Do you go Multiples Mode?
Plus Early Access to beautiful limited-run gems, intel on other fall excellence, new music to be exquisitely crushed by & more
Blackbird Spyplane exists thanks to our readers.
We don’t run any ads, we don’t use affiliate links on new clothes, we don’t do any spon. This makes our subscribers the only people we owe anything, and it’s why we keep some of our best material for the Classified Tier.
Upgrade today if you haven’t yet, support greatness and enjoy a better life in the inner sanctum — Jonah & Erin
Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, Cameron Winter and Geese, Adam Sandler, Brendan from Turnstile, Patrick Radden Keefe, MJ Lenderman, Issy Wood, Evan Kinori, Steven Yeun, Maya Hawke, Bon Iver, André 3000, Sandy Liang, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, Ryota Iwai from Auralee, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Rashida Jones, Father John Misty, Kate Berlant, Clairo, Conner O’Malley & more are here.
Check out our monumental new list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.
Our Cool Mom Style Guide is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
The No. 1 Source Across All Media for Unbeatable Recon is back once again.
First up —
We got in some good reader questions recently. Here’s 2 quick ones:
Do either of you own and regularly wear multiples of the same piece of clothing?
If it’s multiples of the same exact piece — i.e., “I love these black Orslow Super Dads so much I’m buying three pairs” — no, neither of us does that. The Plane wants to travel, to paraphrase Diana Vreeland, more than it wants to burrow.
But there are degrees of burrowing, to be fair, and if we’re talking about multiple iterations of the same piece — i.e., “I love this jacket so much I’m gonna seek it out in as many different colors and fabrics as I can find,” then our answers are Not Really (Erin) and Absolutely, to the Point it Frequently Slips into a Compulsion (Jonah).
I’ve written about this before, vis a vis the concept of what I call Collector Brain Worms. Erin does not suffer from 🪱CBWs, but brother do I ever.
Among other multiples in my current rotation, I’ve got two Henry’s Swoop Jackets, two Man-tle P4 pants, two Casey Casey Big Raccourcie shirts, and … eight Evan Kinori Big Shirts 😵💫.
Going Multiples Mode can definitely become a pathology. For me, part of it might be a kind of “set it and forget it” mentality — the convenience of finding something you love and then locking in, without going all-out Uniform Mode. Maybe it’s also got to do with the part of my brain that loves drones, e.g., music by Terry Riley, Hiroshi Yoshimura, The Scientist, etc., who like to repeat the same basic figures while varying them slightly and incrementally.
There are other ways in which Multiples-Amassing Collector Brain Worms can be blessed & beneficial, not just parasitic. Do you go Multiples Mode? I explored the topic further here.
How to keep a semblance o’ swag in a workplace that demands corporate conformity?
Readers ask a version of this every so often, and I’m always at a bit of a loss to answer it. For one thing, I haven’t worked in an office full-time since 2009, and that was a culture magazine with no semblance of a dress code. For another, I feel ~99% of the button-ups and trousers from ~99% of the lines we write about would not be remotely inappropriate in an office — so you could just wear any of those that you like? What am I missing?
I replied along these lines the other day to a Spyfriend in the Classified SpyTalk Chat Room who was having “trouble dialing in my office fit.” He agreed, but was hoping all the same for some more-granular feedback from people who work in offices and are swaggy. If that describes you, we’re curious what you think — the thread is here.
Speaking of which —
A handful of small lines we’ve been f--king with for a minute just dropped their collections for fall. Here’s a roundup of some of our favorite pieces…
… starting with an Exclusive Early Access Event with some extremely limited gems.
We’ve been writing about Portland’s Aléjandro Gutiérrez since Spyplane Year One. For Graziano & Gutiérrez, he designs, patterns, cuts and sews every single piece of clothing himself, using a beautiful array of natural fabrics made for him by a network of family farmers and weavers in Oaxaca.
We were stoked to finally visit his studio earlier this year for our PDX guide and see the lab IRL.
In a week or so, G&G are putting out their fall editions. Alé gave us a peek, and we chose three of the best pieces — and, as we discovered, three of the most limited pieces — for an Early Access Capsule that’s live now:
There’s…
The Two Pocket Overshirt, a brand-new style, cut here from 4.5oz Japanese organic-cotton gingham seersucker, with “hand-sewn corozo buttons, a curved hem, two front chest pockets with flaps, rear side pleats, pattern matching throughout and the back yoke cut on the bias.” Alé tells us, “I currently have fabric on hand for just 8 of them, but I’m going to try and order yardage for a couple more.”
The Coyuchi Pintor Shirt, a workshirt-style button-up “from the community of Khadi in Oaxaca: they grow their own cotton, spin their own thread and weave their own fabric on pedal-looms. They used two different threads for this fabric’s weave: natural heritage cotton & coyuchi cotton” — the dye-free, naturally brown predecessor of Sally Fox’s FoxFibre cotton. “This creates a beautiful chambray-like fabric that is very soft and drapey,” Alé says, “but it’s full of texture. We will only make 10 of these available, as fabric is limited.”
And the four-pocket cut Taller Pant, “a loose-fitting, straight-leg pant with a 8.5” hem opening,” Alé says, cut from “a medium-weight brown cotton twill” that comes from the same Japanese mill as the seersucker.
You can find the capsule here: