Everyone wants a place to put their hands
A menswear line secretly designed for women, plus artist-made jeans, handmade jewelry & more
Welcome to Concorde — Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical,” except it’s for everyone who is cool. Every edition is archived here.
The Concorde Cute Swag Index, a guide to everything we’ve covered, arranged by category, is here.
Our brand-new 2024 G.I.F.T.S. List, bursting with slappers for the mind, body and home, is here.
Unisex clothing has been core to the Spyplane mission since we launched in 2020 — it’s a natural extension of how Jonah and I (Erin) have always dressed and shopped. And over the past few years, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of lines framing their clothes as unisex. Just last week I noticed that France’s Rendez-Vous, one of our 35 slappiest shops, added an entire “unisex” category to their site, and some lines — like the L.A. label behind the killer deadstock-cotton button-ups I put in Concorde last week — are going a step further with a not only one-gender but one-size approach. It’s why Vuokko Nurmesniemi, who designed for Marimekko, is forever in my Concorde GOAT Pantheon: She designed a unisex shirt in 1956!
Speaking of gender-agnostic GOATS, earlier this year I asked Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta of NYC’s Eckhaus Latta about their approach to unisex. After all, they’ve been making “gender-neutral” clothing since they launched 10+ years ago.
Zoe said something extremely interesting: “We’re definitely not here to say that all of our clothes are fit off of a gender-neutral form. I think that’s an impossible act — or, like, from a patterning perspective, it would just mean oversized baby clothes. For us it’s more about cross-dressing fluidity, experimentation regardless of gender.” A liberatory and low-cap way to think about it.
Today I talk to the mastermind behind an up & coming label that makes its clothes in the U.S. using beautiful fabrics from mills in Belgium and Japan — some of the same ones the Spyfriends at Man-tle and Evan Kinori use, as it happens.
It’s a line beloved by tasteful, plugged-in fellas, but this season the designs & styling are more accommodating to women than ever.
Also in today’s Concorde:
In Thursday’s sletter we launched BBSP Exclusive Access to Xenia Telunts’s first-ever sample sale which ends tomorrow. All ~300 pieces sold out expeditiously, though, so Xenia just added nearly 200 more pieces. Access info below.
Hand-painted jeans, the antidote to raw-denim doldrums.
Silver jewelry in organic forms I love from an artist in Wisconsin.
A beautiful new, giftable tome on the big papa of minimalism, & more unbeatable recon.
Let’s get to it —