The phenomenon that causes vintage cars to gain value as they become older is now taking over the fashion world. Vintage clothing has become a trend of today as teenagers all over the country have flooded social media platforms with this new ‘aesthetic’ look. This new wave of fashion may be due to the appeal that young generations have to the worn out look of older pieces of clothing.
Many teenagers including myself turn to large chain thrifts, such as Goodwill to come across these vintage, hard to find pieces. A lot of the time, clothing in these donation centers may be torn, stained, or immensely huge. For this reason, there is a lot of sorting involved when one wants to find a hidden gem. These hidden gems are articles of clothing that trace back to the 90’s, or even 80’s, these are the truly vintage clothes that were part of a Golden Age of fashion that everyone so desires. After sacrificing a significant amount of time, gallons of sweat and cramping hands, people are able to come across these gems in the caves of large chain thrift stores. This aspect adds to the value of vintage clothing, however, it would be more convenient if you had someone else do the hard work for you at the right price.
Credit: Anthony Vallejo
The Vintage Twin is one of several stores that get their hands dirty in finding older, valuable clothing pieces for you, at a reasonable price of course. They do the hard work of traveling all over the United States looking for vintage pieces, while inventorying what they find to later sell them as ‘Collections’ in their physical stores.
As Samantha Hernandez, The Vintage Twin sales associate, said, “ everything is going to be at least 20 years old as opposed to the bigger thrift warehouses where it’s both vintage and recent second hand department store items.” These higher end thrifts make sure that the items they choose are on the trend wave, washed, and not mass produced before they hit their racks. This allows for a “second hand unique piece and experience for the consumer,” said Hernandez. Nevertheless, all these factors add up as price tags in these stores may reach up to one-hundred dollars!
Bigger chain thrift stores let you do the digging in order to find the trendy, vintage piece that you badly want. On the other hand, stores like The Vintage Twin does this work for you as they pick out certain trendy clothes to add to their “collections” and make them available for larger prices. You can pay $55 for a rare concert tee of the 70’s or you can pay $5 for a wild trip to a large thrift to look for a similar shirt, either way you are saving and losing an aspect of this article of clothing. The decades of the 70s, 80s and 90s had a golden age of fashion, one that we miss so much we are willing to bring it back, but at what price?
