It all depends on how you move
Sick new shoes, cognoscenti hand-wovens, streamers can't beat a movie theater with insane carpeting, digging deeper into what Made in Portugal means & more
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
Our brand new Home-Goods Recon Spectacular has intel on shower curtains, dish racks, rugs, ceramics and more.
Check out our monumental new list of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.
Blackbird Spyplane with you once again. Today we’ve got:
Intel from a gifted weaver with only 860 IG followers who makes amazing hand-loomed scarves, approved by one of our favorite designers, which we saw several Swagged-Out Fellas rocking in NYC.
Exclusive info & pics on a sick new skate-shoe / walking-shoe hybrid dropping tomorrow from a highly respected under-the-radar line.
You still can’t trust these streamers, chief!
But first —
“Made in Portugal” — Mach 3+ clothes appreciators have grown increasingly accustomed over the past ~decade to seeing these words on handsome slappers that once might have said “Made in France,” “Made in the UK,” or “Made in Italy.”
Portugal has a broad reputation for factories that do good work at lower cost than those in other EU nations. But since Blackbird Spyplane is about getting the f--k off the smooth-brained surface and down into the craggy-brained crevices, we’ve long been curious to know more about why so many ~smallish clothing brands move production there…
In this past Tuesday’s sletter I raised the topic of Made in Portugal with Sono co-designer Simon Homes — a 25+ year menswear veteran whose insights into the industry are always sharp.
Unsurprisingly, Simon had a bunch of illuminating stuff to say on the topic beyond what we could fit in the interview. We want to share his full answer here:
“When I first started to see people work with Portugal, they were finding great factories there for knitted garments, especially sweatshirts and jersey. Knitteds were becoming more expensive in Italy, so designers were moving to Portugal for that. Then there were a few amazing performance-outerwear factories, so you could get some wicked rain coats with a higher-performance frequency welding than you could find very easily in Italy.
“Portugal invested in those factories, and you had huge places like Hugo Boss back in the ‘90s investing in Portuguese capabilities, too.
“When it came to woven fabrics, Portugal used to have a few mills, but they weren’t at the level of the Italian mills, so brands would buy fabric milled in Italy, then ship it Portugal to be cut into garments — there had to be a huge difference in production cost to make that worthwhile. But now you can get Portuguese-milled fabric that’s quite nice. And if you’ve got the mill there, suddenly it makes so much more sense to make a woven garment there, too, like a cotton button-up shirt.
“From my perspective, Portugal was all about quantity. For much of the last 30 years, say, the factories there were going for much bigger contracts, charging a lot less than other places, but making money from volume. It’s only in the past 10 years or so that a smaller brand could even be able to get in there. Part of that is because more factories are getting established and saying, ‘OK, we can take on smaller clients.’
“And part of it is because the Portuguese are feeling loss of the bigger fish moving production away from Portugal now.”
Wow —
Here at Spyplane HQ we’re fans of swaggy skate shoes.
And we’re fans of Mephistos and other examples of what we’ve called Sensible Leather Oldhead Walker (S.L.O.W.) Mode footwear.
So you know we are highly intrigued that a respected yet under-the-radar skate brand is putting out their own take on some category-blurring lug-soled leather walkers — and that they look sick.
These come out tomorrow. We scored early pics & info: