#RAWTHOUGHTS 12/9/24
This one is about shopping.
Been getting into vintage shopping lately, mostly out of necessity. The state of clothing, or at least menswear, is such that everything is either really cheap or really expensive. The quality is lacking either way. This is in terms of construction AND design.
L Train Vintage is a crapshoot. Past two times I went there, I got two LL Bean flannels and a Pendleton wool. The LL Beans were $10 and $8 respectively and the Pendleton was $15 which if you know how much they are retail that’s a fuckin come-up. At the same time… I had no idea that much Chaps was put into production. I also didn’t know that Shein lasted enough to be resold at L Train Vintage.
One fun thing to do, especially at one of the larger locations like St Nicholas Avenue or Knickerbocker, is to go through the jeans. You can build a pretty comprehensive timeline of Levi’s… I can’t even call it a fall from grace necessarily because just from say the 2000s to the 2010s the quality dropped drastically but this past decade has to be their nadir. If you go through one of the racks at Urban Jungle you can feel the deterioration of a national icon and you only have to travel but three feet. So many terrible fits, so many varying percentages of spandex. If the gawd Orange Cassidy is still active next year you have a plethora of options to go as him for Halloween.
I’ll probably talk about the “curated” shops sometime in the future. That deserves its own post.
