Why did we go to Fashion Week?
The cursed, the blessed, and the Mach 3+ of Paris
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A couple weeks ago Erin and I floated over to Paris for Fashion Week, where a bunch of labels were showing their SS25 collections.
“Blackbird Spyplane, hold up,” you’re maybe saying. “Fashion Week obviously sounds tight, but it also sounds like some frou-frou s**t with a high potential for industry cursedness. Why did you and Erin — two truth-telling renegades who create a delightfully anti-consumerist dope-clothes culture sletter — want to be a part of it?”
Great observation re: us being cool renegades, and fair question.
We wanted to link with homies we don’t get to see enough, from fellow professional cool-clothes appreciators to designers behind a bunch of lines we wear and admire. We wanted to do IRL recon into the near future of clothing, hitting showrooms to see pieces, touch them, try them on, and flip them inside out to inspect their seams. And we wanted to attend the two Spyplaniest runway shows of the week to witness forthcoming slappers rocked by cool models while cool music played at high volume, ok??
Also, in a week overloaded with guest lists, doormen, gifting suites, and other fodder for “You wasn’t there”-type IG behavior, we wanted to co-host a fun party with friends, open to anyone in town who wanted to come, with wine, vibes & chunes on a beautiful corner in the Marais.
You already know we accomplished all of the above & more. However — there were also a few times when I (Jonah) felt an emotion creep up in me that, thankfully, I very rarely feel: Bad about myself??
I knew I had to go “Spyplane Mode” on these negative emotions: a process that combines philosophy, humor, self-questioning, systems analysis, and looking great in outfits. I did exactly that, and we came out of the week armed with new strength, wisdom and insights — into the tragicomedy of contemporaneity, the swag sciences, and the fascinating business of slapper-making.
Let’s get to it, starting with a few stray nuggets of elite showroom eavesdropping —
• A knowledgeable insider told us he’d heard that a storied French luxury house produces (some of) their shirts in Turkey, then sews on buttons and notions domestically and slaps on a “Made in France” label. This is permitted under regulations whereby clothes made using cheaper labor outside France can still qualify for an exalted-sounding Made in France tag as long as France is where the garments are finished. The person who told us this correctly pointed out that, in addition to being misleading, the (alleged) practice gives short shrift to the clearly god-tier levels of garmento craftsmanship in Turkey.
• Someone at a youngish independent line told us that buyers from a shop that stocks lots of cool labels visited their showroom, said nice things, but did not place an order. “They told us, ‘Make more,’” the clothesmaker said: The store wanted to lessen the chances that any pieces they bought would be stocked by other shops. Telling a small brand to ramp up production and take on the associated costs & risks is a tall order in its own right. But beyond that, it’s calling for more clothes to be put into the world for no reason beyond the asinine prerogatives of the competitive retail landscape! This struck us as “low-key” dark in a way you can extrapolate out to much of what is “high-key” dark about the apparel industry.
• A talented designer we f**k with — London-based Xenia Telunts — gave Paris a miss entirely. “We’ll be sending our stores a collection binder with physical fabric samples and finishes alongside the full range of silhouettes,” she told us. “When it feels necessary, we’ll show in Paris again in the future — when we introduce new silhouettes — but as we transition to a more ‘seasonless’ offering, and as part of our commitment to being zero waste and sustainable in all areas, sampling our entire fabric offering and taking that to Paris does not feel aligned with our approach.” Can’t argue with that!
But ayyye —
I asked to attend two shows and two shows only — Tokyo’s Auralee and Paris’s Lemaire — because we actually wear & write about these lines regularly in the sletter. Both lines let me come through, and the shows were, unsurprisingly, gas….
• Auralee •
The vagaries of Japan’s business landscape are murky to us, and we haven’t seen this reported anywhere else, but as we understand it from people with connections to Japanese clothesmaking, Auralee is a “factory brand.” Meaning that, whereas a designer usually contracts with factories to produce clothes, in this case factory owners hired a designer — the gifted Ryota Iwai — to build a label. This is actually how one of history’s most famous houses was born: a wealthy French textile manufacturer looking to get into the apparel business went on a hunt for a designer and gave Christian Dior the job.
And Auralee also does in-house materials development. This adds up to a rare depth and breadth of control over the clothesmaking process, the results of which were on display in what was, from our POV, the coolest show of the week. Above you can see a few professional shots, and also a couple pics taken by me, for verité flavor.
The colors were fantastic — we saw the sage green on dude above top right in a lot of collections, as it happens, and you know we f**k with the Robby Müller Red ma is wearing top right beside him. People were also flipping for what you might call the “Tokyo sprezzatura” styling: the left shirt collar tucked away, the right collar flopping over a jacket; sweaters tied around the waist or around the shoulder sideways; neckerchiefs hanging askew; a high-degree-of-difficulty short casual jacket layered over a longer formal jacket (above top left), and on and on.
• Lemaire •
This show was great in a way you could almost take for granted: Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran are highly influential masters of a deeply French look that travels extremely well — billowing but structured, elegant but louche, muted but smoldering. They’ve been exploring it for years, and in their hands, it somehow refuses to age. Nobody does minimalist tonal-swag combos like them, and their layering game is understatedly yanking, too. Peep the multiple strata on the model below top right with the bolo tie over the partially unbuttoned trench, and a little hint of PURPLY-GRAY shirt-collar and -tail peeking out tantalizingly — not to mention the monochrome matte / shiny texture collision between the coat and the pants.
Much here felt familiar from previous seasons, because that’s what vision & consistency look like. In that light, though, it would be ill if a brand of Lemaire’s size & stature could go Xenia Telunts mode and officially transition toward a more “seasonless” model. If you keep things this tight from one collection to the next, do you even need a show?
On the subject of runway fantasies and material realities —
Erin and I popped into the Lemaire flagship shop (above bottom left) a few days later, and the store’s a stunner. But if runway shows are exercises in fantasy-building, then stores are where the rubber of fantasy meets the road of actually touching the clothes — and peeping their pricetags.
Like so many labels we love, operating in an industry with a disappearing middle, Lemaire has gotten eye-poppingly expensive in recent years, and we weren’t sure that every piece stood up to the pricing. The line has been expanding production into more and more factories around the world, and the fabrics and finishing aren’t always as fine as they’ve been in the past … At the shop, Erin pulled out a denim vest made in Morocco, and observed that the material, color and style seemed a bit too much like the best possible version of a denim vest you might find at, like, COS — where it wouldn’t cost €420.
A friend copped pleated lightweight cotton wide-leg pants garment-dyed a great shade of burgundy. The color, fit & drape were fantastic — but they were also €650, a price point where pants have really got to be special, and she wouldn’t have copped if it wasn’t for a private sale a chill saleswoman tipped her off about. (We wrote about the way brands preemptively factor markdowns into ever-increasing prices in our piece about whether clothes should ever go on sale.)
We wondered if the balance between 1. Lemaire’s design genius, 2. their runway panache, 3. how special the clothes feel in person, and 4. the prices they’re asking might threaten to fall out of whack as the brand continues to transition from a fundamentally niche, craft operation into a growing global concern with corporate owners intent on finding any opportunity to boost margins, the way corporate owners do…
And finally —
A personal saga of SHAME, soul-searching & swaggy solace…
• Much fashion marketing operates, as we all know, on a principle of making you feel lacking and in need of external validation — problems you can supposedly solve by buying new garments, even if those garments will soon go out of style and “out of season,” creating new problems the only remedy for which will be more new purchases.
So it tracks that much of Fashion Week itself operates on a principle of making people feel lacking and left out. It’s a week of invitations you didn’t get, guest lists you aren’t on, seeing IG stories from Clamato dinners you weren’t at, getting asked things like, “Are you going to Dries?” and “Are you going to see James Blake DJ at Silencio?” and pretending you knew it was happening and are “so tired and it’s gonna be a s**tshow so I’ll probably skip it.”
In other words — even if you’re there, and not watching along on your phone from a couch somewhere else — it’s a week of countless walled gardens where attendees continually find themselves welcomed in, or shut out. A week, that is, where “access” is the most valuable currency.
A lot of brands create or sponsor these various walled gardens, to look cool and also to seduce, coddle and capture the fashion media, who risk losing access if, say, they ever get too critical.
This has been true, in degrees, for ages. Cathy Horyn was banned from shows by Giorgio Armani and Hedi Slimane for the crime of keeping it too d*mn real. But the Cathy Horyns of the world — and publications powerful and based enough to back them — are rarer and rarer in the social-media era. Influencers increasingly outnumber & outgun actual journalists, and journalists are increasingly incentivized to behave like influencers. Circa 2024, as media business-models shift and a “content creator’s personal brand” becomes ever-more important to their livelihood, the promise of not just access but access to things to post about is as potent and alluring as ever.
Of course, chasing and flaunting access that way — effectively relying on the approval of brands to demonstrate your cachet and worth to your audience — is an inane game with no end. Bottega Veneta put you on flow team and sent you a bag to put on IG — but someone with more followers got a bigger bag, and some shoes, too. Loro Piana flew you to a junket in the Dolomites to write about in your sletter, but there’s a private dinner that weekend where you’re not invited, and even if you were, there’d be a better table than yours seated with “more important” people — and only some of them would be asked back to the chalet afterparty to do the real alpha-tier creepy rich-person s**t.
Or, to choose an example closer at hand, you got into the runway show, but you’re not in the front row. I speak from experience on that score: I was not front row at Auralee. I wasn’t second-row either. O yes — your boy got a Standing Room invitation, lovers.
Before the show kicked off, I clocked a bunch of Spyfriends seated around the room. The Throwing Fits boys were second row behind some guy who was barechested under a fur coat. Sam Hine, Noah Johnson and Will Welch of GQ were front row, huddled next to Jacob Gallagher of the Wall Street Journal, looking like a group of buds packed in tight around a campfire making ‘smores — except instead of ‘smores they were making IG stories of cool clothes.
I will confess that I felt momentarily embarrassed & lame that I was standing up. This was the meaningless hierarchical logic of Walled Garden Mindset attempting to infect my big beautiful brain: Every time I felt bad about myself during the week, I realized, it was because I was on the “wrong” side of some imaginary line. This is a dynamic it feels cliché to call “middle-school lunchroom s**t,” but the middle-school lunchroom turns out to be a blueprint for all kinds of wack adult social structures.
But when the show started, and tremendous outfits started to roll by, I checked myself. “Young Spyplane,” I said. “Chill. You’re not here to have your place in the pecking order affirmed. You are a truth-telling renegade who co-creates an anti-consumerist dope-clothes culture sletter, and you’re here to see clothes from a label that is absolutely cooking right now — no more, no less.
“If you’re going to attend runway shows, you are in fact obligated to post up on the d*mn fringes. These other girls are gathered ‘round the fire in the clearing, and that’s cool. But you are a ROGUE SPIRIT most at home in the trees.”
🌲👻🌲
When I took my Row C seat at Lemaire the next day I looked wistfully at the empty space behind my bench — space where I could have been standing.
That’s all for now —
There were other highlights throughout the week, topmost being that we saw some very sick new clothes at showrooms, connected with all manner of passionate gifted people doing cool things, flicked up some Parisian street-style virtuosos and threw a wonderful party at Le Mary Celeste with our friends from Neighbour and Colbo.
Some of our favorite people mobbed through, Yu Su made a playlist, and several Spyfriends brought their kids, who got busy with a Lion King coloring book on the sidewalk — along with all the good outfits, this cemented the party’s status as “the most blessed fête of the week.”
We’ll share some pictures, along with a Classified Subscriber exclusive sneak-peekiolo of the best SS25 pieces we saw at the showrooms (plus some other rare intel gems), in the sletter real soon.
Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, André 3000, 100 gecs, Danielle Haim, Mac DeMarco, Jerry Seinfeld, Matty Matheson, Michael Stipe, Alison Roman, Phoebe Bridgers, Seth Rogen, Emily Bode, Conner O’Malley, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Steven Yeun, John C. Reilly, Clairo and more are here.
Insecurity is temporary, knowing thyself is eternal, amen
You lost a smidge of my heart when you did the pfw biz, I thought oh no, they're just more fashion people. Well consider it recovered and enrichened via your motherloving ode to fully realised selfness and the beautiful articulation of of your true calling. Respect.