November 9, 2004
Old Is Everywhere, So a Charity Tries On the New
By GUY TREBAY
he day Grace Jones's hooded leather Azzedine Alaïa dress comes through the door at a Housing Works Thrift store, both the dress and Eduardo Bennett, the charity's women's wear expert, are going to walk. That, anyway, is what Mr. Bennett said with a laugh last week, as he threaded his way through a maze of garments hung from overhead racks in a Queens warehouse down the block from a depot for the online food market Fresh Direct.
Fresh is about the last thing anyone might call the stuff sold at the four Housing Works shops in Manhattan, and that is precisely the point. There was a time when used clothes were termed castoffs and not fancied up as "vintage," when thrift stores were still Aladdin's caves for bargain hunters with fashion sense and a sharp eye.
Those days, it would appear, are over. Blame a culture of recycling, or Miuccia Prada or the general failure of designers even to attempt innovation anymore. Whatever the reason, old is the new new. And it is a truth people in the secondhand clothes business know only too well.
"The competition is wising up," Matthew Bernardo, the president of Housing Works Thrift stores said last week, referring to both the supply side and the demand. Where charities once relied on clueless but genteel blue-haired volunteers to stand sentinel over other people's castoffs, now a solid knowledge of eBay comparables is required, as well as laser instincts for the fugitive unlabeled treasure from Stephen Sprouse.
The hunt for old clothes, Mr. Bernardo said, becomes more cutthroat daily, as vintage aficionados vie with museum curators, collectors and platoons of fanatical pickers, who swoop through the city's thrift stores looking for stock to keep the vintage maw fed. It is not rare, Mr. Bernardo said, to see the same faces making a circuit of Housing Works' stores three times a day.
They have to. These days, vintage is not just the province of resale stores. Even high-end retailers have entered the global trade. The Polo Sport store in SoHo and the DKNY on Madison Avenue have both sold vintage pieces alongside new clothes, and Bon Marché in Paris this fall transformed a large area on its second floor into a boutique selling old clothes next to new ones deliberately designed to look as though they had been around the block.
It is a struggle to keep pace. And so places like Housing Works — long a favorite charity among New York's fashion elite — are improvising new strategies, like a four-day benefit called Fashion4Action, which opens tomorrow with a benefit cocktail party given by the actress Natasha Richardson. It will then morph into a sample sale offering over $1 million worth of new salesroom samples donated by 80 designers, like Prada, Armani, Narciso Rodriguez and the tiny independent Palmer Jones. "You have to come up with something to keep people coming in," Mr. Bernardo said.
Still, the core of a nonprofit that will generate $9 million this year to support AIDS and homeless programs is not samples, but the mysterious matter that gets hauled from collection points around New York to the Housing Works depot.
There, in two daily shifts, 15 salaried sorters mine a mountain of donations, whose Sisyphean dimensions never seem to diminish. Roughly 10,000 garbage bags of clothes come into the warehouse every month, an increase of 30 percent from five years ago. "Sometimes," said Ira Botor, the warehouse manager, "it does feel like you're being closed in."
That observation seemed like an understatement last week, as Mr. Botor paused before an Everest of black plastic blobs, which so dwarfed his slight frame that any person of lesser fortitude might see it and run screaming into the street.
"People all decide to donate at the same time because they want the deduction," Mr. Botor explained, referring to the end-of-year Internal Revenue Service deadline. "You get through it," he added flatly, as a platoon of workers loaded trolleys and wheeled the bags to sorting tables, tore them open and got to work.
Hands gloved against rash and the occasional outbreak of scabies, the sorters sifted the contents, dividing them into men's and women's wear categories, culling out the goods with soiled collars, frayed cuffs, woebegone crotches and mold (yes, mold.)
They tossed undergarments, elbowless sweaters and pilled flannel pajamas into bins to be sent to a rag jobber, who will repeat this sorting process with a liberal eye and send goods too damaged for resale in the United States to vendors in Guinea or Bangladesh.
"Things that are really, really unusable, they rag," Mr. Botor explained, referring to garments beyond any sartorial redemption. Even those will find use, however, he said, as stuffing for airplane seats.
But naturally, it is the high-end apparel that triggers the flow of adrenaline. "Everyone here is trained to spot couture," Mr. Botor said. "I test them to keep their knowledge of designers upgraded and to know the trends." This season, for instance, "Tweeds are what people are buying, thrift-wise. It's like a department store where you have to keep up with what people want."
Just as important is seducing consumers with what they do not know they want until it floats across their field of vision, direct from the closet of the model Iman, who recently donated a cache of dresses from Mr. Alaïa and Thierry Mugler, or from the wardrobe of the soprano Roberta Peters, who recently gave away three decades of dresses and costumes, or from an anonymous Samaritan who not long ago dropped off a $10,000 Fendi fur dress from 1992 stuffed into a Conway bag.
It is true that there are times when the pickings get slim and the Hefty bags produce more St. John knits than 1960's suits from Pauline Trigère. But then suddenly a donation arrives, as occurred during this reporter's visit, that has the distinct look of a lottery winning.
"I don't know who these people are that they can give these things away," said Mr. Bennett, stagily stroking his mane of luxuriant hair. He was referring to a donation of furs that included a nearly new man's trench coat lined with sheared mink and a woman's calf-length golden sable bearing a label from the uptown furrier Dennis Basso.
"Even I'm surprised she would give that away," Mr. Basso said last week, when notified of this anonymous act of largess. "That's a $75,000 coat."
The sable will be sold at one of the charity's monthly silent auctions — held at each of the stores — for which, Mr. Bernardo said, the charity reserves its choicest finds. The practice has led some donors to gripe that their best donations never seem to make it to the stores, whose racks occasionally look crammed not with rarities but with designer licensee junk.
"People don't realize that if you live in Chelsea, you can't expect to see your stuff in Chelsea," Mr. Bernardo said, referring to the charity's two downtown stores, one on West 17th Street and the other on East 23rd. "People also give us spring goods in fall, and obviously we can't sell it then," Mr. Bernardo explained.
And sometimes goods float over the transom that would tax the abilities of the most creative merchant. "We get some strange things," Mr. Bennett said, as he moved aside a rack containing clothes from Chanel, Alaïa, Mr. Sprouse and Mr. Mugler to disclose a stupefying sight. "It's Koos," he said, referring to the designer Koos van den Akker, who may prefer to forget that he once designed a patchwork adult onesie of metallic cloth and velvet, with a clownish collar and a pair of booties attached.
"This one I just can't see myself sending out there," Mr. Bennett said, and indeed the garment in question resembled a hazmat suit designed for Liberace. "It's just too ugly to sell."
for WORN t shirts. sorry but if its over priced i will not buy it. it has to be WORTH it, like a very good find, but these days its getting ridiculous. levi's cords i saw the other day for 200. 
the days where i would find good 70's boots......all gone. hippy skirts.....nope. an actual vintage piece, dream on everything is gone in thriftland 
it was like an amazing high 
thrifting is an addiction 
i cant believe there are people keener than me out there in charity shop land 
taking everything and over pricing it. 
they're just people who have been caught up in a trend. most of these people wouldn't have even considered shopping at a charity shop 5 years ago. 
!
