What your city needs to be truly "up"
Robust civic-swag indicators, some of the world's best clothes, & more in our new favorite place: Antwerp
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New York. People look at Zohran Mamdani, they look at the Knicks, and they say that, these days, the city is epochally up. They aren’t wrong, and as a born & bred New Yorker, I (Jonah) love to see it.
However, I do gotta note a glaring absence in NYC’s tapestry, which proves that the city is not as up as it could be: There is no cool new restaurant in NYC that has no name, zero Google Maps presence, and hosts avant-garde puppet shows put on by beautiful young people.
Until the cultural and economic conditions align for NYC to have a cool new restaurant with no name and zero Google Maps presence which hosts avant-garde puppet shows put on by beautiful young people — a scenario last plausible circa 1983 — it will not be truly, funkily, deliriously up.
And you know what city does have exactly this? Antwerp.
Erin and I had heard great things about Antwerp but never been there until earlier this month, when we swung through for 36 delightful hours after our week in Paris (collecting intel on cool clothes and the people making and wearing them) and our 72 hours in London (collecting intel on horizon-expanding Dieter Rams collectors, delicious food, gifted independent bag-makers and more).
Antwerp’s ~3 hours on the Eurostar from each of those cities, and it rocks. We came out of the trip feeling All-In On Antwerp (A.I.O.A.) and Majorly Twerped Out (M.T.O.). What truly sealed the deal is that, on our last evening in town, the designers behind the fantastic label Unkruid, who call Antwerp home, took us to a great new restaurant, where we had an excellent dinner together. The restaurant has no name, and it’s not on Google Maps. But it does have an IG page, where I saw that, the very next evening, it was hosting avant-garde puppetry by beautiful young people.
That, to me, is a sign of robust civic health, and profound civic swag, that New York sadly lacks. The jaded attitudes and punitive cost of living simply don’t allow for “cool unnamed restaurants that aren’t on Google Maps” + “avant-garde puppetry” + “beautiful young people” to occupy the same chunk of the NYC time-space continuum these days.
Antwerp is sick in ways that will have you contemplating what other, better-known cities lack sicknesswise. The architecture is awesome, the energy is mellow, the food is great, the rents are low, the people are warm, mad spots are chill, and unsurprisingly, given the city’s history, it’s got a God-tier cool-clothes ecosystem, including:
a Spyplane Top 10 clothing shop globally
a Spyplane Top 5 most exciting clothing line globally
the most beautiful dressing room on earth??
a newly opened store where they’ve got eagle eyes for high-craft under-the-radar labels
and more!
We’re getting into all this & more today, starting with the young local Antwerp label whose unisex clothes are beloved by Mach 3+ garment enthusiasts worldwide — and whose dopeness is a big part of why we wanted to hit Antwerp in the first place…