Twin freaks

How strange it feels to wear the exact same thing as your homie, and more from NYC

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

Check our new Ultimate Spyplane Guides to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, Naoshima, Teshima & more.

Our list of 35 Spyplane Icons — celebrating pinnacle design excellence of the contemporary slapper era — is here.

There were heavy storms in the forecast for our recon mission to New York City last week, so I (Jonah) packed The Rain Jacket to End All Rain Jackets, which kept me dry in some true deluges.

I wore it to get coffee in Chinatown one wet morning with Bay Area photographer Allen Danze, who was coincidentally in NYC, too, and who was wearing the same rain jacket — not so coincidentally, because Allen’s the person who convinced me to buy it in the first place.

It’s a strange feeling to hang out with someone who’s wearing the same thing you are. Not just in a broad-strokes, tribal-affinity, we’ve-both-got-camp-shirts-over-A-shirts-with-stonewashed-jeans kind of way (Erin and I saw uncountable clusters of youths doing this kind of twinning) but literally identical garments.

It’s a social-media-era truism that people enjoy seeing images on their phones of 1) people they admire 2) wearing garments they also own, or garments they now wish to own, having beheld the incepting image. There’s a sense of pleasant recognition, entwined with “mimetic desire.” You know this feeling firsthand. I certainly do. It might be how most clothes-related desire-stoking, and clothes-related taste-formation in general, works these days.

But that experience of recognition and desire happens virtually, and in isolation. Whereas occupying actual physical space with someone wearing the same thing as you can feel as uncanny as hearing someone say the same words as you, in the same order, at the same time as you’re saying them…

Lost Spyway

It can feel like a stranger walking up to you when you’re out at a party, telling you he’s back at your own house “right now,” then handing you a cell phone so you can call your own number — and when you do, this same weird dude currently standing before you is somehow also on the other end of the line, in your crib. And if all that wasn’t unsettling enough, he’s got on the same Auralee barn jacket as you!! Doubling can be some spooky s--t.

If we’re talking about someone who you think looks “wack,” this has its own set of issues. (Because wack people can ruin the things you love.) You are confronted, in this moment of doubling, with an unnervingly explicit index of your desire to use a garment to look a certain way. You want that desire to feel seamless, smooth and natural, but here you feel denatured from it, maybe even ashamed by it, powerless against the signifying surplus of the doppelganger garment. All the more so if the other person has qualities you don’t recognize in yourself — or, even worse, qualities you wish you didn’t.

If it’s someone you think looks cool, meanwhile, the dynamics aren’t straightforward, either. In both scenarios, you left the crib thinking you were moving like an “individual,” and suddenly you find yourself dressed in a uniform. Processing this, you might recoil from the Starter Pack Vibes: “Damn, I really got dressed out of a kit.”

Steve Schirripa, Tracy Morgan and Lenny Kravitz at Knicks-Celtics Game 6

Alternatively, you might share a laugh with the other person, since, together, you look like a glitch in the Matrix. Having found some amusement in the situation, when you are done making Spider-man meme jokes, you might even decide to take some pride in the doubling, team-apparel style. This is what I imagine the many people I saw rocking Jalen Brunson jerseys around the city felt when they passed other people rocking Jalen Brunson jerseys throughout the week, as the Knicks took out the Celtics in 6…

---

The communal joy in the air around that series made me that much happier to be back home in New York. Another thing I love about the city is how easy it is to bump into people without trying.

Case in point: Allen and I had barely sat down when I saw Spyfriend and photographic king Daniel Arnold walking by, camera lashed to his wrist as always. I popped outside to holler at him, and he joined us in the café.

Two recent photos by Daniel Arnold

Lingering over a spontaneous coffee with some buds might be even more pleasant on a wet grey sh-tty day than on a sunny one, and even harder to cut short. So we sat around a while chatting. The East Village Irish bar Swift came up, because Erin bumped into Allen there a couple days earlier. Swift has become a mob scene lately: They pour Guinnesses properly, at a time when the lads have gone mad for Guinness. I told Allen and Daniel I’d Googled whether or not Swift was a loyalist bar, on some idle anti-colonial due diligence, and Google says it isn’t. (Someone told me the very popping T.J. Byrne’s down near South Street Seaport is?) Daniel raved about Gilles Peress’s monumental 2000-page book of photos about the Troubles, which I would love to see sometime, but it’s very rare and expensive.

After an hour, we boogied, walking together for a few blocks before splitting up. Daniel, who’s working on his own forthcoming book (following up the instant sell-out success of Pickpocket, his 2021 paperback with Elara), snapped some shots of me and Allen as we strolled in a drizzle near the Manhattan Bridge.

Two even-more-recent photos by Daniel Arnold

If one of your favorite photographers — with a special gift for capturing unexpected sights on sidewalks — takes some pictures of you, you publish those pictures in your newsletter. Even (especially?) if you’re Matrix-glitching in the same jacket as your buddy.

---

Erin and I were in New York for intel-gathering, and to celebrate my mother’s birthday. (We didn’t have time to see my aunt and uncle, who live in Sunnyside and read Blackbird Spyplane — I love you and will make it up to you next time, I’m sorry not to have hung out).

Here is some of that intel:

1. COOL-CLOTHES DISPATCH

I’m still pretty clothes-shopped-out from our Japan trip, so I kept things simple and stuck to blue-chip hits on this visit to New York:

I popped in on Agyesh and Nick at Stòffa, Chris Fireoved at Lauren Manoogian (Lauren was down in Peru, where people knit their knitwear), Chris Green at Ven.Space, and Joel and Rich at C’H’C’M’. I gotta hit the new Kartik Research flagship on Orchard, right by Colbo and Lara Koleji, next time.

At C’H’C’M’ they still have Auralee’s pale-green wool max canvas high-neck blouson in stock — a jacket saluted in last week’s 35 Spyplane Modern Icons Celebration. Ven.Space still has it in black.

The best color, red, has long been sold out everywhere. (You can still find it online in several sizes at Goods, in Copenhagen, where the VAT deducts at checkout, and at Kith, of all places, where apparently the core clientele has been sleeping on it, go figure.)

Allen wanted a pair of the German-made Jacoform walkers that Sweetu Patel, an eternal visionary, recently got in at C’H’C’M’, with the wild duckbill toebox:

I’m in arch-support lockstep with Erin when it comes to my immense respect for European Pensioner Vibed Orthopedic Footwear, even if the Jacoforms aren’t for us personally.

On that same note, Mephisto is truly “having a moment” these days — this is something that happens every few years, as we noted when we did a Mephisto Match Spygiveaway back in 2021. Of the collabs they’ve been putting out lately, the 18 East Rainbow / Break hybrids are cool, and I’m really feeling these new Body of Work x Mephisto Matches, done in the same “loam” color that Brittany and Dwayne of BOW used for their sick SAS collab sneakers, which we named the best shoe of 2023.

These drop via our friends at NYC’s Colbo this Thursday, May 22; they hit the Body of Work site on Friday; and on Saturday they’ll be at Toronto’s Lost & Found.

BTW don’t sleep on the tri-tone vintage Mephistos we called out here (we put a few vintage pairs in SpyMall), and the Larry-David-Simple-looking ones I gave Spyfriend Eli Bush major props for rocking here.

2. NEWLY OPENED VINTAGE-CLOTHING MEGA-PLUGS

I got breakfast one morning at Gem Home with Sam Hine from GQ. Shout out to Sam — he’s been a Spyfriend since Day One, and his Show Notes sletter is consistently great. He could just go on SEO-maxxing branded-content autopilot and post flicks of himself looking tremendous in clothes, but he enjoys the work of thinking up stories and actually reporting them out. When we met, he was finishing a post about the brand-new NYC showroom from L.A. vintage-clothing legend Tommy Dorr a.k.a. Moth Food. An instant must-hit.

So is the recently opened 6th-floor studio space at Front General Store (not to be confused with Front General’s Outpost down the block) “where we work, store, and keep special pieces not often seen on the main floors.” Also in Dumbo, we did not get a chance to visit the brand-new Doppelganger Vintage, but we hear it rips and wish we did.

3. FOOD DISPATCH

A new contender for the city’s best pizza slice, wrapped up in an unlikely tale of comedy and drama?

The based Soho Japanese joint that is not remotely buzzy, but Old Souls and oldhead real ones revere it, i.e., Patti Smith and Salman Rushdie were both there, separately, when we popped in one night, and the last time I went, back in February, Beck was there??

The delicious Upper East Side French restaurant where it’s extremely hard to get a table — and extremely gratifying to let other people know you ate there, to a degree that might make a Modern Introspective Gourmand assess what the real point of eating out in NYC circa 2025 is???

This & more soon.

Until then, P⚙️E⚙️A⚙️C⚙️E

— J & E

Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, Adam Sandler, André 3000, Steven Yeun, Patrick Radden Keefe, Kim Gordon, Mac DeMarco, Danielle Haim, David Grann, Matty Matheson, Seth Rogen, Laraaji, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, Rashida Jones, MJ Lenderman, John C. Reilly, Clairo, Conner O’Malley, Michelle Williams and more are here.