Can you dress well if you can't layer?
Plus layering weapons, the definition of True Sauce, stop putting writers on camera except for Richard Brody, and more unbeatable recon
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In today’s Plane we’ve got:
Deep layering thoughts and powerful layering weapons,
Stop putting writers on video, they are not built for it, except Richard Brody,
Great garments that rely on — and two great little books about — interspecies kinship,
Meditative throbs,
& more
Let’s get to it —
I can’t tell you how many times a week friendly, attractive people stop me in the street or come up to me at a cool party and say, “Jonah, you and Erin are Legendary Layering Gods. Few of us can wear a coat over a jacket over a shirt over a shirt with as much flavor as you two, especially Erin.”
They intend this as a compliment, and on balance, that’s how I take it.
But I’ve got a Spyplane Confession. When I hear them say this, it also makes me wonder if I am, in the final analysis … a charlatan.
Because, unbeknownst to them, this compliment cuts right to the heart of a nagging uncertainty I feel about the definition of Real Sauce, and my relationship to it.
I can express this uncertainty via 3 overlapping questions:
Do people who possess a True Swag that I, in fact, lack, get off Mach 7+ fits on the reg without any layers?
If you take away my ability to layer, do I have anything left that is meaningfully identifiable as “sauce”?
Is “putting that s--t on to the degree it’s an art form” even possible if you don’t layer?
For me and Erin, our conception of what it means to really dress well has always been, conservatively speaking, ~85% about layering. Maybe it’s got to do with the fact that we’re both native East Coasters. But we’re obviously not alone in feeling this way, as evidenced by the popular cold-weather-themed “really start dressin” memes:
Here at the Plane, we see layering as the technique for creating tension, surprise, tantalizing hints & reveals, pleasing juxtapositions, and assorted other textural & chromatic intrigue.
You can absolutely look fantastic in just jeans and a tee shirt. But when you add more pieces to the equation, that’s where the question of styling really comes in — that’s where you aren’t simply buying “the right” pieces but figuring out how to combine them, upping the risk and the reward with each new layer.
New Yorker film critic and Spyplane-certified Swag Lord Richard Brody illustrates this well:
Less, when it comes to an outfit, is not necessarily more. And yes, more can always cross the line into too much, but the right amount is unbeatable.
Are we wrong?
Ultimately, I think this question might be unanswerable, in the sense that differing schools of thought about what “style” means lead to fundamentally different answers. One school holds that layering is where the true artistry and pleasure of putting that s--t on really flourishes and shines. Another school holds that true sauce exhibits itself, quite the contrary, in the ability to pare back a fit to the fewest possible components and still look dope: the ability to swag out, that is, even in a tank top and shorts.
As summers get hotter and hotter, this question gets — enragingly — less and less academic. Right now, though, it’s winter for our Northern Hemispheric Spyfriends.
And at the very least I can tell you there’s one kind of garment that any Layering Arsenal will be richly enswaggened by forever: