The Lo-fi mark of a Real One
Plus replicating an iconic photographer's swag, beeswax-candle intel, fleece pillbox hats, berets & more hat recon
Welcome to Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical” that the fellas love as well. Every edition is archived here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
Our 2025 year-end excellence celebration is here.
Don't sleep on our brand new Home-Goods Recon Spectacular with intel on furniture, dish racks, pillows, ceramics and more.
We write a lot here about the benefits of building a sustained relationship with your clothes over time. The more we wear something, the better it sits on the body, and the more comfortably it sits in our mind, too. If it’s a garment you’ve owned for a particularly long time, though, and during that span you’ve taken it in and out of rotation — wearing it for years on end, only to put it on ice for a stretch — then another dynamic can emerge, which is the strange pleasure of digging something back out and re-encountering a once-familiar part of yourself you’d put on hiatus, if not totally forgotten.
This dynamic applies far beyond clothes. That occurred to me (Erin) the other day when Jonah and I tapped back in at a museum we visited a ton when we first moved to the Bay from New York a decade ago, but hadn’t been to in ages. Walking through the permanent collection, I passed a Ruth Asawa, a Barry McGee, a Joanne Leonard and a Bruce Conner, drawn without knowing it to a Diebenkorn canvas that stopped me cold. I first saw it in 2014, and on subsequent visits I always made a point to linger in front of it.
The Diebenkorn is energetic and flat at the same time. It looks like an abstraction at first glance, then arranges itself into a portrait. Looking at it again, I felt a combination of recognition, confusion, and nostalgia — a wobbliness of the self, as I looked across the canyon between where I am now and where I was when I first saw it. It was kind of like seeing an old friend and marveling at how well we still got along, despite falling out of touch… Do you have a work of art, in the place where you live, or a place you visit, that you go back to again and again, to see how you’ve both changed over time?
In today’s Concorde we’ve got:
Spicy Mach 3+ hat intel
Beautiful beeswax candle recommendations
A couple vintage accessories rabbit holes
And, throughout…
A bunch of makers who run 💾 extremely Lo-fi sites 💾, which inherently makes me trust them more…
Let’s get to it —
After vibing with the Diebenkorn portrait, I stopped at a photo of a legendary artist dripped down in classic workwear set off by some key, very chic accessories.
I set out to track down near-exact replicas: