You wanna dress like this restaurant
Everyone's going to Greece but they don't see the things the Spyplane sees!
Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.
Blackbird Spyplane back once again. Late last month we hit Greece to wind down our extended “Spyplane Summer European Recon” Mission, having gathered Mach 3+ intel in Copenhagen and Paris.
Specifically, we hit Athens & Hydra, where we saw a bunch of beauty, galloped around with friends, ate tremendous meals — and wouldn’t you know it, the most delicious of them all happened on our last night and in a fantastic taverna that, real talk, we are trying to dress like.
Specifically, we’re trying to channel its sublime interior color scheme, which embodies the color-combining technique we call “Tonal Swag.” This place is tonal-swagged-out to an elite degree that would fit right in on an Auralee or Casey Casey moodboard. Yes, the print by still-life master Giorgio Morandi is lovely and tonally swaggy in its own right. But the true achievement is the exquisite 5-color symphony happening on the walls, as diagrammed above.
What works so well here? What lessons can be extrapolated from these hues? For starters, they all read as “neutrals,” even though you’ve got a couple primary and secondary colors (yellow and green) in the mix. B., C. and E. are different colors but they’re all roughly the same tone, so the combination is deeply pleasing to the eye. D. and E. are the same color, in different shades. A. and D. are technically neutrals but do the unexpected work in this context of “accent colors,” popping from the field — you could swap in similarly toned reds, blacks or dark blues for either of these, and we bet it would look great, too. Also, the picture frame on the left is roughly the same color as E., and the picture frame on the right is roughly the same color as A. — internal harmonies that work if we analogize the picture frames to “accessories.”
You can check out our eternally useful guide to How to Wear Colors Well — which contains a bunch of fundamentals & illustrative pictures — to get a fuller sense of the principles at play here & never brick a palette again.
In today’s Plane — in addition to how to color-match an outfit, taverna-style — we’ve got:
A deep-cut Greek clothesmaker doing very cool unisex work on an independent level, whom Erin and I both copped pieces from and you can too, via her store in Athens or her webshop
One of the most fascinating (and most-commented-on) street-style photos we’ve ever posted to Spyplane IG stories, taken a stone’s throw from the Acropolis
The rest of our All-Killer, No-Filler roundup of the Wonders of Athens and Hydra
We went to Greece because friends of ours (one of whom is 1/2 Greek) were celebrating their 10-year wedding anniversary and kindly invited us to come down from Paris to celebrate. We booked flights, then realized that mad Spyfriends — including Them Jeans, Issy Wood, and Danielle Haim — were going to Greece (separately) this summer, too. Danielle blessed me with a bunch of ill Hydra tips (thank you D), and several of her recommendations turned out to be highlights of our entire European Mission.
Let’s get to it !
Starting with 1 (ONE) tremendous street-style photo and 1 only, because it captures something very rare and bewitching: Uncanny Sauce.
I posted this to IG stories and got as many replies as I’ve ever gotten: