Will your style ever "cohere" or are you fated to WANDER forever?
Why not both! Plus an ill vintage-watch trove for the low & more unbeatable recon
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Your no. 1 source across all media for unbeatable recon is back once again. In today’s Spyplane we’ve got:
An enigmatic sick vintage jacket — identified
An enigmatic sick vintage watch — identified, along with a trove of similar gems
New beautiful dreamy rock chuneage
But first —
A philosophical Personal Spyplane reader question:
“Do you ever arrive at a cohesive personal style, or is it about the journey?” — sammillar3
When I envision a “cohesive personal style” in strict terms, I (Jonah) am likely to think of my father, Papa Spyplane himself. He’s an octogenarian king who, like many dads, has never cared much about fashion per se, but has always had an extremely specific sense of style. By the time I was born he’d locked into a pretty narrowly defined “sauce idiom” that he’s tweaked since in only the slightest of ways.
For instance, he stopped wearing jeans in his early thirties, gravitating toward roomy trousers (mostly corduroys). He’s owned the same winter coat since the ‘90s (the deep yurple North Face parka we shouted out here). He bought a Barbour jacket during a trip to London in the ‘80s, wore holes in it, replaced it in the ‘00s with an off-brand waxed-cotton lookalike, and rocks it to this day. As far as footwear, he wore literally nothing but classic black Converse All-Stars for decades. I’m talking from like his ~teens into his ~fifties.
Thereabouts, however, he deaded the Chucks cold turkey and shifted to simple black walking shoes — Rockports, IIRC. In part, this was a response to the mounting demands of orthopedic comfort. In part, it was because new Converse weren’t as well made as the old ones. And in part, no doubt, it was because he performed a “swag-structural stress test” on his whole MF gestalt in middle age and decided to modify his go-to footwear accordingly, because Chucks no longer suited his vision of himself.
My eye is way hungrier and farther-ranging than his. I’m not trying to be “nomadic” with my fits, exactly — I try to refer to some fundamentally stable sense of myself when I’m putting on a jawn. But I do build elasticity into that vision, because I like seeing what’s new and how it may or may not vibe with where I’m at. And I like staying open to surprises, discoveries, and rediscoveries, looking around at what cool designers are making and what interesting people are rocking, in case I wanna tilt “where I’m at” in a new direction.
This is actually a pretty good working definition of what it means to care about fashion, not just about style!
Case in point: As I wrote in last fall’s “Banger Boots Hunt” sletter, after like ~15 years of wearing sneakers only, I recently re-entered Hard-Sole Spyplane Mode… gravitating heavily towards lace-ups and zip boots and mostly saving my sneakers and hiking boots for pounding these trails or running these errands. With this change, am I “journeying”?? Or am I zeroing in on footwear that feels age-appropriate — and thereby moving one step closer to a “cohesive personal style?”
Obviously, the East Bay is full of swagged-out elders in Hokas, New Balances, Merrells, Obōz, etc. But for me, right now, I do personally feel a bit like a kid when I put on sneakers, whereas I feel sharper and more put-together in boots. Maybe this will prove a passing phase, but I’m not alone among my peers when it comes to these proclivities. The other day, GQ EIC and Spyfriend Will Welch, who’s about my age, did a Perfectly Imperfect interview where he mentions feeling weird rocking sneakers in his 40s:
Will’s friend’s photo allowed him to “see himself” anew, and — not unlike Papa Spyplane with the Chucks — Will realized that where he used to be vis-a-vis sneakers no longer rang true.
Your experience may vary, of course. You might be my age and f**king with sneakers heavy right now. Nothing wrong with that. Because here’s the twist: I am too! Albeit in just one strange and hard-to-explain case:
Yup! At the very same time that I’m deeply feeling my James Coward x Tricker’s zip boots (above left), I’ve also put my insane white molded-plastic Nike x Comme Des Garçons Foamposites (above right), which I copped in 2021, back into active rotation.
When I first got these, I wrote a sletter about whether you should get dressed “for yourself” or “for others.” And in the context of that inquiry, I tried to unpack the complex ingredients of the Commeposites’s allure, which for me combined adolescent infatuation with Foams; subsequent admiration of Rei Kawakubo; the vagaries of hype; and my delight at seeing some “disconcertingly beautiful biomorphic-crop-circle cocoons on my d*mn dogs…”
All those factors are still in play today, except for the hype, which helps me feel a more personal sort of ownership over them. As with the James Coward boots, I’ve rocked the CDGs a ton by now, meaning they are scuffed, buffed and otherwise fricasseed in a way that makes them feel that much more mine, too.
Footwear this cuckoo gets theoretically tougher to pull off the older I get. At a certain point I may have to accept, as I have with other cuckoo jawns, that I love them in the abstract but they are no longer part of a “cohesive” self-conception… But then again, maybe not! Maybe this is simply a wild jawn that can and should coexist in my wardrobe for years, counterbalanced against more classically elegant black boots in an unlikely ☯ jawn yin-yang. ☯ (Not for nothing, the CDGs are high-topped and stiff, and so they read, in an abstracted way, as pretty d*mn bootlike.)
And that’s my answer to the question: Can a wardrobe that includes both classic black zip boots and wild white bulbous spiraling basketball sneakers be considered “cohesive?” Of course it can. Because cohesion for some people might mean an extremely pared-down uniform (shout out to the time I wore the exact same outfit for a whole month.) But it doesn’t need to be that literal. It doesn’t even need to mean a stripped-down palette like the one Papa Spyplane paints with.
No! All who wander are not lost…. A journey can itself be cohesive. You develop your sensibility, you deepen it, you broaden it — and if you do it right, that’s your superglue.
Meanwhile —
The other day a reader in the Classified SpyTalk Chat Room posted the below photo of Wim Wenders in the early ‘80s, SWAGGING out as he is prone to do. Could we I.D. his wristwatch, this reader asked??
Well not only was the I.D. secured, but it opened up into a trove of similar low-price heat from the same era!!