On Friday afternoon, I went by a new vintage showroom on the Lower East Side, operated by Bidstitch, a very 2026 sort of company. It’s a resale app, an Instagram content machine (“This vintage Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt just sold for nearly $5,000,” read a recent post) and now, an appointment-only showroom. Message them to go; the owners are accommodating.
I thumbed through holey tees and bitty jackets with pockmarks and scars. I admired a firefighter’s quarter-zip sweatshirt, its fraying cuffs a sneeze away from disappearing, and paused on a The Sugarcubes tee that was older than I was.
Vintage may have once been a market for getting used clothes for less; it’s not really that anymore. (I inquired about a T-shirt with a sushi print. It was $100. That same shirt is somewhere in my drawer. I bought it for $19 on eBay three years ago.) Nor is it insulated from the churn of trends. And in this vintage economy, those trends sure are crisply defined.
For its part, Bidstitch’s selection was some of the best stuff I’ve seen under the “true vintage” umbrella, a term used to delineate authentically old clothes from the barely teenage poly-blend stuff from the aughts that litters sites like Poshmark and eBay.
A pair of blue work pants were so faded they were molting to gray. Dylan Gins, who runs the shop, explained that they were more than 100 years old. I believe it. A stars and stripes leather jacket with fringe resembled something Sly Stone would’ve worn to Woodstock. I could see why, according Gins, most of Bidstitch’s clients are stylists and celebrities. That’s who has the money, and appetite, for much of this stuff.
Impressive as it was, it wasn’t unexpected. I thought of how many times I’ve encountered the words thrashed, tattered, frayed and faded in recent years. It’s obvious now what people hunger for in that upper tier: paper-thin band tees, paint-splotched jeans, work jackets as bruised as tenderized steak. The selection at Bidstitch ticked those boxes.
It’s another example of shoppers locating an alternative to the plasticky feeling of fashion now. To buy a moth-afflicted sweater is to wink at wrongness, to flash, via the hole in your jeans, that a real human is responsible for your style.
One of my big purchases of the summer was a pair of mended vintage jeans. They have a purple bandanna over one kneehole, stitches like Frankensteinian sutures and flyaway frays all over. They look like they’ve been run over and resurrected. Someone put a lot of love into them. That someone wasn’t me. I just paid for them.
Other things worth knowing about:
-
Nicki Minaj wore a monogrammed Gucci skirt suit to introduce President Trump at a rally in Michigan. Gucci, thus far, has not sent the typical “Hey, a celeb wore us!” press release about the outfit.
-
Credit to my colleague Sandra Garcia for pointing out that this is the fall of shrinking sweaters: First, it was J.Crew’s cropped “tiny rollneck.” This week, Miu Miu sent a marketing email with a photo of Gigi Hadid in a sweater vest that barely covered her rib cage. Shriveling clothes for slimmer bodies.
-
This weekend we got a new Frank Ocean … fit pic (What, you thought it was going to be an album? It’s been a decade. Move on!) He’s wearing a new pair of Prada’s America’s Cup sneakers. He looks great. We’ll take what we can get.
-
Last week, Puck reported that Martine Rose is going to be the new creative director of Balenciaga. We’ll see if and when that comes to pass, but it’s a good excuse to revisit the collections Rose worked on during her years as a men’s wear consultant for the brand under Demna. Start with spring 2018, which is like the Rosetta Stone to men’s fashion in the late-aughts. (I’ll always remember speaking with Kyle MacLachlan after this show. He was dressed in a big-shouldered black overcoat and was incredibly gracious.)
-
An exhibit in New York for those who have already seen the Lee Krasner/Jackson Pollock at the Met and want to keep contemplating artist couples.
-
A reminder that Alexander Skarsgard’s creaky, woven corporeal form in “Wicker” was not C.G.I. but rather a “fully practical fabricated suit and full facial prosthetic makeup,” according to the New Zealand artisans who made these things.
What we’re reading and watching:
-
It can’t always be Paris. Someone’s gotta hold it down at West Yorkshire fashion week.
-
Hedi Slimane’s self-mythologizing over on Instagram, particularly the Dutch angle-filled video he posted of his 2016 couture show for Saint Laurent. As the caption says: “A private gathering of 150 guests. No music. No distraction. No show.”
-
This New Yorker profile of the man behind the literary tote bag that has, anecdotally, displaced The New Yorker’s.
-
This essay by the writer Charlotte Mandell about gales, for the first issue of the New England Review of Boats, a new little magazine whose staff includes an “island editor.”
The indelible fit of the day
More vintage! Ralph Lauren’s PoloFest, held in Tokyo over the weekend, lassoed together an army of Polo collectors and obsessives. Our photographer Simbarashe Cha was on the scene.
The post The Truth About ‘True Vintage’ appeared first on New York Times.
