Arts

My Neighbor’s “Designer” Stoop Sale

While DVF was showing at Bryant Park, I was browsing through old pajamas down the block.

Erika Kawalek is covering fashion week for DoubleX, not by watching the runway but by observing what clothes women are throwing away. Read her first dispatch here and her second dispatch here. Click here for a slide show of the stoop sale.

In the hours before Diane von Furstenberg’s runway show at Bryant Park Sunday afternoon, I scanned the listings of New York’s Craigslist in search of a woman who was selling the contents of her closet. Stoop sales are a theater of disposal. We set up temporary shops, fill them with belongings we no longer want, and greet the potential stewards of our possessions—who may be poor passersby, middle-class bargain hunters, or tony antique dealers. The thrill is in finding new homes for our old loves, the pin money to console us because we haven’t merely consigned our possessions to the trash heap. I wasn’t surprised to learn that yard sales were popularized by a bunch of recycling-minded hippies during the fiscal crisis of 1973. This fad, which sprung up as a community-minded critique of postwar affluence, was quickly adopted by the masses.

I couldn’t find a “Closet Fire Sale,” which I had hoped to include in my Schmatta Week coverage, but there was a listing advertising a “Designer Stoop Sale—$5” happening just a few blocks from my apartment. When I got to the stoop I met “starving filmmaker” Nora Malone and her friend Tania Sandler, a blogger at I Heart NYC Bars, two 30-something friends who had decided to clean out their closets and raise a little “cocktail money” by setting up shop on Malone’s Brooklyn stoop.

Because the ad posted said “Designer clothing” I made sure to arrive at 1 p.m. sharp—which items were being deaccessioned this Fashion Week? I wondered, hoping maybe to score some cheap well-tailored clothes—only to learn that it was false advertising. “When I posted the ad I sort of exaggerated,” said Sandler. "We don’t have designer stuff,” Malone said. “But we do have Splendid, Mango, Zara … .”

“Those aren’t really designer labels,” I said, disappointed. (I’m in the market for a good skirt suit.) But I parked myself on the stoop anyhow. Nobody really visits a yard sale for high-end cast-offs, do they? They’re for neighborly, woman-to-woman exchange and for the voyeuristic thrill of watching what others are getting rid of. Money is often beside the point, the trendiness of the goods on offer irrelevant. Yard sales are the opposite of designer resale, which, as I observed in my previous SchmattaWeek dispatch, hinges on the discretion of a middlewoman who transfers fashionable luxury goods from one group of women—elite consignors whose anonymity must be preserved—into the hands of another.

Malone said, as she placed a pile of polka-dotted cotton shorts and tank pajamas on a coffee table, that she’d had a stoop sale last August and made $100.

“Did you have a moment of feminine reproach where you said to yourself, 'I’m going to try to be more girly and wear cute PJs every night?' ” I asked.

“Yes—I went out and bought these cute PJs at Forever 21—but I never wear them,” she replied, “I always end up in a T-shirt or naked.”

Sandler maintained her own rack, which consisted mostly of graphic T-shirts and jean shorts—stuff that she claimed diluted her personal style. She held up a micro mini jean skirt. “This skirt is the first thing that I feel too old to wear,” she confessed. “I bought it at a vintage store in L.A., Out of the Closet; it feels silly on, even with leggings. If I don’t sell it maybe I’ll have another go at it.”

Tags: Brooklyn, Craigslist, DVF, fashion week, schmatta week, stoop sales, vintage

Erika Kawalek is a New York-based journalist and author of the forthcoming fashion chronicle, Ragpicker.

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