Hardbody springtime slappers
An exclusive look inside Man-tle's new collection, a rare Spygiveaway for hand-cut horn sunglasses, and monster chuneage
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
ENJOY the few remaining Spyplane tees and totes in the Spy Store.
Our roundup of the Best Pants Out is here.
Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of gems in the comments.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
Our newest Home-Goods Guide is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.
— Jonah & Erin
Blackbird Spyplane back again. Today we’ve got —
A SpyGiveaway for beautiful new shades from Bardo, a very sick, very tiny Seattle-based jawnscrafting operation…
A monster new chune featuring one of our favorite singers in the d*mn game
More unbeatable recon !!
First up —
Australia’s Man-tle is one of our very favorite labels, for reasons far beyond their Category Leading Bucket Hats, which we first wrote about in Spyplane Year One.
Cofounders Larz Harry and Aida Kim met while they were both working for Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market years ago, and they rolled out their first collection together in FW2016. They’re based in Perth and make their clothes in Japan. Their emphasis is on generously cut unisex pieces, where a no-nonsense utility (workwear styles, hard-wearing fabrics that only look doper with time) CONVERGES with unfussy, elegant lines, clean finishes, rich colors and other ingenious but understated little details of construction — swooping side seams, seatbelt-tape button plackets, optical-illusion-a** ovoid welt pockets, and on and on.
Man-tle just dropped their full spring-summer 2024 collection — or, in their terminology, “Range 16.” So I (Jonah) was stoked to hop on an Encrypted SpyVideo Connection for some Mach 3+ Design Talk. They told me about the new pieces they’re most excited about, and they also revealed that their black waxed-cotton “Pant 4” — a standout hero of our recent Pants Excellence Roundup — just got a fresh restock.
“When your pants guide came out we had a bunch of people get in touch about the P4,” Larz says. “And we were totally sold out,” Aida adds. So don’t sleep this time!!
As far as the new pieces they highlighted —
A. Man-tle are rolling out a suit for the first time since their earliest days. “We made a suit in Range 2 in a very heavy canvas,” Aida says. “And since then a lot of people requested we make a new one.”
They’ve been making this jacket on and off for several years now: “We love it, it’s a very resolved shape,” Larz says. “There’s no interfacing in the whole garment, and” — as you can see directly above — “the inside is fully bagged, totally smooth. We wanted to put a pant with it, and the P4 worked really well, but we modified it a bit for the context of a suit — we put flap welted pockets on the back, took away the taped button closure and fattened up the belt loops.”
The suit comes in one of two fabrics: black waxed-cotton, and a softer cotton gabardine with a water-resistant “Aqua Magic coating — we call it Black Magic,” Larz explains. “It’s quite a light fabric for us, 280g or something.” (Departamento in L.A. is getting an exclusive yellow waxed-cotton version, FYI.)
B. Man-tle’s “J-Series” stands for Jebok, uniform in Korean. “People were wearing Man-tle clothes to do things like gardening,” Aida explains, so “we decided to make something stronger but more affordable, and with a lot of room, so it’s easy to work in.” This season’s Jebok pieces — like the jacket and pants pictured above — come in a one-wash 13-oz black-slub denim, woven in Okayama, “with quite a heavy drape,” Larz says.
Also new this season? “Our first piece of eyewear.” The E1 sunglasses, silhouetted above, are a collaboration with Tommy Ogara of Japan’s revered Native Sons: A revival, in two Man-tle-devised colorways, of a decommissioned frame called the Cooper, which “Tommy describes as a ‘slash across the face,’” says Larz. For Native Sons’s HQ, Ogara took over a former primary school in Sabae, Fukui, and “retrofitted it with all this beautiful machinery. He makes everything there, with full control over the entire process. No one’s working the way Tommy does.”
The E1 is unisex — it somehow “works on both our faces,” says Aida (modeling a pair above left). “They’re thin acetate frames that feel delicate, but in proportion, and they’re quite strong,” Larz says. “They’ve got a bit of that Wayfarer tilt, but not quite as dramatic.”
And closing things out —
C. The R16P5 (top left) is an all-new W-I-D-E trouser. “We wanted a more elegant, full-length trouser with an elastic waist,” Larz says. It’s above in Limestone Canvas and Blue Metal.
And the R16S3 (above in Limestone Canvas), nicknamed the Peak Shirt, is a totally new shirt-jacket: “A big, boxy outerwear shape with an unusual neckline that kind of hugs the neck without there being a collar,” Larz says. Peep that effortlessly AERODYNAMIC neckline!! “It’s easy to figure out how to do a neck like that with jersey fabrics, but hard in a woven fabric,” Larz notes, and in the detail shot above he’s showing me how the front of the jacket sneakily carries around the back of the collar to achieve this effect.
Man-tle were inspired by traditional Korean Hanbok tops — “the best way we found to get that taper up the neck,” Aida explains. Where my American mind goes looking at this is baseball jerseys, an appropriate reference in its own right for spring & summer. “It’s roomy, so it ventilates nicely — a great warm-weather piece,” says Larz.
Man-tle are online here and on IG here. Range 16 is here. They’re carried by a tight coterie of cool small shops globally, too, including the Spyfriends at Neighbour and Nitty Gritty.
Meanwhile —
When Spyfriends make cool s**t, which happens all the time, we love it.
Commonly, the cool s**t in question is sick garments. But Spy Nation is a multidisciplinary crew, so sometimes Spyfriends make great paintings… fantastic books … phenomenal Netflix series, Hulu series, and Showtime series where they star opposite Emma Stone and Benny Safdie and pose some of the most profound questions you can pose in modernity …
And sometimes, Spyfriends f**k around and make a monster chune we can’t stop listening to…
Yes! That is the situation we find ourselves in today: Our homies Ben and Aakaash are two indie-electronic-music vets — one was in Cookies, the other was in Dawn of Midi. They are nice with these synths & these surprising pop toplines, and lately they’ve been in the lab concocting new music together under the name Clothing.
We’re stoked to share their debut single, “Kingdom,” early versions of which we’ve been bumping at HQ for a minute, and which just came out in its final, kaleidoscopically slappy form… Also the cover art is a basketball blasting a dart, which is tight …
The beat goes spare and herky-jerky in the verses… then lush and rubbery on the chorus… Please groove upon these wildly ~StUtTeRiNg~ synth tones and some major guest vocals from Amber Coffman — one of the goatedest singers of our time off the strength of Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness is the Move” alone, and her voice is sounding as beautifully, breezily BROLIC as ever.
Do Ben and Aakaash have more Clothing bangers on deck? Featuring even more gifted & popping guests? We are not currently at liberty to say. But enjoy this track & cross yr fingers baby!!
It’s on Bandcamp here, Apple Music here and Spotify here.
Finally — O baby —
Bardo is a two-man line we’ve had our eyes on since they put out a very cool-looking apparel capsule in Seattle with the Spyfriends at Glasswing. The clothes are made in NYC and L.A., cut in small batches from “artisanal textiles from family-owned mills,” and they’ve got another apparel drop set for this spring, with the Spyfriends at Canoe Club, in Boulder.
In the meantime?? Bardo — Kyle Edson and Kyle Nielsen — just launched the first edition of a very sick new hand-cut sunglasses series they’re calling Frame Works.
As with the Man-tle Native Sons sunglasses, these are a small-scale, “slow-shades”-type operation. For a year now, Edson & Nielsen have been handmaking bespoke eyewear themselves, using water buffalo horn, at their studio. “During the pandemic, I was feeling super burnt on clothing, and wanted to get my hands dirty and make a pair of frames for myself,” Edson says. “Acetate was pretty annoying to work with on a small scale, so I did research that led me to water buffalo horn, a sustainable material that was used before acetate. Horn is special because every pair of glasses has to be hand-cut, carved, and sculpted into their form. There’s no way to make millions of these things, and so they go the opposite direction of mass-market glasses. No two pairs are the same, and they take a ton of craft and time to make, but they still serve the same purpose.”
Now Bardo have increased output — relatively speaking — and contracted with an outside producer. The result is 8 different unisex styles, still hand-cut from horn.
To mark the occasion, we’re teaming up with Bardo on a 🌀👓 Special SPYGIVEWAY👓🌀 for all 8 pairs. Between now and this coming Sunday morning, our Classified Tier Readers can put their names in the Virtual Bucket Hat by smashing the ENTER button down below. We’ll fish out 8 lucky Spyfriends at random, and Bardo will bless you with the d*mn shades!!
Bardo are online here and on IG here.
This is a ‘xclusie for Spyplane Classified Tier readers — one more reason to come on behind the Recon Curtain if you haven’t yet.