Get in your F.R.I.D.G.E. and cook
The Mindset Drought is over
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Not long ago, a friend of mine came across a pair of pants that he loved, looked great in, and felt like himself rocking. This isn’t the kind of miracle that just happens every day. So he began hunting down secondhand pairs, in as many colors and fabrics as he could find. He angled on Grailed and Japanese resale sites, reeling in a few different pairs: The trousers were Kaptain Sunshine’s Gurkhas, self-belted, double pleated, relaxed with a slight taper, made in Japan from cottons, wools, silks, and linens. If you have the right breed of Brain Worms nibbling on your cerebellum, you likely recognize this behavior. When you find pants that click the way these did for him, it’s hard to stop there — you try to build a deep bench.
Along the way, though, you might find yourself in a state of focus so intense it edges into blindness. In my buddy’s case, this manifested with him copping a silk-linen pair of the Gurkhas in a shade of blue you’d call… distinct. Not unlovely at all, but big and bold, whereas the other pairs he’d bought were chiller shades of black, chocolate, and olive. “They were into the violet part of the spectrum,” is how he describes the color on these pants. “I don’t know if there was truly any purple in them, but they gave purple.”
He liked them in the abstract, but any time he actually pulled them on, these s--ts were a no-go, chromatically speaking. Paradoxically, he’d bought an unrockable pair of perfect pants.
Someone else might have simply taken the L, gotten rid of the violet-blue gurkhas, and charged it to the game. You live and you learn. But my friend decided to take another path — and he wound up setting the stage for a Profound Epiphany.
Rather than put the pants up for sale, or stuff them in the back of his closet in the hopes that, whenever he looked at them next, things would somehow be different, he did something he’d never normally have thought to do with a pair of silk-linen slappers: He decided to wear them to the climbing gym, like some Mach 7+ dirtbag rocking an extremely artisanal pair of Dickies. He belayed in them, he tackled projects in them, he fell in them, fell some more, got sweaty, threw them in the wash, and went back a few days later to do it all over again.
And wouldn’t you know it, with the washing and wearing, the violet-blue quickly began to fade to a much chiller indigo. By treating the pants unpreciously, he’d rendered them rockable. They soon went from gym-only status to bruv’s daily rotation.
When my friend recounted this saga for me, my mind went to a few places.
I thought about something Erin’s talked about, which is what she calls Breaking the Seal on a new garment. This involves wearing the f--k out of something immediately upon obtaining it, in order to kickstart the process of making it yours, feeling at home in it and, if it’s a remotely fancy piece, dispelling any nerves around wearing it. The alternative — hanging it up all store-fresh and waiting for “its time to come” — can risk allowing a mental roadblock to build up against ever busting it out, or at least against ever feeling truly comfortable in it.
And I thought about another friend who, against his better judgment, bought himself a bright white Evan Kinori button-up a couple years ago. I say “against his better judgment” because white shirts are, of course, tough to keep white, and he feared this one wasn’t going to stay spotless for long. So he didn’t wear it much. When he did, he mollycoddled it. And despite that preciousness, a waxy red stain materialized on the collar all the same — possibly lipstick.
Now, as the Blackbird Spyplane Semiotics of Swaggy Stains goes, lipstick is a pimpish imperfection. But he felt it ruined the shirt. So he gave it to his wife to turn into a dedicated piece of gardening gear — roomy enough to maneuver in, lightweight, perfect for working under the hot sun. And wouldn’t you know it, the lipstick faded over several washes and came to share space with other charming stains borne of Gaia’s soil and flora. Now the shirt looks better than ever.
That’s one of the things I love about clothesmakers like Evan. They tend to work with special, “elevated” fabrics. But they’re fabrics that, despite their fineness, often age, wear and patinate the way a more intuitively hard-wearing material will. Check out the lightweight linen double-pleat pants, above, that Evan’s right-hand man Neal has been wearing to work day in, day out, for a couple years now. When holes develop, he just throws some quick patches at them with an unprecious zigzag stitch. They’re beautiful.
All of which can only lead us to one place: the formulation of a brand new Spyplane Mindset.
Yes. It’s been too long since we dropped a mindset here at the Plane. There were months on end, during our first several years, when it felt like we dropped profound new mindsets weekly. I’m not sure what happened.
Maybe I wanted to avoid spreading so many Massively Enlightening Mind Expanding Schemata (M.E.M.E.S.) that, if a reader were to study them all, they would risk perceiving the Face of G-d and find themselves annihilated by a rush of True Consciousness. Maybe I sensed that our minds can only do so much expanding before we are incapacitated by epiphany.
But today? The mindset drought is over. Because what the stories above all demonstrate is that, instead of putting supposedly “precious” clothes on ice, there’s a world of value and sauce in taking them out of the F.R.I.D.G.E., i.e. wearing the hell out of them and coming out the other end with Finery Roasted Into Daily Garment Excellence.
We write all the time about how wearing clothes is cooler than buying clothes, and how clothes that look worn make you look swaggier than clothes that look right off the rack. When I see the fold lines from an e-comm box still creasing someone’s shirt? Damn it if I don’t feel disenchanted, depressed … and disgusted 😜 !!
F.R.I.D.G.E. Mindset is a connected but different point, though. Because the idea here is to treat all manner of putative “finery” the same way a denim head treats jeans cut from raw 14oz. Cone Mills White Oak selvedge, pummeling them in the name of the fades.
As it happens, you can see me practicing the F.R.I.D.G.E. Mindset lifestyle in the picture all the way up top, rocking a pair of Lemaire’s Vibram-soled “Wrap On” sneakers on a dusty trail along the Sonoma coast.
Your boy was ensorcelled with these shoes from the moment Lemaire first teased them, back in January of 2024. But when they finally dropped last fall, the pricetag was a dealbreaker. As sick as they were, I couldn’t as a matter of principle cross the $1,000 Sneaker Red Line.
A few months ago, I came across a good deal on a pair in my size, coppethed, and have worn them almost daily since. They’re a perfect F.R.I.D.G.E. specimen: Few things scream WACK to me like a pair of pristine, “Fashion Sneaker” looking a-- fashion sneakers. The reason I liked these was their aesthetics of gorpy utility, backed up by the full faith and credit guarantee of their actually tough outsoles. This wasn’t some chauffered-car-to-the-carpeted-restaurant-only s--t from The Row baby.
So even though the temptation was high to rock them sparingly, and to treat them like an auction-house conservator when I did, I knew that would look and feel cheesy. And it would be at cross purposes with a very important metric: Not “Cost Per Wear,” which is inane, but “Joy Per Garment.”
I knew I had to traipse pon these trails, and get some grit on the sneakers right out of the gate. I knew I had to take them out of the F.R.I.D.G.E. and start cooking.
P🥘E🥘A🥘C🥘E til next time,
— J&E
There’s a trove of rugs, cushions, lamps, ceramics and more in our Home Goods Index.
Classified-Tier Spyfriends request, share and receive Mach 3+ recommendations in our SpyTalk Chat Room.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a handy rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to socks — is here.
🗣️🗣️🗣️ BTW — I (Jonah) went on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast, hosted by smart & savvy Spyfriends Max Tani and Ben Smith, to talk about Blackbird Spyplane. The episode is out now on Apple here, and on YouTube here.
It may or may not have been Fabio Borrelli, of Neapolitan shirtmaker Luigi Borrelli, who once told how he would Break the Seal on any new bespoke suit he got by wearing it on his next intercontinental flight, buttoned all the way, and sleeping in it, shoes off and curled up in his seat. Not before he had arrived in his hotel room, he said, would the suit even start to be his. Or something like that.
Biked to work in a secondhand genuine blue suede shift dress and feel great about it. My lifestyle of cycling, playgrounds and gardening in a four-season climate is made for the F.R.I.D.G.E. mindset, I refuse to bow to the business casual-athleisure “solution.” Finessing it for my professional/conservative work environment is not straightforward though!