No more small plates!!
Except in Copenhagen, which is on one right now. The art, design & clothes are slapping, too. Our Ultimate Spyplane City Experience, Pt. I
As I (Jonah) write this paragraph at a banging flat in Paris’s 11th, enjoying a tangy Monoprix-brand yogurt, and listening to the lovely chansons of rare oiseaux, it occurs to me that one extremely chill thing about Blackbird Spyplane is that we’re “citizens of the world” — and when we travel to global locales, sick under-the-radar places containing mad delights open their doors and become known by us.
We share these delights with you, the most cosmopolitan readership across all media, in our smash-hit city reports on, e.g., the Wonders of London, the Wonders of Seoul, the Wonders of Paris, and the Wonders of Tokyo. Just this past Sunday Erin dropped a Philadelphia Swag edition of Concorde.
We hear from people who live in these cities thanking us for putting them on to spots even they didn’t know about, which is tight. And the feeling is mutual: In our Global Intel Travel Chat, Spyfriends share their own favorite spots around the world, and their depth of “dope-location knowledge” is beautiful.
Today we’ve got a Spyplane Travel Report for the ages, focused on a city intimately responsible for too many “elevated modernity-defining cultural trends” to count:
Yes! This month we took the best trip we’ve ever taken to Copenhagen — a world-class city for food, art, design, and inadvertently stepping into a bike lane and getting yelled at by a 6’4” dude doing 26 mph on a creaky steel cruiser who looks like Mads Mikkelsen but even hotter, because people here are tall, hot and serious about bicycles to a degree that rocks but can take some getting used to.
The best way to get used to it, of course, is to rent a bike yourself. But it’s an easy city to get around no matter what, and for a blissful 7 days earlier this month (before coming here to Paris for an intel- and vibes-gathering fashion-week mission), Erin and I glided across these Copenhagen cobblestones and rode these hyper-timely subways, harbor boats and regional trains. We engaged in uovertruffen Danish recon… hitting tremendous restaurants and bars, elite bakeries and coffee temples… Popping into some great clothing spots… Strolling through beautiful parks and museums so dope we wanted to move into them… Spending hours wandering through a stunningly vast plug for midcentury furniture & home goods priced for the low… And more!
Part Two of the Copenhagen Report is here.
When you see a “📀” below, that’s a DVD-ROM: Dope Vibey D*mn Recon Ordnance Marker. Let’s get into it —
We timed our Copenhagen trip to coincide with 3 Days of Design, the annual festival that many illustrious industrial designers tell us is their s**t, especially as Milan’s Salone Del Mobile becomes increasingly Art Basel-ified, i.e. transforms into a sh*tshow teeming with annoying influencers and cursed corpo activations.
At 3 Days of Design there’s a ton happening every day, and people fly in from all over, but it rarely feels elbow-to-elbow mobbed, except at the reliably jampacked-but-vibey 📀 Bar Palæ, which is to 3DD what Bar Basso is to the Salone. Our two favorite functions of the festival involved fashion collabs —
Many “fake leather” options are, unfortunately, plastic and grody, so we were stoked to learn about a new hemp-based leather alternative called 📀 Vireo, developed under the umbrella of the Danish textile GOATS Kvadrat, which looks leatherish despite its “yes ma the DNA is plant-based” pedigree. We learned about it at a launch party for A. some very cool-looking new camel- & charcoal-colored 📀 “Resonance” tote bags, pictured above, cut by Marimekko. Spyfriend Louise Sigvardt (who designs for both Marimekko and Kvadrat) noted that the hemp is pressed, not woven, so you can still see plant fibers, which is a vibe enhancer. These bags come out this fall, and in the meantime you can rummage around for a cheap secondhand unisex Marimekko button-up that has looked good for more than 65 years straight.
B. 📀 Apartamento and 📀 Our Legacy Work Shop filled a lil gallery with Canadian designer Willo Perron’s big, snaking “Sausage Sofas,” upholstered in Work Shop’s own fabrics, like the copper-colored corduroy joint your boy is LOUNGING upon in the picture above. Too gigantic to make sense in any of the rooms at Spyplane’s modest HQ, but to any vast loft-dwellers in Spy Nation: You know what you have to do.
C. At the opening party for that collab we chopped it up with Apartamento’s Marco Velardi, Spyfriend Jockum Hallin from Our Legacy, and also the Big Homie Spyfriend Sami Reiss of furniture-sletter Snake America. Jockum was wearing my favorite OL piece in recent memory, the 📀 Exhale Puffa, a windbreaker styled to look like a deflated down jacket. His was black ripstop but they make a few, plus a vest version.
On the subject of clothes, we visited E. the shop / HQ of Danish cool-clothes-wizards 📀 Mfpen, where founder and Spyfriend Sigurd Bank showed us some excellent FW24 and SS25 pieces — including a very sick cropped duck-canvas jacket with fireman-clasp closures. Other Scando-heavy clothing stores to check out in town are 📀 Another Aspect, 📀 Grocery, which carries a bunch of regional lines including OL and Sunflower, and 📀 Norse Store, where they stock their own house label plus many small lines we love, including 📀 Man-tle and 📀 James Coward.
We visited some (hit-or-miss) vintage spots in Copenhagen, too, including 📀 O-S-V, where we spotted the extremely S.T.R.O.N.G.G. Raf Simons-era Calvin Klein skirt pictured D. above, but also, like, ‘00s-era H&M button ups, which are not the wave. Sami says that 📀 Studio 1455 is the best shop for men’s vintage; we tried to make it there but ran out of time.
Real talk, some exceptional slappers notwithstanding, clothes were not the main event for us in Copenhagen. Danish home-goods titans Hay launched an Asics collab during the festival at 📀 Hay House. The sneakers look fine, but what really caught our eyes were the award-winning 📀 “Apex” clip lamps designed for Hay by Spyfriend John Tree, and F. these 📀 magnetic-closure laminated-cardboard storage boxes, which are an extremely classy and simple way to declutter and organize your cribbo.
You can put magazines, papers, photos, ephemera, art and office supplies in them. We’ve met people who put socks, tees, even sweaters and jeans in them. They look great on open shelves or stacked on the floor, come in different sizes, and are ~$20 each. The new range of colors pictured above will be out in the fall, but others are coppable now — including white, if you just wanna go straight “austere archivist” with it.
You know what truly made the trip? We ate real good, baby.
It’s no fluke that this is the city that gave the world Noma: Copenhagen’s restaurants are uniquely banging, and we hit up several of the very best, none of which cost anywhere near what Noma costs.
Let’s start with our No. 1 dinner of the whole visit:
This place was an unbeatable combination of laidback and EXQUISITE. Amazingly, several Danes we mentioned it to were unfamiliar: