“The New York eye is the best,” said Tommy Dorr, the owner of Mothfood, a vintage clothing business that this month opened a showroom in Lower Manhattan. “I mean, people here have the best taste in clothes.”
Mr. Dorr, 43, is originally from Michigan, where he got his start as a vintage seller working at a bowling alley turned flea market in the late 1990s. Since then, he’s started a few of his own ventures, including Lost and Found, a shop he has kept open just outside Detroit since 2003.
Mothfood is probably the project for which New Yorkers know him best, largely because of the Instagram account Mr. Dorr used to establish the brand more than a decade ago under the same name.
“I don’t even remember why I picked it, but it’s just a great tongue-in-cheek kind of name,” said Mr. Dorr, who considers it a good litmus test for customers. Are you in on the joke, or do you find the notion of moth-eaten clothing kind of, well, gross?
He likes garments that are well worn — sun-bleached jackets, paint-splattered denim and hole-y T-shirts. Historically, they have not been everyone’s thing. But over the years, Mr. Dorr has found a devoted following that counts celebrities, stylists, designers and everyday vintage hunters among its ranks. They are accustomed to ordering from his e-shop or visiting him in Los Angeles, where he opened the first Mothfood showroom in 2015.
“I’ve been wanting him to come to New York,” said Emily Adams Bode Aujla, a New York designer and friend of Mr. Dorr’s who has been buying vintage pieces from him both for personal use and for her brand, Bode, for longer than either of them can remember. “I think that I always have thought his business would do so well here, but I’m selfish,” she added with a laugh.
Ms. Bode Aujla got her wish in April, when Mr. Dorr started moving into a 1,000-square-foot space on the second floor of a nondescript building on the corner of Allen and Canal Streets in Chinatown. On a recent afternoon, light poured in through a wall of windows, the door to the fire escape was cracked open, and Mr. Dorr was sitting in a gray armchair wearing a thrashed baseball cap and canvas shorts, appreciating some quiet moments before he invited customers into the space.
The shop, like his Los Angeles location, is appointment only. It’s a casual system: Anyone who wants to come by can reach Mr. Dorr by email through his website, or shoot him a direct message on Instagram. (Though Mr. Dorr warns that direct messages risk getting lost in the shuffle.)
The goal isn’t to exclude anyone, Mr. Dorr said, but rather to make the shopping experience more intentional. When he experimented last year with a pop-up in Williamsburg, in the former location of Chickee’s, the vintage shop run by Kathleen Sorbara, he found that the foot traffic was mostly people biding their time while they waited for tables at nearby restaurants.
“Most of my good customers were ones I already knew,” Mr. Dorr said, or people who had set out deliberately to check out the brick-and-mortar version of his Instagram account.
Lately, more intimate retail experiences are on the rise in New York, with some shopkeepers eschewing more traditional storefronts by inviting shoppers into their studios or even to their apartments.
“There’s a value to these places because I think people want privacy in general,” added Llewellyn Mejia, who opened the Allen Street showroom with Mr. Dorr. People like “just being able to shop on their own,” he said, noting that appointment-only spaces were “already booming.”
The new Manhattan space is decorated with antique furniture and folk art Mr. Mejia sells from his shop Trinket. It is pleasantly filled — not crammed — with vintage clothing spanning the 20th century.
Faded Made in USA Levi’s, silky-soft threadbare T-shirts and earth-toned cotton duck work wear are some of the shop’s forever staples. But Mr. Dorr is eager to cater to his New York base and bring in a wider range of styles that Los Angeles customers have been less interested in, like suiting and outerwear. “You need to dress for weather here,” Mr. Dorr said. “It’s more interesting just as far as what you can sell here.”
For now, though, he’s looking ahead to summer, and an antique rack at the front of the showroom displayed a selection of 1930s Japanese hemp and linen suits ($995-$1,250).
Mr. Mejia’s home furnishings and objets d’art, including a hand-carved statue of a poodle ($450), were arranged on a gallery-style wall. Elsewhere, a 19th-century church pew served as a display for Mr. Dorr’s stacks of vintage work wear double-knee pants.
So far, visitors to Mr. Dorr’s new showroom have included people from around the neighborhood, which is home to a vibrant crop of well-curated vintage stores like Leisure Centre and Desert Vintage. (Not to mention the robust community vintage institutions just across the East River in Brooklyn, such as Front General Store and Crowley Vintage.) A few stylists, costume designers and fashion world people he is friendly with have also dropped by.
Mr. Dorr estimates that about 75 percent of his business is taken up by these industry types. He has supplied styles for period pieces like the recent Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” and has helped dress musicians including Boy Genius and Paramore.
Though he sources mainly men’s clothing and sizing, his customers are pretty evenly split between men and women.
One of his female clients is the filmmaker Durga Chew-Bose, who has been shopping with Mr. Dorr for about four years. While shooting her directorial debut feature film, “Bonjour Tristesse,” she realized she needed some stylish but unfussy clothes for long hours on location in the South of France.
Already foundational to her wardrobe were the soft blank T-shirts — especially in faded black — she has sourced from Mothfood over the years.
“Whenever I’m packing my suitcase, I pack all of the blanks that I have gotten from him,” Ms. Chew-Bose said. “Basically I can’t travel without them.”
Getting overheated in the French summer sun, Ms. Chew-Bose reached out to Mr. Dorr for an emergency shipment of some extras.
“When I was shooting in France, I remember he found some for me to direct in, which I found really useful,” she said.
In his showroom, Mr. Dorr walked around the racks pointing out some of his favorite pieces, like a simple cotton 1960s white dress shirt, a 1980s western-style Carhartt chore coat, a stack of 1990s Champion reverse weave sweatshirts, and a World War II-era anti-gas pullover with splatters of paint from its second life as a painter’s smock.
Over the last couple decades, the people interested in his finds have changed, he said.
“When I started, vintage was only for hipster kids and weirdos,” Mr. Dorr reflected. Nowadays, he added, the average vintage shopper is more likely to be “just regular people.”
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