Stop drawing lines in your closet where they don't need to be
Plus a fantastic new vintage designer plug & more
Welcome to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical,” except it’s for everyone who is cool. Every edition is archived here.
Check out our comprehensive new Home Goods Index.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to underwear — is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
Our interviews with Adam Sandler, Kim Gordon, André 3000, Nathan Fielder, 100 gecs, Danielle Haim, Mac DeMarco, Jerry Seinfeld, Matty Matheson, Phoebe Bridgers, Seth Rogen, Emily Bode, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Steven Yeun, John C. Reilly, Conner O’Malley, Clairo and more are here.
Erin here! In today’s ‘Corde:
Spyfriends always ask me for style-inspiration sources. I recently caught wind of a deep-cut Japanese photo book from the ‘80s that’s beloved by fashionable real ones, because it’s about specifically good clothes for men & women and it’s also about a MINDSET … I got my hands on a copy & you can too
A Concorde World Exclusive on a new, extremely high-level online vintage store — stocked with heavy-hitters from Miu Miu, Prada, Jil, Comme, Issey, and Yohji — started by a secretive fashion insider who keeps the prices low (and only has 293 followers on IG right now, because everyone’s still sleeping)
Soft Supple Denim Watch continues: The sick enzyme-washed jeans I took home from one of my favorite shops in Brooklyn, plus other select intel from our trip to NYC
But first —
I have a bunch of imaginary lines crisscrossing my closet.
Over here are my daily drivers: worn-in denim, workwear, sweaters, button ups, etc. Over there are once-in-a-blue-moon Special Occasion clothes. But in between lies a vexing middle category of pieces that don’t read as formal or stuffy, exactly, but I nonetheless see them as nicer than necessary for everyday — maybe they’re cut from finer fabrics, maybe with special attention paid to structure, prints, colors, shape and/or some other sign that they are “doing something.”
They aren’t extravagant per se, but they can feel out of place in daily life (especially when you don’t live in a “fashion capital”). When I bought these clothes, there was a degree to which I imagined myself into them — took an imaginative leap into some future, quasi-fantastical scenario related but not identical to my everyday.
We all have clothes like this: “Someday-but-not-today” pieces that we tend to reach past in favor of more casual, easy styles that require no such imaginative leaping. But while some clothes are flat wrong outside of certain contexts, I think we could all stand to be way more expansive in the lines we draw across our closets! Because when you endlessly defer “some day,” you leave pleasure on the table today, and put a pointless mental block between you and a garment you could be GLORYING in right now.
One thing I’ve started doing to unclog these blockages is to “break the seal” on new clothes by wearing them immediately, instead of filing them away for Someday. The minute I bring something home from a shop, or the minute it lands on our doorstep, I put it on and wear it throughout the rest of the day. Every so often I wear something right out of the damn store — an all-too-rare treat for no good reason! And what I often find is that I feel so good in it that I repeat the outfit the next day. Like that, something I bought with Someday in mind becomes the thing I’m wearing Today, Tomorrow and Next Week.
Another way to break the seal is to rock a Someday Fit on, say, a grocery run. You might fear you’ll be “overdressed,” but this is mistaken, because a good grocery store is an incredible place of bright, unreal abundance worth dressing well for. If anyone else clocks you it will be because you are a vision in silk noil, lit up by fluorescent bulbs, backdropped by cereal packaging, reaching swaggily through the produce-mister dewdrops for the parsley.
And speaking of wearing Someday clothes in unexpectedly quotidian contexts — contexts where they shine! — get a load of this grail-tier photo book. It’s inspired stylists, designers and all manner of other Mach 3+ clothes appreciators over the years: