Being both a parent and a fogey I have a knack for finding occasions to annoy the youth by pointing out the many ways in which life is now worse than it used to be. I’m not a complete fool, whatever evidence there may be to the contrary, so I am aware that this attitude — thinking the past was better than the present — is a trap fools easily fall into, a trick of the mind to which we become more and more susceptible as we age; in fact, I think this may be the very definition of the word “fogey.” I am, also, perfectly aware that advances in science and medicine have made the human life span safer and less physically painful than it was in decades and centuries past. But still. There are so many irrefutable ways in which life is worse now and it’s only us old folks who are in a position to know it.
Hey, kids, turn that racket down!
One would be, for example, the decline in nightclubs, discos, and roadhouses. Another, and an obvious one, is the nationwide near-total destruction of the small-town Main Street, with its luncheonettes selling burgers and Jackie Wilson on the jukebox, its tonsorial parlors, pool halls, candy shops, hat shops, and greengrocers. And a third, indisputably if you ask me, is the paltry less-fun of what vintage-clothing shopping has become. It really is too bad for the teenagers of 2025 that thrifting has devolved into such a sad affair, slim pickings and executive prices.
As I write this, I realize I must sound like a total fashion-history blowhard, but to revisit an observation I keep making over and over in print: It’s an observable fact that the forward movement of fashion — the way fashion trends advanced cyclically — ground to a full halt sometime in the late 1990s and has barely budged since. It’s simply a fact that a woman from 2001 could time-travel to 2025 and go for a latte in Starbucks in her low-rise jeans and white sneakers and not a soul would notice anything incongruent about her clothing, while a woman from 1951 would have stopped traffic so drivers could gawk, such a bizarre apparition would she be if she time-traveled 24 years to 1975 while wearing her felt circle skirt with bowling-pin appliqués and her hair under a nylon kerchief.
The halting of fashion time means that the goods you see in Goodwill today hardly register as “vintage,” and this makes the hunt of the vintage-clothing maven much more boring and difficult. It’s a sea of distressed denim and T-shirts out there. For an item of clothing on the secondhand racks to have any aura of specialness about it, it has to date to at least 40 years ago. The remoteness of “vintage” in terms of pure calendar years has made Hawaiian shirts and cowboy boots too expensive for the average art student or theater major. Kids these days are missing out on the fun and excitement of Canal Jeans, Reminiscence, the Salvation Army in Riverhead, and the Bargain Box back when it was on Main Street, next door to Pets Painted With Love, managed under the gentle eye of Frank, the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s store manager.
They don’t make ‘em like they used to!
Who remembers the shop called Fifth Avenue Fashions at 4 Newtown Lane, where the Firestone Gallery is today? Fifth Avenue Fashions, according to clippings in the Star archive, was run by a couple named Rager — wait, their name was “Rager”? — and opened for business in that location on March 20, 1953, after a briefer run on Main Street, and it was still in business when I began scouting stores for the weird and retro at the age of 13 in 1980. I remember Fifth Avenue Fashions, which I believe was at least originally a dress shop, having a darkened interior and specializing in lingerie and what used to be called “hosiery.” On high shelves were stacks and stacks of those slim, white boxes that stockings once came in, gathering dust, and one time the shopkeeper reached up and brought down for me a bin containing neon-green, neon-yellow, and neon-pink fishnets that dated back to the psychedelic 1960s. I bought several pairs, awestruck by my good fortune.
As I recall, I wore the neon fishnets from Fifth Avenue Fashions with a pair of mid-calf plastic go-go boots colorblocked in imitation of Saint Laurent’s famous Mondrian boots, white with blue and red squares outlined in black like Piet Mondrian’s “Composition II.” They were not genuine Saint Laurent originals (c. 1965), which were leather, but plastic or vinyl knockoffs (c. 1966). I remember clearly fishing my pair out from a large crate of them at a shop on Eighth Street in Manhattan, a crate as high as my waist piled with dozens of pairs of identical go-go boots. I’ve just Googled and found a pair of these “vinyl” knockoffs selling for $2,134 on an auction site. They zipped up the back and gave me horrible blisters, but I wore them to boarding school when I left East Hampton for New England in January of 1982.
What is this world coming to? Pull up your pants!
Does anyone reading this remember Rags in Boston, where you bought vintage for a dollar a pound from giant heaps of secondhand clothing, bales that had been opened and dumped on the floor of what was, I believe, some kind of defunct factory? You could find all of 20th-century fashion history in the rag bin: cotton house muumuus in the 1950s style of “I Love Lucy” with pink-and-black kittens and diamonds; wool bomber jackets embroidered with dragons and the words “Viet Nam 1967”; rayon evening gowns worthy of Rita Hayworth . . .
My 17-year-old has finally, belatedly, gotten into thrifting, but it means something different. Now, the hunt is on for denim from the early 2000s that looks very, very, very much like the denim of 2025, and oversize T-shirts from the 1990s and 1980s with a logo on the back, not the front, which look very, very, very much like the faux-vintage T-shirts you can buy at Brandy Melville. Well, thank God we at least still have the Bargain Box (which, astute local readers will note, I am refusing, in full fogey fashion, to call by its new name, “the Shops at LVIS”). You can still find a unique high-end designer party dress there at a steal to repurpose for prom.