Epilogue

The epilogue discusses the contining role of secondhand commerce and style in the twenty-first century United States. Throughout the twentieth century, used goods economies codified and expanded, branching out into million-dollar industries. Vintage exhibitionism and elective poverty merged even more decisively at the end of the millennium. After habitual heroin user Kurt Cobain took his own life with a shotgun in 1994, styles straight-facedly called shabby chic, heroin chic, or poor chic enjoyed greater cultural currency than ever before. Voluntary secondhand dress persists precisely because it suggests both cultural and economic distinction, and shoppers continued to view secondhand venues as exceptions to the social and economic critiques of dominant capitalisms. Secondhand styles satisfy a desire to be seen as different than the average consumer dupe, as willing to invest time in the cultivation of originality without utilizing class and wealth privilege. The success of the 2013 song, “Thrift Shop,” by independent rappers Macklemore and Lewis—born and raised in the hometown of grunge, Seattle— attests to the continuing relevance of secondhand to popular culture.

The Invention of Vintage Clothing

This chapter recounts the process of upgrading certain older apparel, a transnational process led by the wealthy and famous, including rich collegians, titled nobility, and rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Celebrations of affluence, elitism, individuality, and fame framed this path. The invention of "vintage" responded to a desire for visible distinction, one almost classically linked to affluence and in keeping with the 1899 thesis of economist Thorstein Veblen. For example, the 1956-7 college fad for old raccoon-fur coats from the 1920s was emblematic of a rising class of wealthy youth to whom chain department stores like Lord & Taylor eagerly appealed—and for whom the word “vintage” was first applied to clothing. Vintage exhibitionism usually disavowed political affiliations while reveling in bucking convention.

Garage Sales and Suburban Subversiveness

This chapter focuses on the origins and rise of another new form of secondhand exchange: the garage sales. Hosted and attended mostly by women, garage sales emerged in 1950s suburbs as tactics for newly isolated housewives to earn intermittent income, participate in politics, and build community networks. From huge Barry Goldwater campaign fundraisers to small family sales to raise "pin money," these intimate events both adapted to and defied the spatial limitations of suburban domesticity and postwar gender expectations. Moreover, garage sales introduced a new, larger-than-ever generation of middle-class youth to secondhand goods and clothing—providing provocative glimpses of the tools that could be used in a partly generational rejection of class status, sexual normativity, and political consensus.

Dressing Dada and the Rise of Flea Markets

This chapter describes the economic, cultural, and demographic supports for the rise of flea markets during the interwar period. I introduce the duality of secondhand consumer motivations, as well as the contradictions of a perennial avant-garde adoration of used materials. The reframing of novelty to include the not-new was connected to, on one hand, transnational art movements tinged with political radicalism, such as Surrealism and Dada, and on the other, nostalgic sentimentalism forged by conservative patriotism, like that of automitive mogul-turned-collecter Henry Ford. While the growth of flea markets did rely on a broadening consumer market for secondhand goods, the forms and locations of the outdoor venues demonstrated the independent determination and entrepreneurialism of marginalized classes, especially immigrants and black southern migrants; xenophobia and antisemitism helped establish the locations and format of many urban flea markets. As chain grocery stores like the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (the A & P) replaced direct-to-consumer food distribution via farmer’s markets in the country and city-sanctioned public markets in urban areas, secondhand commodities filled in the gap, sustaining preexisting open-air venures.

Introduction

Modern consumer society is symbolized at least as much by the mountains of rubbish, the garage and jumble sales, the columns of advertisements of second-hand goods for sale and the second-hand car lots, as it is by the ubiquitous propaganda on behalf of new goods....

Connoisseurs of Trash in a World Full of It

This chapter examines the links between trash aesthetics, secondhand dress, and pop iconography, focusing on the myths and dismissals of the short-lived but massively popular music and fashion fad grunge. Whether dubbed retro, kitsch, camp, or trash, borrowing from the ideas and images of the past was an intrinsic part of the postmodern artistic landscape, and debates as to the worth of such reflexive borrowing raged. In the nineties, grunge style was often dismissed as an adolescent form of slumming—perhaps as a reaction to the profligancy of the Reagan years. But viewing grunge styles as simply reactive loses the social meaning embodied in the specific ironic posturing of nineties dress and music, views that preserved and sustained foregoing models of creativity and style at least as much as they upset them. Grunge was not just "the way we dress when we have no money," as designer Jean-Paul Gaultier sniffed disdainfully, but an elaboration on what secondhand aficionados had cultivated for almost a century.

Genderfuck and the Boyfriend Look

This chapter describes the many ways in which secondhand exchange served the gay liberation movement and helped create a broader scope of sexual identities and related imagery, through not only political activism, but by cultural routes such as glam rock, punk, underground art and film, and avant-garde performance art. Some secondhand dressers such as activist José Sarria used secondhand exchange to both financially support gay rights and to oppose homophobic public perceptions. Others, like underground filmmaker Jack Smith and Hibiscus of the psychedelic drag troupe The Cockettes, cited anticommercial motives for seeking alternative economies and for presenting "queer" appearances. Both men and women—like the Bowery-browsing punk icon Patti Smith—displayed cross-gendered appearance, yet public reception of "genderfuck" suggested that men in women’s clothing were assumed to be more politically radical than women in men’s attire. Regardless of these inconsistencies, by the end of the 1970s, a queer, "trash" self-presentation had entered the country’s visual lexicon, and was specifically associated with popular musicians and artists.

Elective Poverty and Postwar Politics

This chapter tracks the rise of voluntary poor dress and its links to a middle-class rejection of inherited class positions often rooted in political protest—against widespread poverty, the Vietnam war, gender inequality, and environmental destruction. Like rock-n-roll’s appropriation of black musical styles, the adoption of visibly secondhand clothing, as well as Native American and Old West costumes, relied upon the white, middle-class conviction that sincerity, depth, passion, creativity, and even social equality were more accessible from the margins of society—past and present. As public appearances and personal identities became central to the social and political conflicts of the era, a dramatized appearance of elective poverty—often through secondhand consumption— joined other visible means of middle-class, usually white, social rebellion. One commonality attends almost all the wide array of secondhand dressers in the postwar years: in one direction or another, they expressed a disaffiliation with the middle class and its connotations of homogeneity, conformity, and bland plasticity. Beats, hippies, and Tom Wolfe’s derided “radical chic” all followed this pattern.

Thrift Stores and the Gilded Age Shopper

This chapter enunciates the social, moral, and hygienic anxieties plaguing popular perceptions of secondhand trade at the end of the nineteenth century and the steps taken to placate such concerns. As firsthand production of everyday goods increased in availability and decreased in cost, more still-viable discarded goods made secondhand economies attractive to a broader range of entrepreneurs. Protestant-run salvage businesses, known as "thrift stores" by the 1920s, used contemporary marketing tools to advertise Christianized, sanitized, and Americanized venues for secondhand products. The links between charity and profit created a new breed of business, which I call “philanthropic capitalism,” and established some of the earliest, still-existing American chain businesses. Meanwhile, style’s role in society shifted without diminishing; it grew in general economic, personal aesthetic, and political expressive value while declining as a clear indication of luxury and exclusivity. From the start, clientele included voluntary secondhand shoppers who used secondhand venues to expand their sartorial options.