The Best of Paris Fashion Week: Vancouver Edition
"Cool city, hey?" Swag Report
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane, your no. 1 source across all media for “unbeatable recon” into style & culture.
Fashion week… wow. It’s that time of year when “fit hordes of fit lords” descend on Milan, then Paris, to peep SS24 runway shows … drop in on showrooms … and consult our beloved “Wonders of Paris” recon report to see where they should go get flicked up while looking sexy as h*ll.
Here at Blackbird Spyplane we’re nothing if not masters of “unbeatable counter-programming,” so we just wrapped up an alternate fashion-week recon visit to a very cool city that you could call “the Milan and Paris rolled into one of British Columbia”: Vancouver, baby !
This is a city we f**k with deeply. Not only because of its kindvibed residents and proximity to stunning GORP locales. Not only because the food scene and the communist-bookshop circuit is on point. And not only because it produced Mach 3+ Spyfriends like Nathan Fielder, Seth Rogen and (after he graduated from high school) Mac DeMarco …
But also because it’s home to some of the sickest small designers & shops in the Spyplane Universe, like Dana Lee Brown, James Coward, and Neighbour, among other excellence. Friends: If you f**k with cool clothes & objets and you are sleeping on Vancouver?? You are playing yourself.
So while these other girls were flaneuring down cobblestone Marais rues, Erin and I chopped it up on this ’Couver concrete. We also saw some chill bands play, hiked great and ate very well.*
*(except for the pasta place on Commercial Drive that tons of people raved about where you have to wait ~an hour to put your name in on the weekends, so we did that, ‘cause f**k it — but then the kitchen put up one disappointment after the next, the flavors were anemic and the wine tasted like Trader Joe’s blends!! Sorry to be rude, everyone here is so nice, and maybe it was just an off night, but we’ve got to speak truthfully to warn the gourmands of Spy Nation!!)
And of course we took notes for a classic Spyplane City Report. For ease of use, when you see a “📀” below, that’s a DVD-ROM: Dope Vibey D*mn Recon Ordnance Marker. Let’s get to it —
You know we BEELINED to 📀 Neighbour — our pick for the coolest shop in the world, which you know if you saw this past Tuesday’s list of the 35 Slappiest Stores Across the Spyplane Universe, or read our interview the other day with Saager Dilawri. The only downside to this trip is that Saager and Karyna from Neighbour were on a buying trip to Paris so we could not link ‘n’ build with them.
But shout out to James & Brennan at the men’s store & Keelin at the women’s store, who held us down. I admired the banger 📀 madder-dyed Man-tle button up (below left) and the banger 📀 slubby linen German-made Polyploid jacket (below right), while Erin picked up a very sick 📀 multilayered black belted gauze ramie top from Our Legacy, as seen below right:
Neighbour’s stock list is global but they put on, as you’d expect, for sick local designers — none sicker than James Coward, Dana Lee Brown and an emerging Vancouver line run by two friendly brothers called Alterior.
While we were in town we hit up the very charming HQs of all 3 lines, which you need on yr d*mn radar if they aren’t PINGING for you already:
📀 Dana Lee Brown’s Bowen Island flagship shop is worth the shortish, scenic schlep from Vancouver. One bright sunny morning Erin and I took a car ferry out to Bowen and hung out with Dana in a warren of workshops & storefronts known as “Artisan Square.” (We had a car but that’s not necessary. Also if you go there she has friends who have cool spaces nearby and she’ll point you toward them.)
If you’re unfamiliar with Dana, we interviewed her here. A veteran of the menswear game, she’s trying to do something very rare and very hard, even though it seems simple: Make ingenious, beautiful, simple clothes entirely from North American-grown (and -milled, -spun, -knit, -cut and -sewn) fibers and dyes …
You can see from photos that, e.g., 📀 Dana’s ringneck sweatshirts — double-faced with fluffy California~Nevada rambouillet wool on the interior and Texas organic cotton on the exterior — are sick. But it wasn’t until we tried them on that we fully appreciated their dopeness. They’re substantial but lightweight, in an almost paradoxical combination — like a STURDY CLOUD?? Same for her boxy tees and fuzzy & thick yet airy button-ups…
Above left you can see a couple shots of an upcoming 📀 dye-free, naturally brown Fox-Fibre-cotton-faced sweatshirt; some 📀 California-made indigo selvedge denim painter’s jeans; and 📀 fantastic roomy ecru jeans that I got to try on, both of which should be out by the fall. And, above bottom right, some luminous new 📀 rumpled fleecy cottons in development, dyed using foraged Osage Orange Tree bark.
I’m swaddled in one of Dana’s wool-cotton sweatshirts in ecru as I write this sletter — those are 10/10 no-notes Spyplane Endorsed, and coppable now. Dana’s webshop is here.
MAMMA MIA —
The next day we popped in on the “live/work” space that is 📀 James Coward HQ.
James Coward is the trio of Dan Garrod, Patrick Bull and Aaron Gray — one of our favorite clothing lines going. Amazingly, Spy Nation helped James Coward hit their “highest volume sales day” ever when we dropped their natural-dye short-sleeve Sundown shirts as a BBSP ‘xclusie in the sletter in May, so props to you.
We were stoked that they turned out to be as chill a set of broskis as we were hoping ; )
At their stu we f**ked especially heavy with two new versions of their excellent Site Jacket — one cut from a very 📀 fine black wool gabardine, and another cut highly poppingly from some 📀 hardbody Italian-made black recycled nylon … a sample of the jacket is pictured above left, and it was giving “Canadian Prada.” (Dan told me it’s not a sure thing they’re gonna make these, but let’s hope.)
There were also swatches on hand (above right) of cool starchy linens and crinkly wool-cotton blends that are about to get cheffed up into a 📀 collaborative capsule with Toronto handmade-jawn wizard & Spyfriend Keith Henry of Henry’s — mamma mia.
The James Coward site is here. They kindly took us out for a night on the d*mn town, too, and recommended a fantastic hike — more on both below.
OOOOF — We were very keen to check out 📀 A Living Taste, the workshop / storefront / lending library / mini-climbing-gym (!) run by brothers Dallas and Cole Chreptyk, who design & fabricate the apparel and accessories line 📀 Alterior…
Dallas and Cole make all of Alterior’s clothes themselves, on the drafting tables & sewing machines you see above. They started out doing just leather goods and slowly expanded into apparel, recently dropping a capsule of jackets, caps, & jeans cut from cone mills denim…
Dallas was wearing those jeans, which looked great, while Cole was wearing a sample of an upcoming 📀 contrast-stitch light-cotton ripstop Alterior zip jacket (pictured above bottom right) that went VERY hard in black, as did the samples Dallas showed me cut from ecru ripstop with black contrast-stitching…
The Chreptyk brothers sell a bunch of pieces by their friends, local and far-flung, too, like Clubgear and All Caps Studio; 📀 sick sneakers from Keen; some LPs; cool art books from visionaries like 📀 LSDWorldpeace; and a bunch of miscellaneous treasure. Very blessed vibes in this place, in no small part because it’s a former wedding / banquet hall ?? Their site is here.
REAL QUICK — 2 fantastic “home goods” / objets spots deserve a special shout-out:
📀 CAVE Gallery — Max King is a local sculptor and longtime Stüssy designer who, through his travels and estate sales, has amassed an incredible collection of art, lighting, and furniture, not to mention phenomenal driftwood and rocks. Since 2019 he’s operated a Mt. Pleasant showroom known as Cave, which we visited right before we left town. (Erin shouted it out in a 2020 Home Goods Report here FYI.) There are Joe Colombo spider lamps; Peruvian textile art from 400 A.D., the 2 first Green River Project pieces ever made (stools hand-numbered GRP001 and GRP002 on the bottom); a bunch of found rocks known as “concretions” that look like sculptures except they were sculpted by Gaia; and tons more.
Appointment-only, but highly worth trying to schedule a time. Max has an amazing eye & he’s nice as h*ll to boot. There’s a webshop with some (but not nearly all) of his inventory here.
Also, Max recommended we hit the nearby Japanese home-goods store 📀 Itsumo — he was right, but Dana Lee beat him to the punch, so we’d swung by already and copped a smattering of teas, incense, and copper wasabi- & citrus-zest-graters formed to look like animals (pictured above).
You can check the Itsumo site here.
FINALLY — let’s close things out with a quick Cla$$ified Tier rundown of delicious restaurants high & low; sick shops, new and vintage; banging bookstores & record stores; and other gems we loved / had highly recommended to us by Mach 3+ locals: