When Kanye fired him he vowed to chase his own swag visions
Cutting-edge excellence in post-GORP sauce from Gnuhr, our top restaurant in Portland, and more PDX intel
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
Our Home Goods Report, bursting with things to enliven the place you live, and stores where you can find them, is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a helpful rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.
Is it possible to spend ~48 hours in a city full of fantastic food and crown the No. 1 Restaurant in Town with complete accuracy?
For most people, of course not. But when you have the big craggy taste buds, elite discernment, highly informed network of Mach 3+ local recommenders, and proven record of 100% infallibility that Blackbird Spyplane does, you simply call it like you see it and know you’re right as hell.
That’s what happened the other day, when a reporting trip brought me (Jonah) to coastal Oregon and, at the tail end, Erin and I met in Portland for a weekend of high-level intel gathering. Portland is a cool city whose coolness has, in the last decade or so, been increasingly contested — like Austin, TX, it’s a place with a beautiful funky past but has seen much of its soul and character threatened by a steamrolling influx of bland “beer-garden yuppieism,” as I recently heard it described.
The flipside is that the presence of A) Behemoth Job Creators like Nike, Adidas and Hoka, and B) creative agencies like Wieden Kennedy and their offshoots, has also combined with C) lingering relatively low rents, to attract and support D) a small network of top-notch restaurants, shops, and small makers.
So we were stoked to touch down and hurtle through a packed, sauce-seeking itinerary. Assisting us in this mission were many fantastic tips from Spy Nation in our own Global Intel Travel Chat Room — and some firsthand recommendations from tied-in friends on the ground.
This week we’re rounding up some of the Very Best that Portland has to offer — including gems you can coppeth wherever you are between now and whenever you visit, and fantastic things you can only experience IRL.
Enjoy —
One of the Portland-based Spyfriends we consulted for tips was Nur Abbas, a swagged-out designer whose 20+ year résumé includes stints working hand-in-hand with Martin Margiela and Christophe Lemaire; overseeing the design of Nike ACG apparel; and his own excellent, highly innovative post-GORP label, Gnuhr, which he launched in 2023.
Erin has been homies with Nur for years. I was happy to finally meet him at our smash-hit party in Paris last summer. But this was our first time visiting the Gnuhr studio. Nur greeted us near the elevators wearing a great pair of trousers from the UK’s Sono (whose line we first wrote about here) and a great jacket from Japan’s Stein (who recently showed our favorite FW25 collection) so you know this man (below right) knows what he’s doing.
Gnuhr gets props for bringing a subtle “fashion” sensibility to the ultralight backpacking idiom — a Really With the Gorpy S**ts community that Nur is himself a part of. So one of their most-used fabrics is the lightweight but shaggy Polartec Alpha, which they cut into cool hoodies and tees. (Shout out on this score to the Spyfriends at Portland’s Senchi, too, who we wrote about back in 2020.)
We peeped the next several months’ worth of drops (A. above); some of the clothes that Gnuhr designs for Goldwin’s “0” sublabel; banging upcoming trousers with an elastic cinch at the ankle so you can let them flow wide or gather them (B., as demonstrated by Marilyn Smith); prototypes of a very cool hooded puffer (C., as rocked by me) that is insulated ingeniously using [REDACTED], plus a windshell cut from the same creamy semi-translucent nylon (D.) Also some higher-pile wool fleece (E.) and a heap of Mylar the Gnuhr crew were f**king around with on some exploratory workshop s**t as they try to develop [REDACTED].
The pieces are deceptively simple, conceived with an Industrial Designer’s “elegant solutions” mentality. The garment that might best exemplify that spirit is Gnuhr’s Tubular Tee, below, which (not counting the ribbing at the neck) consists of one piece of fabric, folded over on itself, so there’s only one seam, running across the back. After admiring these online, Erin bought one of these on the spot (she went for a version with black reflective polka dots all over it).
In that same Slapper Innovation mode, they’re in the process of developing running shorts (above left) and a running vest (above right) that incorporate an Italian “warp knit” fabric which can expand a ton while retaining its strength, meaning they can add in taut cargo pockets simply by perforating it, as pictured.
Before we left the Gnuhr stu we noticed a framed text message from 3 years ago, when Nur was working on the design team at Yeezy. Specifically, it was from his last day, when Ye fired more than a dozen people in one go. That job ended — but it cleared the way for Gnuhr to be born.
Gnuhr’s website is here and they’re on IG here. Portland’s Stand Up Comedy carries them here, as do Vancouver’s Neighbour, here, among other shops.
Meanwhile —
Let’s get into Blackbird Spyplane’s No. 1 restaurant in Portland, plus other great food, and the brand-new print-periodicals shop that everyone cool in town told us to hit up.