Connections: T-Shirt Travels

A New Year’s resolution may be an indulgence in wish?ful thinking, but I’m determined to fulfill a modest resolution I’ve made for 2019. It’s simple: I am going to sort through my T-shirts and give away most of them. Exactly when I took to buying T-shirts in large numbers is clouded in history. Suffice it to say they come from only two or three retailers and can no longer fit in a bureau drawer, so they clog my closets.

Giving away clothes makes us feel good; we like to spin it as an earth-friendly effort at recycling. (Although, if you have ever seen a good documentary called “T-Shirt Travels” you know how not-so-wonderful the used-clothing trade actually is for local industries in the countries where our castoffs end up, though I guess it might still be better than the landfill.)

Many residents here donate their nicest unwanted clothes to the Bargain Box, the secondhand shop run by the Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton, which — despite having become quite tony in recent years and not always as big a bargain — is still chockablock with fortuitous fashion finds. Young men of my acquaintance have found perfect tuxedos at the Bargain Box, and there always seems to be a plethora of secondhand designer shoes and outfits.

My daughter tells me she and a close childhood friend had an argument in the Bargain Box’s dress?ing rooms, over Christmas, about a beautiful Carolina Herrera poppy-colored skirt suit with cutout lace trim that was on sale for $10 and probably was originally priced at 200 times that; it didn’t fit either of them, but was too tempting to leave on the rack. (The Herrera suit, I’m told, is currently on a jet plane on its way to Seattle with the victorious childhood friend.)

I am afraid that the staff who manage the Bargain Box would laugh me right out of the building if I showed up with my T-shirts. They would likely suggest I take them to the row of donation bins at the dump, but I am not enthusiastic about that.

Everything that goes into those bins is bundled into bales and resold in less-affluent communities and countries, from the Canadian Maritimes to Zanzibar. No doubt you have seen men, women, and children in faraway places wearing clothes with all kinds of American logos? The reason people on the other side of the world are photographed in Bonac football jerseys and “I’m With Stupid!” T-shirts is because the clothing-bale industry has knocked local fabric and clothing manufacturers right out of business.

I will never forget a jammed, warehouse-like store called Frenchie’s in the small town in Nova Scotia where my daughter used to live; it was stocked entirely with items from these secondhand bales. It was amusing to realize while browsing that all of the clothing, recognizably, had originated from donation bins in the Boston area: In among the woman’s cashmere pullovers from J. Crew and the used lacrosse uniforms, we found a green T-shirt with the logo of Concord Academy, the boarding school in Massachusetts that my daughter attended.

As for the Bargain Box, it has been a year or more, but I remain sorry that the L.V.I.S. decided to stop offering children’s clothes there. Apparently, it just didn’t make economic sense to give over valuable selling-floor space to a kids’ clothing section that didn’t turn much of a profit. Also, I’m told, it was difficult to find reliable volunteers to take on the unglamorous, week-in-week-out task of sorting and pricing things for this particular department.

Still, the fact is that many families hereabouts depend on hand-me-downs to clothe their kids. This is true for both old-time locals and newer arrivals.

It seems to me that a thrift shop is, in this regard, a moral venture. Not only do thrift shops almost invariably benefit charitable causes, and not only do they enable recycling, but they lend a needed hand to those who cannot afford boutique shopping. “Waste not, want not” is indeed a noble dictum. Perhaps someone who reads this — someone with experience in the clothing trade, or a pair of friends — will be inspired to offer their volunteer services to our beloved Bargain Box.