Devour your world
Graceful style transitions, summerweight knits, great new shoes, and more
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— Jonah & Erin
Blackbird Spyplane by your side again and always. In today’s sletter we’ve got:
An up & coming line doing Made in USA natural-dye tees, cool wide-leg easy pants, nice boxy jackets, and other roomy slappers, cut from deadstock linens and crinkly Japanese cottons — for less dough than you’d think
Notes on navigating a style transition with grace
One of Japan’s sickest shoemakers just dropped some great new styles
Summerweight knits
And more!
Let’s get to it —
A reader wrote in the other day asking about graceful “style transitions.”
How does one navigate a style transition without engaging in acquisitive, vapid consumerism? — stromburgagram
Switching up your style is acquisitive by definition. You could trade clothes with friends, or put bygone bangers from deep in your closet back into rotation. But there’s no real way to reinvent your whole s--t without acquiring anything — unless you move off the grid, spin your own hemp, and craft your own crunchy slappers, achieving a level of swag too beautiful and too advanced to count as realistic for most of us at the current historical juncture.
That’s just the nature of the beast. This brings us to the “vapid consumerism” part of the question. Not unreasonably, some people are prone to feel a nagging sense of decadence and wastefulness when it comes to copping new clothes and jettisoning old ones, in a way that doesn’t happen with most other interests. If I’m heavy into one genre of fiction, or music, and now I want to explore elsewhere, the books and records I already own tend not to become “worthless” to me, much less actively repulsive, in the way that, e.g., a pair of very skinny pants or Nike Roshe Runs is liable to become. Not unrelatedly, books and records don’t require nearly as many resources to produce as clothes.
The obvious way to address this is by buying secondhand clothes. Always good advice. But I (Jonah) want to dig a bit deeper into what a “style transition” can mean in the first place.
It could be a long, smooth merge from one lane into an adjoining one. It could be an ongoing process that unfolds across decades of your life and, quite possibly, never ends: a constant state of becoming, rather than a few hinge moments. It could also be a slam-on-the-emergency-brake-and-yank-the-steering-wheel whiplash maneuver that sends you hurtling off in a totally different direction.
If you dressed horribly and you suddenly start dressing cool, more power to you. Edging into more pathological territory, though, we might be talking about a higher-twitch situation where, every several years, if not months, you seem to shed your skin and put on a new one, pinballing between personas, costumes, looks and vibes. Maybe there’s some sense of organic connective tissue between them all, maybe there isn’t.
Change is more common when you’re younger, because that’s when you’re neck-deep in the muck of “figuring out who you are.” The fact that you typically have less bread when you’re young also forces you to get crafty, to develop taste and ingenuity without shortcuts. There can be awkwardness along the way, but it’s a healthy awkwardness, to the extent that it bespeaks an openness, curiosity and appetite we’d all do well to keep alive in ourselves as we age — especially since “figuring out who you are” never really stops.
Dramatic shapeshifting at any point in life can be exhilarating. All outfits are costumes, all selves are performed, we’re never set in stone. But going Pinball Mode with your style can also suggest a disquieting jitteriness. Switch up your s--t for the third time in a calendar year and people might start to shiver in the cold, swagless winds they feel howling at them from the void at your core… Those same winds might make you shiver, too. No one believes your performance, you included.
Frenetic style transitions, in other words, carry a greater risk of failure and dissatisfaction than gradual ones, so err on the side of moving slowly and deliberately.
And yet! You also do gotta leave room for spontaneity, for lightness, for epiphany, for doing things for no good reason.
In On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle’s series of novels about a woman who finds herself stuck in a repeating day, the protagonist discovers that the food she eats does not replenish itself when the day resets. She’s a “monster,” she realizes, devouring her world little by little. She takes careful steps to mitigate this monstrousness, but accepts it as an irreducible condition of being alive. That might be the best any of us can do.
Meanwhile —
We walked into a clothing shop we f--k with a few weeks back and saw a little flotilla of pieces by a small, unisex line whose name was new to us. The clothes were a mix of natural-dyed organic-cotton shortsleeve & longsleeve tees … roomy shorts … wide-cut easy trousers … boxy jackets cut from salvaged linens, crinkly Japanese cottons and other natty fibies … all of it made in the USA: