Portals
SpyAccess to sick limited-run Mephistos, cool bookends and other home-enswaggening ceramics & more
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Real quick —
We mentioned this on Tuesday, and we’ll share more details soon, but we cooked up new Spyplane shoes in collaboration with our friends at Tarvas and Nitty Gritty Worldwide. They’re rolling out at 6 of the world’s best shops the week of November 10, and we’re throwing a party at Ven.Space in Brooklyn on November 13.
In today’s Plane we’ve got:
A Spyfriend-Exclusive Access Portal for some of the coolest Mephistos ever made
Cool bookends and other home-enswaggening ceramics, new and secondhand
Siri’s crazy a-- comes through with an amazing musical discovery
Let’s get to it —
We’re longtime admirers of the artisan Toronto sportswear line Body of Work. Their speciality is beautiful, simple cotton knits made in Canada — except, on highly selective occasions, when they link & build with outside collaborators on the creation of exquisitely low-key, very fire walking sneakers in an unbeatable shade of brown.
A few years ago, Body of Work worked with San Antonio Shoemakers on a fantastic brown-suede version of the USA-made Journey Mesh. A few months back they did it again with some unbeatable brown-suede French-made Mephisto Matches whose dopeness we saluted in the sletter.
The first run sold out with alacrity. But last week Brittney and Dwayne from Body of Work dropped us a line to let us know about an imminent limited restock.
Today we’ve got Exclusive SpyAccess to that restock, just for you:
O baby. The uppers on these are a loamy-hued Italian suede with color-matched laces, offset with a black-leather interior and black D-rings and eyelets. These are made in Mephisto’s Sarrebourg, France, atelier “through a process involving 160 precise steps, performed by 18 expert craftspeople,” as BoW explain, “all of whom train for over three years before crafting their first pair.”
And if you multiply 160 x 18 x 3, I don’t need to tell you what happens next: You get a Handcrafted Poppingness Quotient (HPQ) of 8640.
This restock goes live to the general public this Saturday, November 1, at 7 a.m. PT / 10 a.m. ET at Body of Work.
But BBSP Classified-Tier readers don’t need to wait that long. You can pick up a pair right now using the 🌀Portal at the bottom of today’s sletter.
Meanwhile —
There’s that famous John Waters quote to the effect that if you go home with someone and they own zero books, you should under no circumstances let them hit.
As a pro-books and anti-dumbasses sletter, we support this sentiment. But as bon vivants, aesthetes and appreciators of rare swaggy crafts, we gotta complicate the premise. What if the person owns books, but is in possession of zero cool bookends?
You might never have thought about cool bookends before. I’ll confess that I myself hadn’t until Erin and I came across, and promptly copped, one of our most highly cherished possessions at Spyplane HQ: A mighty pair of ceramic bookends that blur the line between functional objects and sculptures.
They’re hand-built in NYC by one of our favorite ceramicists, a gifted young king who just whipped up a new batch of them. And if someone has books + these at home, then, frankly, it’s smashing time:





