Quiet miracles
Masterpiece Sweatshirts Spygiveaway from Dana Lee Brown, an exclusive First Look at Evan Kinori's SS25 editions & more
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
Our Home Goods Report, full of things to enliven the place you live, and stores where you can find them, is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a helpful rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.
What’s up Spy Nation — in today’s sletter we’ve got:
A classified-exclusive Spyplane First Look at a bunch of imminent spring pieces from Evan Kinori
A Spygiveaway for yarn-dyed elite-tier sweatshirts from Dana Lee Brown
New clothes that have become fixtures in my cerebellum, newly available, from the buzziest new label out
The ins and outs of $118 million in GOAT-auteur moviemaking eccentricity, as revealed by me
Let’s get to it —
We recently got a note from Spyfriend Dana Lee of Dana Lee Brown — a great small line out of British Columbia, where every single element of every garment is grown, woven / knit, cut & sewn in North America. (Read our 2023 interview with Dana about how and why she does what she does, here.)
Dana knows that Erin and I (Jonah) are enormous admirers of her Ring Neck sweatshirt, so she was alerting us to a brand-new version in a yarn-dyed color she calls Lichen.
The exterior face is organic cotton from Texas. The interior is undyed & unbleached Rambouillet wool from High Desert, CA. She calls the combination Cloud Fleece: “insulating but not overly warm or bulky.” Nothing less than a Spyplane-certified Quietly Miraculous slapper.
It now comes in not just “masculine” but also more-cropped “feminine” cuts, modeled above. We’re celebrating this launch with a Classified Subscriber Xclusie Spygiveaway. Between now and this coming Saturday, 3/15, at 9 a.m. PT, toss your name into our Virtual Bucket Hat for a chance to be blessed with a DLB sweatshirt.
Enter using the button at the bottom of today’s sletter. We’ll draw the winning names on Saturday.
Meanwhile —
At this point, a plurality of my wardrobe consists of clothes from Bay Area designer Evan Kinori. Evan’s silhouettes pop in pictures, but what you can’t fully appreciate until you’re with them in person is that very few designers have the same gift he does when it comes to choosing fabrics that make a piece really sing.
Evan’s Spring 2025 editions come out next week, so we asked him to pick out a range of new pieces he’s especially excited about — and to share not only pictures but insights into the special textiles he cut them from, and what makes them distinct.
The result is a Spyplane First Look at a bunch of stunners:
A. Evan cut several pieces this season from a walnut-dyed organic cotton denim, seen above in the form of the beautiful bomberish Zip Jacket Two. The fabric was woven in Hiroshima “and then sent to Okayama,” he explains, “where it was dyed with 100% natural walnut juice, made by the dyer with collected walnut shells, mixed with iron.” This creates “a great shade of warm, greyish beige, with a soft hand and a great, subtle wobble in color.”
B. Another fabric that recurs across the collection is a raw silk, as seen above on the Field Shirt Two and matching pants. (I handled it in Paris last summer and, as described here, its striated, nubbly face called out from across the room.)
This was “pretty much my first time working with an all-silk cloth,” Evan says. He was drawn specifically to silk noil, made through “a special process that uses/recycles the shorter-length silk fibers” generated in the production of finer silks. This noil has what he calls an “almost cotton-like hand feel and durability, with an ultra-matte appearance.”