rocker, not to mention the savvy marketer. Designers and customers seek physical durability and aesthetic durability. And a huge part of an understated garment’s promise is that it will be, if not trend-proof, far more resilient to obsolescence than a garment marked by bold colors, crazy graphics, elaborate patterns…

Does resilience to obsolescence mean stasis? How can design keep evolving to meet the moment without adding to kilotons of industrial waste, abetting the dark prerogatives of marketing departments, and slipping into empty novelty?

The seams on Levi’s 501s are where they are. The seams on Carhartt Detroits are where they are. We like them there. Yet some of us wonder: Why are they there? Do they have to be? What revelatory delight — and what unholy hell — might we unleash if we move them elsewhere? It’s “just clothes,” and the stakes are enormous.

Morrison, for his part, acknowledges that we require “something more than simple use” from a great design, insisting on “an extra quality of presence,” too. He eventually theorized this as “Super Normal.” But the moment you move past pure, unadorned functionalism and open the door to an abstraction like “presence,” you usher in the ineffable, the artistic, and the useless.

I see that as a good thing. Shut the door entirely and the room grows airless. But take the door off the hinges and chaos reigns.

So maybe war is the wrong metaphor. Maybe a better way to think about ornament and function is that they feed off of each other in a fascinating, productive, unending tension. At any given moment, more of us will find ourselves drawn to one than the other. But without both, the whole thing falls flat.

Peace til next time,

— J & E

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