Concorde 003: Play God with your pants
Tailor-made unisex denim, righteous gemstones, hand-dyed tights & more
Welcome to Concorde, a new 2x monthly creation from Blackbird Spyplane where Erin takes the lead. You could call it a women’s vertical, but the insights, intel and “cute swag information” transcend gender. Issues 001 and 002 are archived here…
Heyyyyy, welcome to Issue 003 of Concorde!
With our first two issues out, the “unbeatable paywall” has now slid down in front of Concorde with a pleasing whoosh — and this life-improving delight is officially an exclusive for our Cla$$ified Subscribers. Upgrade if you haven’t 😉.
If you’re new to BBSP, you can get a feel for what we’re about in two recent profiles of us, in The New York Times and The Guardian.
— Erin & Jonah
Clones… They’re not something we think about much here at Spyplane HQ. The idea of cloning people strikes us as some nonstarter dystopian “Playing God” creep s**t, and even though we love all of earth’s beasts, when we hear about people cloning beloved pets so that “they never have to die,” it seems to betray a fundamentally unhealthy attitude of denial toward death — no matter how motivated by love the impulse might be at bottom…
But what about denying the death of a fire jawn by cloning it? Specifically, what about cloning a beloved pair of jeans? The search for great pants can be vexing, to the degree that when you find a pair of jeans you look good in and feel comfortable wearing, you want to keep them around forever. This is why some ppl buy multiples from the jump, but sometimes you don’t really know how much you love a pair of jeans until enough time has passed that that precise pair is no longer coppable.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because I came across a wildly talented customs-jeans-maker in NYC who, among other things, “clones” cherished jeans that people bring to her. And, in the process, she lets you make “genetic tweaks” to the materials and the fit…
We are a firmly anti-eugenicist newsletter, but might be pro… eujawnicist?!
Today we’ve also got strangely beautiful gemstone-studded accessories, cool artist-made t-shirts, and the signs of an incoming trend, but first, check this out —
Emma Sienkiewycz is a New York-based tailor who specializes in denim. She learned how to sew using industrial machines while she was a high-school student in Vermont, apprenticing with a shoemaker there, then she moved to NYC to study menswear at Parsons. She went on to work at the beloved Greenpoint denim shop Loren, doing tailoring/repairs and custom orders for four years — which is where she learned the ins and outs of exceptional-pants construction.
“When you do repairs and tailoring, you’re studying how things are made by taking them apart and putting them back together,” Emma told me the other day, “and you start to recognize, Oh, this is made well, based on the quality of the stitching, how things are lining up, quality of the fabric, etc.”