Did the A.I. shoes actually exist?
Plus guidance — concrete and non-cursed — on Living in the Moment, deep-cut slept-on sweaters & more
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Blackbird Spyplane back with you once again. Today we’ve got:
<My brains are starting to drip out of my ears voice> Did the A.I. shoes even ever actually exist?
A simple, concrete technique for Living in the Moment and lightening your psychic burden by considering the fascinatingly unknowable subjectivities of other living creatures
Rollneck Season Returns — and other deep-cut slept-on sweaters for fall
More unbeatable recon
Let’s get to it —
Here at the Plane we publish blockbuster sletters all the time. So it was light work for us this past Tuesday when we broke the news that J.Crew used A.I. to generate a bunch of images that evoked the look of their ‘80s and ‘90s catalogs.
Our story got picked up a ton of places, including The Cut; Business of Fashion; Advertising Age; Feed Me; Emily Keegin’s reels; Edgy Albert’s reels; J. Crew model, investigative journalist and Spyfriend Ezra Marcus’s close friends IG; and the front page of the New York Times above the fold.
As we noted in an update at the bottom of our piece, J.Crew added new language to their posts later in the day, attributing what they called the “digital art” to the self-described “A.I. photographer” we identified behind the pictures on Tuesday.
The conversation around these images since our story came out has been spirited, to put it mildly. The general tone is that cool people regard this s--t as depressing and wack.
I (Jonah) wanted to quickly add one more strange but important detail. On Tuesday, I wrote that “presumably the shoes featured in these images — the Vans collab J.Crew is promoting — are real, meaning they were actually photographed and inserted into A.I. tableaux.”
Insanely, it seems that I gave them too much credit on that score. Several Spyfriends pointed out that, in several of J.Crew’s A.I. images, the sneakers pictured were not even the correct Vans. A few commenters remarked on this same discrepancy two weeks ago on IG, to which J.Crew replied — confoundingly — “Happy to confirm those are the same shoes!”
The shoes in question are called the Vans Authentics … and friends, ironically, these “Authentics” do not pass Authentication:
As you can see above, the sneakers in some of the A.I.-generated posts have Derby-style eyelet facings, i.e. they’re sewn on top of the vamp. Whereas actual Vans Authentics have Oxford-style facings, i.e. they’re sewn underneath the vamp, as seen in the official product shot above.
Brands selling clothes using A.I. hallucinations of the clothes they’re selling … It’s dizzying to the point you might start to wonder: Do these sneakers even exist?
I’m going to try and stop thinking about this soon. But if anyone actually bought a pair when they dropped and is wearing them here in the corporeal realm, please let us know.
Meanwhile —
As of tonight at midnight, if you live in the U.S., you will have to start paying taxes on clothes copped from abroad even when they fall under the $800 threshold, known as the de minimis exemption, which is where taxes used to kick in.
This exemption has existed in some form since 1938. The limit has been $800 since 2015. Many foreign brands and foreign stores, such as Earth’s Best Clothing Shop, Neighbour in Vancouver, have suspended shipments to the U.S. while they try to wrap their heads around the ramifications. You’ve gotta imagine things are gonna prove so massively confusing, dysfunctional and costly that they will get worked out sooner than later. What a s--tshow.
However —
Speaking of vintage J. Crew energies and copping slappers domestically: Rollneck sweaters are in the BBSP Permanent Slapper Pantheon (BBSPPSP), but they’ve been having a broader resurgence over the past couple years.
Erin wrote about their history, and found a bunch of new & old versions, in Concorde back in 2023, not long after we rewatched the Scorsese Dylan documentary and saw king below left rocking an unraveling faded-black rollneck with extreme panache…
More recently, Evan Kinori started selling beautiful Italian-made rollnecks… And this past June, when we popped into Auralee’s showroom in Paris, I was stoked to see their springweight cashmere-and-silk take on the style, above right, which drops early next year, and which I shall be yopping.
But right now, with autumn right around the corner, we have a line on a cool old-school U.S.-based shop that stocks fantastic, slept-on Irish-made rollneck sweaters, along with a bunch of other great Shetland-wool knits in lovely colors. (They also sell a bunch of deadstock non-knitwear gems.)
Since we remain a cosmopolitan international operation, we have intel for you on banger rollnecks and other sweaters from some labels and shops outside the U.S., too.
Check these out: