Are your clothes "performative"?
Plus slapper sotto voce garments from a small line with impeccable DNA, a very funny jawns satirist & more
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— Jonah & Erin
Blackbird Spyplane back in the building. Today we’ve got:
Sick new unisex clothes on their “sotto voce eleganza mamma mia” flow from a small independent line with Lemaire and The Row in its DNA
A TikTok comic who’s not only a virtuoso “absurdist zoomer-speak” satirist but extremely funny about clothes & consumer culture at large.
BUT FIRST — A provocative reader question… and our profound answer —
“Do you ever feel like your clothes are a performance?” — leemore
Of course. On some level, I (Jonah) always feel this way, and rather than this being a bad thing, it’s probably a huge part of why I like clothes…
We’re all constantly performing, consciously and unconsciously, as a matter of course. Rather than being toothless or insincere acts of posturing — which is how the word “performative” mostly gets used online these days — these performances help to create our identities, “fake it till you make it”-style. You could call me Jawn-Paul Sartre the father of Flexistentialism the way one of my long-held philosophical tenets is that there is no such thing as a stable, coherent, “authentic” self that exists meaningfully apart from our actions — which is to say, the ways we behave ourselves into being.
How you dress, how you talk, the way you treat strangers, the movies and music you love, the ways you react to others, the kinds of people you’re attracted to, what makes you angry, and so on — these are all things that help make you “you,” and they’re also contingencies within your power to change as you live, grow, make mistakes, accumulate regrets, discover unexpected joys, and generally get wiser and discover dope new s**t.
Some things are harder to change than others. But I don’t believe there’s some fundamental unbudging you that you’re permanently tethered to and which, by extension, dictates how you “can and should” dress.
If that was the case then “the self” would be a prison, and I don’t wanna feel imprisoned baby, I wanna feel free!! The fact that you can explore and experiment with different ways of getting off fits — not just finding but also rewriting yourself, one jawn at a time — is some liberatory and exciting s**t.
The chief danger with “performing yourself” via clothes, of course, is that you don’t want your choices to feel arbitrary or feigned, which, put plainly, will risk making you look and feel corny. We all know — firsthand and from looking at other people — that some performances ring true, while others register as fidgety, hollow, and affected.
This is as true of clothes as it is of other forms of creative expression. Let’s take an example from the arts. Were you once stopped dead in your tracks by the immense power of a Donald Judd stack sculpture? Did it reveal surprising new depths and dimensions as you walked around it and its metal planes seemed to thrum, changing color ever so slightly in the light? As you beheld that b*tch, did the interplay of shadows on the wall between each rectangle remind you of the way that Steve Reich’s music, which you love, might seem droning and repetitive on its face but in fact contains a galaxy of transportive variations that only reveal themselves with attention and time?
No?? Then maybe that $150 repro Donald Judd Castelli 1966 exhibition poster you copped after you saw photos of Judd’s loft on an “elevated streetwear” moodboard is taking up wall space at your crib that would be better occupied by different décor!! What’s more, maybe the poster stands as a physical manifestation of some insecurity or pretension on your part that you might be happier if you tried to interrogate and push past…
But also, maybe that poster — despite the fact that you acquired it under dubious circumstances — will turn out to be a gateway. Your portal into an exploration of post-minimalist art that broadens your sense of the world, rocking your whole s**t and leading you down all kinds of other unpredictable but tight cultural rabbitholes that no moodboard has ever charted.
This would be amazing. And you couldn’t have gotten there without some “performing” along the way. Substitute enormous pleated pants for Donald Judd poster and the point remains the same!!
MEANWHILE — Check this fantastic line —
No one with Mach 3+ taste doesn’t respect The Row and Lemaire: 2 labels that excel, season after season, at cutting sumptuously roomy clothes from beautiful fabrics in fantastic, understated colors …
We’re talking about jawns that manage to speak volumes saucewise, but in sotte voce tones … Real eleganza s**t.
Well, here are some fantastic new unisex clothes that check all the above boxes and more. Made in the UK and France, they’re from a small independent label doing their d*mn thing way further under the radar…
A few of our favorites are pictured above and below. And the line in question was co-founded by someone who has put in design work at…. Lemaire and The Row, where they helped launch menswear.
O yes! They just put out their FW23 collection, and it’s smacking.
The line is called Sono, it’s based in Hackney, and it’s the co-creation of Stephanie Oberg and Simon Homes.
Looking at the FW23 pieces, Erin’s eyes shot to the natural wool one-button oversized one-button “Juri” jacket that ma is rocking middle above left, also pictured above in an earthy-hued wool-linen.
My eyes?? They shot to the round-shoulder Mac “made out of irregular linen / wool” in that same loamy hue, which, as you can see above, has a wonderful, Spyplane-approved BACKWARDS-D silhouette when you view it from the side.
There’s a lot of “sustainability” rhetoric around Sono’s self-presentation, but it gets beyond platitudes. Reading through their site you learn that, for instance, “Our garments are sewn by only a few factories and artisans that are all close to our studio here in London and one amazing factory in the Loire Valley, France, with the best practice at every level of technical detail, all seamstresses are fully employed and protected under French employment laws. The relationships have been built slowly over years, we know the names of everyone who makes our clothes and know for sure they are paid fairly.” Shout out to a definition of sustainability that acknowledges labor practices up front.
You also learn that “the yarn for our knitwear is from the Sesia Valley in Northern Italy. All wool is organic, natural and ensure that the sheep, goats and alpacas are looked after in the most humane and responsible way, the spinning and finishing techniques avoid all chemicals and use 100% renewable energy.” Shout out to a vision of sustainability that acknowledges the role of blessed beasts and Gaia in true Mach 3 jawnscraft !!
Their wool is “either woven raw without any chemical finishes in the UK or in Tuscany by an artisan and friend.” Their cotton is “mainly woven in Veneto Italy using 100% GOTS (global organic standard) cotton yarns by a small family business.” Buttons: “carved from organic corozo nut in Padua and dyed with plant based ecological dyes.” Zippers?? “Made from recycled brass in Switzerland, free from any harmful galvanisation processes and clean waste water.”
And so on… The only other designer we’ve seen balance sick unisex design with such rigorous attention to details of “supply chain” / provenance is Spyfriend Dana Lee.
All of this would be theoretically tight enough in a vacuum, but wouldn’t matter as much in practice, obviously, if the clothes weren’t so good. Peep those camel-wool knits. The ill cuff stack JUTTING from the canvasy-looking wool smock. The SMART brown pants!!
Sono is on IG here — with under 6k followers — and their site is here.
FINALLY — This guy is very funny about clothes —