Clutching a Clyde’s Chemists cloth bag, with the distinctive screen-printed back-to-back giraffes, Claire Dylan breaks down the thrift store ecosystem with a posh British accent.
“I remember I would always shop at secondhand shops when I was a student, when I was at high school or university. You’d wanna go into an expensive suburb’s charity store because the rich ladies would donate all the good clothes.”
It wasn’t mainstream at the time, Dylan says. Just something students did.
“But it’s a lot more acceptable now to buy things that aren’t brand new. It’s been rebranded to all these other things, thrift or vintage or antiquing or whatever… And perhaps it’s been a lucky coincidence that at the same time, global manufacturing has been doing this race to the bottom of the cheapest, most mass-produced, shittiest shit. So if you actually want quality, your safer bet is to go secondhand, stuff that was made 20, 30 years ago.”
Dylan reaches into her bag and shows me something she just bought — what looks like a glass bowl, with etched and faceted designs.
“Real crystal,” she says, flicking the rim with her nail. “Can you hear it?”
Now touch linen. Crushed velvet. Lace. Muslin gauze. The wool collected from a cashmere goat shed in the springtime. The protein fiber purloined from the silk cocoons of mulberry worms. The pile sheared off a llama with a mane like Patrick Swayze once had.
Spun into yarn, woven into fabric, fibers and filaments knitted and brushed, sartorially speaking, we just can’t help ourselves. It’s in our DNA. Blue denim, cowboy, wool sheared from a sheep, then the weft and warp ordered comme ça, and dyed with indigo — the world’s oldest natural dye.
Contrast these familiar fabrics to the Frankenstein fibers scientists have been cooking up in labs since the beginning of the 20th century.
Queen of sports bras, wrestling singlets and cushioned bicycle shorts, spandex is made from polyurethane, a carcinogen. Combine water, petroleum and coal and nylon is born. Polyether-polyurea copolymer? Ethylene-vinyl acetate? Lycra and the foamy plastic in running shoes, respectively. But it’s polyester, first used to make war-time parachutes, which is now the most widely used material in new clothing. Concocted from petroleum-based polyethylene terephthalate, shedding microplastics with every wash cycle, the material is woven into socks and boxer shorts and backpacks and scarves. And baby clothing.
“Nylon, rayon, they make up all the different names for them,” explains Dylan. “It’s basically all petroleum byproducts, hybrid materials that you’ve noticed don’t seem to last very long. Yeah, the color’s wrong. You put them in the dryer, they melt. They stretch or shrink. You wash them once or twice and they’re just disintegrated. Like really thin synthetic materials. What’s the cheapest and quickest to produce? That’s fast fashion.”
Trapped between the exploitation and cruelty to animals on one side or the deleterious byproducts of an ingenuous petroleum industry on the other — to say nothing of the environmental fallout perpetuated from industry practices — fashion marches forward in leather and poly-vinyl chloride boots.
But there’s a movement afoot in the City of Kingston to evade inferior product pushed by modern department store outlets, a rejection of built-in obsolescence or disposability as desirable characteristics. Dylan simply says she wouldn’t shop mass market clothing retailers even if you paid her.
“Fast fashioners like H&M, like Zara, like Forever 21, or like any mail order fashion on the internet. You can almost find trendy clothes in Target, but it’s still like thinner, crappier fabric.”
Wearing a leather Akubra, a style of hat popular among Australians, and a square neck, baby-doll dress patterned with a tiny flower print, the owner of Free to Thrift, Christina Kravig, rows her boat in the same river, but it was her dismay with the operation of well-known, for-profit thrift stores that motivated her to go further. She opened Free to Thrift three years ago.
“I was a reseller and I saw a lot of exploitation happening in the second-hand market and it pissed me off — what they were charging, what they paid their employees. I felt like I could try and make a space that eliminated all these exploitative aspects of the system.”
She says that well known for-profit thrift stores look to the second-hand online resell market for the upper limit of prices which can be charged and then, contrary to the spirit and philosophy of thrift, set their prices with an eye to maximizing profit.
“You should have actual real thrift prices if you call yourself a thrift store,” she says pointing to a sign hanging on the wall across from the cash register.
1050 Morton Blvd.
“I took those prices from the Goodwill actually,” Kravig says. “The difference is Goodwill goes up from those prices. They’ll have one color that might be half-off on a given day but everything else is that price or higher. My store, what I sell starts at that price and goes lower, all the way down to free.”
She has to pay the rent and she has to pay her employees, but beyond that, Kravig says she donates her profits. Her goal is 10% of net.
“This year we donated over $40,000 to charities that are local and active in Ulster County. Because I also want the money to stay local.”
While her anti-capitalist philosophy certainly plays a factor, providing a do-it-yourself venue where the creation of fashion happens is what Kravig really relishes.
“Getting to see a super wide-range spectrum of humans come up to this counter, that’s one of the things that I love the most about this store. They have all gone through the store and every single one of them has found things that are absolutely unique to them. I see them reflected in their choices… People are not meant to be cookie-cutter.”
In spite of both her rock-bottom prices and the fact that she gives away half of all her goods for free, a tsunami of donated goods flowing through her doors is inexhaustible.
“I have had half a million items go through my hands since we opened. So that’s half a million items that stayed out of a landfill. But even though we’ll have stuff on for free for five, six, seven days, there’s still stuff left over that just literally nobody wants it. Linens that are stained. Underwear. Socks. So we recycle all this stuff with Helpsy, an organization out of New Jersey who takes all the fiber products that we can’t use or that nobody wants.”
Like Free to Thrift, the Fairly New thrift shop in Uptown Kingston also treats its profits with contempt.
“With the exception of the rent that I pay for this building,” says Todd Levinson, Director of Fairly New, “our profits are donated every single month to charities.”
Open each week on Friday, Saturday and Wednesday, the success of Fairly New can be attributed in part to being an entirely volunteer-run operation, and in part to having The Fair Street Reformed Church as its landlord. For the privilege of converting the two stories plus basement of its standalone brick building into a labyrinth of show-floor rooms, Fairly New pays $1,750 a month.
“I think that’s a pretty fair deal,” says Levinson. “We couldn’t rent a space this big anywhere else to do this kind of endeavor.”
Levinson’s fashion sense hews to the pragmatic and he’s wearing what he calls his typical uniform — a camouflage-patterned Detroit Lions hat, a soft, roomy hoody, and camouflage cargo pants.
“I dress for comfort,” he says, “and I do love camouflage.”
Today, Levinson is enthusiastic about a $4,000 charitable donation written on a check made out to the thrift shop which he waves in the air. It’s from a woman who wanted a way to memorialize her sister.
“We have a board meeting on the second Tuesday of every month and we brainstorm and take suggestions from our volunteers about where we can donate money to. So we get everybody involved. We don’t donate to the same charities over and over. This week we donated $3,000 to the Immigration Defense Network.”
Levinson too must wrestle the flood of donations, most frequently culling the stock with 50 percent off sales and seasonal purges with rock-bottom pricing.
“We liquidate our inventory because we do have a constant influx. We do need to keep it moving. We have a 96¢ rack right in our front hallway that’s designed to expedite clothing that we’ve seen hanging out for a while. Put it on the rack, 96¢ with 4¢ tax, $1. People, they love it.”
For any textile at Fairly New which still has failed to excite a buyer’s interest, a box behind St. John’s Episcopal Church on Albany Avenue waits. Levinson believes those cast-offs get recycled or redistributed through St. Pauly Textiles based in Rochester.
“But we try to not toss anything. We actually have a free bin outside. We put it in the free bin and away it goes.”
Over in Midtown, too, on Broadway Avenue the thrift model of recycled fashion is thriving. Curated thrift, vintage and upcycling is the shopping experience offered at Rewind Kingston.
Staffed exclusively by Floods — Kevin, Joanne, Karlie, Jake and Sydney — Rewind Kingston is a family affair, and here too the idea of hoarding a profit is déclassé. The cultivation and preservation of community is the real goal, says Kevin, Flood paterfamilias — a mission which rose up like a bittersweet flower after the passing of an emotionally suffering daughter.
“My wife has purpose,” he says. “She is not driven by money. What we do is we pay the electric and our lights and our mortgage. The rest we donate.”
Unique among the other shops mentioned so far, Rewind Kingston refuses donations.
“We don’t want to take from People’s Place,” says Kevin. “Or from the Salvation Army. That’s another ecosystem. Then you have the consignment ecosystem. And those prices are much higher than ours. So we play in the curated space.”
Instead of buying new clothing, finding and buying deadstock is primarily the Rewind model. Apparently clothing produced over various decades — tagged but never purchased, cleaned but never worn — waits still in warehouses. And so auction houses offer opportunities at wholesale. If an auction halfway across the world takes place at 3am, then through the glory and reach of the internet, Joanne Flood, materfamilias, is up at 3am, bidding. Buying right-priced items and then sprucing them up also takes much of her time.
“Let’s say something had not the best color or it was bleached,” says daughter Karlie Flood. “Like a stain. You take it down to the basement and then redye them and recreate what would have been thrown out.”
Karlie wears a beige plaid linen skirt and a loose-knit neon magenta sweater, while Joanne wears a hoodie decorated with a screen-printed disco ball over the heart, a message scrawled across the back: “Going dancing in city be back later.”
“Everything that’s deemed cool by my kids, that’s kind of our whole thing. Sidney is the curator. Karlie does all the art. Jake is the one who went dancing [in New York City]. We woke up one morning and he was gone. He left this note on the chalkboard. That’s his writing. He was 19 years old.”
But Jake Flood did come back. And now he’s a club promoter.
With a portion of their proceeds, the Floods throw an annual concert called Heart of Midtown — live music, mental health experts, a party in the streets — to draw attention to all things mental health. Owing to the memory of daughter Cassidy.
“I don’t want young people to feel guilty with themselves or stressed,” Joanne explains. “The world is hard enough as it is. If you need to come in and buy something and spend less than $20 and feel good and have a conversation and feel community, that’s what’s important to me.”
Fomenting feelings of guilt, holding out the promise of redemption for a price, these features of consumerism mimic the dependence fostered by many a religious system.
Shops like Rewind jam that culture. Along with Free to Thrift and Fairly New Thrift Shop, the yesteryear products of the high church of fashion are offered affordably, as a sartorial salvation accessible to all. Profits donated. The community is clothed.
“I actually sold a fur yesterday,” says Levinson, “it was a stole or it may have been a cape, but whatever it was, it was pure fur. I know that’s not something that’s necessarily politically correct but I’m gonna say it was 60 or 70 years old. And somebody walked out of here, thrilled because they got something that keeps you warm, at a fraction of the cost you may find anywhere else. People love the fact that when they spend their money it’s going to a charity. That has excited and delighted more people than I know.”
Asked to name her favorite thrift stores in the area, Kravig gives a shout out to Rewind. She’s also a fan of the Red Owl Collective a few blocks away.
Held in a parking lot outside a 1000 sq ft warehouse, the Midtown flea market manifested itself last summer to immediate acclaim. Weather notwithstanding, inside the warehouse a day-in day-out market proper, a collection of vendors and stalls, carries on year round. Prioritizing thrifty reuse and a kind of anti-industrial nostalgia for the hand-made and the bespoke, and the congregation is growing. Kravig has plans to move her store to the same midtown neighborhood as Rewind and the Red Owl Collective in 2025.
“The more we have access to these resources,” Kravig says, “the less we’re going to need to go to stupid Dollar General or Walmart to rebuy the exact same stupid thing that we’re giving away ten times a week for free.”
Addendum
As it has since the spring of 2018, the Sears department store building stands like a giant derelict headstone in the expanding commercial graveyard on the hill that is the Hudson Valley Mall. Reproduced here for posterity, its final words were the distracted sweet nothings offered from a lover whose passions had already cooled.
“Sears Holdings continues the strategic assessment of the productivity of our store base and will continue to right size our store footprint in number and size.”
Translation: Sears went out for cigarettes and never came back.
Which is not the disaster it seems.
In March of 2019, seeking to call attention to and halt a textile waste problem of vast proportions, the UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion held an event in Nairobi to address what it referred to as the environmentally and socially destructive practices of fashion.
There are around 8 billion human beings living on the planet, and they are outpaced by an estimated 100 billion items of new scraps created every year — 92 million pounds, the equivalent of 472 Brooklyn Bridges of clothing dropped out of the sky annually. Fashion tsunami.
The fashion industry — that is the unrelated consortium of cotton fields, livestock operations, petro-chemical labs, dye and textile factories, etcetera, which all work together to pump out the finished product is blamed for producing anywhere from two to eight percent of global carbon emissions as well as being the second largest industrial consumer of water on the planet, drinking up 93 billion cubic meters per year.
It’s said for a single cotton shirt to be produced, cotton plants must be irrigated with the same amount of water a person would drink in two and a half years.
Against the backdrop of such absurd overproduction of clothing, the closing of any retail outlet not specializing in the bespoke production of durable, sustainable product — or the resell of existing product regardless of its quality — is a positive development.
Dismiss the exterior signage, ignore the branding, and see any chain store for what it is- fronts for an assortment of national distribution pipelines.
Owned by K-Mart since 2005, when Sears, Roebuck and Co. stripped its sales floor, packed the last load into a tractor trailer and drove away, it still had 233 other stores left across the country. Six years later there were just 9 Sears stores left. It was never exactly a maven of fashion anyway. But still. 224 less stores means 224 spigots of fashion destined for the landfill have been shut off.
And thrift stores are thriving.
Join the family! 
