Rare vintage report
Your favorite clothes are out there waiting for you to find them
Welcome to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical” that the fellas love as well. Every edition is archived here.
The Natural Fiber Workout Gear Report is here.
We just dropped a new guide to How to Wear Colors Well.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
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Let’s say you want to hear some music you’ve never heard before. And let’s say that, rather than unfamiliar contemporary music, which will connect you to the present moment, you want to hear some unfamiliar old music, to open up a little wormhole you can wriggle through between present and past.
Jonah and I (Erin) talk about this all the time: how amazing it is to discover a fantastic song that someone recorded ages ago, to fall in love with it, and to know there’s so much else lying there in wait, unenjoyed, just out of sight on the menu.
It happened the other day when we saw a marg.mp3 interview with james K, who shared her love for the eccentric NYC art-rock act Anna Domino’s 1984 single “Land of My Dreams,” built around endlessly descending guitar riffs, a dinky drum machine and a hypnotic, slightly amateur-sounding vocal….
We’d never heard of it, it’s fantastic, it turns out it’s an Aretha Franklin cover, and we’d never heard that version, either!
The same holds true with books, movies, and, of course, clothes.
There are all kinds of things we would love to hear / see / read / wear, if only we could figure out what they are and, to use the techspeak term for it, “surface” them.
The dominant, dubious technique for surfacing is, of course The Algorithm, an ostensible tool for discovery that, we’ve come to suspect, forecloses more than it opens up.
The much doper technique is when a person you trust tips you off and sends you spelunking.
Which brings us to today’s Concorde: whether it’s at thrift stores, vintage shops, or the chaotic garage sale of online platforms, I will never stop digging for vibey secondhand treasures. Today I’m sharing some beloved vintage troves, a bunch of which I’d never heard of myself until recently, and which I unearthed through pure unadulterated expert rummaging. Including:
Great designers whose names have largely been lost to time
Under-the-radar jewelry makers
A huge edit of vintage scarves
Y2K designer hiking boots, slim-soled sneakers, and the shoe that inspired Marc Jacobs’s mouse flat?
Rare unisex workwear from the ‘40s and ‘50s
& more!
Let’s get to it —