The verdict is in: these slap
Sick clogs, handwoven rugs, deep-cut electronic chunes, and “wearing glasses for fashion” — adjudicated!!
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— Jonah & Erin
Wearing cool clothes — this s**t is full of paradoxes. For instance, it seems obviously, indisputably correct to say that you want your clothes to feel “true to who you are,” and that, by extension, when you rock a jawn, you don’t want to look like you’re “wearing a costume” or feel like you are “playing a character.”
And yet, if your imagination stops there, you risk imprisoning yourself within a leaden, swag-limiting literalism. Because one of the dopest things about wearing cool clothes is precisely that, sometimes, it feels like you’re playing a character. Not just taking a little vacation from yourself, but seeing if some previously unexpressed (or previously missing!!) parts of yourself get coaxed forth, and changing “who you are” in the process.
Fakery is lame, but play is joyous… Fickle trend-hopping is corny, but experimentation is tight… And an unbudging adherence to some fixed standard of “personal truth” might work for some people, but it’s not a rule we’d ever impose across the board, especially not on Mach 3+ clothes rockers…
This is where my mind went the other day when we put out a call for Personal Spyplane questions on IG and a reader named rollindangerous asked for our thoughts on
“wearing non-prescription glasses (sunnies excluded) to complete a fit?”
We’ve written about what we call C.O.M.B.O.V.E.R. Mindset, “which holds that Cringe Overcompensation Maneuvers Bespeak Obvious Vanity — Embrace Realness.” In that case we were grappling with a Spyfriend’s question about what to do in the face of imminent baldness: fight it or accept it. Our answer was brilliant, complex and surprising, but one of its essential premises was that displays of vanity come off lame, whereas owning whatever it is you’re working with can help you transform a trait you regard as a “deficiency” into a sauce-heightening superpower.
There’s something similar at play with the question of wearing eyeglasses for purely aesthetic reasons, in the absence of any physiological-medical need for them. Except, of course, whereas the baldness question is about cosmetic responses to a circumstance you didn’t choose, rocking glasses as accessories is about making a voluntary cosmetic choice. The intuitive move here is to liken this, unflatteringly, to putting on a British accent when you are not British — i.e. a fraudulent, pseudo-intellectual affectation. For most people, that’s probably as far as we need to go: “Don’t fake an accent, don’t wear glasses you don’t need, don’t be a pseud-a** goofy.”
But Spy Nation is not “most people.” And, thinking through it further, glasses are not simple, straightforward tools; they can be popping aesthetic creations in their own right. And so we do gotta admit that there is something inspiringly audacious and possibly even cool — if you can thread the needle, stick the landing, and own it — about the idea of rocking non-prescription glasses divorced from any strict utility, in the same spirit that people often rock sunglasses as accessories divorced from any strict utility. (That is, sick shades can make you look cool and popping even when it’s not that sunny out.)
There is so much energy and fun and face-modifying power in a great pair of sunglasses — why not try to find the same in eyeglasses, even when you’re 20/20?
It’s rocking them like you would an earring, or a brooch, or make-up, or a H.O.P.E. Mindset scarf, etc. These are all things that can look (to others) and feel (to you) fraudulent or affected if done wrong, and which can look and feel wonderful if done right. The cultural stigma around “fake eyeglasses” (like the one around fake accents) does create a substantially higher degree of difficulty. But if you can make “cool glasses you don’t actually need” your thing, and rock them not in a spirit of craven overcompensation / vanity / fakery (i.e. “I am a dumb*ss and want to look like I read books”) but in a spirit of confidence (“this frame shape flatters my nose in a way that is dope”) and even of unhindered, voracious play (“I f**k heavy with these sick glasses I found and even though my vision’s fine I’m gonna freak them”), who are we to clip yr wings and stop you from soaring?
Meanwhile, today we’ve got intel on some fire rugs handwoven in the U.S.; sick vibey deep-cut electronic chunes that just resurfaced; and buzzy unisex clogs that are very tight…
FIRST UP —