Party clothes
Wedding fit sorted. Plus intel on petite unisex watches, consistently excellent small lines, shoes and accessories spotted on Paris streets & a visit to a rare jewelry atelier
Welcome to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical” that the fellas love as well. Every edition is archived here.
This how you pack swaggily without ever checking a bag.
These are the sickest hiking-style sandals.
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To break bread is a civilized way to make someone’s acquaintance — but to break a sweat with strangers? That’s a lifelong bond.
This was my (Erin’s) takeaway after our recent stint in Paris during an unrelenting heatwave (~104°F). Grumpy as I felt at times, the optimist in me tried to take comfort in the fact that we were all in it together.
Every year I question why we attend Paris Fashion Week, and this year was no different. But I returned from this trip inspired by the richness of intel I gathered from conversations with buyers, designers, and other people I respect. We all know too well that just looking at clothes on a screen is a dead-eyed experience that keeps them entirely unknowable, so I will never pass up the ability to see, touch and try on new clothes designed by the small makers we started this newsletter to salute!
With that in mind, today we have The Concorde Paris Awards, featuring the very best news, small makers, accessories, shoes and artisanal details I gleaned during fashion week, from insiders and out on the street. This is not a SS27 preview — most of what I’m sharing can be acted on today, including:
Dainty-dialed watches, spotted on the fellas, just right for the ladies
The women’s lines that buyers I trust say are consistently excellent
The shoe most likely to replace Aurora’s Middle English, from a freaky-deaky comfort brand GOATS respect but the masses have been sleeping on?
Who’s making the best party clothes — it’s what I’d wear as a wedding guest
A visit to jewelry designer Zoé Mohm’s new appointment-only atelier
& more!
BTW, if you’re planning a trip to Paris, you’ll find all of our guides to the city, along with superb reader intel, in the Global Intel Travel Chat Room:
Let’s get to it —
• The Award for “Most Covetable Low-Tech Accessory” goes to…
The hand fan. Guests at the Lemaire runway show — one of my favorites of theirs from the past few years — were given black lacquer & cloth fans at the door. We put them to such good use that, by the end of the week, we’d mastered the ‘50s greaser switchblade-style one-handed flick to open them.
Fans were also in high demand at the party we threw with Neighbour and Lady White Co. (the high that day: 102°F). I photographed a bunch of partygoers carrying fans, as seen above in the header art: Camiel Fortgens women’s designer Floortje Wijnands, and designers Wanze Song and Body of Work’s Brittney MacKinnon and Dwayne Vatcher.
• The Daintiest Dials Award goes to...
Petite watches. Throughout the week I clocked dudes sporting the kind of delicate cases I could see wrapped around my own wrist. I’m always looking for style ideas I can steal back from the fellas, so I snapped pictures of the best ones — by both high-end makers and virtually unknown names alike — and am sharing them here, along with a bunch of similarly slim vintage finds: