Washing your clothes is cool again
The dopest detergent, dry cleaning is overrated, 2 of modernity's greatest jackets reborn, & more
In today’s Spyplane we’ve got:
A laundry epiphany, as we discover “the dopest detergent in the game” and our clothes thank us for it
Two of modernity’s greatest jackets get a limited reissue
Powerfully vibey new music from one of our favorite musicians
But first —
Care tag instructions … what’s up with these? Specifically: Is it just us, or have clothesmakers started slapping catch-all “Dry Clean Only” warnings on ~everything they make these days, irrespective of composition, on some indiscriminate, cover-your-a** logic? It’s one of our Unfounded Yet True-Feeling Conspiracy Theories here at Blackbird Spyplane that, yes, this is increasingly common practice…
We get it. People are afraid of washing a nice garment and not just f**king it up but changing its appearance at all, and so they’re all too happy to stick to the (relatively) low-risk route of dry cleaning. They found a beautiful piece, they very possibly spent a lot of dough on it, and so they wanna keep it looking as lustrous as it did the day it first sung out to them from the racks. And they know that different materials can react to washing — machine washing, especially — in SpOoKiLy unpredictable ways.
But what if I (Jonah) wisely told you that a life spent trying to steer clear of unpredictability means a life of constant anxiousness, misery and frustration?
And what if I went on to profoundly add that unpredictability, while often SpOoKy, is also the beautiful condition for growth, change and discovery — and that, with some exceptions, this principle applies in its own cool way to far more clothes than the current dominant discourse would have us believe?
Because it is, and it does!! I’m speaking from firsthand experience. Recently I’ve been saying f**k it and BUNGING all kinds of beloved pieces into the wash, despite Dry Clean Only tags. I’m talking clothes cut from beautiful natural fibers and high-end “technical” synthetics alike. Some pieces come out looking exactly the same as they did before, except now they’re crisper, feel much nicer against my skin, and smell good. Other pieces come out looking different in ways that, after I spend some time with them, I appreciate: The color gathers richness and nuance on my black hemp Never Cursed pants; a densely woven Casey Casey cotton-button up starts to drape even better than before.
And, crucially, clothes that contained a lingering swagless trace of the State-of-Shopping Vortex start to look and feel MORE MINE, because part of what it means to actually wear your clothes and make them yours is, yes, to wash them.
Erin’s had her own comparable experiences machine-washing all kinds of putatively Dry Clean Only pieces, too.
To be clear, some times we use laundry bags and/or the hand-wash setting and we’re more often than not line-drying these babies. We’re not the d*mn Joker. Also this is a good opportunity to shout out Eucalan soap for hand-washing sweaters & other woolen pieces, a tip we first put in the sletter a few years back via my knitwear-wizard mother, Mama Spyplane herself.
And sure, fears of the worst-case scenario — a totally “bricked” garment — keep us from washing just everything. But so far that scenario has thankfully … not happened.
And we’re not alone. During our Silk Slapper Report in Concorde, Spyfriend Chelsea Mak talked about how she and a bunch of her customers have started machine-washing silks — a bold violation of hegemonic care-tag wisdom — and that the garments come out looking not just fine but unexpectedly cool.
Or, when we linked with Big Homie Spyfriend Nick Dierl in L.A. a couple weeks back, he showed up wearing a wool-cotton Dana Lee Brown sweatshirt — the greatest sweatshirts Erin and I have ever owned — and it was looking appealingly slubby and nubbly. We asked Nick if this was some rare variant we’d slept on, but no. He informed us he’d simply run that beauty through the washing machine, TRANSMOGRIFIED it, and embraced the funky results.
At this point, we’ve seen enough to issue a new Spyplane Holy Decree: on balance, and with some exceptions, just washing your d*mn clothes is cool again!!
Which raises the obvious question:
What’s the Dopest and Most Spyplaned-Out Detergent (D.A.M.S.O.D.)? Until a couple months ago, we wouldn’t have had a particularly exciting answer.
But we recently discovered a detergent that checks ALL the Spyplaney boxes and then some — and it makes our clothes smell fantastic in a way that it’s not an exaggeration to say collapses space and time: