Gray magic

What you need to know about last week's FW25 shows. Also shout out Abbas Kiarostami the color master

Jan 28, 2025

Our new Home Goods Report, bursting with things to enliven the place you live, 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.

Here at Blackbird Spyplane, two of our main concerns are cool colors and artistic visionaries.

So we were delighted last Friday to discover a 1975 film by the late Iranian king Abbas Kiarostami called Colors, streaming for free until this Friday on the always-excellent Le Cinéma Club. We’d never heard of it before, and it’s wonderful: a 16-minute short Kiarostami made to teach children colors. It stars a swaggy young boy named Shahid, who enjoys some charming color-related adventures interspersed with the main event: ingenious color-grouped montages …

Stills from Abbas Kiarostami’s fantastic 1975 short film *Colors*, streaming at Le Cinéma Club this week

It’s great — a delicious yet judicious chromatic abbondanza.

The same day we watched Colors, we started to pore through various runway presentations, lookbooks and line sheets from some of our favorite labels at Paris FW25 Men’s Week. And coming off the Kiarostami short, we felt some whiplash — because, mamma mia, the prevailing energy in a bunch of these collections is grays on grays on grays.

Erin and I (Jonah) both start from a place of ambivalence about gray. We love neutrals — a fundamental building block of How to Wear Colors Well — but we tend to think of grays as the most boring and enervating of the bunch… the color of wardrobes worn by conformist bureaucratic drones in dystopian-future sci fi… the risk-averse color of “seriousness” and “sobriety”…

However! We also recognize that many people feel similarly dismissive about beige, and we love beige — humble, earthy, quietly expressive. So we use this insight into other people’s blind spots to push past our own … and acknowledge that GRAY MAGIC is possible:

Grays dominated at a bunch of the FW25 collections from labels we care about most

Our favorite look by far at Prada was the one that Miuccia Prada came out rocking, above bottom left: She tossed a simple, fine-gauge gray short-sleeve wool v-neck over a silky white dress with purple tights and silver heels that have a navy ankle strap — the gray does great counterbalancing here, tugging pleasantly against the flashier pieces.

The Row tinted their gray topcoat brown (above right), warming it up. Our Legacy (above left) pushed theirs into a deep charcoal register. It made sense that Mfpen (above left) leaned into silvery gray, the totemic hue of the ‘00s corporate-officewear look they’ve been exploring for a couple years now. But even Auralee — known for doing color like nobody else — sent out a mostly gray deconstructed ‘90s corporate-officewear fit, above right. Issey Miyake (above right) did a wide-pleated, green-tinted riff on the classic Gray Flannel Suit. Now that “nobody goes into offices anymore,” and the people who still do dress casually, the bygone Codes of the Cubicle are riper for pastiche than ever.

You know whose FW25 collection quietly freaked it when it came to grays? The bubbling Japanese line Stein, overseen by designer Kiichiro Asakawa. On the fit above bottom right, the proportion, blue-gray tone and the (charcoal?) midlayer all mesh perfectly.

In fact, Stein freaked it all kinds of ways for FW25, to the extent that we gotta give them Spyplane Top Honors as our No. 1 collection of the week.

I (Jonah) own one Stein piece, and it’s a cool khaki colorblock windbreaker with pronounced S.T.R.R.O.N.G.G. (Soviet Techno Racing Raver Orbital Neo Gorp Gymnast) energy — an energy nowhere in evidence here. They switched it up, ventured in new directions, and killed it.

Some our favorite looks from Stein, who showed our No. 1 collection of the week

Expert layering was the uniting theme, from the knits-on-knits fits pictured A. and C. above, to the denim shorts rocked over trousers in fits E. and F.

And see how those denim pieces look just the right amount of scuzzy and ripped? That’s a pan-seared-and-flambéed vibe that cuts beautifully against what might otherwise be Suffocatingly Unbroken Luxury Sumptuousness, without looking like wack fugazi “distressing.”

There’s a great torched-and-scorched vibe happening in fit B., with the oil-splattered-looking mechanic’s set rocked over the crisp white button-up and gray fuzzy high turtleneck. Also, there were some slim-fit pieces in other collections, but we are still not rocking with that s**t. We love the comprehensive devotion to roominess at Stein — nowhere more swaggily in evidence than the (highly Lemaire-ish) enzyme-washed-looking green denim work set on ma in fit D. above.

And please enjoy two different ways a double-zip jacket can be a layering superweapon: You could let one soar GULL-WING style as an outerlayer, as in fit G. above, or deploy it as a cheeky midlayer window onto a sliver of shirt, as in fit H. Take notes!

Meanwhile —

It wasn’t all grayscales. There were pops and splashes of brighter colors, too. Prominent among these were deep purples (a trend we called in January 2024 that is still rocking), and variations on the crimson hue we’ve named “Robby Müller Red,” which we called the color of the year in 2021 — a declaration we made so far back, yet which was so powerfully prophetic, that it’s been continually coming true ever since…

How to attempt rocking Robby Müller Red yourself?

If you’re feeling bolder than we are, you could dive in & rock an all-red fit, as seen above left on bruv at Rier and on ma in the overcoat above right at Auralee.
Still bold, you could do some swag colorblocking as seen above in the ~50% black (possibly dark navy) / ~50% red fits at Our Legacy and Lemaire. There’s also the excellent Willy Chavarria fit above right, where they style a red track jacket with big jeans cut from a fantastic rusty red denim — a color Erin was feeling in several collections.
Your boy Jonah’s approach would be to work a small-but-potent burst of red into an otherwise restrained ensemble, as seen with the red sleeves peeking out from the cuff stacks at Lii, above bottom right, or the red hemline cheekily tugged out amid earth-tone layering at Auralee, in the detail above top right.

Wow —

There were some eye-popping color combinations at Kiko Kostadinov — many of them too loud for our taste, real talk, especially because Kiko’s designs themselves can pack a pretty forceful punch. But we’re feeling the dark-brown set below top right. Here are some other colors — and color combinations — that caught our eyes:

We’re talking about killer forest-greens at Auralee (on the slouchy cords above right).
A great olive drab at Gabriella Coll Garments (above top left), in a S.T.R.R.O.N.G.G.-vibed fit where a pinstriped stand-collar windbreaker gets tucked into the technical-looking wrap skirt.
A dark YURPLE topcoat over a murdered-out matching set at Lemaire.
Another nice orange-inflected rusty red, at Issey Miyake.
Great dusty tones across the turmeric top and saffrony pants at Martine Rose.
We weren’t crazy about most of what we saw at Prada FW25 (too much gross fur trim and tight satiny pants) but the rounded boatneck brown-knit-on-peach-sorbet-knit look here was cool, especially with the pink-and-blue striped pants.
And this Hermès coat (above bottom right) looks kind of like it was cut from very luxurious electrical tape — its silvery gray-blue-green outer face looked great against its navy lining, matching navy pants, brown tucked cardigan (don’t just layer your knits — tuck them) and pale-yellow turtleneck.

We call this “Tonal Swag,” and we broke down how to master it here.

Speaking of tonal swag — real quick —

The Spyfriends at Sono, a young label started by ex-Lemaire and ex-The Row people, which we first wrote about several seasons ago, sent us this pleasantly gradating overview of their FW25 collection.

Part of the fun of going to shows IRL is seeing grids like these taped up backstage. When you let your eyes wash over this one, it’s also a great illustration of how neutrals have RANGE, and a great tip sheet for how to put them together.

Finally —

The Spyfriends at Man-tle sent us their line sheet & lookbook. We were stoked to see that they went heavily primary with it, colorwise, as seen on the silhouetted Robby Müller Red nylon “gill” jacket above left and the banging blue-and-yellow fit on our man above top right — he’s also wearing a black waterproof “Master Shield” bucket hat and a mud-dip-dyed button-up that takes Gray Magic to a loamy place. The silhouetted shoe is Man-tle’s upcoming chunkier-soled, black-hardware version of the “Middle English,” made in collaboration with the greats at upstate New York’s Aurora, who we wrote about here (it’s also coming in a dark navy).

We’re very intrigued to see Camiel Fortgens’s (unofficial) frayed-edge riff on a Barbour jacket IRL, which they teased on their IG above right; this Kartik Research anorak (above left), among other pieces; and the great leaf-motif Small Talk intarsia (I think) sweater above right, which proves that big bold graphics, when done right, need not feel torched splashed across a torso in 2025.

Last but not least, thanks to the dimensions, the grungy plaid and the workweary chest pockets, Willy Chavarria makes the typically cursed suit-over-hoodie maneuver look tremendous, above bottom left.

Gray magic

What you need to know about last week's FW25 shows. Also shout out Abbas Kiarostami the color master

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