She's everywhere
Spring shorts report, the indie model of the moment, simple furniture
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
Our Home Goods Index, full of things to enliven the place you live, and stores where you can find them, is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a handy rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.
Today we’ve got:
A Spyplane Springtime Slapper Shorts Report, perfectly timed now that A) it’s getting warmer and B) everyone has mostly recovered from ~2021-era shorts derangement
A very simple spider-legged floor lamp we are circling, and other handsome Shaker-style furniture
The Indie Model of the Moment
Let’s get to it —
One thing we find ourselves doing a lot at Blackbird Spyplane is looking at cool clothes. To put a finer point on it, we look at cool clothes from cool small independent labels and shops.
So sometimes we clock patterns developing across “the space.”
One such pattern — the same transfixingly swaggy model rocking s--t everywhere — crystallized for us last fall, when Erin showed me a photo of a striking-looking woman she’d seen wearing clothes at more and more places, men’s and women’s alike, and who I started spotting more and more, too.
“She looks like someone you’d see in a chariot on a Greek vase,” Erin said.
As Natasha Stagg put it at Feed Me earlier this week, “cool people should get credit for being cool,” so we decided to get to the bottom of this. It turns out the model’s name is Natalie Tischler, she lives in NYC, and we’ve got several pals in common.
Over the past ~year we’ve seen her stanced up for a range of shops and labels for the ladies & the boys, including Colbo, Vestige, Eckhaus Latta (who first cast her back in like 2021), Small Talk, Sophie Buhai, Sensoria, Paloma Wool, Maryam Nassir Zadeh, Araks, Nu Swim, 6397, Rachel Comey, Silphium, Café Forgot, William Frederick and, just the other week, Never Cursed…
Somehow Tischler has become The Indie Model of the Moment a.k.a. The Face of Dope Indie Clothing.
How? Why? What does it mean?
Maybe the answer’s got something to do with her combination, aura-wise, of the chill and the classical… The way she meets these turbulent and uncertain times with a gaze that’s simultaneously assured and assuring, earnest and wry, optimistic and a bit mournful…
“I don’t remember where I first saw her, I think it was via Colbo,” Dylan from Never Cursed told us. “But she immediately stuck in my mind. I thought she looked very much like a bust of a Roman general or something. Magisterial and outside of time.”
He eventually learned that when Tischler’s not busy getting flicked up with panache, she writes and makes art, furniture, and ceramics — all evidence, to a polyglot clothesmaker like him, of a “shared sensibility” that made him feel she’d have the right energy in a Never Cursed lookbook.
Bill from William Frederick echoed that point, nodding to Tischler’s artmaking, too. “I felt a sense of curiosity from her,” he told us, adding that he cast her for the last WF lookbook in collaboration with stylist Dione Davis and photographers Anna and Marie Ritsch, who have also worked with… Rachel Comey and Eckhaus Latta.
It bears emphasizing that she has great hair. “Such an impressive mane,” said Zoe Latta, who explained that Tischler works with Midland Agency, whose co-founder Rachel Chandler handles Eckhaus Latta’s casting. But Zoe said that the label truly f--ks with Tischler “because she is a real person, a real downtown character, who actually lives and works there.”
So shout out to Tischler for doing cool s--t and making cool clothes look good. She affirms our maxim that if you wanna look great, you should chase artistic interests and passions that have nothing to do with clothes, because this will make you “well rounded” in an indescribably swaggy way that helps to enhance and transmogrify your sauce on a molecular level. The science on this is increasingly clear.
Wow —
A few years ago, the fellas writ large lost their minds about shorts. Some set up warring factions as related to the only acceptable hem-length and/or the question of whether Grown Adults Who Know Better should even wear shorts at all, or if they were only rockable by Wee Children.
I (Jonah) have consistently floated above the fray beatifically by simply not caring very much about shorts.
As someone who cares “too much” about most other clothes, this is a gift. I’m happy whenever I discover that there are limits on my obsessive energies, and thankfully shorts (like sunglasses) fall just outside those limits. I realized years ago that, yes, I and most other people tend to look better in pants than shorts, and that given the option you should opt for the former.
But I also recognize that shorts serve a purpose in certain contexts. Especially hot weather & getting-active scenarios, but also just “looking swag, chill & sexy at the BBQ” type situations. And in these contexts, what the Shorts Warriors won’t tell you is that most of us look perfectly fine in shorts across a range of hem lengths, materials, thigh-opening circumferences, etc.
However! There are absolutely wack shorts. The wrong pair can make someone look just as goofy as bad pants can — possibly even more so, since, viewed on a binary, shorts are objectively sillier garments.
So it’s no surprise that, as spring blossoms, we’ve started to hear from Spyfriends hoping to track down Cool Shorts and avoid Wack Ones.
Today I’ve whipped up a 2025 Springtime Slapper Shorts Report for you: