Life

Forget Fashion Week. Style Starts With New York’s Cast-Offs.

Instead of following the runway, I’m exploring what real women are throwing away.

Starting today, and for the next eight days and nights, designers will parade their spring 2010 collections on catwalks all over New York City. And scads of publications will provide comprehensive coverage of the new designs streaming down the runways. But instead of doing our version of Vogue or style.com, I wanted to focus on the vast but underreported world of used clothing, encompassing everything from chi-chi consignment stores where wealthy women hawk designer duds to homeless ragpickers.

Redesignating Fashion Week as Schmatta Week (“Rag Week,” for those of you who aren’t familiar with Yiddish) isn’t based on anti-fashion sentiment or a pinko refusal to acknowledge the latest textile novelties. I’m not at all in favor of torching the tents at Bryant Park and handing out copies of Brave New World ("Old clothes are beastly. We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending."). I love fashion! And because of this, I refuse to have what constitutes fashion be dictated by a glittered-up trade show in Bryant Park.

Here are five reasons why:

1) With respect to fashion, used duds play an essential role in the design of new clothes. Designers and stylists rely on them for copying and inspiration. For example, when I was working for Isaac Mizrahi in 2006, one day I showed up in a pair of Hammer-style jeans with nifty brass D-hook fasteners on the waist and cuffs. He asked me to take them off and hand them over to his pattern maker—he wanted to make a copy for potential mass replication in a Target collection. My vintage jeans were never reproduced, but this anecdote illustrates what everybody in the industry practices. Designers—even the most manically creative ones like Isaac, are under the gun to churn out look after look after look. Of course they rely on items gleaned from the heaps of fashion effluvia for inspiration and outright copying. Anthroplogie? Marc Jacobs? Polo? Ask any vintage shop owner and they tell you stories about crews who come in sniffing for items to copy in whole or in part.

2) Secondhand clothing is also a way for millions of women (and men, too) to participate in trends they couldn’t otherwise afford. For teenagers, this means chains like Plato’s Closet, Buffalo Exchange, and Crossroads Trading.

3) The secondary marketplace is also where you can find stuff that pleases you but is out of fashion. For example, back when low-riders were the only pants available and cut the body in an unflattering spot, in addition to exposing ass—literally—I would buy high-waisted ones in vintage stores.

4) You can find stuff that pleases you in the secondary marketplace that’s so advanced fashion-wise you’ll have to wait a few years to get it new.

5) Most of our cast-off clothing ends up on the backs of Africans and South Americans: The U.S. charity-sorting circuit has exported roughly 11 billion pounds since 1990. But the destitute need more stuff, and we throw out a lot more than we donate. Right now, Americans toss 70 percent of their old clothes into the trash, which adds up to a minimum of 6.6 million tons a year—it goes straight to landfill. (In Los Angeles, clothing makes up an astounding 10 percent of landfill content.) The infrastructure for large-scale recycling is already in place. To all the green-minded fashion people, I ask: Isn’t promoting charity clothing collections a better way to be “sustainable” than buying new organic crap?

Join me this week as I turn from the runways to designer resale boutiques, Craigslist closet sales, Goodwill Industries, and a rag sorting and export facility that processes, in the words of Baudelaire, “everything that the big city has cast off, everything it lost, everything it disdained, everything it broke.”

Tags: Anthropologie, fashion week, Isaac Mizrahi, Marc Jacobs, rags, salvation army, schmattas

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

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