Everyone's doing flowers
Plus, new spring arrivals, my favorite rain coat & more
This is Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical,” except it’s for everyone who is cool. Every edition is archived here.
Our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, which Spyfriends have added to, is here.
Check out our guides on belts and sunglasses.
Erin here, drunk on the scent of hyacinths. This week in the Bay, we’ve had two 70-degree days and the plum and magnolia blossoms are painting themselves onto the sidewalks in a post-parade impasto.
I’m also seeing flowers pop off in the work of independent designers I f**k with, including one whose line didn’t quite click for me until I did some genetic sequencing and discovered the Prada in her DNA.
That’s in today’s Corde plus:
The first spring pieces from two of my current favorite small lines
The coolest rain coats out for men & women, including some resale finds coppable on the low
Big beautiful non-logo’ed unisex bags
Let’s get to it —
At every Spyplane party we’ve thrown since 2020 I’ve seen someone wearing the work of Danish designer Cecilie Bahnsen. And while all these people have looked great — to the degree that I complimented them and/or asked what they were wearing — something about her clothes just didn’t feel quite right for me. The sheer organza dresses with their ruffles and fluffy layers read as too wedding cake-y. Too feminine for me. Or so I thought.
I’ve been looking closer for the past few collections, feeling them more and more. And my block was fully lifted very recently, when I realized how much of Bahnsen’s style DNA comes from one of my (and very probably your) all-time favorite designers: Miuccia Prada.
There’s so much overlap between these two, particularly if you look at the Prada Sport line. Bahnsen and Prada both go for a “cute sport” style: sneakers or comfortable walking sandals plus a feminine skirt and a small practical fabric bag. They both incorporate floral motifs, use fancy nylons to create a sense of casual glamour, and add technical elements like bungees, zips and velcro. Take the flower-adorned mini-heel sandals from Bahnsen’s spring collection, which I currently have in my cart (below left). Then look at the late ‘90s- / Y2K-era flower-adorned mini-heel sandals from Prada Sport, below middle and right.
To be extremely clear, Bahnsen absolutely has her own original vision, and I’m not saying these are Prada clones. But they were the key to helping me better understand and appreciate Bahnsen’s world. I see now that she, like Prada, designs clothes for women who live full lives. They work, play, walk 20 blocks in between. They maybe don’t change for dinner. They care about how they look, but once they’ve put something on, they don’t want to have to think about it again. As simple or silly as that might sound, it’s not something most designers nail.
(BTW — I found a few vintage Prada flower sandals, including the ones pictured, and put them for you in SpyMall.)
I’m not alone in my Bahnsen breakthrough. Last weekend in Portland I had dinner with Diana Kim of Stand Up Comedy (we’ll share more about our trip next week), and she told me Bahnsen’s work didn’t quite speak to her either, until she visited the showroom.
“I loved seeing people working wearing Cecilie’s clothes, that was really inspiring,” she texted me a couple days ago. Seeing real women wearing voluminous tops and pouf-y skirts while packing boxes or hunched over a laptop, that is, unlocked something for her. She’s since picked up the pre-fall collection for her store.
I asked Diana to send photos of what she was talking about and she passed along these beauties taken in Copenhagen:
Don’t they all look so at ease? Busy and going about their days. I love seeing how they mixed in more casual pieces like the red flip-flop, printed long sleeve and denim jacket. Note that they all choose black, which really helps you appreciate the sculptural volumes.
Beyond the sandals, for spring I’m drawn to the oversized fancy-ish basketball shorts with flower trim, the embossed floral skirt with pannier-like panels at the hips, and Madame Grès-adjacent smocked t-shirt (all pictured below).
I know Bahnsen is beloved for her femme sneakers. A couple weeks ago, she dropped a new pair of floral-print zip-fronts with a hidden neoprene sock as part of her ongoing Asics collaboration. They hit the Asics site on Friday and almost instantly sold out, but if you have petite feet, you might be in luck because they run small and there are still a lot of the smaller sizes at Bahnsen’s website, here.
Also? I’m surprised by how much I like what I’ve seen of her forthcoming collaboration with The North Face, which launches next week. The prototype she shared on IG (top middle above) is insanely charming: she took an existing TNF duffel bag and pinned black paper flowers all over, then added organza ribbons. It reminds me of some of my friend’s daughters’ sticker-covered bedroom walls… But the production versions of these bags are done in black all over, which gives those cute little flowers a little more bite.
Cecilie Bahnsen’s site is here. The North Face collaboration will be available next Thursday, March 13.
If it’s time for spring flowers, you know it’s time for spring showers baby…
And the people who make my favorite raincoats, hands-down, just put out some excellent new ones.