Do good work and your fits will follow
We read people's swag through the cool things they make & do
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Mark your calendars —
In this Thursday’s newsletter we have a Very Special Clothing Event for classified-tier subscribers. The mighty Vancouver line James Coward are dropping a capsule of 5 of the most beautiful pieces they’ve ever made, exclusively through Blackbird Spyplane: 2 new jackets in a modified Type 1 trucker style, and 3 new button-ups. They’re cut, variously, from dense-weave cotton chambray and luminous black wool gabardine sourced from the same mill Yohji Yamamoto uses. The colors are excellent, the pieces slap, and the run is highly limited. For 48 hours, Spy Nation will be the only people who can cop.
The last time we did a Coward ‘xclusie they had their highest-ever sales day and the pieces evanesced expeditiously, so don’t sleep.
One more reason to come back behind the Recon Curtain if you haven’t yet.
Meanwhile —
Some time in 2020, when Instagram “style-inspo moodboard” culture was at its peak, I started to feel a little tinge of uncertainty as I drank up a flood of ‘90s airport fit pics, behind-the-scenes shots of directors on set, throwback red-carpet flicks, archival portraits of painters, authors, architects, sculptors, and on and on…
It was not uncommon to encounter, say, a picture of Richard Serra stanced up in front of Tilted Arc in the ‘80s rocking a dark button-up and chinos with a pair of thrashed sneakers, and to see not only that 19.6k people had smashed the fave, but that hundreds of them had also commented “FIT IS HARDDDD 😤.”
The fits were absolutely hard, on some inarguable level, and I smashed the fave, too. And yet, as I did, part of me wondered how much heavy lifting the idea of “Richard Serra” was doing when it came to creating this sense of hardness, versus the clothes themselves. If you transposed these outfits onto 99.9% of the people who are not Richard Serra, I wondered, wouldn’t their hardness be substantially diminished?
We are no longer in quite the same “peak moodboard” moment, but this kind of thing still happens today, of course, all the time. When Serra died earlier this year, a Spyfriend sent over the below 2004 portrait, by legendary photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and asked us for help ID-ing Serra’s basketball sneakers.
They were Air Max Chosens — thank you Spy Nation sneakerheads — and they looked patently sick as hell. Or, at least, they looked sick as hell in the context of a great photo of Richard Serra. The soft, undulating, industrially produced uppers of the Nikes played pleasantly off Serra’s hard, undulating, industrially produced monoliths — and the charming goofiness of the basketball shoes played off the gravitas of the Elder Master — in a swaggy tension. These shoes might still look cool on someone else, but I’m not sure they’d look quite as tremendous as they do here.
Serra is just one example that springs to mind to illustrate any number of cases where the quality of a fit feels significantly dependent on a) knowing the person wearing it, and b) holding them in high esteem for reasons indirectly related — or entirely unrelated — to how they dress.
For instance, below are two pictures of Katharine Hepburn from the late ‘80s - early ‘90s. Her outfits in both are fantastic. The ensemble below left — a murdered-out leisurewear set accented with toasted white Reeboks and “Robby Müller Red” vest & socks — is one you could re-create and stand a pretty good chance of looking cool in. Whereas the one below right is great, too, but in a subtle enough register, I’d argue, that it owes most of its heat to the metatextual knowledge that we’re looking at a Regal Old Hollywood Icon rocking surprisingly filthy Nikes with some otherwise clean & well-fitting basics…
Or take Amiri Baraka, who killed the extremely simple fit below left mostly by being Amiri Baraka sitting in a cool chair in a charming Newark apartment…
Or David Fincher, who killed the fit below right mostly by being David Fincher in the ‘90s on the set of Fight Club with Helena Bonham Carter…
Or James Gandolfini. The moodboards have been going nutty for flicks of this titan — R.I.P. — for years now. But while he looks wonderful below left rocking a work jacket (hard to look bad in) with a fedora (hard to look good in), and below right rocking a suburban-dad checked short sleeve with stonewashed jeans and a visible white undershirt … you probably wouldn’t if you wore these clothes!
Similarly, moodboards love Philip Seymour Hoffman. But whereas his washed-out Carhartt below right is a rightfully celebrated slapper, his totally unprepossessing plaid pattern-DJ-ing on the mountain bike with the New Balances and garment-dyed Knicks cap, below left, is simultaneously sick and also an outfit that basically requires Philip Seymour Hoffman wearing it in order to leave the realm of “normal guy you wouldn’t look at twice on the street” and enter “FIT IS HARDDDD 😤” territory….
And so on. Scroll through Getty Images paparazzi shots or IG accounts like Night Openings and Director Fits (shout out to our man Hagop), and you’ll see tons of outfits whose power derives substantially from the person wearing them, as opposed to some overwhelming dopeness inherent to the fit itself. For every picture of a Steve McQueen, Justine Triet, Joanna Hogg or Wim Wenders rocking Yohji, Casey Casey or Lemaire, there’s a pic of Ridley Scott, Paul Shrader or Peter Jackson (above bottom left) looking mad cool despite / because of an outfit that a normal person is wearing right now at your local hardware store that you would never register, or a pic of Bong Joon-ho looking mad cool (above bottom right) despite / because of a Stüssy bucket hat and frameless eyeglasses that you would likely look like a doofus in!
“Blackbird Spyplane,” some of you might be thinking right now. “Nobody does profound contemplation with the off-kilter brilliance you do. But — duh?? It’s no shock that great artists, especially visual artists, have highly developed eyes and instincts when it comes to wrangling small but meaningful details into satisfying wholes. And it’s no shock that celebrities, who are generally accustomed to looking good on camera, and who generally exude charisma and swag as a matter of course, move through the world with a halo of glamour that enhances sartorial choices we’d find unremarkable (if not bad) on regular people.”
To which I’d reply, sure. That’s undeniably part of it.
But there’s something else going on here. Something deeper, and with more exciting implications for anyone interested in rocking clothes with sauce and panache. Two things, actually.
I. Our societal understanding of “Great Style” has expanded to become much more holistic & conceptually accommodating
Over the past few years, the Mach 3+ definition of “great style” has steadily grown more capacious, sophisticated and nuanced, expanding to include all kinds of garments and outfits that once upon a time did not rise to the level of inclusion in anyone’s “sauced-out” paradigm.
Part of this change has to do with the embrace and subsequent mutation of the notion of “normcore.” We see that with the elevation of dudes like George Costanza and Steve Carell in that one picture from Crazy Stupid Love to unlikely swag-lord status.
Directors offer an especially good “data set” to observe and explore this expansion in our sense of great style, because — the Wim Wenderses and Justine Triets aside — most filmmakers seem to have very little interest in fashion qua fashion, but they nonetheless see the world (literally) in uniquely compelling ways. And this vision is invariably reflected not just by what they put on screen but by what they put on.
They’ve developed their taste and refined their eye across a bunch of interests and disciplines, and they dress better as a result. This is something you can do, too, even if you can’t direct Zodiac. In that way, directors offer excellent, varied object lessons in style as a mode of communication that can and does exist wholly separate from a hyper-plugged-in conscious interest in dressing.
Which brings us to a compelling truth …
II. We read people’s swag through our admiration for their work
The kinds of celebrities, actors, artists, musicians etc. I’ve been talking about look good to us, to a significant degree, because we know they are good at their craft, and we respect them for this. Not only do they have their own style. Not only are they highly practiced (or innately gifted) stewards of their own appearances. We also read their style & appearance inexorably through our admiration for their work and their talent.
That’s a huge part of what’s going on with the celebration of, e.g., James Gandolfini’s or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s daily-driver fits: We can’t help but read their style choices through their actorly brilliance, and the immensity of both hits that much harder in the wake of their untimely deaths.
This is just as true of living people whose sui generis talents we admire. There’s the ones I’ve mentioned above. There’s counterintuitively style-rich Spyfriends like Nathan Fielder, scientist Suzanne Simard and non-fiction GOAT David Grann. There’s intentionally stylish Spyfriends like Steven Yeun and Héctor Bellerin. There’s largely fashion-agnostic Spyplane Swag Pantheon Giants like Larry David and possibly also “Gervaiscore” legend Ricky Gervais. Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t quite in Larry David territory yet, but mark our words: if he sticks to his current path, we as a society may have no choice sooner than later but to bow to his unmatched artistic talent and his unwavering dedication to newsboy caps, to the degree we find ourselves obligated to “hand it to him.”
The point is not just that these people are famous. Most famous people famously dress horribly. The point is that we admire / respect / f**k heavy with the work these famous people do, and the things they make, and so we are inclined (though not guaranteed) to see their clothes favorably through that prism. See also the style obsession with Steve Jobs and his iconic black Issey mocknecks, stonewashed Levi’s and gray New Balances — fits that look great but would absolutely not inspire the same adulation if it weren’t for the halo around Apple’s design and Jobs’ ample marketing genius. (There is no such halo around Facebook or Twitter, whose founders also happen to be well known for bricking 10,000 fits for every .000001 they get off.)
To be clear, some people are great at making things and simply bad at dressing. But what inspires me about the examples above is the running theme of work and talent making you look better. Too often, when we desperately search for “the perfect jeans” “the perfect tee” or “the perfect haircut,” I think that what we are really looking for doesn’t actually exist: A shortcut to work, talent, and the great sense of style that is frequently their byproduct.
When we wrote about how to wear cool clothes when you live in a place where no one else cares about cool clothes, our ultimate advice was to start by being a good neighbor and letting the swag sort itself out. The conclusion here is similar: If you put in work, and focus on caring about and making good things — whether it’s good art or, real talk, just good deeds! — it will augment and enhance your sauce in all kinds of molecular-level ways, making you look much cooler, and helping you to move through the world much more poppingly.
In other words: Do good work and your fits will follow.
finally a compelling reason to be a kind, well rounded person 🙏🙏🙏
Furthermore, I think these fits look so good because the clothes have clearly been worn many times by the people wearing them. I think this hurts so many non-cool celebrities today who are obviously wearing things for the first time that were picked out for them by a stylist. Just check out any pic of Travis Kelce walking into an NFL stadium.