This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
There’s a famous saying about the Velvet Underground: The group’s debut album sold few copies, but everyone who bought a copy started a band.
A similar thing might be said about Bobby Garnett and his vintage clothing store, Bobby From Boston. For decades, a select group of customers and employees passed through his South End shop, and many of them went on to open stores of their own, carrying the spirit of Garnett’s store with them, if not his encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century fashion or his magnetic personality.
Chris Duval was in high school when he stumbled upon Garnett’s earlier retail outpost, Uptown Strutters Ball, in Provincetown, Mass., in 1974.
“It was so amazingly curated,” said Duval, who later opened Circa Vintage Wear, in New Bedford, Mass. “Nineteen-forties bowling shirts, Ricky Ricardo jackets, two-tone shoes and colorful ties. I was taken aback — what is this stuff? I stayed for an hour.”
At a time when vintage was on the fringes of fashion and great stuff was cheap and plentiful, Garnett bought at thrift stores, flea markets, estate sales, Army-Navy outfitters and anywhere else he could find the goods.
He stocked his warehouse with tens of thousands of items — a wide selection that included 1920s workwear, ’50s denim and English rowing blazers. That range set him apart from other dealers.
So did his race: He was Black and specialized in a preppy style of men’s wear often associated with New England WASPs. In a trade not known for diversity or charm, he was a welcome change. Customers were drawn to his easy manner.
“I remember being in the shop, and someone would come in, and they’d be talking for half an hour, carrying on, laughing like old friends,” Sean Crowley, a former employee who now owns Crowley Vintage in Brooklyn, said. “He had that openness.”
Fashion designers, stylists, collectors from other countries and Hollywood costumers all made pilgrimages to Garnett’s store. He supplied period clothing for films and TV shows, including “Walk the Line,” “A Bronx Tale,” “Casino,” “Hairspray” and “Boardwalk Empire.” As a movie buff, he took special pride in those contributions.
His former employees say he taught them to look at clothes differently — to see not just an old coat or a moth-eaten sweater but an idea, a creative possibility.
“Bobby made it look easy and fun,” Ed Tonderys, a former employee who owns the vintage store Regal Tombs in Massachusetts, said. “It definitely was fun, but there was a lot of work in being a successful vintage dealer. Especially at that volume. He was working 24-7.”
Yet as Garnett explained in a short documentary in 2011, he wasn’t much interested in the business side of the clothing business. What excited him was the finding and buying — the chase.
“It’s a treasure hunt,” he said. “And I don’t know anything that’s more gratifying than a treasure hunt.”
Ralph Lauren’s designers shopped at Bobby’s for inspiration, mining the racks for ideas that would filter into the brand’s collections. Several of Garnett’s employees went on to work for the company.
When Garnett died of renal failure on May 19, 2016, at the age of 66, Bobby From Boston was widely considered the most influential seller in the vintage trade.
Just about every retail store that has opened in the last 20 years selling highly curated men’s wear in a space with an antique vibe has, in some way, followed Bobby’s.
“He was a precursor to everything we do now,” Charles Moschos, who hung out at Bobby’s most Saturdays in the early 2000s and now owns Ridgefield Vintage and Coffee in Connecticut, said. “He was 100 percent the godfather of all that.”
Robert Charles Garnett III was born on July 13, 1949, in Boston. His father, Robert Garnett Jr., was a naval architect, and his mother, Sylvia (Francis) Garnett, taught nursery school. She instilled in him her love of fashion and her innate good taste.
“She dragged my brother and I around every department store,” Garnett told The Boston Globe in 2002. “She knew good stuff.”
By the age of 12, Garnett was wearing what he called “the continental James Bond look”: gabardine jackets and casual linen or cotton trousers. By 16, he was working summers at Krackerjacks, a mod clothing store in Cambridge. He attended boarding school in Maine and then Gordon College in Wenham, Mass., where he made and sold leather bracelets out of his dorm room.
“He had the entrepreneurial spirit even back then,” Connie Garnett, his ex-wife, who was a fellow student, said in an interview.
Garnett opened his first store, Muddy River Trading Co., with a partner in Brookline Village around 1971, selling leather goods and denim. Later, he opened Uptown Strutters Ball, named after the early jazz standard “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”
Garnett handled the day-to-day operations, while Connie helped manage the warehouse he rented for his ever-growing hoard of merchandise.
“He was not into the money side, even though he needed money to keep buying,” she said. “He bought from the love of fashion.”
Otto Johnson, a Massachusetts-based vintage dealer who learned the trade from Garnett in the 1980s, recalled going to struggling department stores with him and buying out everything, from the deadstock to the period fixtures and even the shelving. It would all find a place at Bobby’s.
Several times a year, Garnett would go to England on buying trips, developing relationships with European dealers. The items he brought home — riding clothes, Belstaff jackets, Savile Row suits — distinguished his store from most vintage emporiums, which were selling polyester shirts, Levi’s and old T-shirts.
It was in England that Garnett got his nickname, when someone recognized him and asked, “Are you Bobby from Boston?” By the 1990s, that had become the name of his business.
Within the next decade, he went from being a fixture in New England to a celebrated figure in the New York fashion industry and beyond. The fame surprised him, his daughter, Jessica Garnett Carrion, said.
“Japanese buyers would come and bring some sort of gift from Japan,” she said in an interview. “Any time we did movies, the designer for the movie would come and spend the day.”
Since her father’s death, she has kept Bobby From Boston going, selling his vast trove of clothing out of the warehouse space he operated in Lynn, Mass.
The care and style with which he ran his store lives on in subtle ways.
“Bobby would always tag things with these pin tickets,” said Crowley, describing a paper tag that was creased in the middle and affixed to the sleeve of a jacket or shirt. When Crowley opened his store, he bought the tags from the same shop in New York’s garment district that Garnett did.
“I didn’t realize at the time how unusual and old-fashioned they were,” he said. “It was a perfect, clean way to price things.”
As a new generation of buyers and sellers turns vintage into social media fodder, Garnett has come to be regarded as a foundational figure — “a thrift legend,” as one admirer put it.
“He would be down for buying anytime,” Tonderys said. “He once told me, ‘If I was starving to death and had 10 bucks in my pocket, and I was in front of a restaurant and a thrift store, I would go into the thrift store.’”
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
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