It's the year of the Fox
It's the year of the Fox
Exclusive Spy-Access to soil-to-hanger dye-free bangers from one of our favorite small designers
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Gnarly pesticides … toxic industrial dyes … these lurk in the DNA of maybe ~98.9% of the clothes we wear these days, wack ones and exquisite slappers alike. This is, of course, not great for the soils of Gaia, for the farmers who till it, for workers at dye-plants and factories, or for the waterways where the byproducts get dumped. When you add it all up, you gotta wonder if it’s great news for us when we put that s**t on…
So Erin and I (Jonah) — longtime natural-dyed-garment enthusiasts — were intrigued a couple years back to learn that things can be yet another way entirely, when we spotted some humble 3-packs of brown and green socks at L.A.’s The Good Liver during a recon mission. These socks, we learned, were knit from organic cotton grown A) using no chemical pesticides and B) in naturally occurring hues. The color of the socks was endemic to the cotton itself, which not only required no dyeing, but was naturally pest-repellent to boot. I took home a brown pack, and they’ve been in my rotation ever since.
This was our first encounter with the work of cotton breeder Sally Fox, whose work had eluded us up til then — and d*mn we’d been sleeping, because we came to realize that Sally is an undersung legend. (We later discovered she’s a Classified Tier Spyfriend, so that’s tight, too.)
Back in the ‘80s, embarking on a noble crunchy mission, Sally formed a company around her own proprietary crossbreeds of dye-free, long-fiber cottons. By the mid-‘90s she was selling her trademark FoxFibre® to brands including Levi’s, L.L. Bean, Land’s End, Gap and Giorgio Armani. She kept cooking even when powerful haters in California’s regs-cotton industry got her (temporarily) banned from growing in the state by claiming that her cotton was a contaminant (!) that threatened to sully their “pure” white crops 🤔.
Then Cursed Bill Cl*nton & NAFTA decimated the American textile industry and, with it, the vast majority of Sally’s business. (In a grim irony, she’d kept a framed letter from Al Gore in her office commending her eco-apparel breakthroughs.) It could have been a wrap for Sally then & there, but she hung in tight, and over the past few years she’s been mounting a comeback, which we wrote about here.
I’ve been slowly amassing several cherished Fox holdings, new and old — most of them in Sally’s “Coyote” brown color, seen on the swatch chart above right. It started with the socks. Then, during my intel-rich trip to NYC this past May, I picked up a pair of double-pleated Evan Kinori pants cut from Japan-milled Fox cotton-canvas. Soon afterwards I paid $100 for a beautiful ‘90s Levi’s FoxFibre® trucker jacket that turned out to be deadstock when it arrived at HQ …
And when Erin and I hit Paris last month??
Your boy was Foxed-up EGREGIOUSLY: Rocking the socks and the pants and a trio of new unisex FoxFibre® bangers by designer Dana Lee Brown that are officially dropping right here, right now, in a Spyplane Exclusive Early Access Event.
For the past few years Dana has been attempting something extremely hard: A line of chill, elegant, trend-resistant clothes where every single element — from the cottons to the wools to the dyes — is regeneratively grown, farmed, milled, spun, woven, cut, sewn, and so on, in North America. This would be cool yet ultimately unremarkable if the clothes (including our pick for earth’s greatest sweatshirt) weren’t so good. You can read our interview with Dana from last spring here.
In 2021 she began “exploring possibilities with Sally and with local mills,” Dana told us, “figuring out what fabrics and yarns were possible within the constraints of local capabilities.” Rather than buy Fox fabrics milled overseas and then shipped here, she wanted to make what she calls fully “soil to loom” FoxFibre® garments on her own regionally specific terms. In fall 2022 she visited Sally’s cotton fields in Northern California, and in early 2023 she purchased “1 bale — approximately 500 lbs — of Sally’s Coyote-colored cotton,” spinning it “into custom yarns with a mill in North Carolina.” Then she sent these yarns “to a weaving mill in Pennsylvania and a knitting mill in Quebec and worked with them to weave and knit custom fabrics.”
Erin and I have been waiting for this moment since last summer, when we visited Dana’s studio on Bowen Island, outside Vancouver, and she showed us an early sample of a DLB FoxFibre® sweatshirt. Her original plan was to put out a tight Fox capsule early this year — but when you’re a tiny operation and you set out to make garments from the soil up, the process can take more time than you anticipate.
But the wait ends today! Yes — we’re psyched to link with Dana on a Spyplane-exclusive early-access drop for her new capsule of FoxFibre® 🌳slappers🌳. (Which happen to go really well with YURPLES, as you can see above.)
For the next 24 hours, Classified-Tier Spyfriends are the only people on the planet who can cop.
The capsule consists of —
1. The Pocket Boxy Tee and 2. the Base Tee, both sewn in Canada from 6.5-oz organic FoxFibre® jersey. The former is Dana’s recurring drop-shoulder tee shape, now with a squared-off patch pocket. The latter is a “classic relaxed-fitting tee, styled after a Canadian Military undershirt, long enough to tuck in,” Dana says, with “double-needle rib-knit binding at the neck and sleeves,” and a “single needle vintage-style blind stitch at the hem”:
3. A new Raglan Sweatshirt sewn in Canada from an 11-oz double-faced fabric, knitted with Coyote-brown organic FoxFibre® on the exterior and, on the inside, organic Texas Upland Cotton fleece.
4. My personal favorite is the Curved-Hem Shirt, a soft but structured middleweight button-up with Coyote-brown sun-dried Oxford stripes, a roomy fit, natural Troca shell buttons placed perfectly down the placket (don’t you hate it when the second button is just a little too high or little too low?!), hand-flat-felled interior seams, and an ever-so-slightly oversize patch pocket. (I’m wearing a sz. L with the ‘90s Fox Levi’s jacket & Fox Kinori pants in today’s opening art, up top.) It’s cut & sewn in Canada from FoxFibre® and organic Upland cottons on the warp, all Upland on the weft, woven for Dana in Pennsylvania:
5. Also there’s some cool new roomy organic-ecru straight-leg 5-pocket jeans cut and sewn in San Francisco from 12 oz. vintage-shuttle-loomed denim “gilded” (!) with FoxFibre® selvedge. (Joining some hemp-denim pieces that Dana gave the same Fox-selvedge treatment in the past.) The tees are $185, the button-up is $400 and the others are in between.
These are, by definition, extremely small batch. And for the next 24 hours, our Classified-Tier Spyfriends are the only people on earth who can cop, using the secret passwordiolo down below.
Here are a few detail shots Dana sent from Bowen Island, shining in that British Columbia light:
As ever, we receive no spon money or affiliate-link kickbacks here. Blackbird Spyplane remains a subscriber-supported newsletter miracle, doing things like this for you & you only — and because it’s tight to support people like Dana and Sally doing extremely cool, extremely uncommon work.
Join our Classified Tier if you haven’t. If you have, enjoy Spyplane Exclusive Access to the new Dana Lee Brown FoxFibre® Capsule here: