The power of "just looking"

NYC Inspiration Report

Welcome to Concorde — the Blackbird Spyplane “women’s vertical,” except it’s for everyone who is cool.

The Concorde Cute Swag Index — a guide to everything we’ve covered, arranged by category — is here.

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.

— Erin & Jonah

Erin here, fresh off a packed 72-hour gallivant to NYC where I gorged myself on art and fashion exhibits, caught up with old buddies, and linked & built with some illustrious SpyFriends in the business of making, collecting and selling beautiful and rare things.

I booked this trip in late January, when I was in the throes of some winter doldrums and found myself on a run of compulsive copping. Those DHL boxes were not the remedy I needed, friends! I should have been filling my eyeballs, my heart and mind, not my closet. I knew I needed to revisit our N.O. C.A.P. (Non-Obsessive Chill Artgoer’s Perspective) Mindset, which is about nurturing the “desire-free relationship to objectively desirable things” that you experience in galleries & museums.

As Jonah mentioned the other day in his essay about how “The Price of Clothes is Insane Right Now,” I grew up hitting retrospectives dedicated to designers like Schiaparelli, Prada, Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Balenciaga, Chanel, Patrick Kelly and many more… Getting up close and seeing the construction, fabrics and choices of these masters gave me a stellar fashion education, while producing zero acquisitive anxieties. Looking, done right, can be so much more rewarding than owning.

With all that in mind, I planned a shopping-free NYC itinerary — taking me back to the days where my mom and I would cruise the mall and call out, “Just looking!” as we checked out stores. I’ll share the highlights today, including:

• two blockbuster fashion exhibits that close in early March and allowed me to ogle the work, down to the stitching, of some of the best designers of the 20th and 21st centuries

• a just-opened show by one of our favorite contemporary artists, whose work is in no small part about the fantasy of “consuming” your way to a better self!

• linking with the people behind some of my favorite made-in-NYC labels, who all share a love of textiles and vintage

• a new gallery/salon/showroom filled with rare art, fashion and design objects and assorted cool ephemera — some of which is for sale and some is just there to be appreciated.

Let’s get to it— !