Fortify your mentals

Plus French sneakers nobody's checking for, handwoven kitchen textiles, other vibey home goods & more

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Blackbird Spyplane coming to you from Day 4 of a historic triple-digit Parisian heatwave. We’ve been deploying multiple cool-keeping techniques from last week’s visionary guide to How to Dress Well When It’s Too Hot —not least among them some Radical Expectation Setting and Mental Conditioning.

Before leaving California, I steeled myself for multiple 204°F days of brutal, nonstop sweating. I imagined wearing a wool suit doing cardio in a sauna. And so on. Compared to that abject nightmare, the abject reality of multiple 102°F days feels like a breeze, to the extent that, yes, I have been wearing 2 shirts, as seen above, with the cool blobby 1970s Gérard Singer mailboxes.

I never wore a dusty pink long sleeve under an ecru tee before, but it’s such a pleasing, sorbetto-like combination that Parisian strangers have been stopping me to say, “merci monsieur” because the mere sight cools them down. That’s just the kind of thing you can do when your mentals are fortified.

Today we’ve got:

• Dope, clean, gorpish sneakers, made in France, from a brand no one is checking for

• Handwoven kitchen textiles from London

• Mad vibey home-goods from Copenhagen

• The hallucinatorily slapping, rarely heard debut album from a towering NYC minimalist-music legend, reissued for the first time on vinyl

• And more!

Let’s get to it —

We just caught wind of some very cool French-made, Vibram-soled sneakers we’d never heard of before, thanks to a big cosign from a Japanese artisan-clothes luminary…