"Cashless" is swagless
Wallets, hoodies, beanies, 2026 footwear trends, styling tricks from the Paris swag frontlines & more
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
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Check out our monumental new list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.
Before anything else —
As you might have heard, Minneapolis organizers have called for a general strike across the U.S. tomorrow, Friday, Jan. 30. Take off work, take off school, do no shopping, find a rally near you, show up alongside your brothers & sisters and, as dark as things feel, take comfort in the fact that there are more of us than there are of them.
Today we’ve got an intel-rich Plane for you, featuring:
Sick wallets,
Dope Canada-made contrast-stitch wool-fleece beanies some cool dudes were rocking with sauce in Paris last week,
A fantastic hoodie, currently coppable at cut rates,
How to rock a spicy bracelet as a fella?? Use it to cinch a cuff stack jauntily, and other swaggy styling visions you can Emulate and Learn From,
Two of the coolest shoes of 2026 — which dig deeper into a very fire footwear trend we first identified two years ago, and in which cheap bangers abound on eBay,
And more unbeatable recon
But first —
Blackbird Spyplane is a pro-cash sletter, and society’s slide away from physical currency dismays us.
“Cashlessness,” of course, empowers and enriches no one as much as credit-card companies, payment-processors, and other Capitalism Superparasites. It’s not difficult to envision a near-future scenario where cash has been all but forced into obsolescence and — in addition to the surveillance nightmare that an all-digital-payments world would entail — some enterprising “disrupters” turn the ability to pay for things itself into a monthly paid-subscription service… We’re almost there already!
As payment modes migrate to our phones, the writing might be on the wall for credit cards, too.
All of which got me (Jonah) & Erin wondering: Does anyone use wallets anymore?
Insanely, I myself use neither wallet nor cardholder nor thick blue broccoli rubber band. No: I simply toss my cards & cash into my pants pocket in a loose bundle, and have done so since college. I’ve tried a couple wallets and card cases for short stretches, but they never stick. I recognize that this is nutty behavior, but it’s how I roll.
Spyfriends, g-d bless them, are clearly still long on wallets, though, judging by the frequency with which readers hit us up asking for wallet intel.
I’m often at a loss for answers, since I don’t pay much attention to them personally, but two beautiful, simple, sturdy leather wallets just dropped the other day, from a bulletproof Japanese line: