The trials and tribulations of buying vintage clothing

US consumers spend billions of dollars each year on second hand clothing. These range from thrift stores, to consignment stores, to vintage clothing fairs. A key part of the appeal is cost. It can be significantly cheaper than buying a new garment at a retail store. On top of that, there is the appeal of a clothing item with a bit of history to it or a design that is no longer available. Yet there are major drawbacks as well. The way inventory works at a department store is they will purchase multiple sizes of a given season’s collection. You then go and find a shirt that you like and you get it in your size. Your size will either be on display or the retail clerk will bring it to you. With consignment shops their inventory is far less consistent. They are selling a collection of individual wardrobes rather than a particular season’s collection. They will have a range of brands and patterns distributed across the sizing scale. If you find a garment that resonates with you but is not in your size, you can’t just request it in your size. They only have what the consigner consigns and most consigners have their clothing in one size. In certain cases, you could buy something that is too large and get it altered, however this is additive to the cost of purchasing it and so the spread starts to narrow with a retail store. The gap narrows further if you are incurring shipping fees when thrifting online. Not to mention the time and trouble you must go through. If you find a shirt you really like but the collar is too small you could buy and not close the last button. When buying clothing though, you want to be getting something that will fit you. If you outgrow it later that’s a different story, but at the time of purchase it should fit you.

Another underappreciated aspect is how time-consuming buying vintage clothing. If they are catalogued on an online marketplace, it will be nowhere near as neat and searchable as a fashion brand’s ecommerce store. Searching by size can be tricky, the photos are taken at home and don’t do justice to the garment. The quality if hard to determine. When shopping at a particular brand all merchandise will fall under that umbrella and then be grouped by category i.e. shirts, pants, suits, accessories. Filter tags and taxonomy are tailored to the particularities of their product lines. Within a particular category such as shirts, you will see subdivisions such as dress shirts, business shirt, casual shirts. Other categorizations may include fit or fabric weave such as poplin, oxford, twill, herringbone, stretch. Advanced filtering options may also be available such as cuff type, size availability, color, pattern and whether an item is on sale. Such user-friendly features are often absent from second hand resale platforms since they are not able to cater to a specific clothing line or item but need to force fit a one size fits all taxonomy on their entire inventory. In some cases, you are given the ability to make an offer to counter the listed price. While this can be a source of good deals however negotiating is time consuming and you end up paying shipping for each individual shirt you purchase from a particular reseller rather than being able to spread the shipping across multiple items as you would when checking out at a retailer. You can buy multiple shirts from the same seller to bundle shipping fees but trying to add that to your search criteria is another layer of friction and complexity. At the end of the day, you want to purchase a shirt that speaks to you not make a decision based on who the merchant is. If you have made procuring vintage clothing your profession it may be well worth you time to jump through hoops. Most people though don’t have the time and need something quicker and less labor-intensive.

Purchasing new clothing especially dress shirts can be both expensive and frustrating. Not only do the prices give you pause but the pattern that you were so found of may no longer be in production. This is especially true now that many clothing lines have felt the need to cave to the trend towards casual and will not take the risk of manufacturing a lively dress shirt that caters to a narrower audience. Quality can also be a concern. The durability and longevity of garments across many apparel companies has declined as they have moved to outsource production at the expense of quality. Not only will you pay the full freight to buy a new item but it may not last as long as a vintage garment. For foreign boutique designers that do not have a local presence the shipping costs can be exorbitant running as high as thirty or fifty dollars. For a single shirt purchase that can be prohibitive. When it comes to free shipping above a certain order minimum many of them will restrict the availability of such deals to domestic purchasers.

What if you could combine the benefits vintage pricing with your current size? You can accomplish just that by mending your existing shirt instead of buying a new one because the most sustainable and cost-effective garment is the one you already own. Rather than scavenging around a resale store looking for a shirt that is both the right fit and to your liking, you can breathe new life into your existing shirt by changing the frayed collar. This is a shirt that you know fits and so you don’t have to worry about the perils of sizing. Instead of purchasing someone else’s clothing you can get a second chance at your own clothes. You receive the benefits on pricing without the hassle on fit. When getting button shirts repaired, you can send a bunch of them in at once in order to bundle the shipping costs and get a better deal that way. It's also incredibly convenient since you can ship them from your local post office, have them repairs and then they will be mailed back to you. You can also have the cuffs replaced if those are frayed as well. For a quality shirt you should be able to get an extra four to five years out of it depending on usage and this is certainly a longer timeframe than much of what is sold today which starts to show signs of wear within the first eighteen months, an unacceptably brief time frame. Changing your worn-out shirt collar lets you get a new shirt out of your existing wardrobe, one that you know fits you and suits you. While it may not make sense for fast fashion, for quality shirtmakers that use durable fabrics, this is cheaper than buying a brand-new shirt, more convenient and less time consuming than rummaging through consignment shops or thrift stores looking for that needle in a haystack.