A plea for justice
The worst-dressed famous people and rare sauce lords among them, rare cool tiny-mic-style-advice dudes, rare shirts, and more unbeatable recon
The Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report is here.
We just dropped the smash-hit Spyplane Ultimate Bay Area Guide.
Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.
We don’t run ads and we never use affiliate links except for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay, and books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.
This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.
— Jonah & Erin
It’s become an annual tradition — we’re throwing a Party in Paris with our friends at Neighbour and Lady White Co. in a couple weeks. Chris Kontos of Kennedy Magazine will be playing music, and we’ll have wine from Novice and n.a. drinks from IESSI…
The party is Wednesday June 24 from 6 pm - 9 pm. Come through.
In today’s Plane we’ve got:
Dope non-crazy-priced natural-dye button-ups from some under-sung Japanese goats
New big jeans & new big pants in lovely fabrics from 2 of our favorite small lines
Did we find the only tiny-mic front-facing-camera IG style advice guy worth watching?
Our front-runner for the Best Album of 2026 just came out on Friday, the result of a mysterious legend switching up his style…
And more unbeatable recon!
But first —
We’ve published many interviews over the years with people whose work we admire across creative fields. A very select few have been actors — Steven Yeun, Seth Rogen, Maya Hawke, Rashida Jones, Adam Sandler, Michelle Williams, John C. Reilly and Nathan Fielder foremost among them. (Tyler, The Creator and André 3000 sort of count, but while they were great in Marty Supreme and Showing Up, respectively, they are not actors at this point so much as brilliant musicians who have acted.)
This relative under-representation of actors in the Spyplane Interview Archives is mostly attributable to the fact that actors are, per capita, some of the worst-dressed famous people alive.
As we told France’s Fédération de la Haute Couture and de la Mode when they interviewed us last year: You should ignore the way 99.5% of actors dress, 99.4% of athletes, 96.2% of musicians, and 100% of “influencers.” (Directors, photographers and artists are worth a gander.)
What confuses matters here is that, despite dressing poorly, actors tend to be easy on the eyes. This means people are prone to misguidedly treat them as style north stars, paying their street-style & red-carpet looks entirely too much attention.
This broad saucelessness among actors was not always the case, as demonstrated by countless documents of off-duty dressing from the Hollywood golden age to the ‘90s “airport fits” era. But it has been true since the ~2000s, as the explosion of the paparazzi/tabloid ecosystem gave way to the broadband-internet-era hypersaturation of our culture with images. Actors, on the frontlines of the image business, reacted to these changes by no longer shooting from the hip when they put together outfits. Instead, they became way too calculating, whether it meant extreme risk avoidance (in an attempt to never get caught bricking) or extreme O.D. goofball s--t (in an attempt to court attention).
All of this is to say that, despite these headwinds, there are a few actors perched high in the Spyplane Pantheon of Talent & Clothes-Rocking. Zoe Kravitz comes to mind… Jessie Buckley… LaKeith Stanfield… Charles Melton… Sandra Hüller… Franz Rogowski…
And one dude whose elusiveness is particularly painfully to us: Josh O’Connor.
Erin and I have been singing O’Connor’s praises since we saw him in Alice Rohrwacher’s brilliant La Chimera, a Top 5 Cinematic Achievement of the 21st Century, during which he delivers an indelible, haunted performance while looking great in clothes. That same year he co-starred in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, was scoundrelish and funny, and looked great in clothes in it, too.
He’s since done a bunch more excellent work while continually looking great in clothes. Unfortunately, the two times we’ve reached out to “his camp” to invite him to come on the Plane — first with La Chimera, and then when Spyfriend Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind came out — word came back that the timing wasn’t right.
We know the universe is working toward a happy resolution here, because the other day we saw pics of him wearing the remarkably Spyplanesque outfit above, tucking a black E.T. tee into pleated Studio Nicholson pants with Marsèll derbies, a bootleg Cannes cap, and a baggy suede-collar work jacket that isn’t Ssstein but could be.
So here’s a plea for justice. There are many tied-in readers in Spy Nation. If any of you are friends with O’Connor, please pass along our invitation for him to come enjoy the breeziest & most delightful conversation across all media… on Blackbird Spyplane. 🙏
Meanwhile —
When it comes to rhetorical formats for working through ideas about clothes that are more involved than “this is fire / this is trash,” the ~3-minute front-facing video is, obviously, suboptimal. TikToks and Reels are fine for punchy provocation but also highly susceptible to inanity and hogwash, and far less conducive to nuance and complexity than, say, the essay.
That said: Have we found the one tiny-microphone style guy worth watching? He has fewer than 3,000 followers on IG, a major love of secondhand clothes twinned with respect for garment repair, a charmingly stoic demeanor, and a zero-bogosity POV we f--k with: