Over dinner earlier this summer, the still-new sensation of seeing friends up close and slightly sweating gave way to a smaller pleasure I’d also sorely missed: the ability to see what everyone was wearing nowadays, and the chance to gather instant, on-the-ground intel for where I could get one too.

The garment in question that night: a black T-shirt with a computer and brain holding hands via a quirkily drawn mycorrhizal root system. Hand-lettered among the roots: “Blackbird Spyplane.” “What is that?” I asked, fingers trained from the past year of quarantine impulse-shopping, poised to summon whatever of-the-moment brand this was on Instagram, and hit “order.” Instead, my friend smiled coolly. “It’s a newsletter,” he said. And the shirts were all sold out. I hadn’t felt that degree of sartorial FOMO since the popular kids put our football star’s face on a shirt and batch-ordered dozens for themselves.

In the weeks that followed, it suddenly felt impossible to escape “Blackbird Spyplane” everywhere I looked: New York magazine attested to the newsletter’s “baroque goofiness,” Elle ranked it first on a list of best fashion newsletters. It wasn’t just some inner-circle joke on media Twitter; actual cool people—from Nike designers to A24 creatives, Ezra Koenig to Lorde—read it. Some of the same celebs were even giving exclusive interviews via Q&As that were all either curiously off-season or very thinly pegged to any existing promo circuit: Lorde came on to talk about what she wore on a trip to Antarctica; Jerry Seinfeld professed his love for Volkswagen Beetles. Just this week, Danielle Haim came on to discuss the Phoebe Philo–inspired dress she made herself for prom.

“BBSP is pretty much a distillation of how I feel so many of us talk about fashion and ‘pop culture’ behind closed doors,” MEL Magazine writer Eddie Kim says. “A little loopy, a little ironic, way nerdy, but restless about what the point of all this shit is.” Meanwhile, a friend who worked at a legacy fashion mag privately told me her colleagues were dying with envy over the cachet cultivated by this tiny newsletter with the bizarro voice and chaotic ’90s graphics that no corporate masthead would ever approve of. So, after reading through the back issues for days (and bookmarking not a few links for pay day), I got in touch with the couple behind all the unbeatable recon, Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie, to find out how the fresh lightning gets bottled each week.

Like many creative projects borne of spring 2020, “Blackbird Spyplane” began as a pandemic project fleshed out over long neighborhood walks, Wylie explained over Zoom from their shared home in Oakland (Wylie wearing head-to-toe Rachel Comey; Weiner in a BODE shirt cut from ’50s African indigo cloth). Both are in the culture media by day—Weiner has written cover stories for New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone, and Wylie is an Apple talent scout with a decade of experience in fashion and editorial. Before BBSP, Wylie and Weiner collaborated once before on a short-lived blog that involved stopping and interviewing New Yorkers about what music they were listening to on their headphones. (“I think we walked 10 miles and got like four people, because everyone was like, Leave me the fuck alone. So it didn’t work,” Weiner sighed.)

The idea of combining their respective editorial chops along with their shared identity as “compulsive jawns-coppers” was a far more natural fit. (Jawn, a slang term from Wylie’s native Philadelphia, can stand in for any person, place, or thing; in the context of BBSP, it usually refers to a garment worthy of purchase.) Shopping was something of a contact sport for the couple: Before travel became impossible during the pandemic, Wylie used to map out local shops and vintage hotspots wherever they vacationed. At home, they shared a long-running gag where strange eBay purchases would show up in the mail and have to be evangelized.

Why not create an outlet where they could do it for their friends and like-minded fashion hounds? In a riff on the act of trendspotting and that irresistible childhood impulse to playact secret agents, they named the resulting newsletter—and of course, it was always going to be a newsletter—after Weiner’s favorite plane as a kid.

The BBSP voice is unapologetically political, almost impenetrably colloquial, and littered with haywire punctuation, like if your leftist best guy friend was texting you about a highly caffeinated vintage hunt and illustrating it all with manic Photoshop jobs. The better to keep out the mildly curious, Weiner explained, and let in “the people who want to commit to the mild psychosis.” While the duo want to keep the exact figures under wraps, they hinted that total readership exceeds their Instagram reach (more than 12,900 followers at time of writing); Substack ranks BBSP as the platform’s 11th-most highly paid culture ’sletter and ballparks the paid subscriber numbers in the thousands.

Niche work, if you can get it. In the context of today’s media landscape, where everything flattens to a timeline and everyone’s trying to curate their intake, the “Blackbird Spyplane” is emblematic of the way influence has fractured into these small corners of the internet that feel like an inside joke. Now, it’s normal for a newsletter with a readership smaller than your typical Ivy League student body to occupy the same cultural headspace as a fully staffed glossy mag (a truly ouroboric line from someone whose 10,000-plus newsletter led to the very perch I’m writing from).

While Weiner primarily writes and Wylie edits, they both split the “recon”—pin-pointing all the deadstock Italian sunglasses, Gore-Tex alternatives, and “crib grails” you didn’t know you needed—and make sure each recommendation meets both of their standards of taste. But it’s not solely a shopping newsletter. Depending on the week, each edition takes on slightly different formats, including giveaways, Q&As crowd-sourced from IG (“Is it ever cool to dress like a cop?”), essays on the impossibility of ethical jawns-copping under capitalism, and a shoppable “SpyMall” (FYI, Wylie and Weiner only make affiliate earnings via eBay and Bookshop links). And of course, there are the celeb gets.

“Some people think, Oh it’s easy because Jonah interviewed them, but that’s no guarantee of people wanting to do some small blog,” Wylie said. Seinfeld, Lorde, and Seth Rogen have all been profile subjects from Weiner’s day job who’ve shown up in the newsletter. There are other means of booking interviews too. When André 3000 launched a limited-edition T-shirt line to raise funds for Black Lives Matter last June, he insisted on doing only one interview for the collection. A member of his team subscribed to “Blackbird Spyplane” and included the newsletter as a potential outlet—in terms of brand safety, after all, a newsletter proffering unilateral geek-out seshes sure makes for an edgy and non-combative pick.

“At that point, the most recent post we’d done was this long investigation into a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt I owned,” Weiner explained. “And [André] was like, I love Rage Against the Machine.” In the resulting BBSP exclusive, André promoted the T-shirt line, discussed the definition of “made ethically,” and got nostalgic about a particularly favorite military jacket. (When asked if André 3000 really picked a tiny newsletter out of a list of mainstream publications for the exclusive, a spokesperson said it was “100% true and how it went down.”)

High-wattage gets aside, Wylie and Weiner emphasize that the core of “Blackbird Spyplane” is an appreciation for the small-scale finds and local makers—everything counter to the usual slash-and-burn nature of the fashion industry that wholly horrified them once on a past trip through the Mall of America. “Miles and miles of future landfill,” Weiner shuddered. So while plans for potential capsule collabs and curated pop-ups have been floated—and even Celine has come calling, “the core is making a fun thing that celebrates rare, off-the-beaten-path shit,” Weiner added. “That can be an ambition itself.”

Even those “Blackbird Spyplane” T-shirts I coveted over dinner were a part of the newsletter’s ethos of keeping circles small. Weiner and Wylie envisioned the shirts as a kind of subscriber souvenir, which they made from recycled cotton “trash” tees, numbered with hand-stamped tags, and released in a batch of 200. Within an hour of the paid subscriber-only sale, half were gone; by the time the sale opened to the newsletter’s wider readership, there were three left. This is where my ears perked up. Could it be?

“We sold two of them, and then Lorde texted me and said, ‘Dude, I saw you guys made T-shirts. Are there any left?’” Weiner told me, unwittingly making me aware that none less than the Grammy-winning songstress herself had copped the cool newsletter merch I’d so coveted.

“I said, ‘There’s one extra-small long-sleeve white T-shirt,’ and she was like, ‘That’s my size!’” Weiner laughed. “So the last one sold to Ella. That felt like the gods smiled upon this undertaking.”

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