After the sneaker-drop apocalypse
Swag footwear in an epochal wackness aftermath, sick jackets, tiny home enswaggeners & more
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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: