This is the new ugly shoe.

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

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.

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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:

Read more

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

Read more

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.

Our Cool Mom Style Guide lives here.

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.

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L.A. … it’s one of the truly great cities … and it’s in the middle of a prolonged mojo downswing.

That’s the report we’ve gotten in conversations with any number of friends of ours who live there, anyway. Part of it is aftershocks from the fires… Part of it is hard times in the film & TV industry… But the vibes are off, and morale is low. Some friends of ours have moved. Others tell us they’re thinking about it.

But we love L.A. and always will. Untold cool people live there, and from a specifically Spyplane POV, some of the best independent designers, artists and boutiques call the city home, too. Some of them deny there’s anything off with the vibes in town at all. Just yesterday here in the East Bay we saw Phillip Proyce of L.A.’s Lady White Co., who was in town visiting for the weekend. He told us he feels zero mojo downswing in L.A. whatsoever: he’s too busy remodeling LW-C’s Hyperion flagship shop, due to open this August.

We just published our smash hit Ultimate Guide to the Bay Area, and one very sick thing about the Bay we didn’t mention is that it’s a mere 6-hour drive or 1-hour flight to Los Angeles.

I (Erin) made the OAK-BUR round trip recently for studio visits with a couple excellent under-the-radar L.A. fashion and furniture designers I admire, and to dig up some recon for you on:

• home goods and functional frivolities

• sick made-in-L.A. furniture

• vintage clothes and under-the-radar makers

• & more!

Let’s get to it —

In the pantheon of Concorde Visionaries I’ve had the honor of interviewing, there’s SC103, Eckhaus Latta and Julia Heuer.

My No. 1 reason for this L.A. trip was a chance to tap in with another singular designer, whose talents span both clothing and some ingenious home goods:

Read more

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.

— Jonah & Erin

Subscribe now

Spyplane back once again. Today we’ve got:

• Rare & excellent underwear returns, comet-like

• A studio visit with one of earth’s best small lines, whose spring pieces are dropping now, and if you are, like, “Spyplane, how do I dress tight when it’s hot out?” this collection contains several answers

• Chill ultrathin $130 sandals made in Vermont

• Cheeky Adult Contemporary Musical Dreamscapes

• And more!

Let’s get to it —

We spend 99.999% of our time here at the sletter celebrating the artisanal & the high-craft. But that doesn’t mean we deny the potential for encounters with poetry in mass-produced contexts.

Case in point: Doritos are disgusting. But a single Dorito? Friends, it’s an incredible thing.

Earlier this month I (Jonah) did a boyz weekend with a couple friends up on the Sonoma coast. We hiked, schvitzed, swam, cooked, played Dominoes, ate magic mushies on the beach, got sunburned, smoked perfectly mid Mendocino pre-rolls, and watched Final Destination Bloodlines. Along the way, we consecrated these “Dudes Kicking Back with the Fellas” energies with a well-timed gas-station-junk-food pit stop — and part of the haul a bag of the first “Flamin’ Hot” Lime Doritos I’ve ever tasted.

I avoid eating this kind of thing, not because I have tons of self-control but because I have very little. I’ve learned to set myself overly rigid limits, otherwise my defenses will collapse and I will regret the crimes I commit against myself. In this case, I vowed to cap it at a spartan 4 chips, spread across an hour of driving.

The benefits were twofold: 1) I didn’t feel horrible, and 2) rather than just nod off into a gorge-mode fugue state, I could lock into the delightful feats of engineering the chips embodied. The almost crystalline thinness? The tantalizingly precise “fracture force” of the chip under my teeth? Millions of dollars of PepsiCo R&D probably went into calibrating that, ditto the ratio of fake-lime citric-acid to sweet-piquant-umami red MSG dust carpeting. Marvelous.

I am not suggesting you eat this garbage. It will almost certainly taste worse outside the specific scenario of coastal Highway 1 in a psilocybin afterglow with the broskis. But I do want to acknowledge that not all garbage is created equal, and that those 4 chips were the kind of s--t to make a man contemplate the razor’s edge between restraint and abandon, euphoria and ruin. To ask himself, “Is it possible to spend more time perched on the euphoric side of that divide? Can I get in and out of the casino in the black, again and again, without the house taking all my money and ruining my life?”

It’s tempting to consider. But I think the opposite is true: that any state of euphoria worth the name is in fact a function of extreme rarity, and that any attempts to make it routine, as opposed to ritualized, are folly, guaranteed to lead to disappointment & worse.

Sick clothes, however, are of a different nature. It’s undeniably beautiful to mark our experiences of various Significant Life Moments by wearing special garments, yes. But beyond that, there’s no real downside as I see it to wearing an excellent garment “too much.” Quite the contrary, we’re on the record in our belief that a great piece only looks better the more you flambé it.

On that note…

Cool new clothes alert —

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Our extensive report on Natural Fiber Workout Gear is here.

We just published the Spyplane Ultimate Guide to the Bay Area.

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here. Spyfriends just came through with recs for Amsterdam, Milwaukee, Seoul and San Sebastián.

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We don’t run ads and we don’t use affiliate links, except for some 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.

Erin here, back with a recon-packed Concorde.

We’ve got:

• Sloshy suits for women — plus a couple menswear options, and shorts pairings — all generously cut, mostly in breathable cottons, linens or lightweight wools

• Summer-weight cotton anoraks and other natty-dyed separates from an emerging Italian maker with only 2 U.S. stockists

• A powerful vintage search term that unlocks a wellspring of vintage jewelry, bags, watches, and other accessories

• Ghillie Watch continues…

• Plus, suede moccasins in the Aurora vein; slouchy cotton shorts shot through with silk to add some drape; recycled-wool sweaters & more

Let’s get to it —

If you’re gonna rock a suit, it’s gotta have some slosh. This has been true for a minute, but here in 2026, suits continue to look best in capacious cuts: Calf-clinging trousers and jackets with form-fitting, darted busts are not the wave. A boxy, straight-cut jacket, paired with pants that swirl delicately around your ankles? That’s more like it.

Last summer, feeling envious of the “one good suit” that dudes can always rely on when they’re invited to any function, I went on a suit quest. I wanted something that would take the guesswork out of getting gussied up, but was unfussy enough to rock any old day of the week if I so pleased. The suit I end up copping sold out with alacrity, and for many months afterward I fielded requests for other options from ladies who missed out…

Fortunately, there’s a new crop of independent labels making great sloshy suits that fit the bill. Wearing mine over the past year, I’ve also taken notes about how to avoid looking like you’re swimming in fabric. Those notes are below, along with 10 of the sickest new suits I’ve found, including 3 unisex ones:

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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.

Enjoy our extensive new Natural Fiber Workout Gear Guide.

Spyfriends trade elite travel recommendations in our Global Intel Travel Chat. We need intel on Morocco, Albania, and non-London England, though!

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.

— Jonah & Erin

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Blackbird Spyplane 📼 bussin on your block 📼 once again.

In today’s sletter:

• Japanese-linen-jersey pocket tees made in NYC

• Elegant gorpy leather walking sandals

• How to get married festively while giving the swagless & expensive “lurking menace of the Wedding Industrial Complex” a miss

• And more unbeatable recon

But first —

Have we spent the past ~30 years overthinking rain jackets?

Erin and I are on a road-tripping recon mission through the Pacific Northwest this week and, no big surprise, the weather’s been wet.

Checking the forecasts before we left the Bay, I packed the revelatory, densely woven, all-cotton, coating free, sick-looking and stunningly waterproof rain jacket we wrote about this time last year.

I remain awed by that piece. But five days into this trip, I have yet to bust it out, thanks to another revelatory jacket that has me reconsidering the boundaries of “rain wear”:

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Our guide to Japan’s Best Clothesmakers is here.

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

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

Our Home Goods Index, full of things to enliven the place you live, and stores where you can find them, is 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.

— Jonah & Erin

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Few saw it coming, but here in 2026, it’s incontestable:

The Bay Area has become one of the Top 2 places in America.

In fact, in many Quality of Life respects, the Bay is vastly superior to America’s No. 1 place — New York — especially if you are older than ~29 and booed up.

More and more people are grappling with this truth. Even I’m a bit surprised. I (Jonah) am a native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn. I spent my life in New York, until 2014, when Erin and I came to Oakland. But we loved it here off rip, and we don’t think we’ll ever leave.

Today we’re finally ready to drop the Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.

Perhaps more to the point, the world is finally ready to truly appreciate it. Scaremongering headlines from wack and/or ill-informed dweebs have transformed into rhapsodies of praise. Tremendous food and wine, paradisiacal nature, charismatic fauna, glorious weather, chill people, old-school bars, restaurants and art-deco movie palaces, excellent bookshops, dope record stores, cool clothing stores, one of the world’s sickest designers, and the world’s best newsletter — they all call the Bay home, and it’s no longer a secret.

You might be planning a trip here, or you might live here. Either way, this intel is for you. It’s focused on San Francisco and the East Bay, where we spend the most time, but with a few farther-flung spots mixed in within ~an hour’s drive away.

A few quick notes up top:

• Everything listed here rocks.

• A 🏆 icon indicates a superlative spot.

• An even-rarer 🐦‍⬛ indicates a place in the uppermost tier of our Personal Bay Pantheon.

• An ✨ indicates a great room / major vibiness.

• Other icons (e.g. 🍷🍕🥃⛩️🌳🥾) are clear in context.

• This is a robust but curated selection of places we adore, with a few that come highly recommended to us by trusted and admired locals. There are any number of beloved spots in the Bay we didn’t include, because our goal here is to be useful, not to be exhaustive.

• In that spirit, if there’s a spot you f--k with heavy and it isn’t in this guide, shout it out in the comments.

Let’s get to it —

Food & Drinks

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Our new Natural Fiber Workout Gear Guide is here.

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

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

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Resplendent, stoic, haunted, hopeful — Blackbird Spyplane is with you once again.

In today’s sletter:

• A Slapper Swarm full of banger striped springtime tees for the fellas & ladies alike

• Sick deep-cut cotton basics that we would call “affordable” if that wasn’t a term that’s been so debased it now implies lame s--t, which we would of course never recommend

• Exclusive early intel on a rare drop from one of our favorite small makers, coming next week through one of our favorite stores

• Two excellent gangster-movie recommendations to watch this weekend, one from the 1980, one from the 2000, courtesy of Spyfriend Patrick Radden Keefe

Let’s get to it —

People love to talk about how “trends move at lightning speeds,” and while this is in a certain objective sense true, how true is it when you are a real one?

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We just published our extensive Natural Fiber Workout Gear Guide.

Spyfriends share elite city tips in our Global Intel Travel Chat.

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

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.

— Jonah & Erin

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The world knows Patrick Radden Keefe as one of the great living nonfiction writers, with a string of incredible New Yorker stories and best-selling books under his belt, among them Say Nothing, about the Troubles, Empire of Pain, about the family that got rich off the opioid crisis, and Rogues, an excellent collection of his magazine pieces.

Patrick’s reporting? Deep. His prose? Elegant. His tales? Enveloping. He is our foremost chronicler of illicit systems that would prefer to do their dirty work in the darkness, and which he drags into the light.

Also, he is a charming, handsome and tasteful clothes-rocker known to casually drip down in some 45R or Oliver Church.

It’s to the point where you might think the man walks on air, free of self-doubt. But I (Jonah) have had the fortune of calling Patrick the Big Homie for many years, and I know a more vulnerable side of him. Case in point: Around this time last year, he called me up on what sounded like the verge of tears. He’d finished a draft of his newest book, London Falling, and he was happy with it, but he couldn’t sleep properly, he explained, voice trembling, until I let him know what I thought. He sent me a PDF and, since Patrick is the man, I eagerly cracked it open and proceeded to read it in two sittings.

The book investigates the mysterious death of a teenager named Zac Brettler, who plummeted from the terrace of a London luxury apartment into the Thames in 2019, under extremely strange circumstances. It emerged that Brettler had been passing himself off as the ultrarich son of a Russian oligarch, and become enmeshed with figures in London’s criminal underworld.

The book is a caper. A romp. Haunting. Profound. It’s about greed, delusion, predation, willful police incompetence, and the way money can poison the soul not just of a person but of a city. It’s also about the power — ruinous here, liberatory there — of fakery.

When I finished reading the draft, I told Patrick he’d done his damn thing, then gave him 4 small yet brilliant notes that made the book .000006% more fire.

London Falling comes out today. And wouldn’t you know it, last week Patrick called me up once again, once again on the verge of tears, this time saying that even though he’d booked big splashy interviews with the New York Times and a bunch of other places, the rollout was not gonna feel complete, and the book would not feel like an authentic success, until he’d tapped in with you, the beautiful & blessed readers of Spy Nation.

Rather than discuss the book, though, Patrick and I decided to talk about the book’s setting: London, where he once lived, and where he’s been traveling virtually every year for several decades now. In particular, we decided to talk about Patrick’s favorite restaurants in London — because he is a real eater with great taste in food — plus a little Bookshop Talk for good measure.

You can find our own London Recon Reports here and here. Whether you’re headed to the UK some time soon, or whether you’re one of the many Chill Spyfriends who call it home, enjoy Patrick Radden Keefe’s London:

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Our guide to the Japan’s Best Clothesmakers is here.

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here. Spyfriends just came through with recs for Bilbao, Belgrade and Bologna. We need intel for Milwaukee though!

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Today’s Plane is all about a question we’ve gotten a lot recently from friends and readers alike. It boils down to this:

“I don’t want to exercise in plastic. Most workout gear out there is full of plastic, plus the clothes look wack. What are the coolest Spyplane-grade natural-fiber pieces I can exercise in, which also look sick enough that I could wear them and look chill in other contexts?”

These days, more and more of us are trying to eliminate as much plastic from our lives as possible. Part of it has to do with horrifying headlines about microplastics. Part of it reflects anthropocene-era anxieties about the effects we’ve had on the planet over the past ~century, with plastics as the perfect manifestation of those effects at their most ruinous. If you ask me, part of it probably has to do with a deeper desire to purify ourselves of the literal and metaphysical contaminants of modernity baby!!

When it comes to plastics in workout clothes, the issue is especially salient, because it’s clothes we’re prone to get hot in, sweat into, and wear right up against our skin.

The common wisdom for decades has been that if you wanna go crazy hard and smash all your PRs, nothing is gonna rival synthetics for performance capability. There’s definitely something to this: doing a century is gonna feel a ton better if you’re wearing Lycra bib shorts than if you’re wearing cotton sweatshorts. But the dominance of synthetics is, of course, a relatively recent development — and there’s lots of contexts where a natty-fibey option will get the job done just as well, if not better, than a synthetic.

Then there’s the sad truth that cool workout clothes of any kind are few and far in between, and women have it especially tough on this front. Tons of legacy brands still follow the “shrink it and pink it” playbook — as designer Sandy Liang put it when I interviewed her in 2021, “Why do I need to be ‘sexy’ when I’m hiking?” Newer DTC brands pump out charmless and gross alternatives. The upshot is that we’re drowning in weird bondage-strap sports bras and goofy hiking skorts. Add the specter of toxicity to the equation? And it’s tempting to go full Julianne Moore in Safe mode 😷.

But not to worry. Because I (Erin) have expended a wealth of Salutary Unbeatable Recon Energy (S.U.R.E.) finding non-wack natural-fiber exercise clothes —for the ladies and the fellas alike — in a very special Spyplane Natty Fibey Workout Gear Report.

We’re talking about a robust guide to the best under-the-radar performance-driven pieces made from natural materials by labels we respect, including:

• Shorts every which way — skintight, baggy, short or long

• Tees & tanks

• Base layers & long sleeves

• Leggings & capris

• Underwear & sports bras

• Sweats & fleeces

• Jackets, vests & outerwear

• Pieces you can look cool rocking beyond strictly Getting Active scenarios

As always, there are zero affiliate links in the mix, because we remain a 100% uncompromised reader-supported miracle and never use affiliates when we cover new clothes.

Let’s get to it —

Read more

Our guide to the Japan’s Best Clothesmakers is here.

If you are a well-traveled player with intel on Delhi, Bologna, and/or the Basque Country, please bless your fellow Spyfriends in the Global Intel Travel Chat.

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

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.

— Jonah & Erin

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Blackbird Spyplane back with you.

In today’s sletter we’ve got:

• How to not wear cool jackets wrong

• A half dozen of the sickest jeans out

• More vibey intel from the phone unbundling / screen un-cuckening frontlines

• And more!

Let’s get to it —

We’re all familiar with the getting-dressed conundrum that is the Footwear Ankle Pant (F.A.P.) Interface, a.k.a. how well, or how poorly, your pants harmonize with your shoes.

But the other day we got a reader question about the much-less-discussed Jacket-Aperture Waist Shirt (J.A.W.S.) Interface, specifically as pertains to dope, shorter-cut jackets of the kind that abounded in our recent Great Jackets Roundup.

Yes — cropped jackets are fire, and there’s a bunch of bangers in circulation right now from some of our favorite lines. But styling them can be vexing if you’ve grown accustomed to jackets that hit further down the thighs.

So here’s some Infallible Spyplane Guidance for keeping this region of an outfit in order:

Read more

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

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

We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for some 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.

— Jonah & Erin

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Petra Collins started taking pictures as a teenager, capturing the lives of her sister and their friends in Toronto. Her photographs blurred the line between stylized artifice and documentary-style naturalism — and since the lines between artifice and naturalism tend to feel pretty blurry to most teenagers, that only deepened the feeling of emotional and psychological power in the work.

In the 2010s, Petra moved to New York, showing pictures at art galleries while posting them to Instagram, shooting magazine covers and luxury-fashion billboards, helping to develop the look of the epochal HBO zoomer drama Euphoria, directing music videos for pop stars, and putting out a series of cult-adored photo books. She’s done as much as any other photographer to hash out a distinctly “millennial” aesthetic, and she has a legion of imitators to prove it.

Across it all, she’s explored increasingly slippery ideas about intimacy and performance, truth and fantasy, beauty and horror. These tensions animate Petra’s newest book, Star, which imagines the troubled lives of a group of fictitious pop stars, their friends, their fans, and their stalkers — a movie, of sorts, broken down into its individual frames.

The other day I (Jonah) was stoked to get on the Spyphone with Petra to talk about the molecular-level swag of people who know how to dance; why she used to love selfies, and why she was wrong to do so; what Wim Wenders taught her about photography; and other “unbeatable topics.

Blackbird Spyplane: You were a dancer before you were a photographer. I’m always fascinated by the command dancers have over how their bodies signify. There’s this sense of molecular-level deliberateness to how they move, and how they hold themselves — whereas I feel like I’m non-verbally telling people all kinds of s--t about myself, through the way I carry myself, that I have no control over. Are there lingering effects of dance on the way you move and inhabit your body, moment-to-moment?

Petra Collins: “Oh, yeah. It helped me with photography, for one thing, because I’m so aware of how the body looks in motion. And it kind of helped me even more behind the camera, because, in a way that’s hard to explain, it helped me to understand where to put the camera in space.

“But it’s funny you say that, because the reason I had to stop dancing is that my body basically couldn’t hold itself together. My joints and ligaments are super loose, and I have no proprioception, meaning my brain can’t really comprehend where my body is, because it’s so loose. The way I live, day to day, I don’t know where my limbs are in time and space. I stopped dancing because I’d be dislocating my knees every couple weeks, and maybe 6 months ago I was just walking to a meeting, I stepped off the sidewalk, and I herniated a disc in my back. So in my case it’s kind of the opposite of what you’re saying. But it does end up making you super vigilant.”

Blackbird Spyplane: I was reading an old interview with you where the topic of selfies arose, tied up with the rise of Instagram. You said you initially saw selfies and social media as good things, because “a lot of people who never had the ability to create, or even see, images of themselves could finally do that.” Looking back, do you think you were wrong?

Petra Collins: “Totally. I’m not a techno-optimist anymore. But back then there was this feeling of hope and excitement at the beginning of any kind of technology. Like, I remember getting dial-up internet and saying, ‘This is amazing, there’s so much I can do with it.’ But I saw really quickly that, if we’re talking about young women taking images of themselves, the misogyny is so baked in, you can’t escape it. I realized it was not this new dawn of imagery I’d thought it was.”

Blackbird Spyplane: That might have been the last time when a majority of us still saw technology as liberatory. Now technology feels mostly like the prerogatives of capital working through us, looking for new markets, annexing us, making everything worse.

Petra Collins: “We’re at the worst stage of it. We’re like 90% in here [taps phone], and we’ve almost fully lost touch, to the point that we’re actually changing the way we look so we can look more like our own avatars.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Your new book is about pop stars, fans and stalkers, and it takes inspiration from the 2000s pop culture you grew up with. How was that time different from now, as relates to fame and fandom, and what hasn’t changed?

Petra Collins: “The book’s not really a period piece, but it takes that era, and this era, and brings them together. Back then, the tabloids were really crazy, there was a newer access to celebrity, and a newer obsession with it. Which is obviously at a fever pitch now. We have so much access to celebrities, and to each other, that we feel we have complete ownership of whoever it is we’re watching.

“Also, that era was this hypersexualized time for young women. I grew up in Canada, so I didn’t have MTV, but I had Much Music, and watching videos and shows, it was so hypersexual, and the girls were so young. I think we’re finding ourselves back in that space right now.”

Blackbird Spyplane: One thing I noticed is how few phones there are in these pictures. Phones have been a recurring motif in your art, but I counted 4 total in this whole book, and they’re all face down or screens off.

Petra Collins: “Something I did love about that era was being off the phone, not having to be on it. But I think the book still represents what happens in the phone — what happens in the imagination of the viewer — because it’s not clear who the author is. If you look at the images, it could be reality, or it could be a 12-year-old girl in her bed making up the whole thing. So I like to have the feeling of the phone in the book, if that makes sense, but I didn’t need to actually have the phone in the frame.”

Blackbird Spyplane: You started taking photos as a kid, because of what you’ve described as a nostalgia “for a teenage life that I didn’t have,” and you wound up creating an extremely influential aesthetic. I’m curious, once the art world embraces your pictures, Vogue hires you to do editorials, Gucci hires you to shoot campaigns, Sam Levinson hires you to help build the look of Euphoria, Selena Gomez hires you to direct music videos, and a thousand creative agencies rip off your s--t… It’s gotta feel strange that this language you developed as an outsider is not only mainstream now, but has been used specifically to sell images of girlhood to girls.

Petra Collins: “It’s trippy, and insane. Between that and having done it for so long, going into this project — and really, going into anything new — I ask myself, ‘What can I say now? What can I scratch at and explore that I haven’t?’ With Star I think I wanted to tap back into that time, because I’m so sick of the now.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Why do this as a photo book at all, as opposed to a movie or video piece?

Petra Collins: “Number one, it’s impossible to make a movie. It’s very difficult. So that’s the first answer. But I was up last night looking for this Wim Wenders quote I love, and I was sobbing thinking about it. He has this book called Once, about photography, and how everything is so ephemeral, you can’t catch it.

“The quote goes, ‘“Once is not enough,” I used to say as a kid. That seemed very plausible to me, “once upon a time.” But when you take pictures, I learned, none of that applies. Then “once” is “once and for all.”’

“I first read that when I was pretty young, because I was obsessed with Wim Wenders, and it cemented why I love photography. I want to hold moments and thoughts forever. And it’s why I’ve always loved photo books. Making this one, scene by scene, shot by shot — you could hold each tiny moment in the characters’ lives, it didn’t just slip by.”

Blackbird Spyplane: All right, finally, I asked you to talk about a cherished possession of yours, and you chose a Blythe doll from the 2000s that you bought in Japan. I was not familiar with Blythe dolls, what’s the story?

Petra Collins: “The story of Blythe is interesting. She first came out in the early 1970s and was completely rejected. People said, ‘This is the ugliest doll, her eyes move, she’s horrible and scary, we hate this.’ She only became a trend later, after they brought her back in Japan. I became obsessed with her maybe a year or so ago, because I loved the idea of that rejection. I got this one at Nakano Broadway in Tokyo, at a mall with so much s--t, I’ll spend multiple days there digging. I found this doll lying in a bin, I thought she kind of looked like me, and she really reminded me of my sister, so I bought her.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Is revulsion part of the appeal for you with this doll? Do you think it’s scary looking? She reminds me a bit of those crazy Y2K-era Steve Madden subway and magazine ads, with the big-headed, huge-eyed, tiny-bodied Photoshopped models.

Petra Collins: “I used to find her creepy, then I was reintroduced and I was, like, ‘I love her, she’s so weird and cute.’ But I’m a crazy collector, I love oddities, I have a lot of weird stuff. I’m that person where, if you go to their house and look around, you’ll be like, ‘What is that? What are all these unsettling things piled up everywhere?’”

Petra Collins’s site is here, and she’s on IG here. Star comes out via Rizzoli on April 14. You can find it at Bookshop.org here.

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Our Home Goods Index, including our brand-new 2026 Home Goods Guide, is here.

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

Our guide to the Japan’s Best Clothesmakers is here.

If you are a well-traveled player with intel on Delhi, Bologna, and/or the Basque Country, please bless your fellow Spyfriends in the Global Intel Travel Chat.

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

— Jonah & Erin

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We don’t run ads and we don’t use affiliate links, except for some 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.

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

• Banger waxed-cotton caps, great bags & more from a young post-GORP designer

• Extremely rare elite-level-swag approach shoes, and a salute to the great shop that put us on to them

• A wealth of inexpensive ceramics from Picasso’s homie

• A based weapon in the war against screencuckery

• And more

Let’s get to it —

Last week Esquire published a story about how “It’s Now Lame to Be on Your Phone All the Time.” Staring at our devices, hunched over and filmy-eyed, the writer argued, “We all look subhuman. Prone. Weak. Uncool.”

We’re in total agreement here at the Plane, to the extent that, months ago, we published a smash-hit sletter about how “You don’t look cool looking at your phone.”

If Esquire had wanted to make their case truly airtight vis a vis the no-sauce aura of device-beholding? They could have cited our post as Exhibit A.

But what are you gonna do, sometimes things slip through the cracks of scholarship. Erin and I are just happy to see more people spreading the truth that a powerful remedy for phone addiction is considering how wack you look when you’re on your phone.

Putting this truth into practice can take time. I know firsthand. One of the most frightening stats cited in that Esquire piece is that “nearly 90 percent” of people “look at their devices within the first ten minutes of waking up.” This is horrible, but thankfully very easy to fix by charging your phone outside your bedroom and starting the day with a good book or, if you prefer, some stretching, a walk, or other exercise. Something I’ve been doing with fantastic results is reading for an hour or so every day before I come into contact with a screen. Several Spyfriends have thanked me for changing their lives with this One Ingenious Trick.

As part of getting your phone the f--k out of your dreamscape, I recommend an alarm clock — we rounded up a gang of cool bedside clocks here, including my no-frills Braun joint below left.

And that’s not all. The other day I took things a crucial step further and copped an outdoor thermometer, because it is untenably screencucked behavior to look at your phone to find out the temperature when you could, much more basedly, and much more accurately, look at a thermometer.

We walked over to our great neighborhood hardware store, where they had a bunch of different thermometers for sale. We chose the smallest, simplest option, above right, which you just pop on to a window in a place that doesn’t ever get full sun. It cost us $2.79, it’s aesthetically inoffensive, and it has already increased our daily happiness by ~33.3%.

No, a thermometer doesn’t give you a forecast for the whole day (and you can’t read the new Blackbird Spyplane on one, either) but in the war against screencuckery, every bit helps.

Meanwhile —

Baseball caps. Every time I think I’ve got more than enough, a new banger crosses my radar that gets me thinking about expanding my flotilla of dome-ensconcers.

Case in point, a tight cluster of fantastic new 6-panel caps — including an extremely Jonah-coded olive-green waxed-cotton gem — just dropped from a young post-GORP wizard we’ve long admired, along with a beautiful boxy-cut waxed-nylon rain jacket, some excellent messenger bags and more:

Read more

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

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

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

— Jonah & Erin

Subscribe now

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Pusha T is one of the all-time great rappers. A solo act and one-half of Clipse, he came up in the small-yet-musical-genius-heavy Virginia Beach hip-hop scene of the late ‘90s and early 2000s — a scene that also gave the world Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Teddy Riley and Pharrell Williams.

Pharrell has been a close collaborator of Push’s since Day One. This is tight not only because you love to see childhood friends linking, building & making moves across many decades, but also because Push has a way of coaxing out Pharrell’s hardest, weirdest, coolest sounds.

And as fantastic as their music together is? You could make a strong case that the many songs Pusha T has made with Kanye — among them “Runaway,” “Mercy,” “Numbers on the Board” and “If You Know You Know” — are even harder, weirder, and cooler.

A quick word on “Numbers on the Boards.” Erin and I (Jonah) have listened to this song 300+ times easy. It captures Pusha T’s mix of sly humor and seething, borderline-sociopathic ferocity; his gift for gliding over sparse, amelodic, oblong tracks; the pleasure he takes from deceptively dense wordplay; and his conceptual-art-grade commitment to the topic of drug dealing, which he has rapped about to the exclusion of virtually anything else since ~1994.

Besides making sick songs, Pusha T also wears some sick clothes of the under-the-radar kind we love here at the Plane, including pieces by Spyfriend Camiel Fortgens, Craig Green, and Martine Rose, among other independent designers.

And in a curveball, next month he’s putting out a coffee with Pharrell called Grindin, in partnership with the Italian behemoth Lavazza. They made two blends, the darker of which has notes of “caramel, cacao and spices,” as Push described it to me recently, and is designed to function as “task-driven” jet fuel. Here at Spyplane HQ, our No. 1 coffee in the world is a single-origin artisan light-roast we love to savor while accomplishing no tasks whatsoever, but to each his own baby!

The other day I was stoked to hop on the Spyphone with Pusha T for a conversation about getting evil in your art, and whether the abyss does in fact gaze back into you when you do; rocking cool clothes from underground labels; whether he’s ever driven a Honda Fit; why he has never done a psychedelic and never will; and more “unbeatable topics.”

Blackbird Spyplane: This is crazy to think about, but I interviewed you and Malice 20 years ago, right before Hell Hath No Fury came out. And then Malice thanked me in the liner notes of the CD, but you wrote something like, “F--k a shout out!

Pusha T: “Ahahaha.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Do you wanna make things right and thank me now?

Pusha T: “I can’t. I gotta stay true. That’s my favorite album, everything about it. Even the lack of acknowledgments.”

Blackbird Spyplane: One thing that’s always struck me about your music is this persona you created where you’re unafraid to go to dark, sometimes evil places. Biggie had the famous line about dealing drugs in order to feed his daughter, but you’ve never justified it like that, and you’ve never looked for any sympathy. It’s more, “I turned people into zombie fiends, I ruined their lives, I got rich.”

Pusha T: “M hm.”

Blackbird Spyplane: I’ve talked to actors who’ve gone deep into dark roles, and they’ve told me it takes a toll, to where they almost need a detox on the other side, to pull themselves back from the abyss of that character’s mind. Has there ever been a similar thing for you, where leaning into the more evil parts of your persona takes a toll?

Pusha T: “I don’t think so. I know how to compartmentalize all of this. And when it comes to music, I look at it like I look at movies and TV series. I’m an A&E guy. I love documentary-style shows. I love horror when it actually feels like it can happen — not CGI green-screen horror, I’m not into that. I’m into things that bring real fear into it.

“So for me lyrically, there’s just an energy, an arrogance, and a level of animosity that helps me get my point across. It’s letting me get some s--t out, but it’s doing it artistically. People aren’t true enough, people don’t speak the truth off-the-cuff enough. So I think that’s what you’re getting with these Jekyll & Hyde type of moments, man. It’s just how the f--k I feel.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Have you ever driven a Honda Fit?

Pusha T: “A Honda what?”

Blackbird Spyplane: A Honda Fit. It’s a small Honda, very maneuverable, snub-nose, surprisingly large cargo capacity. From the outside it might look like any small car, but they’ve got a cult of real ones around them.

Pusha T: “Yeah? Okay...”

Blackbird Spyplane: It occurred to me I’ve never had the pleasure of driving a McLaren or some other Pusha-T-ass whip, and then I wondered if you’ve ever had the pleasure of driving a Honda Fit.

Pusha T: “To be honest, I never have.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Does it sound at all intriguing to you?

Pusha T: “Not at all.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Another thing I’m curious about: Have you ever taken LSD or mushrooms?

Pusha T: “No, sir. I have no interest in it. Kids be trying s--t and dying, man.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Dying off mushrooms??

Pusha T: “No, not off mushrooms, but they have all these habits and pills that are supposed to be fun, and a lot them are dying from ‘em. I’m at a time in my life where my health is more important to me. I’d rather not tamper. I’ve done enough tampering.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Let’s see if we can go 0 for 3 with these “Have you evers.” Have you ever read Moby-Dick?

Pusha T: “Man, I was supposed to read it, but I probably lied and read the Clif Notes instead.”

Blackbird Spyplane: I’d never read it, either, but I finally dove in a few weeks back, I just finished it the other day, and it’s great. What’s the last book you loved?

Pusha T: “I just listened to the audiobook of Willy Falcon and Sam Magluta, the Cocaine Cowboys of Miami. It was so interesting. That took me a few days on my treadmill. I don’t read novels so much as nonfiction. I need to know there’s that truth to it.”

Blackbird Spyplane: We write a lot about style here. How important are clothes to your sense of who you are?

Pusha T: “Very important. People can see how sturdy you are by your fashion choices, by what trends you’re chasing — and not chasing. Clothes are very important to my profession, too. When I think of hip-hop as a culture, and how I was introduced it, fashion helped me aspire to want certain things, and gave me the drive to get those things. My favorite rapper was someone I wanted to look like, someone I wanted to dress like. Yo! MTV Raps taught me how to dress.”

Blackbird Spyplane: Over the past few years you’ve worn a lot of smaller designers and labels, like Camiel Fortgens, Craig Green, and Martine Rose. It’s sick that you’re on the lookout for people working further below the radar…

Pusha T: “Camiel, Craig, and Martine — you are so spot-on naming them, because the silhouettes those 3 designers bring is always a go-to for me. I see them as elevated performance wear. The functionality of the clothes is always a big deal for me, especially when it comes to the shows, how I’m gonna translate and move onstage.”

Blackbird Spyplane: What are some other independent lines you f--k with, and how do you stay up on them?

Pusha T: “GR10K’s another one. I was introduced to all of them through my stylist, Marcus Paul. We met 15 years ago in Miami in the Delano lobby. We walked past each other and both had on some exclusive BAPE. So we bonded over clothes, and I said, ‘One day maybe we’ll work together.’

“A few years later, I got called to go work on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It was in Hawaii, and when I got there I was around Ye, Virgil Abloh, Don C, the whole gamut. I was, like, ‘Oh no, there’s no way I can be here and not be fresher than them.’ So I went back to my guy Marcus and his man Brennan, and I said, ‘I gotta compete.’ Brennan went on to style LeBron, but me and Marcus have been working tight together ever since.”

Blackbird Spyplane: All right, finally, I asked you to tell Spy Nation about a unique cherished possession. What did you choose?

Pusha T: “It’s a framed piece of art — I call it art because my son made it. It’s a piece of paper with ‘I can’t take it’ written in marker.”

Blackbird Spyplane: What’s the context?

Pusha T: “It was him rebelling during home school. I look at it as a sign of, ‘We made it.’ Like, my son is 5, he’s being home-schooled — I wish I was home-schooled — and he’s bitching about it! It’s sitting framed in my kitchen. I’m never getting rid of it.”

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Pusha T is on IG here. His 2018 solo album Daytona and Clipse’s 2005 mixtape We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2 are especially fantastic. His coffee with Pharrell, Grindin, comes out next month.

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Our Home Goods Index, including our brand-new 2026 Home Goods Guide, is here.

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

Our guide to the Japan’s Best Clothesmakers is here.

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

The 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe is a massive resource for finding the best independent boutiques and under-the-radar lines.

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Erin, back by your side.

Today we’ve got a Concorde heavy on vintage accessories that no one is checking for, including:

• A secret trove of Italian-made sandals and mules. I just copped a pristine pair for $20.

• Fantastic chill leather handbags from the ‘70s.

• Very fire jewelry from two deep-cut designers.

Also?

• The bright, crisp, Shaker-inspired Spyplane Salad of the Spring

Let’s get to it —

Anni Albers’ textiles are widely adored, but I’m just as partial to her far-lesser-known work in jewelry (pictured below).

Albers started making it in 1940 when she was a student at Black Mountain College, teaming up with her classmate Alex Reed. Rather than precious metals and stones, they used paper clips, sieves, bobby pins and other household items they found at five-and-dimes and hardware stores.

I love a “finding beauty in the everyday” approach, and I especially love finding beauty at hardware stores.

Rather than using something like gold, with clear material value, Albers was more interested in figuring out how to freak, e.g., a humdrum washer. Done right, the “surprise and inventiveness” of that choice, she explained, would give her pieces what she called “a spiritual value.”

Isn’t that the mark of truly great design? The value of the materials is one thing — what you’re able to do with them is something else entirely.

As you might have guessed, vintage Albers pieces are almost impossible to come by outside of rarefied institutional and collectors’ circles.

But! There are two other 20th century jewelry designers who also used humble, industrial materials to create pieces with “spiritual value” — which, while rare, are still coppable.

Kindred Spirit Number One:

Read more

Check out our list of the world’s 50 Slappiest Shops.

Here’s what you learn about how to get dressed when you wear all black for a month.

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— Jonah & Erin

Welcome back to Blackbird Spyplane. Today we’ve got:

• Cool footwear developments in the aftermath of the sneaker-drop apocalyspe

• Small but mighty home enswaggeners abundantly available secondhand

• Pantheon-tier unisex spring-weight jackets

• And more!

Let’s get to it —

The Hyped Sneaker Market, much like the Marvel Comics Universe, is an embarrassing blight on society. Blessedly, while both once felt like all but permanent fixtures of life, they’re suffering a major downswing, hopefully en route to oblivion. Dumb limited-edition retro Jordans and dumb Avengers spinoffs simply don’t bring in the gargantuan revenues that seemed automatic just a few years ago.

You could make a compelling case that their declines are connected: Both streetwear drop culture and the MCU were about wielding industrial-grade powers of infantilization against us, luring hordes of ~11-year-olds-to-51-year-olds onto a vast, lucrative, sticky-sweet glue trap of extended adolescence.

But it’s an open question what will rise up in their place, and whether these replacements will be better or worse. Are we seeing a post-bubble market correction, or a paradigm shift?

On the sneakerhead side of things, at least, there’s a fascinating pivot underway where more people than ever are giving a miss to hyped streetwear drops generally and gravitating, instead, toward small, high-quality clothing labels of the kind Blackbird Spyplane has been celebrating since Day One.

It’s gotten to the point where a growing number of those labels are now the object of… hyped drops.

If I (Jonah) were to quickly & crassly sketch the underlying logic here, I’d note that a small-batch Japanese-made silk-hemp bomber is a covetable yet far more appealingly “mature” offering than limited-edition Ben & Jerry’s Dunks or whatever; that the alluring “you can’t get this” factor remains high all the same (though in this case the scarcity is not manufactured); and that, even if the price point on the silk bomber is steeper than on some Day Glo Romper Room SBs, the profit margins for the people making and selling the stuff remain plenty healthy.

I’m glad the frenzy around sneakers has chilled out, because chilling out is cool, and because it’s good when less hideous junk gets made. For my part, I was never a sneakerhead, but I did wear sneakers for ~99% of my life, and over the past few years I’ve been spending more and more time going “Hard Sole Spyplane” Mode and loving it. I’m not surprised I’m not alone.

That said, please be clear that Erin and I are in no way out on dope sneakers. O no! We firmly believe that sneakers that rock are tight.

Case in point: There’s a shop that used to print money off hypey sneaker drops, in what the owners, who are cool, have described to me as a sort of Deal they struck with the Hypebeast Devil. Lately, this shop has shifted away from those drops and towards stocking much cooler clothes.

And yet! They still achieve an excellent selection of fire footwear, sneakers included.

Rather than just throw out all the sneaker-world expertise they spent years developing, they’re building on it, refining their approach for the present moment. The result is a fascinating hybrid, where some of the planet’s best “Slow Clothes” harmoniously share space with some very sick sneakers:

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— Jonah & Erin

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1. Miu Miu & Zuck

When people in fashion talk about politics as relates to clothes, there’s a tendency to limit the conversation to the realm of the symbolic, and to ignore more material questions.

You can see this play out in all kinds of ways. To illustrate it at its most cognitively dissonant, I (Jonah) can’t think of a better example than when the topic of feminism in fashion arises.

A critic might celebrate the revolutionary implications of a given designer’s clothes for the women who wear them — the way these clothes “challenge conventional notions of femininity,” say, or accommodate and amplify women’s feelings of “power.” This critic might take another designer to task for the oppressively sexualized aesthetics of their garments, the misogynist undertones of their ad campaigns, etc. Faced with the blurrier case of a designer whose work seems radical here yet reactionary there, whose marketing imagery seems so sexist that it might in fact be a refutation of sexism, etc., the critic is prone to “unpack the contradictions” at play.

This is all legitimate discourse, as it goes. The problem is that this kind of symbolic engagement with politics narrows our thinking to questions about who designs the clothes and who buys the clothes. It grants no space to the elephant-in-the-room question of who makes the clothes: a global workforce consisting overwhelmingly of very poor women.

What is the actual revolutionary potential of a male-gaze-subverting knee-length skirt sewn by women paid piece rates in L.A. and NYC? What is the true liberatory power of a dad cap embroidered with feminist and anti-racist slogans by nonwhite women working 80-hour weeks in a Bangladeshi sweatshop?

Estimates vary, but there are as many as 90 million garment workers worldwide. Some 60-80% are women. As few as 2% earn a living wage. These women don’t represent compelling contradictions — they are real people suffering real material wrongs. And there are material mechanisms available to right them: strengthened labor laws, an international minimum wage, universal healthcare, tenants rights, worker-ownership models, and so on.

I got to thinking about all this the other day while mulling the curious, oft-repeated fact that Miuccia Prada was, in her 1960s youth, a Communist.

Prada, 76, is not merely a (the most?) totemic living fashion designer. She is a tremendously talented, important, and enigmatic one, up there with Yohji and Rei in the Actively Relevant Living Legend Pantheon. Erin and I don’t care much about big design houses, but we always look at what Prada does. Her decades of collections include canonized classics and unheralded gems, and we like to put vintage Prada finds in the sletter every now and then. When I visited Milan on a magazine assignment a few years ago, I popped into a Prada store, said f--k it, and got myself a black worsted-wool overshirt as a souvenir.

To get an idea of the outsize respect Miuccia Prada commands in the fashion industry, look no further than the weirdly obsequious insider convention by which not just her paid staff but many fashion journalists refer to her as “Mrs. Prada.” For a rough equivalent, imagine if Apple employees, fanboys and tech critics all agreed to call Steve Jobs “Mr. Jobs. ”

It’s in this reverent context that I’ve heard Prada’s youthful political radicalism invoked over the years. Her ‘60s-era communist period tends to crop up as a sort of biographical decoder-ring, helping us to make sense of Prada’s semiotically dense designs. People also use her former radicalism as an implicit bona fide of her intrinsic goodness — evidence that she still “gets it,” that amid the ethical murk of the fashion world, a fundamentally pro-social outlook informs her actions.

However! Until late last month, when Mark Zuckerberg appeared front row at Prada’s FW26 show in Milan, I’d somehow never heard that Miuccia Prada also has an estimated net worth of $4.8 billion — an incontrovertible bona fide of her actual, practical badness.

Zuckerberg is worth an estimated $222 billion. He is a high-profile, uncharismatic dude whose project is self-evidently hostile to human dignity. This makes him abundantly easy to dislike, and his appearance inside the glamorous, putatively hallowed temple of a Prada show sent waves of discomfort rippling through fashion enthusiasts, including NYT Styles editor and Spyfriend Stella Bugbee, who kicked off an IG story thread about it with a screenshot of Prada’s Wikipedia page, billionaire status highlighted. This came just a few weeks after Jeff Bezos was photographed hanging out backstage with Jonathan Anderson at a Dior show, to boot.

That the ultrarich enjoy designer products is news to nobody. Doubtless many billionaires we’ve never heard of have been invited to runway shows for years.

But Zuckerberg’s and Bezos’s appearances (along with Amazon’s sponsorship of the Met Gala) seemed to represent two novel developments:

1. A symbolic incursion of some of the world’s most powerful, despised and swagless elites into a demimonde that — for all its associations with vanity, greed and excess — we’d still like to think of as a haven for creativity, a fertile ground for swag, and a refuge for the misfit dreamers on the right side of history.

2. A symbolic failure, if not outright betrayal, on the part of two particularly beloved designers, whom we’re inclined to regard as fabulously successful yet fundamentally sympathetic creative-class strivers. To put it in sports terms, we see designers as players, not owners. Their creations bring a potent mix of joy, beauty, humor, elegance, desire and fantasy to our lives — but here they were, entertaining tech overlords whose creations actively drain life of its joy, beauty, humor, and elegance!

But are these developments really that surprising? And are they really that novel?

If we only conceive of fashion’s political dimension along a symbolic axis, they may feel like it.

But the life, work, and gargantuan wealth of Miuccia Prada — a player and an owner — tell a different story.

2. The black bag

Prada was born into an haute-bourgeois Milanese family that sold luggage and other fine goods to aristocrats and royals under the name Fratelli Prada. In a 1994 New Yorker profile, Ingrid Sischy wrote that, in the early part of the 20th century, Prada suitcases — “fabricated from walrus skin” with “toilet articles made of tortoiseshell, ivory, and gold” — were “so heavy that you needed servants to carry them.” They were ruling-class accoutrements, consecrated with the official patronage of Italy’s royal family.

In Miuccia Prada’s twenties, she was a card-carrying Communist. She also earned a doctorate in political science and, along the way, studied mime. This last detail is often treated as odd trivia, but mime, like fashion design, sits at the nexus of physicality, performance, truth, and illusion, so why not?

Prada initially resisted joining the brand her grandfather founded. This wasn’t because she didn’t care about fashion — she was known to wear YSL dresses to Party meetings. But she had to quiet the voice in her head that told her caring about fashion was frivolous.

Prada is perceptive about the fraught psychology of clothes-rocking. “When you get dressed, you are making public your idea about yourself, and I think that embarrasses people,” she’s said. When she overcame her own misgivings, though, Prada didn’t just join the family business. She took it over, and in the 1980s, with her husband and business partner Patrizio Bertelli, she set about building it into the global behemoth we know today.

The single most powerful engine of that transformation was a simple bag. It was made not from walrus skin, nor crocodile, or any other exotic luxury material Fratelli Prada might have used circa 1913. Instead, it was cut from a silky, durable and, relative to fine leathers, crucially inexpensive nylon originally developed for military parachutes.

The bags were initially logo-free but, after those didn’t sell, Prada branded them with what would become her signature enamel triangle. In the ‘90s, Prada sent them as gifts to influential editors to build buzz, they became an epochal hit, and they remain popular to this day.

There’s a case to be made that any big fashion house is a handbag company masquerading as a clothing company: What are the outfits on runways, when we get down to brass tacks, but elaborate ads for the margin-rich accessories (and beauty products) that make the real money? Prada is no different. But the brand has sold so many kilotons of nylon junk — not just bags, jackets, hats, shorts and skirts but also wallets, phone cases, key chains, scrunchies, belts, bandanas, neckties, laptop sleeves, hair clips, headbands, lunchboxes and beyond — that it’s tempting to call Prada a petrochemical firm masquerading as a fashion company.

In accounts of Miuccia Prada’s rise, her nylon bags are commonly described as elegant but versatile, elevated yet unprecious — and, for these reasons, as revolutionary. Writing about Prada for the Times in 1999, Ginia Bellafante was sharper in her assessment of this supposed revolution. Some observers believed the black nylon bag “stood in stark opposition to status,” Bellafante wrote. But in reality, this product “was simply tapping into what status would ultimately become: work, so much cooler in the Palm Pilot, high-tech, I.P.O. ‘90s than in the Charlie Sheen ‘Wall Street’ era before.” Prada, she concluded, “speaks to the chic dream of putting in 100-hour weeks at a new-media start-up.”

Delete “new media” and swap in a 17 Pro for the Palm Pilot and damn it if that doesn’t sound like it could have been written yesterday. It’s a fantastic read of what the black nylon Prada bag meant symbolically: a proto-grindset-girlboss must-have.

But what did the bag mean materially? In Dana Thomas’s excellent 2007 book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, she demonstrates how Prada’s nylon accessories embodied “the radical change that luxury was undergoing at the time” — namely, “from small family businesses of beautifully handcrafted goods to global corporations selling to the middle market.”

No one figured out how to bring neoliberal-age industrial capacity to bear on the newly “democratizing” luxury market, in other words, more cannily than Miuccia Prada.

3. Terror-stricken

She couldn’t have done it without Patrizio Bertelli, her businessman husband and partner. When Prada met him in the late 1970s, Bertelli was a factory owner producing leather goods in Tuscany. Together, they hatched a plan for world domination. First they introduced a womenswear line, then menswear, then the (initially) lower-priced diffusion lines Prada Sport and Miu Miu. The company piled up monster debt building starchitect-designed flagships in cities like New York and Tokyo, and buying stakes in rival labels like Gucci, Fendi, Alaia, Jil Sander and Helmut Lang.

These bets paid off lavishly, all in all. And in 2011, after several abortive earlier IPO attempts, Prada went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It was then that Miuccia Prada crossed the billionaire mark, many times over. And this is also a good place to mention that, in 2016, Italian authorities closed a yearslong tax investigation into her and Bertelli, after the couple “repatriated assets it held in Luxembourg and the Netherlands,” per Reuters, and paid “more than 400 million euros” — $530 million USD at the time — “to settle their tax positions.” They had the half-billion to spare.

Who is Patrizio Bertelli? A 1999 profile in Fortune reported that when he was “still a teenager he started his own business making and selling bags and belts,” and “by 20 he had three people working for him.” The magazine also noted that, “according to former employees,” Bertelli was “a nightmare of a boss: a micromanager with a temper” known for “shouting at anyone who doesn’t follow his instructions or at, well, anyone who is around at the wrong time.” A Prada recruiter described the company atmosphere in that piece as “very unprofessional” and “terror-stricken.”

Tales of Bertelli’s public screaming matches with Prada are legion. She herself has described their relationship, with affection, as combustible. The fruits of their partnership are inarguable, but its terms are nuanced: Bertelli’s business-brain purview can extend into Prada’s turf, affecting minute design details, like a Hollywood exec giving an auteur notes. In 2014, one Prada footwear designer told The Cut that Bertelli “has an instinct for what will sell,” explaining that “often he’ll change a heel height to make it more practical — like from 120 millimeters to 110.”

4. Being left-wing was fashionable

In interviews, Miuccia Prada frequently gestures to her “politics,” which she’s characterized as broadly left of center, but she does so with a studied vagueness.

“Because of my politics — being a designer but having thoughts that are not allowed if you are a rich person — it means that I am always struggling with myself,” she told the Independent in 2004.

When she opened the doors of her Palazzo in Milan to Cathy Horyn for a 1997 Vanity Fair profile, Prada described a second Palazzo she owned but pointedly kept empty, because, “I hate it! I always hate the bourgeois rich.” She explained that she’d “inherited this idea that showing money is really vulgar,” before adding, cryptically, “I also have my own political ideas.”

Horyn interpreted this as a reference to Prada’s onetime communism. Since the topic at hand was décor decisions across multiple Palazzos, that feels like a stretch. In fact, Prada has explicitly framed political radicalism as a phase she conclusively outgrew: “I was a Communist, but being left wing was fashionable,” she’s said. “I was no different from thousands of middle-class kids.”

She describes herself, point blank, as a saleswoman and pro-growth industrialist. “My job is to sell,” Prada once said. “And I like very much my job.” In conversation with Robin Givhan last month, Prada declared that, “as an industrialist, growing is the nature of the business.”

If you want concrete proof that Prada has long since abandoned the collectivist principles of her twenties, and that her politics are primarily aesthetic in nature, simply consider the fact that she went on to become a factory owner. And not one factory, but 26 of them.

Of those factories, 23 are in Italy. Prada’s products are also made using contractors in countries where labor costs less, like Vietnam, Turkey and Romania. Before arriving in stores, some of these pieces are shipped to Italy for finishing, where a “Made in Italy” label might be attached, too.

This practice is alluded to deep within Prada’s 589-page 2011 IPO prospectus. As of that report, “our products were made in our ten in-house production facilities in Italy and one in the United Kingdom, and also through a network of approximately 480 external manufacturers, approximately 390 of which were located in Italy,” the company declared. It added that “approximately 20% of our finished products were produced in our in-house production facilities (which include products where at least one important phase of the production process was performed internally)” — emphasis mine — “while the remaining 80% of our finished products were produced by our external manufacturers.”

In 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese factories, in particular, were responsible for making 20% of Prada’s collections. Notably, Patrizio Bertelli once derided Chinese manufacturing, pointing during a 2004 Times interview to his Italian-made Prada loafers and bragging about “a quality you can’t reproduce in China.”

Despite this derision, Bertelli was publicly considering moving a portion of production to China the next year. And in Deluxe, Dana Thomas reports that “in fact, Prada had already been producing leather goods in China for at least six months when Bertelli made that statement.”

It goes without saying that “Made in Italy,” much like “Made in USA,” is no panacea. By the same token, “Made in China” is not by definition “bad.” And Prada is far from alone in producing goods in Chinese factories.

But the company’s labor record is spotty. In 2016, the Guardian reported that Prada had been “found wanting in assessment of forced labour safeguards” by an industry watchdog group, scoring a “nine out of 100” when judged on “the quality and transparency of efforts by 20 major apparel companies to safeguard against forced labour from their supply chains.”

In 2017, Forbes reported that Prada ranked in “the bottom 10%” of a different watchdog’s supply-chain transparency review, along with Dior and Armani.

And just this January, Prada announced that it had cut ties with 222 of its suppliers, after an internal audit “found evidence of serious labour law breaches,” as the FT reported, including “the presence of dormitories inside the factories where workers slept.” The company made this announcement after Milanese authorities requested information about Prada’s supply chain, investigating abuses throughout Italy’s domestic fashion industry.

Which brings us to the conclusion…

5. Factory girls

Over the years, Prada has touted new initiatives into sustainability, including a full transition to recycled nylon in 2021. It has invested in some Hermès-style artisan-forward infrastructure, like an historic leather tannery it bought in Limoges, and a training academy that teaches Prada employees traditional handwork.

But Prada’s core proposition, production-wise, remains factories. And, to be clear, even if internal audits have purged particularly heinous vendors, a communist will regard any factory in which workers do not participate democratically in the profits generated by their labor as fundamentally unjust.

What makes Prada singularly interesting on this score is that she is not only a generational design talent with an avowed interest in politics and a communist past: She is also a factory owner, with the power to practice those politics materially, in the way her products are made, and not just symbolically, in her designs — if she actually wanted to.

And she clearly does not want to.

Quite the contrary — like Ralph Lauren, Bernard Arnault and, until his death, Giorgio Armani — she is the billionaire head of a global fashion conglomerate, and that comes with its own prerogatives.

With vanishingly few possible exceptions (maybe some musicians, maybe some filmmakers) you can not amass a billion dollars without committing yourself to a system of immiseration and environmental degradation.

“Billionaires” and “the social good” exist in an inverse relationship.

Prada likes to pretend otherwise. At the Miu Miu SS26 show, last fall, she sent models down the runway in designer aprons, among other takes on workwear. The show looked sick, but she made clear that it contained a political message, too: “We in fashion always talk about glamour or rich people, but we also have to recognize that life is very difficult,” Prada said afterward. “To me the apron contains the real life of women in history, from factories to the home.” Acknowledging the obvious conceptual tensions here, she added, shruggingly, “I use the instrument I have.”

She was, of course, being disingenuous. Design is not the only instrument Prada wields when it comes to addressing the difficulty of real women’s lives. She also has literal ownership of, and exerts immense influence over, a vast supply chain in which millions of women are employed.

Take another look at Mark Zuckerberg and Miuccia Prada. What if their material, class-based affinities more than overpower their symbolic differences?

What if the designer behind decades’ worth of hit handbags knows something about engineering addictive products, stoking unhealthy compulsions, and getting rich off other people’s labor, much like the owner of Facebook and Instagram does?

Maybe it’s not that Zuckerberg is sullying hallowed ground when he steps into a Prada show. Maybe it’s that the ground has long been sullied, and that “Mrs. Prada” never deserved anyone’s deification in the first place.

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Towards the end of last year I (Erin) started feeling alienated from clothes. I felt little pleasure getting dressed, and had no desire to shop. At first, I figured this was an occupational hazard — Jonah and I look at clothes a lot, reconnoitering both for ourselves and Spy Nation. But after checking in with some stylish women in my orbit, among them editors and designers, I discovered I wasn’t alone in my sartorial doldrums.

Several told me they felt fatigued by the question of what to wear, whereas they used to feel excited by it. We agreed that the firehose of fashion imagery we face daily — runway pics, targeted ads, GRWMs and affiliate-linked lists of the “15 best ____ to wear now” — is clearly a large part of the problem. I felt like I needed to lock myself in a metaphorical Faraday cage and hit reset.

I thought back to what it was like when I first got into clothes, as a fashion-obsessed teen. A theme quickly emerged: constraints. For one thing, back then, there was no impulse-copping on your phone at all hours. There was no e-comm at all. For another, I grew up without much dough, meaning my desire for cool clothes profoundly outstripped my ability to acquire them. This was a gift in disguise: I delighted in thrift shop finds, in exploring my taste and honing my sense of style rummaging through secondhand racks without the influence of trend- and numbers-driven merchandisers.

At the same time, I curated a fantasy closet of sorts, taping magazine tears into spiral notebooks. I maintained these proto-Pinterest “fashion journals” for ~a decade. A couple such pages are below, including baby Gisele in an ad for Stella McCartney’s first Chloé collection in 1998. I never expected to own any of the things in these magazines. The pleasure was in the wanting, and in cribbing styling principles that helped steer my thrifting. Long before “dupe” culture, I got good at ferreting out runway doppelgangers in the aisles of Salvation Army.

Leafing through those decades-old journals last December, I realized that, to rebuild my appetite for getting dressed again, it might help to develop some productive constraints. I wanted to turn down the noise and limit my inputs, to go back to something I’ve done since I was a little kid: lock myself in my room and play around with my clothes.

I committed to a sartorial version of dry January in which I’d avoid all color. For the first 31 days of 2026, I would only wear black. I envisioned this as a sort of fast, a slapper purification ritual. I’d keep a journal of the month, cataloging what I wore and what I felt as the experiment proceeded.

With access only to a limited section of my closet, what clothes would I miss? And what would I learn about what I actually wanted to wear?

The ground rules…

I wear black often, but rarely do I wear it top to bottom. I prefer to break it up — say, black jeans with a red short sleeve sweatshirt from the ‘50s, a white belt, and the new ugly shoe in brown.

Up top, I decided that zinging any colorful accents off my monastic palette was off-limits. The only accessories I permitted myself were a black waxed canvas tote (from this great L.A. store) and silver or gold jewelry. When it rained, I’d grab a black umbrella.

To respect the walls of my Faraday cage, I would buy absolutely no new clothing for those 31 days. Everything had to be A. black and B. already in my closet (and, in a couple clutch cases, Jonah’s).

Observing an all-black diet was an idea I’d had kicking around for a bit. Back in August I wrote about the allure of going Monochrome Mode, i.e. wearing one color head-to-toe, and how it can help “clarify the way we think about getting dressed.”

Also, I’d always been intrigued by the Rei Kawakubos of the world, who wear nothing but black 24/7/365. What did they know that I didn’t?

The month begins…

January 1: The first thing I do is photograph all the black clothes and shoes I own, so I’ll know which pieces are in play, and so I can think about how they might play off each other.

Friends, Lesson No. 1 hits me right then and there:

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