Concorde: Drip like a tree — and we’re not talking maple syrup, baby
Cool bark-pattern pieces, vibey stained glass for the home, NYC-made clothes giving cool "'90s Prada Sport Space Cult" & more
Welcome to Concorde, a bimonthly edition of the sletter where Erin takes the lead. You could call it a women’s vertical, but the insights, intel and “cute swag information” transcend gender. The full Concorde archive lives here…
Here at Blackbird Spyplane / Concorde Enterprises™, we aren’t just tree lovers … we are certified bark connoisseurs. We appreciate our arboreal brothers and sisters so much that we’ve gone so far as to salute the sickest barks in our neighborhood, as seen in this IG video Jonah made.
So you know I was stoked a few weeks back when SpyFriend Ellen Van Dusen1 of Dusen Dusen posted a pic (below left) of herself in some fantastic new bark-print jawns she designed!
I messaged Ellen immediately, telling her, YES, I want to dress like a tree! She told me the inspiration for the pattern came when she was installing a birdhouse she designed for the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens (above right) last summer. “It was installed on a black metal pole, which gnawed at me on a deep level. I went back the next day and painted a tree bark pattern on the pole so it fit in a little better. And then I thought... what if I looked like tree bark too? And what if my bed looked like a tree...? And what if a towel looked like a tree?! And voilà. A print is born!”
The bark design is one of three new patterns in a clothing capsule Ellen’s about to put out — the first clothes she’s made since 2020, having temporarily shifted her focus from the BODY to the HOME. There’s the apron dress she’s wearing above; the top and shorts pictured above right; and a short sleeve shirt-dress with pockets (which also comes in two new colorful geometric prints). All will be available this coming Tuesday, 4/25, here.
Don’t sleep! And in the meantime, today we’ve got:
Inexpensive handmade home jawns whose vibes extend back to the 7th Century
Colorful jewelry for all genders, designed in Paris
A CLEAN and SPORTY unisex clothing line made in NYC that has intoxicating top notes of “‘90s Prada Sport” !!
Let’s get to it!
— Erin & Jonah
We don’t normally take decorating cues from churches2 but we do believe in the "higher power" of stained glass, and at Spyplane HQ there's a couple pieces hanging by Jonah’s aunt Ellen (a glass artist we saluted in our legendary "Auntwave" essay, here).
I love how, at certain times of the day, you can catch a puddle of color swimming on the wall because the sun’s hitting the glass just so. It’s like a little fleeting James Turrell Ganzfeld has snuck into your house and classed up the joint!
Some other examples of cool stained glass off the dome: Sigmar Polke’s windows for Grossmünster church in Zurich, made from very thinly sliced agates3... Any Italian church you stumble into after lunchtime, by which point your body has become 90% olive oil and you possess an extreme receptivity to the fluid, languorous brilliance of LIGHT...
And these extremely cool lights — which cost only $65 despite being handmade, and which will make any cribbo at least 33.3% more ENCHANTED …