Shameless biters and wild coincidence

A lesson in thievery & chance

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Something that came up a lot in conversations with designers during our recent week in Paris was biting… copying… swaggerjacking… theft.

Multiple times, we’d find ourselves talking to Designer A and mentioning Designer B in passing, at which point Designer A would frown, roll their eyes, and show us a screenshot of a garment that Designer B had put out that looked suspiciously similar to one of Designer A’s own designs. “Come on,” they’d say.

It makes sense. The Slow Clothes demimonde is a relatively small and tightly knit one, and the people within it tend to stay abreast of what others in the broad cohort are up to — lots of these designers sell their clothes at the same stores, to a similar clientele, and in cases they even use the same factories and suppliers. Even if they don’t pay particularly active attention to what other labels are doing, news of transgressions, real and imagined, travels fast: “You see this coat [REDACTED] just put out? Brazen.”

The prevailing spirit we’ve encountered among designers we cover in the Plane tends toward mutual respect and a “rising tides lift all boats” magnanimity. But it’s only natural that, if you pour yourself into a creative project, spend untold hours trying to devise and refine meaningful ideas, and execute them on a high level — and if you’re fortunate enough, despite all the odds stacked against you as a small designer, to find some success — you might experience a complex mix of emotions (anger / amusement / disdain / disgust) upon discovering that someone appears to have compressed all that work into a shortcut for themselves, pilfering your s--t and passing it off as their own.

Context matters, of course. If it’s a huge brand jacking you, that feels different than if it’s a smaller, lesser-known maker. In Paris, we heard a secondhand tale about one case that fell somewhere in between. A small label (who we f--k with) designed a pair of pants with a distinctive feature. Some time later, they discovered that a mid-size label, based in another country (who we f--k with, too) seemed to have bought a pair of their pants and copied the pattern stitch for stitch. The copycat version was so faithful to the original that it even replicated a minor flaw in the pocket design that the small label had eliminated in subsequent iterations. We don’t know how this was resolved, but apparently the mid-size label copped to it when confronted privately, apologized, and no longer seems to produce the copycat pants.

No matter the size of the biter, it’s justifiable to feel ickiness and indignation in response to this type of theft: The more personal your work is to you, the grodier it’s gonna feel. When it comes to recourse, though, your avenues are limited. In the context of fashion design, the concept of I.P. is famously hard to enforce from a legal standpoint. Most small independent designers don’t have the time or money for a protracted legal struggle, and it’s basically impossible to trademark a garment, anyway. On the whole, that’s probably a good thing for the robust flourishing of creativity, which always involves degrees of borrowing, but it also redounds to the benefit of enormous fast-fashion brands, who have made ripping off other designers a core element of their cursed business.

If you feel that someone has bitten you, your options as a clothesmaker tend to be limited to the realm of the moral, rather than the legal. You can call out the biter and seek a Public Shaming W. You can talk s--t about them to close confidantes and sympathetic-yet-neutral observers, such as Jonah and Erin from Blackbird Spyplane. You can contact the biter directly, and ideally reach some kind of mea culpa or other understanding that feels fair. Alternatively, you can decide to let God sort ‘em out, and simply charge it to the game: “I’ve got more where that came from,” you might tell yourself. “Unfortunately for them, they need to steal. Fortunately for me, I don’t.”

Or you can just brush it off, decide that it was probably a coincidence, that the Muse moves in all kinds of strange and unpredictable ways, and keep it pressing. Because maybe it motivates you to carry around a little hot coal of indignation in your back pocket, but maybe it is mostly uncomfortable and kind of sucks, and you’d be better off letting it drop.

On that score, I want to share a story from a few years ago, when the forces of the cosmos taught me and Erin a powerful lesson about the slipperiness of Authorship, Biting and Chance.

We’ve told friends this story when the topic of biting comes up, but we’ve never had occasion to share it here in the sletter until now. Erin and I regard it as a cautionary tale — one where we thought we were sitting on clear moral high ground, but in fact, we were on thin ice, and we came frighteningly close to eating s--t.

In the spring of 2022, I interviewed Spyfriend and football superstar Héctor Bellerín. He’s a swaggy mensch and it was a lovely conversation, during which Héctor put me on to a sick vintage Nike wristwatch he’d owned as a kid, and recently bought deadstock off eBay, called the Triax.

On April 12, we published the interview, and in a photo caption, I mentioned swaggerjacking him and buying my own Triax:

In fact, I’d ordered two versions of the Triax off eBay, among the many different colors and dials floating around for sale. (Side note: These are still very sick.)

On April 15, I posted a photo to the Spyplane IG of me wearing these watches on my wrist, and I credited Héctor with putting me on:

So imagine the feeling of shocked indignation that coursed through us 15 days later, on April 30, when a reader pointed us to a tweet from a streetwear-aggregation account called Outlander Magazine, which has some 500k followers. Lo and behold, they’d posted an image of someone who was not me wearing the exact same two Triaxes stacked on their wrist:

This s--t was, to be clear, meaningless in the grand scheme. The stakes couldn’t have been lower, and the seeming infraction, as infractions go, was extremely silly.

All the same, we felt ripped off. We posted side-by-sides of both pictures on our IG stories, circled the dates, and tagged Outlander, maybe with a “🤔” emoji. Loyal Spyfriends hopped into Outlander’s comments on IG to accuse them of biting, the way these things go.

An hour or two later, they hit us up and apologized. C’est la vie when you’re an aggregator, we figured.

But a few hours after that, another shoe dropped. I was thinking about the morning’s chain of events when it occurred to me that, since Outlander was an aggregation account, the picture they’d posted was very likely of someone else’s wrist, not their own.

I did a reverse image search for the picture, at which point I discovered, to my horror, that the London-based creative director Alex Sossah had originally taken the photo of the two watches on his wrist and posted it to IG in December of 2021 — four months before I’d posted mine.

I got a little queasy. I don’t follow Sossah, and had never (consciously?) seen his Triax picture, but we did have a bunch of mutuals.

Through sheer, mind-bogglingly improbable coincidence, I’d bought the same two Triaxes he’d bought, and posted a photo of them stacked on my wrist, the same way he had.

I’d gotten all revved up and righteous about the aggregation account biting me. But here was proof that they hadn’t bitten me at all. And what’s more, this entire time, Sossah could have called me out for biting him. To an outside observer, seeing my image next to his, the case for Young Spyplane’s guilt would have been airtight.

How could I have convinced anyone otherwise?

I deleted my grid pic, said a prayer, and thanked Gaia for this extremely close call — it was a sign from the astral plane, I decided, cautioning me against righteousness and hubris.

Ever since then, whenever Erin and I encounter a case of apparent biting, we take a breath, and say to each other, “Remember the Triaxes.”

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None of this is to say that there aren’t egregious, open-and-shut cases of theft. Of course there are. Say, for example, this past February, when Zara built a replica of Evan Kinori’s San Francisco studio for their website, in a wild & creepy act of “context counterfeiting” that we wrote about here. Evan’s clothes have proven highly influential on several other designers. But a gross fast-fashion brand ripping off the look of his studio? That was new territory.

Blackbird Spyplane, obviously, has been enormously influential in our own right. How could the No. 1 Source Across All Media for Unbeatable Recon not be? And sometimes the line between “people being influenced by the Plane” and “people lifting from the Plane without credit” can be hard to pinpoint.

In most of these cases, we’ve raised an eyebrow, then said, ‘F--k it’ and moved on. We chose to file them away as coincidences / innocent mistakes and take them in stride, rather than get hot under the collar about them. There was one time when the author of another sletter, who reads Blackbird Spyplane, wrote about how you should embrace stains on your clothes as signs of a “Life Well Lived” — three years after we did exactly that, using that exact phrasing. We decided that, like any number of profound and sticky ideas, Blackbird Spyplane’s concept of “Life Well Lived Mindset” had simply become absorbed into this author’s experience of the world to the point they genuinely thought they’d come up with it themselves. That can happen to anyone. I know it’s happened to me.

Also? Remember the Triaxes. Maybe it was truly a freak coincidence.

We try to Remember the Triaxes even when it’s much harder to see innocent coincidence at work. In March of 2023, Brain Dead put out a t-shirt that was preposterously similar to the first tee we ever made. On our tee, which we released in March of 2021, an enormous iMac plays music across a field of mushrooms for the benefit of an enormous human brain, as the two of them shake hands via an underground mycorrhizal network… What a great shirt.

Top: The first-ever Blackbird Spyplane tee, which Jonah came up with and designed. Bottom: The wildly similar Brain Dead tee from a few years later

When we caught wind of the Brain Dead joint — which they released as part of a capsule with Jeff Goldblum — we had to post side by sides on IG, because, truly, how were we not gonna? It was too funny, weird, and (in a twisted way) flattering not to.

Also, Brain Dead makes a bunch of cool stuff, Erin and I have several friends in common with Kyle Ng, and so we didn’t and still don’t feel any antipathy toward them. If we were in the t-shirt business it might have been harder to accept this seeming act of thievery, but we are not, so we made peace with it.

And, again, who knows, maybe the biting was innocent, after all. Maybe someone who designs tees for Brain Dead had seen our tee flash across their timeline ages ago, then forgotten about it, and the underlying idea had gotten stuck somewhere in their heads.

Some things are worth getting fired up about, and some aren’t. A few years ago, Rachel Aviv wrote an incredible New Yorker piece about the brilliant Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, who seems to have lifted the idea for one of his films from a student he taught — and yet, as with most of Rachel’s pieces, the Final Moral and Artistic Accounting is anything but neat & tidy. If someone steals from you knowingly, that’s wack. If they make a lot of money from that theft, that only compounds the offense. If you are feeling generous, you can see it as a sort of little redistributive tax that’s been exacted on you in exchange for being gifted and popping — while a little tax of its own kind has been exacted on the thief’s everlasting soul.

And what if someone steals from you, but does so unknowingly? Theft and creativity are intimately connected. Memory is porous and fallible. Inadvertent theft is different, morally speaking, from someone stealing from you with full awareness of the act. Isn’t it better, on balance, to assume the best of others? Not just for them, but for you, because even if you aren’t sure they “deserve” it, it’s better for your own peace of mind.

See you next time,

— Jonah & Erin

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