Shoes you never saw before
Clearance-rack treasure, plus Italian excellence, a Bedrock Sandals Spygiveaway & more
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Check out our monumental new roundup of the 50 Slappiest Shops across the Spyplane Universe.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
There’s a trove of rugs, cushions, lamps, ceramics and more in our Home Goods Index.
Blackbird Spyplane, back once again. We’ve got a dossier of foot-enswaggening intel for you today, including:
Very dope $70 simple chill New Balances that nobody’s checking for except one of earth’s coolest clothing designers, who might be about to blow them up…
…which leads briefly into an adjacent cool slept-on clearance-priced New Balance rabbit hole.
Reissued all-gender running sneakers from 1975, made by deep-cut Italian athletic-gear GOATS, and no one’s checking for these either, even though they look extremely good today, and if somebody told you they were, like, Dries Van Noten you’d say, “Need these.”
A Spygiveaway for Bedrock’s Mountain Clogs and Cairn hiking sandals.
And more unbeatable recon.
Let’s get to it —
Sometimes your body & soul become one with the harmonies of Gaia. You know what I’m talking about. Out of nowhere, it’s like as if you were a beautiful human tuning fork and Fate was a master pianist getting her 1910 Steinway Grand O ready for a cosmic sonata. Case in point:
The other day, I (Jonah) copped myself a pair of hiking sandals from the Missoula, Montana, footwear line Bedrock. For several years now, I’ve been hearing that backcountry real ones f--k heavy with Bedrock’s Vibram-soled, T-strapped Cairns. I’d shouted them out in the sletter here and there, along with Bedrock’s mule-style Mountain Clogs, after seeing swaggy people wearing both styles out on the streets, removed from any strictly GORPY context.
But I’ve long considered myself a closed-toe type of dude, footwear-wise, so that ruled out the Cairns for me. And while the clogs looked gas, I felt all set on the outdoor-shoe front, between the Arc’teryx, Salomon, Norda and Obōz joints in my Trail Rotation…
After a stretch of hot days, however — during which I found myself hiking up and down a steep hillside before taking a cheeky dip in a pool — I decided to reconsider my closed-toe policy, let my dogs breathe, and give the Bedrocks a try. I bought a pair of river-ready Cairns at Understory in Oakland, and soon discovered that the Bedrocks play a great trick on your feet. You feel like you are nearly barefoot and, simultaneously, like you’re strapped securely into a pair of supple tanks.
And here’s how I knew that Gaia was smiling upon the recon. Not a week passed before a Spyplane reader who works at Bedrock hit us up out of the blue to let us know they were about to drop a tight clutch of new Mountain Clogs, and to ask whether we wanted to do one of our signature “Unbeatable Spygiveaways,” blessing Spy Nation with some pairs.
I told him, “Friend, yes — also, I just bought myself a pair of the Cairns, and they rock, so why don’t we bless Spy Nation with some of those, too?”
Bedrock is about to put out 4 new Mountain Clogs: two “murdered-out black” pairs, and two earth-toned pairs, both in synthetic- and animal-leather options. As pictured above, starting from the top, there’s “Birch Bark” suede, “Pine Cone” synthetic suede, “Obsidian Dark Gray” nubuck, and “Obsidian Black” synthetic.
Today, ahead of their launch next Tuesday, we’re giving a bunch of these clogs to some lucky Spyfriends, plus some “trail & town”-ready Cairn EVO C sandals, also pictured above, in black.
This is a ‘xclusie for Classified Tier Spyfriends, whose support makes the Plane possible. Smash the button at the bottom of today’s sletter to throw your name in the Virtual Bucket Hat. The drawing closes at 9 a.m. PT this Saturday, Sep. 13, at which point we’ll pick the winners at random. Good luck.
Meanwhile —
Speaking of sick shoes, we’ve got a special Sneaker Slapper Swarm for you, featuring cut-rate New Balance heat cosigned by one of earth’s best designers — yet highly slept on — plus some great reissued track-style sneakers from Italian athletic-wear titans that cost way less than the thin-soled Dries Van Noten joints and, while those are cool, if you ask me, these are cooler: