The Anchovy Principle
Lessons in sauce and how to build it
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When it comes to getting dressed, we here at Blackbird Spyplane admire risk-taking, adventurousness, and big swings… in theory.
In actual practice, though, Erin and I (Jonah) tend to err on the side of caution and practicality, all things considered, rather than the side of abandon and fancy. You could say that we like to look more than we like to leap.
And yet — we all have a leaper inside us. Sometimes you see a garment and, even if it’s outside your comfort zone, your heart & soul connect with it, overpower your rational mind, and give you a shove into unknown airspace. “Go off playboy,” your heart & soul say. “Rock that s--t.”
Case in point: While Erin was visiting her parents a few months ago, she spotted a jaunty black wool beret her mom used to wear. Erin has never remotely considered herself “a beret person,” but her heart & soul compelled her to try it on. Sort of ridiculous, she thought, looking in the mirror … but fire?
She brought it back home, where doubt crept in. Understandably so. For decades, the beret has figured in our culture as visual shorthand for pretension… a byword for pomposity … a signal that the 🧑🎨 artiste 🧑🎨 is present.
On the other hand, she thought, the beret done right is élan embodied, and when you get past the stereotypes, what you see when someone rocks one with panache is in fact the opposite of pretension: elegance, wit, easy confidence.
Berets have been dope far longer than they’ve been dubious. Possibly longer, in fact, than any other kind of hat?? A parade of history’s foremost astronomers, painters, sculptors, actors, filmmakers, and revolutionaries — visionary real ones who helped chart, define and shape our understanding of the world — have rocked berets across the centuries. You can’t say that about a strapback cap!
The beret did not read as overwhelmingly effete until recently, either, worn as readily by factory workers and farmers (not to mention soldiers and warlords) as it was by, e.g., gentleman poets. At some point in the 1990s, though, for reasons that are hard to identify, berets transformed from casually swaggy into an attention-grabbing punchline.
Part of the issue is that people just don’t wear hats like they used to, period. Western norms around covering your head in public shifted over the course of the 20th century, and hats stopped being daily uniform staples and became anachronistic statement pieces instead.
Almost all hats, that is. Ball caps and beanies still enjoy broad acceptability. But after that, things start getting dicey. Bucket hats sit within the current limits of acceptability, but remain floppy nonstarters for many. Berets, like pillboxes, sit further afield, on the outer limits of acceptability, beyond which you’ll find a flotilla of fedoras, porkpies, sailor’s caps, fisherman’s caps, newsboys, and other styles that require either above-average charm and conviction (shout out to hat-rocking Spyfriend John C. Reilly) or immense obliviousness to not feel self-conscious and costumey while wearing.
I would be happy never to see some of these hats on anyone ever again. But on balance this change represents a tremendous loss, swagwise, for society.
All of which brings us to an obvious question: Are berets due for a comeback?
Erin and I think that they are, and that, among certain Mach 7+ types, the comeback’s already begun. The design of the beret is simply too good, and its history is too long and illustrious, for society to deny its powers much longer.
But we aren’t there yet. “I knew the beret was a loaded signifier,” Erin told me, “but I was still a bit shocked by how uneasy wearing one made me. The first few times I left the house in it, I felt like a fraud, wearing a costume…”
Rather than let this psychological discomfort win, she pushed back against it, with help from her heart & soul. “I play a character every day,” she reminded herself: A person called Erin whose costumes have changed vastly over the years, and which still remain in flux, even if it doesn’t always seem like it.
It was here that an epiphany struck her about a universal truth that all cool-clothes appreciators must confront at points, or else mummify themselves. Call it The Anchovy Principle.
Erin and I love anchovies, but they are, famously, an acquired taste. If you just plop them on a dish willy-nilly, the flavor can register as too strong, too salty, too much. A cured anchovy can bully away more delicate notes, in other words, and draw undue attention to itself.
“The first few times I put on my beret,” Erin realized, “I was tasting too much anchovy.”
However, she also recognized that when you throw an anchovy into a sauce you’re building on the stovetop, it doesn’t just sit there unabsorbed forever. With time and heat — handled with chefly skill and combined with complementary ingredients — the anchovy melts into a luscious, fragrant oil. It fuses with and enhances the rest of the meal, to the point where you can no longer say where the anchovy ends and the sauce begins.
The same goes for all kinds of piquant clothes. As Erin put it, “Somewhere down the line, your clothes melt into to your whole mf gestalt.” In turn, your sense of self expands to accommodate garments that once seemed too potent, and they become such an integrated part of your look that you stop seeing them. The taste of the anchovies no longer smacks you across the face, but it’s still there, adding flavor.
And so Erin decided to approach rocking the beret much the same way she’d approach building a sauce. To get things bubbling, she paired it with an old black waxed-cotton Barbour International jacket I used to wear, which became hers ~10 years ago.
This allowed her to offset and ground the unfamiliar and “effete” energies of the beret with a well-loved, “rugged classic”-coded staple, much the way you might ground the intense umami of an anchovy with the more familiar tastes of lemon and butter. (A worn denim trucker jacket or beat-up M64 Field Jacket would perform a similar function. Also, the fact that the beret used to be her mom’s added a comfortingly personal “heirloom ingredient” aspect.)
A few days later, our friend Happy posted a mirror selfie to IG where she was rocking a beret (below left) while stanced up beatifically. “I think berets are flattering and photogenic because they knock out the background noise around your head, like a saint in a Renaissance painting,” Happy told Erin.
Unprompted, she shared her own recipe for cooking with anchovies: “I feel a little ridiculous wearing a beret on the sidelines of my kid’s soccer game, but if I counterbalance it with my basic uniform (painter pants, shrunken cable-knit sweater), it works harmoniously.” She sent Erin another pic, above right, and wouldn’t you know it, she’d opted for a Barbour, too. Over time, Happy noted, she’s worked the beret into more audacious fits: “A fav depraved look is pairing it with my yoga unitard, like an athleisure beatnik.”
Another friend of ours, the young homie Alex, has been rocking a felted merino-wool beret for a few years now, working it into a wardrobe that’s heavy on natty fibies, often atop a cool 1984 steel-frame Sequoia.
He is a discerning dude, and it can’t be denied that bruv looks like a damn cutie pie in it:
This brings us to a crucial final point…
A lot of the distaste for anchovies owes to the fact that the first anchovies many of us encountered were low-quality, mouth-irradiating pizza ruiners we ate as children, back when we had undeveloped palates to boot. In a similar way, many of us came to know berets first as gag headwear, consigned to Mime Cosplay Oblivion, when we were young.
To move past that conditioning, you want to work with good ingredients, in the sense of both cool berets and cool beret inspo, where you escape the unsubtle clichés of the Mime Halloween Costume and consider other, doper frames of reference…
As far as cool berets, Erin pulled together a bunch of intel for the ladies & fellas alike, which we’ll share, along with some styling ideas, in this coming Thursday’s sletter.
As far as cool beret inspo, once we got beret-rocking on the brain, we saw people looking good in them all over the place: Directors as poetic as Ingmar Bergman in 1959 and as hardened as Abel Ferrara in 1997… Black Panthers and Che Guevara… Extras in old Godard movies, sure, but also James Gandolfini… Joni Mitchell in 1975, and street photographer and Spyfriend Daniel Arnold a year or so ago… Paul Newman in cartoon form on a Newman’s Own pasta sauce jar… and, very inspiringly, an abundance of swaggy older people we passed on the street…
That final category is where we rest our case, because in swagged-out elders’ commitment to berets, we find proof of the beret’s enduring appeal and of its surprising versatility. We’ve seen grandpas looking great rocking berets with wool coats and moc boots here; others in ‘90s Eddie Bauer windbreakers and Tevas there; grandmas serving in monochrome sweatsuits with shopping bags (above right).
Older people are, after all, the swaggiest population segment per capita, and they grew up during times when daily hat-wearing were still the standard — for them, in other words, berets never went out of style. And these are people who have spent their whole lives building sauce.
If you remain a beret skeptic, that’s fine. A major virtue of the Anchovy Principle is that it allows for the truth that anchovies don’t go with every sauce — that if they fail in one context, they still might flourish in another. What’s more, it allows for the truth that anchovies aren’t for everyone.
If you dislike the taste, you don’t need to try and force yourself to feel otherwise.
If you do love anchovies, though, don’t let other people’s antipathy for them deter you from your enjoyment. Yes, clothes are irreducibly social, and there’s a sense in which, when we put that s--t on, we are always cooking for other people. But, first and foremost, we’re cooking for ourselves.
And who knows, maybe you will cook the dish that finally opens an anchovy hater’s eyes and changes their mind.
Peace til next time!
— J & E
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As someone who absolutely ADORES anchovies, I COULD NOT LOVE THIS POST MORE 😂
Love that metaphor. And yes, with the right outfit, a beret can indeed be great, as all of your examples show. (You’re right, older people usually look amazing in them.) I have fleece berets in a couple of colors that Paa came out with back in 2020. Do I second guess myself sometimes when I catch a glimpse in the mirror? Sure. But other times, they feel great and really add something.