Blame Sambas
Barefoot on the threshold of swag, sick & newly coppable Japanese lines, a Georgia O'Keeffe / Alexander Girard Spygiveaway, and more
Bay Area friends: This Sunday, 5/18, we’re throwing a day party in Oakland’s Temescal Alley with Understory and the great NYC clothing line Archie. Mark from Archie is bringing out his entire SS25 collection, plus a selection of vintage books for sale. Snail Bar will be slinging drinks. Come through 2-6pm Sunday.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
Check our new Ultimate Spyplane Guides to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, Naoshima, Teshima & more.
Our list of 35 Spyplane Icons — celebrating design excellence of the contemporary slapper era — is here.
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane. Today we’ve got:
Intel on a limited-run Georgia O’Keeffe 🤝 Alexander Girard 🤝 Herman Miller home-goods drop, with a special Spygiveaway tie-in.
A dispatch from the wild & wavy Footwear Frontlines, including fantastic sneakers, slip-ons… and a barefoot-shoe Swag Event Horizon you can blame on Sambas.
Three fantastic Japanese lines you should have on your radar — which just got easier to cop outside of Japan.
Let’s get to it —
It’s no secret that Georgia O’Keeffe is an eternal Spyplane Sauce North Star. We’re also longtime admirers of midcentury textile-design legend Alexander Girard, a pal of O’Keeffe’s and, with his wife, Susan, a mad globetrotting collector of folk art. (Their packed-to-the-rafters wing at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art is a must-visit; Spyfriend Jacob Gallagher put us on a few years ago, which you already know if you’ve ever popped into the Santa Fe thread in our Global Intel Travel Chat Room.)
So we were highly intrigued when Spyfriend Kelsey Keith of Herman Miller hit us up a couple months back to let us know she’d just gotten back from O’Keeffe’s painfully sick old adobe home in Abiquiu, NM, helping art-direct photos there for a Top Secret collaboration between Herman Miller and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum — along an axis of Girard rareness.
That project finally comes out this coming Tuesday, a limited-run, two-piece capsule. There’s a classic Eames Wire Chair fitted with Girard-upholstered cushions in New-Mexico-desert-vibed ochre and sienna stripes. The main event, as far as we’re concerned, is a steel-topped, aluminum-legged Girard “Snake Table” with a coiled serpent graphic that, coincidentally, echoes a coiled snake skeleton O’Keeffe kept on display in her living room (below top left).
The Girard snake table was designed decades ago but “never went into production — only a couple of prototypes were made,” Kelsey said, pointing out that these sell for thousands at auction. Rather than flood the zone with new ones, they only ran up an edition of 100, at $895 each. Here’s the chair & table at Abiquiu:
The capsule goes live May 20 at Herman Miller, online and at their NYC store.
As part of the launch, they whipped up some limited-run jumbo bandanas with the Girard snake motif: “100% Japanese cotton, all stitched by hand in the U.S., printed with water-based ink, and available in three colors,” Kelsey said. She added: “You can only get these at the store during the launch week.”
But!
We’re doing a Spygiveaway for a Plane-exclusive clutch of these bandanas. To toss your name into the Virtual Bucket Hat, smash the “enter” button at the bottom of today’s sletter by 9 a.m. PT this Sunday, May 18th. We’ll draw the winners at random & let you know.
BTW you can find an abbondanza of Spyplane home-goods intel in our Home Goods Index.
Meanwhile —
Auralee and A. Presse are two extremely good Japanese lines that we saluted long before they went supernova among Mach 3+ clothes appreciators — to name just two cases of Spyplane hyper-prescience.
Three fantastic but much less well-known Japanese lines just hit the racks for spring at three of North America’s best clothing shops.
We actually called out all three lines in our recent guides to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka — it’s tight to see them more readily coppable with no Japan travel required: