Take the grace-based path
Plus cool sneakers, lamps, incense tendrils to sniff pon & more unbeatable recon
Our interviews with Cameron Winter of Geese, Ryota Iwai from Auralee, SC103, Nathan Fielder, Michelle Williams, Sarah Squirm, Evan Kinori, Adam Sandler, Brendan from Turnstile, MJ Lenderman, André 3000, Matty Matheson, Laraaji, Tyler, The Creator, John C. Reilly, Father John Misty, Steven Yeun, Clairo, Pusha T, Conner O’Malley, Christophe Lemaire & more are here.
Our new guide to “How to Wear Color Well: Vehicular Swag Edition” is here.
Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8B. How good of a person do you expect her to be? Read our Spyplane Deep Dive.
Mach 3+ city tips for traveling the entire planet are here.
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This means the only people we owe anything are our readers.
— Jonah & Erin
Blackbird Spyplane back with you once again. Today we’ve got:
Swaggy ways to carry your s--t around in hot weather sans jacket pockets,
A beautiful moment in sneakers where “cool rare collabs” and “cool general-release regs” are in equilibrium,
2 fantastic lamps,
Sniff pon the smoky tendrils of great incense,
& more unbeatable recon!
But first —
Last week we sent out a revelatory sletter about online explainer-influencers who purport to know the meaning of “quality” and the true signposts of a garment’s true worth. The day we published it, I (Jonah) went on a hike and kept musing idly on the topic… before long, my thoughts turned to the depths of human deviousness.
You know that thing about how some online scammers will intentionally riddle phishing emails with obvious typos and other glaring tells, in order to weed out recipients who know what’s what, and focus their scammy energies, instead, on people gullible enough to take the low-quality bait? The rationale is that the scammer will enjoy a much higher R.O.I. from a target pool that self-selects for the credulous and under-informed.
I got to wondering: Could an IG menswear-explainer-type dude ever be so diabolical as to intentionally create a bunk set of criteria for adjudicating garment quality, in order to weed out followers who have too much taste / know too much about clothes? This way, when the explainer pivots to selling things — a standard influencer arc, whether it’s nutritional supplements or clothing lines — they’ve culled the swaggy and the knowledgeable from their audience, leaving behind a concentration of people who are more prone to cop whatever dubious wares they’re peddling.
I share this scenario not because I believe in it, exactly, but rather to offer a little peek into the Spyplane cerebellum — and to talk about something much more important: the Grace-Based P.O.V.
It’s no surprise that the apparel biz is full of unsavory hustlers. But one of the patternmakers I spoke to emphasized the importance, for him, of adhering to what he called the “grace-based P.O.V.” not despite but because of the prevalence of these bozos.
There’s never been a time in history when being grace-based — kind, patient, magnanimous — has been a bad thing. But these days we find ourselves under an unprecedentedly high-volume, multi-pronged assault of garbage “content,” AI slop, mids creative output, mild hucksterism, faked expertise, outright scams, loneliness masquerading as misanthropy, loneliness masquerading as dead-eyed cheer, rentseeking companies intent on squeezing every dime they can, normal people trying to eke out whatever income they can against a backdrop of extreme precarity, etc., etc.
The lines between these categories can blur. And in reaction, it’s all too easy to find oneself becoming hard, uncharitable, and mean.
The grace-based P.O.V. is, of course, a superior path. Better for your health and happiness in a way that helps increase the general health and happiness in the world, too.
What really recommends the G.B.P.O.V. is if you read it as a hybrid of graciousness and basedness, with one informing and counterbalancing the other.
Because the thing is, we do need to be based, clear-eyed and critical. We do need to call out bad arguments and bad actors. We should defend standards of excellence in the disciplines and art forms that matter to us, rather than devolve into a milky-brained “let people enjoy things” haze.
We don’t want to lapse into a state of pure anodyne “positivity,” because that isn’t actual positivity, just a positivity-colored version of “lol nothing matters” cynicism.
Yes, for our own sanity, we should probably ignore ~95% of the odious and insipid s--t we come across and keep it pushing. But that leaves the ~5% of odious and insipid s--t that’s worth actively challenging.
How do we tell one from the other? Even more crucially, how do we do it from a place of grace?
Wow —
As long as we’re bringing up life’s big questions: How do you carry all your s--t around in hot weather, sans jacket, without resorting to “stuffing your pockets full of every damn thing you need?”
Here are 3 very fire answers —