Let's cool it with the bathroom fit pics!!
They're grody and sauce is holistic. Plus more unbeatable recon
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
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— Jonah & Erin
Blackbird Spyplane — one-in-a-trillion sletter excellence, back with you once again.
Today we’ve got:
An object lesson in unlocking TONAL SWAG — a fit-enhancing superpower that mad people pay scant attention to but anyone can freak…
Fire developments in the chilled-out-yet-very-fire post-GORP sneaker landscape…
BUT FIRST —
If there’s one thing we do at Blackbird Spyplane, it’s publish masterpiece sletters that people love because the clothes are fire and the ruminations are philosophical.
In that philosophical spirit — What is a fit pic for?
It’s a question I (Jonah) think about often, and it occurred to me anew the other day when — in the spirit of “New Year’s Resolutions” — I realized that in 2024 we should resolve once and for all to 🙅♀️ Stop sharing fit pics with toilets and urinals in them 🙅♀️ !!
Below are four fit pics, a couple from Big Homie Spyfriends, others from cool-seeming strangers I stumbled across online. All have been chosen purely for illustrative purposes — I’ve obscured everyone’s identity just to keep it 100% claro that Blackbird Spyplane leads with L💗VE and is in no way calling anybody out…
That being said, this is some grody s**t and needs to stop!!
The semiotic underpinnings of the Spyplane analysis here are straightforward: You put a fit on and you felt baller as f**k. That’s tight. So why are you posting an image of such a beautiful moment where people’s eyes are gonna drift, spot plumbing fixtures, and suddenly they’re associating your fit with peepee and doodoo baby??
That seems like an open-and-shut case to me, and in a less big-brained context I’d stop it there, with an Anti-Toilet Fit-Pic Spyplane Holy Decree.
But in the spirit of intellectual honesty & craggy-cerebellum-style rigor, let’s try and problematize this… Because maybe my understanding of the point of a fit pic differs from yours. “Young Spyplane,” you might say, “You’re coming at it all wrong. The job of the fit pic is simply to document the fact that a) I exist and b) wore these clothes, no more no less. It’s an image with a strictly evidentiary (as opposed to aesthetic) function, whereby all visual information besides the assemblage of jawns is irrelevant and to be ignored.”
Considered that way, I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s a toilet peeking out behind your pants or a glorious rosebush in full flower: the point is a loose & chill snapshot of the fit and the fit alone.
I hear that… but Spy Nation, I believe we can and should aim higher. Because:
The world is full of enough ugliness and banality. Let’s leap at any and all opportunities to create, if not beautiful images, then pleasing or, at least, intentional ones. And even more to the point,
Contra the “strictly evidentiary” argument, your fit does not and cannot ever exist in a vacuum. An outfit is not a static, isolated thing — like you, your clothes exist in the world in three dimensions, and they’re at their best when they’re in “conversation” with the time & space they occupy and move through. As such, your fit does not and cannot look fly in a vacuum. Sauce is holistic. And if you think it’s acceptable to post fit pics in this kind of “backgrounds don’t matter,” context-agnostic, tunnel-vision spirit, then I’m afraid you risk hindering your swag at large by getting dressed in a tunnel-vision spirit too.
Sometimes I wonder if we should never post fit pics taken in bathrooms, period, on the grounds that they are private and typically unlovely places. But I understand the practical and utilitarian reasons why some people do: It’s a place where there’s reliably mirrors / where there’s reliably light / where we get ready at home / where we catch glimpses of ourselves looking pimp & fire at the office, the airport, the dinner spot / and so on.
And yes, there are cases where even bathroom fit-pics can be good images. Above are two successes. On the left, bruv has found the rare cool bathroom background (one he shoots, crucially, with no urinals or toilets in sight) that makes him look like one of the original Mark Romanek iPod ads. Tight.
On the right, this bon-vivant-a** king has gone one further, owning and freaking the banal bathroom environs by standing rakishly on the d*mn toilet and the sink, flashing a charming thumbs up and placing a red Dixie cup in the frame to cement the pic’s very winning and chill “I’m just taking a break from being the life of the party and my fit is slapping” vibes. Wonderful.
However, rare exceptions aside, and all things being equal, you don’t wanna mount the gem that is your fit into a setting that is at best drab and at worst nasty. You are sending out a “visual ambassador” of your whole f**king swag into the world… You want that ambassador to be on its Ps and Qs top to bottom!!
GLAMOROUS JETSET HOUSEKEEPING —
The Spyplane Global Intel Travel Chat Room has been going off lately, with mad recommendations flowing through for popping locales as varied as Mexico City, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Paris, and Bozeman MT.
There are other cities where the threads need COOL INTEL — like Budapest, Savannah GA, Oaxaca and Shanghai. If you have tips for these places or other destinations, please do Spy Nation a favor, flex on us with yr global pedigree & share them! ☮️☮️☮️
BEFORE WE GET TO THE SNEAKERS — AS LONG AS WE’RE TALKING ABOUT MINDSETS FOR ASSEMBLING GREAT FITS —
Social media was going cuckoo the other day over this video, for good reason: