Be the wetlands
Swag visions of 2025
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Happy New Year. As you rub the last lingering fog of 2024 from your eyes, how are you feeling? What do you think 2025 holds?
Yesterday morning, I (Jonah) gazed at the shimmering horizon of the new year and matched my breathing to the tempo of the Goldberg Variations as interpreted by Glenn Gould, who famously submerged his fingers in warm water before recording his definitive take in 1955, and whose preference for warm hands helps explain why he’s wearing wool gloves indoors sipping a cocktail in the picture below — a fantastic look I would like to emulate:
Anyway, contemplating the horizon — and bathing my big brain in the warm, clear water of Gould’s beautiful staccatissimos — I closed my eyes to let my Inner Prophetic Projector do its thing. Within moments, several Compelling Truths and Visions about the Present and Future began to take shape before me.
Here are a few of those truths & visions.
Streetwear & sneaker-drop heads are moving toward muted, logo-free, slow, small-batch, fabric-forward, independent, Spyplaney-type s**t
Is a sea change underway? The Spyfriends at L.A.’s legendary Union did as much as any shop to define the “streetwear” movement, and while they’ve always been adventurous in their tastes, they’ve tended toward the bright and the graphic in the clothes they stock. Some of their splashiest releases in recent memory were limited-edition retro Jordan collabs, and the “high fashion” lines they’ve picked up over the years, e.g., Kapital, Marni, Bode, Dries, and Martine Rose, favor bold patterns & colors, too. So it felt highly notable to see that, a month or so ago, Union became the first U.S. stockist to sell A. Presse, the fantastic, extremely understated Japanese line I saluted in our 2024 Slappy Awards.
Meanwhile, the high-end streetwear chain Kith did a collab with the rarefied Japanese line Auralee. The Spyfriends at Notre in Chicago kept selling Cactus Jack Jordans (which apparently still print money??) while simultaneously dipping a toe into the cashmere abyss of The Row. Berkeley’s Bows & Arrows, a longstanding East Bay sneakerhead institution, started carrying more small, independent, Spyplane-beloved lines whose clothes speak in hushed tones, like Man-tle, Lady White Co., Mfpen and Bardo (when Bows & Arrows owner and Spyfriend Jerry Harris came to our party in Paris last summer, he was wearing a Henry’s Swoop Jacket, too).
It’s possible that these streetwear-coded shops are simply doing a little portfolio diversification, and it’s possible that they’re aiming for different customers with these brands. But if you ask me, it’s a sign that hypebeast taste, historically understood as fast and loud, is gonna broaden to include a slower and more sotto voce register this year.
Two-Way-Zipper Supremacy
This has been bubbling up for a few years, but in 2025 it will reach critical mass. If you are the type to get active, you’ve long known that a two-way zipper on, e.g., a rain shell, cycling jacket or down parka proves handy in all sorts of scenarios. But Mach 3+ clothes-rockers are increasingly insisting on two-way zippers across the board — avoiding otherwise cool outer layers that only zip one way, or in the case of a few dudes I know, bringing them to tailors to have two-ways installed (a straightforward job that shouldn’t cost a ton).
The two-way zip lets you tweak a jacket’s shape and drape so as to achieve a subtly swaggier silhouette, kind of like how you leave a suit jacket’s bottommost button unfastened. Not to mention the chance it gives you to let a cool underlayer peek through from below. As illustrated above with James Coward’s new black wool-gabardine Circuit Jacket, seen on-body at Neighbour, and on-hanger at C’H’C’M’.
Don’t be like the Sea Wall. Be like the Wetlands.
For centuries, foolhardy Western engineers paved over funky coastal wetlands and erected concrete sea walls, to “better” defend cities from hurricanes, tsunamis, pollution, and other oceanic threats.
But science has since confirmed what Blessed Real Ones knew all along: Wetlands themselves are not just deeply salutary for the health of an ecosystem, they are a far more effective “defensive technology” than concrete!
Sea walls erode and crumble. Not only do they fail to quell monster waves, they can actually make them worse. Whereas wetlands absorb, redistribute, and nullify storm swells.
Sea walls stand cold and barren. They tend to look mad ugly. Whereas wetlands are beautiful, full of arcing reeds, tufts of bright-green grass, and cranes. They create vibey homes for these and other birds, for eels and frogs, and for a diverse abbondanza of other flora and fauna.
In 2025, it’s as clear as ever that we need to learn these exact lessons when it comes not only to how we build cities, but to how we envision ourselves and our own humanity — how we as Cool Craggy-Brained People react to, absorb, defend against, and adapt ourselves in the face of life’s onslaughts, upheavals, confusions, mystifications, misunderstandings, and tragedies.
We can’t be ideologically rigid, inflexible, doctrinaire, and corny. We gotta learn how to bend, reedlike, while staying firmly rooted in Dope Principles.
We can’t keep setting ourselves off from each other, trying to achieve false states of concrete-like invincibility. No! We gotta link and build communitarian-style, absorbing and diminishing the destructive power of any gnarly shockwaves that hit us, like as if we were rich, fertile, marshy soils.
We can’t try to bluntly repel or cancel out the foreign, the counterintuitive, and the unfamiliar. Instead, we gotta take in new ideas and filter them, incorporating what’s useful while neutralizing the heinousness and bogosity, much the way dense coastal vegetation filters out airborne and waterborne toxicities.
We need to be the Wetlands, not the Sea Wall!
And finally—
The coolest thing in clothes-rocking will be repetition
You know how when you’re watching a movie or TV show and you notice a character repeating the same garment across several time periods / different episodes? Erin and I always appreciate this when we clock it, because Garment Repeating is what Real People as opposed to Fake Characters actually do.
In the era of the fit pic, however, lots of people seemed to start viewing garment repetition as a pitfall to avoid at all costs, acting like judgmental and insecure middle-school kids on some “ew, you wore that yesterday” s**t. This is because the form of the fit pic itself creates a pressure for constant novelty. This in turn creates a pressure in us to constantly cop new garments, so that we have New Things to Post. (Would Shein as we know it exist without the gaping maws of contemporary social-media feeds? I don’t think so!)
But this is a sauceless path: You risk looking fidgety and restless, like a Fake Character motivated not by a love of and meaningful relationship to any one garment — much less by a coherent sense of style — but by a base desire to pander to an online audience.
Recently I saw a couple Spyfriends talking online about a cool weird hooded leather anorak thing that Stone Roses singer and Smolderingly Hot Swag Lord Ian Brown rocked back in the late ‘80s and was still rocking 30 years later.
How tight would it be if we took a page from Brown and, instead of worrying about shoveling nonstop novelty at our feeds, posted fit pics where the same garments popped up again and again over time? I’m not talking about locking in a daily uniform, the way I did for a month back in 2022. I’m not talking about wearing, say, the same jacket in every single picture you post. I’m talking about repeating garments intermittently, across not just weeks but months and years, so that down the road you can look back and see the same piece get worn in over time, gaining in patina, and see how you freaked it in different ways and in different fits. Even if you do not have Ian Brown’s cheekbones, this would obviously be extremely tight.
Since turning every single thing you post into a little commercial for yourself has never felt more cooked — joylessly going through the motions for diminishing returns — the time feels especially ripe for Garment Repeating. At root, it’s a sign that you aren’t trapped hopelessly in the death-loop that is The State of Shopping, but rather that you put that s**t on and wear the f**k out of it.
And in 2025, as in every year, wearing clothes > buying clothes.
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"Thank you for the prophetic wisdom Spyplane," everyone says in unison
Not only is repetition sustainable and healthy for the environment, but I think it also screams confidence to rock the same pieces again and again mixing and matching as you go along. If you think an article is hype, the best way to show that is to flex it as often and in as many contexts as possible. This sletter is a great start to 2025.