The problem of the Boring Fit Pic
Taking ourselves out of the picture, plus fall jackets, the short story of the summer, & more
Concorde is 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.
The Spyplane Global Intel Travel Chat Room is crackling with tips from everyone’s summer travels. I’m fresh off a weekend in Portland, Maine, and added my favorite spots, alongside new intel from SpyFriends on all manner of sick destinations — here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a comprehensive index of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples — is here.
Erin here, back with you for an all-timer! Today we’ve got:
A solution for the problem of the Boring Fit Pic
A 100-year-old jacket that some of our favorite labels are remaking this fall for ladies & fellas alike, and some vintage beauties for under $50
The Concorde Short Story of the Summer — a tightly wound 20-page account of two rich b*tches in Italy having a delicious fight that’s resolved in the final sentence — was published in 1934
& more !
Let’s get to it…
I have fit-pic fatigue. The dead-on portrait of someone standing in front of a wall. The selfie with the arm outstretched to create a foreshortened view. The mirror pic with the phone in front of the face and the other hand doing a peace sign. The time-lapse GRWM video. Circa 2024, the fit pic’s dominant forms have been established and codified within an inch of their lives. It’s all feeling familiar… tired… staid!
To be fair, I have always preferred to be behind a camera rather than in front of it. But Jonah — who’s posted untold BBSP fit pics, many of which I’ve taken — feels me on this, too. Part of what we’re reacting to is pure aesthetic fatigue. Another part of it is that fit pics have become increasingly indissociable from the visual lexicon of torched and un-fun “personal brand” management online … the lingua franca of influencers and would-be influencers alike.
The thing is, it’s cool to share and look at pictures of outfits. And when you publish the no. 1 newsletter across all media for “unbeatable recon” into style & culture, there is a clear utility to fit pics. But what I really care about is how someone puts things together, and recently I’ve been thinking: What if, even just every now and then, we took ourselves out of the picture entirely?
A few years ago one such fit-pic alternative got popular on IG — so-called “#outfitgrids,” a sibling of knolling where you arrange neatly folded components of an outfit on the floor in the straightforward style you might see evidence arranged on a folding table at a drug-bust press conference. The #outfitgrid was largely adopted by dudes, and always struck me as less about sharing ingenious outfit combinations and more about a clinical display of someone’s Travis Scott Jordan 1s and other color-matched “holdings.”
I want an approach to fit pics with more panache — and the other day I came across one that jumps off the screen. Done right, it can say way more about you than yet another desultory flick of you stanced up in your favorite corner of your living room. Plus it has an exciting element of chance that can only be accessed through physics!
The wheels started turning when Spyfriend Kelsey Keith tipped me off to the wonderful IG account Esprit Flashback, which posts archival imagery from that ‘80s label. Check this sh*t out —
First off, these fits, included in catalogs from 1984-1985, are banging. And the jauntiness and literal esprit of the assemblages feels so refreshing to me as a way to photograph outfits.
What if we took cues from these images to create a NEW WAVE of non-torched fit pics?