Marcus Allen is lucky that he never heeded Marie Kondo’s advice.
Mr. Allen, a smiley 38-year-old who greets everyone like his long lost bro, runs the Society Archive, a vintage clothing showroom in Manhattan that has become a port of call for stylists and shoppers seeking something they can’t really find elsewhere.
His is not a cubbyhole heaving with musty militaria or moth-snack suits of the 1920s. Rather, Mr. Allen specializes in what he calls “heritage American mall brands.” He may be the first, and is certainly the biggest, vintage dealer to trade in candy-striped Gap sweaters, Abercrombie & Fitch cargo pants and groany graphic tees. The mainstream prep-wear you may have purchased as a teen and cast off to Goodwill years, if not decades, ago? Mr. Allen held on to it, and today he has built a business around it.
“I kept all of that stuff,” said Mr. Allen, whose turquoise eyes fall into a wistful gaze as he talks about growing up in suburban Boston, where he worked at a local Abercrombie throughout high school. All of that Gap, all of that Polo and, mostly, all of that Abercrombie & Fitch, purchased with the aid of his cushy employee discount.
His stockpile of cargo pants and salty T-shirts remained in his aunt and uncle’s home in Easton, Mass., when he went off to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design to study photography. It stayed there as he found a toehold in New York’s fashion industry, working retail at Ralph Lauren, then as a stylist on his own and for brands like Brunello Cucinelli and Urban Outfitters. He just could not bring himself to part with his pubescent clothes.
“It’s what the girls had on when I was in school,” Mr. Allen said. “It’s what I wore when I was in school. It’s what the actors in Hollywood wore and what I thought I wanted to be like.”
Even as fashion turned away from the frayed-at-the-edges preppy look, as “mall brand” became a derisive term and, most of all, as Abercrombie’s ribald image went through a reassessment in the Me Too era, Mr. Allen never discarded those clothes.
“What you’re seeing in here is actually my background,” Mr. Allen said as he waded through his overflowing showroom, plucking out L.L. Bean flannels, straight-leg Gap chinos and a pair of underwear from Abercrombie’s short-lived, supposedly more mature big brother brand Ruehl No.925. “It’s so personal to me. I’m not making this up.”
The surprise is that the collection, personal though it is, has become desired by Mr. Allen’s peers. The Society Archive, which he started in 2020 as a way to resell and loan out his teenage wardrobe, is now an “in” secret among New York stylists.
His collection has since broadened, in taste and scale. Recently, he moved to a new showroom, having outgrown his previous space, and as he walked through it, Mr. Allen pulled out worn-in Giorgio Armani button-ups and $3,000 fleece jackets from Miu Miu that, in a sign of just how cyclical fashion is, looked like something the Gap might have offered when Mr. Allen was 16.
He still sells some pieces, but most of his business is in renting the clothes for photo shoots. The prices reflect that he can probably milk more cash out of loaning out a given item over and over. One Abercrombie graphic tee hanging on a rack was tagged at $350.
The showroom has also become a brand of its own. Mr. Allen, who continues to style for magazines like GQ and Interview, sells $124 frayed edge “The Society Archive” hats, and later this year, he will release plaid boxer shorts, a true Abercrombie dupe, and banker bags with the showroom’s name embroidered along the handles.
“It’s this nostalgia that he’s hitting on that is relatable beyond anything else,” said Jon Tietz, a stylist in Brooklyn who has frequented the Society Archive over the years. For Mr. Tietz, there is a comfort in entering Mr. Allen’s space and seeing five things that transport him back to high school.
The industry today “is way too oversaturated with high fashion,” Mr. Tietz said. “With all these different designers just hopping around, creating the same thing at the next house. People get tired of that.” Sometimes, they just want the Gap cargos they could not get as a kid.
Certainly, there is something to the fact that many of the fashion image-makers of the moment, like Mr. Tietz and Mr. Allen, came of age in the suburbs during Abercrombie’s glory days, when the brand was a beacon of upper middle class bro-vado. It was, at least per its marketing, for lettuce-haired lacrosse captains and perma-tanned cheerleaders. In other words, for winners. That aspirational image left an imprint.
Certainly, for Mr. Allen, working at Abercrombie was a formative experience. He spoke about his mall job the way a wistful ex-football player recounts his high school passing record. Decades later, the woody whiff of Abercrombie’s Fierce cologne was almost palpable as Mr. Allen reminisced about hiring his friends and scouting prospective co-workers in the food court.
“It was the most fun,” Mr. Allen said. He was, he said, one of just a few Black kids in his largely white New England town. At his job, he found a sense of identity through the clothes, styling himself like guys in the A&F Quarterlys, the now-collectible early aughts catalogs, which were shot by Bruce Weber.
“I didn’t do it to fit in,” he said, rejecting any sort of outsider label. He did it because going to work in a blazer and a half-done tie just felt right to him.
Mr. Weber’s work continues to influence Mr. Allen. (Two copies of the photographer’s newly released monograph, “My Education,” sat on his desk as we spoke.) Since 2022, he has published his own Society Archive magazine, released sporadically. The third edition, “Dogma,” comes out next month. Think of it as Mr. Allen’s version of the Quarterly: heavy on visible boxers, exposed skin, distressed jeans and PG-13 graphic tees.
Of course, the sunny Abercrombie narrative has become complicated in recent years, as ex-employees have spoken out about discrimination at the company, reshaping the brand’s brash image into something more sinister. Mike Jeffries, who was the chief executive of the company during Mr. Allen’s time working there, was indicted last year on charges of running an international sex-trafficking scheme. In 2018, Mr. Weber was accused of sexual misconduct. He has denied the allegations.
And so really, what Mr. Allen offers is this palatably preppy look yanked from its original, now unsavory context. His showroom is a reminder of the cloudless image that Abercrombie had before the allegations against Mr. Jeffries and the reports of abused employees.
It helps that Mr. Allen is an affable presence who laughs freely and looks sprung from a Weber-shot catalog. On a late September afternoon in his office, he was wearing a checked shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, techy swish pants and a seen-better-days Society Archive cap.
Mr. Allen tends to surround himself with prom-court types. When I visited the space, one of his employees, Jack Lumsden, a square-jawed part-time model who was busying himself around the studio in a faded Emory College T-shirt, could just as well have been reorganizing the stacks at the mall back in 2004.
“It doesn’t surprise me that this is now a thing that that generation is nostalgic for, but somehow their reinterpretation of this time just feels more current,” said James Scully, a former casting director who has known Mr. Allen for years and runs Jamestown Hudson, a clothing store in upstate New York that has hosted events for the Society Archive. “It’s kind of this sort of new sporty aspirational look.”
The Society Archive has taken off as prep broadly ebbs back into the fashion conversation. With its popped polos and shirtless male models, Raimundo Langlois, a New York label that reinterprets American classics, trades heavily on A&F Quarterly cues. The sprightly Los Angeles label ERL serves up pre-faded sweaters with “College” printed across the front, and Dior has shown rep ties and pleated khakis on the runways.
To Mr. Allen, the pull of this look is the same as it was when he was a teen. The clothes are comfortable, inviting and, whether fashion snobs want to acknowledge it or not, distinctly American.
“The basis of it is preppy, right? he said. “And I think that is an area where American culture can be celebrated.”
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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