IN 2017, Collin James Weber and Brandon Veloria Giordano opened a vintage store in the most unassuming retail spot in NYC: on the dim second floor of the East Broadway Mall, a humble building hidden under the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown. Their shop, James Veloria, would sell archival fashion by legends of the '80s and '90s like Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood-the more eccentric and colorful the piece, the better. At first, their ambitions were modest. "Let's just go for it and see what happens, a few people will come, maybe," says Giordano of the opening. For a few years, they were a word-of-mouth spot, and knew just about everybody who came in by "one or two degrees," says Weber.
Then one day, in the summer of 2020, they found a line for the store snaking through the hallway. "I remember coming in and being like, What's wrong with these people? What are they doing?" recalls Giordano. They found out the shoppers had been waiting for over an hour to get in the door thanks to a TikTok video. That level of buzz carried over to the new wave of vintage stores that soon opened elsewhere in the area, like the merch-y Leisure Centre, the '90s subculture specialists at Lara Koleji, archival-luxury destination Desert Vintage, and the "street rack" run by vintage dealer Chad Senzel, a guerrilla closet sale that brought crowds to the corner of Ludlow and Canal streets, leaving New Yorkers to try on secondhand Ralph Lauren pants right on the busy sidewalk.
Welcome to fashion's new preoccupation with the old. Fueled by a customer highly attuned to ephemeral trends and stoked by social media, vintage is now a cultural force that defines how we dress and shop. What was once synonymous with attic-scented Americana is now a remarkably universal obsession shared by downtown scenesters, blue-collar workers, young Hollywood stars, and rappers alike.
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