A wild scandal rocks the slow-clothes demimonde

Corporate swaggerjackery enters new territory, plus NYC wetlands, airport Noguchis, and more

Feb 11, 2025

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.

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The Plane is by your side, reporting from New York City, where I (Jonah) am back on my native soil. I flew here from California last week, and even before takeoff, I faced a test. When you 1) find yourself in a nice seat up front, as I did thanks to some miles I had lying around, can you 2) resist posting a photo to IG stories of your shoes nestling into the little telltale foot cubby and/or posting a selfie where people can glimpse the fat telltale over-ear headphones hanging from the seat peg?

You must resist. Call it the Act Like You’ve Been Here Before principle. I think there’s more or less one potentially acceptable variety of “my seat number’s in the single digits” IG story post, and that’s a shot of something good on your (wider than the screens in coach) screen: a still from Blade or 50 First Dates, or the world map showing some unlikely destination. Because this way you’re still bragging, but bragging in a way that might at least mildly interest your friends (“King is watching Blade en route to Incheon, that’s tight.”) Whereas a photo of just your shoes going into a cubby is of course interesting to no one, unless you’re wearing the Purple Earth Spyplane Obōz.

In my case, I kept my screen off the whole flight and read stories from Jesus’ Son. It’s been ~20 years since I last picked it up, it’s just as incredible as I remembered, and much funnier, especially “Emergency.” I didn’t post anything to stories until later that night, when I shared the following two travel documents:

Yes — there’s a Noguchi sculpture I’ve never seen before wedged unceremoniously between some seats and a wall at SFO. I can’t tell you how to find it, because it was 5 a.m. and I was not fully conscious, but they stuffed it into an otherwise humdrum passageway between two terminals or something.

And speaking of unexpected encounters with grace: Unless you land at JFK extremely off-peak, the cab ride into the city always takes 1h09m and costs $100+, meaning it is chump s**t to do anything but take the AirTrain to Howard Beach and hop on the A train. This trip also takes an hour, but you’re not sitting in traffic, it costs $11.40 all in, you get to immediately be among a bunch of outerborough New Yorkers, and you get to behold the gorgeous JFK-adjacent wetlands, pictured above right, where if you’re lucky you’ll see a crane.

I did a phone interview with Metropolitan and Last Days of Disco director Whit Stillman in 2011. He was fresh off a flight and took my call from the Howard Beach A train platform. I thought that was very tight, and so (unless it’s 11 p.m. and a car will take 31 minutes) I’ve done the same ever since.

I got dinner my first evening at Altro Paradiso with Spyfriends Noah Johnson, who just left GQ to edit Highsnobiety, and Chris Black of How Long Gone. It was the start of New York Fashion Week, a topic that didn’t come up much except that two of us were going to the Eckhaus Latta show and all three of us were curious what the newly resuscitated Calvin Klein collection would look like. (Seemed nice from video & pics I saw — so many grays though, mamma mia.)

Little did Noah and I know as we ate our strozzapreti and pappardelle, however, that the very next day a wild scandal would rock our particular demimonde of “slow clothes” enthusiasts.

Just after 9 a.m. PT / noon ET on Thursday, Feb. 8, San Francisco clothing designer and Spyfriend Evan Kinori texted me a link to Zara’s men’s suiting page, which bore the image bottom left. Bottom right is Evan’s studio on Valencia St.

Did Zara do an AI rendition of his studio, or build an actual replica set?? Either way, as I put it to Evan in my reply, this s**t was creepy and, frankly, incredible. For his part, he seemed to be taking this ridiculously brazen rip-off in stride, though he’d have been well within his rights to fume at these demons!

I texted low-res screenshots of the Zara page to Superstar Photography Analyzer Emily Keegin. Consulting this (imperfect) evidence, she spotted no definitive hallmarks of AI, but some indications of Photoshopping. She ultimately leaned toward the conclusion that they actually built and shot a set. (I contacted Zara’s press department with questions last week but haven’t heard back.)

Evan sent the same link to Noah, who posted a tweet about it that got ~4k faves: People love it when Zara gets called out for biting small designers. That’s as it should be, because Zara’s high-volume churn stands out as distinctly horrible for the planet — in an industry where “horrible for the planet” is Standard Operating Procedure — and because that churn is so heavily predicated on a model of making clothes that look remarkably similar to clothes other designers made first.

By that evening, the company had removed the image from their site entirely.

But something else is happening here. Because by now we’re all familiar with wack stories of a corporate fast-fashion label egregiously swaggerjacking a small independent operation’s distinctive clothing designs. This was new territory: a corporate fast-fashion label egregiously swaggerjacking a small independent operation’s distinctive physical environs.

Evan — more than almost any other designer I know, save maybe Dana Lee Brown — works to situate his clothes in a lived, breathed, real-world context. This takes several forms, local and global, e.g., photo shoots set amid rolling Marin hills; shirts and sofas constructed from wools and woods sourced in North California; photoessays about the time-honored Japanese weaving mills and octogenarian textile designers he contracts with; Evan himself talking in Blackbird Spyplane about the immense literal and metaphorical weight of the resources that go into a garment; and, of course, the studio itself. Up front it’s the most beautiful clothing shop in the Bay Area. In back is the workshop where designs are refined and patterns are cut. All that context deepens and animates the experience of wearing Evan’s clothes.

A place like Zara, by contrast, has mastered a kind of hyper-globalized contextlessness. This translates into extreme supply-chain efficiencies, but it also translates into a depressing aura of flatness and meaninglessness when it comes to the actual clothes the company sells.

As Erin and I told Paris Fashion Week when they interviewed us the other day, we sense a growing fatigue with the flatness, contextlessness and meaninglessness of big corporate brands and of the infinite e-comm scroll. It’s not hard to see how this fatigue could pose a growing threat to the bottom line.

In that light, Zara’s e-comm pictures of a knockoff Kinori HQ strike me as an attempt not merely to counterfeit a vibe but to counterfeit a context: to situate meaningless clothes in what seems like a meaningful physical environment — even if it’s a total facsimile.

Huge shout out to the great photographer and big homie Spyfriend Bobby Doherty, who had me over to his studio on Sunday morning for a little go-see, which is where the portrait up top came from.

More cutting-edge NYC recon coming in Thursday’s Classified-Tier Sletter.

P💆‍♀️E💆‍♀️A💆‍♀️C💆‍♀️E til then,

— J & E

A wild scandal rocks the slow-clothes demimonde

Corporate swaggerjackery enters new territory, plus NYC wetlands, airport Noguchis, and more

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