Wearing your city across your chest
Bring the places of your memory back to life, one faded T-shirt at a time
NEW YORK— Recently, in the basement of my mom’s house upstate, I discovered two boxes full of clothes that somehow got diverted from me back in 1997. They were full of gems — old merch from Twin Peaks and In
Living Color, peak-era Gap and so on. But I was most warmed to re-encounter the ones so specific that they’d be essentially meaningless to almost anyone else.
The best is a fire truck red shirt that reads, “Goodbye Old Stuy.” I was part of the first class that graduated from the new Stuyvesant High School building in 1993. These shirts were given to students when we left the old building on East 15th St. the year before.
My New York is a small and obscure one, full of private corners that I still lurk in when the world turns cruel, and darkened by the shadows of places that have been swallowed by time (and developers).
It’d be nice if I had photos of those places, but mostly I don’t. It’d be nicer, even, to have a memento. I would pay whoknows-how-much for a T-shirt from my beloved El Greco Diner in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where in the mid-tolate-1980s I ate 1 million french fries and stuffed the Galaga machine with quarters sneaked to me by the women who worked the cash register.
It was knocked down a few years ago and is now a condo tower with units that can sell for more than $1 million (U.S.).
I never had much hope of finding such a totem until last year, when I stumbled upon the Fantasy Explosion Instagram account, which was posting decades-old T-shirts from niche corners of the city — the type of shirts that are given away to people who complete a 5K, or to sanitation workers in the boroughs outside Manhattan, or which you can buy near tourist sites from street vendors. It was vernacular vintage: a reconstruction of New York memory, one faded garment at a time.
Fantasy Explosion is the work of Kevin Fallon, 30, a musician who moved to New York from West Greenwich, R.I., six years ago. “I wanted to feel more connected when I moved here,” he told me recently.
In between jobs, he began going to thrift stores. “Originally,” he said, “I was finding things that were important to me ’cause I’d been there — ‘I had a sandwich at this place.’ But that feeling for me started turning into, ‘Whoa, what does this mean to other people?’ ”
Quite a bit, it turns out. After selling online since last year, Fantasy Explosion opened a micro-stall in the Williamsburg Mini Mall in April. (The retail location is in partnership with the pin brand Pintrill, which also sells from the space.) I stop in whenever I’m nearby, though I generally know what’s in stock from its Instagram story.
Fallon said he sells these items not just to locals, but also to those new to the city: “You move to New York, and you want to be down.”
Fallon estimates that about half of his stock is regionally specific. Some recent highlights include street-vendor shirts from the 2003 blackout; a teal beauty from the 1998 New York State Gymnastics Championship; a cap from the Chemical Bank fishing club; an embroidered shirt from the meat seller Pat LaFrieda.
On one recent trip, I spied a shirt from Downstairs Records, a go-to for hip-hop in the 1980s and ’90s, which was too small for me. But I took a picture and posted it on Instagram, where one of my friends, a one-time patron of the store, saw it and immediately snapped it up.
As I get older, I find myself more interested in wearing items of clothing that reflect, down to a microscopic level, my history. This sort of vernacular vintage is made up of clothes that convey cachet and intimate knowledge.
“They’re code and status symbols,” says Brian Procell, the owner of the vintage emporium Procell on the Lower East Side and a vintage archivist. Wearing certain pieces, he said, is one way to communicate membership in “a New York City elite.” Items like these serve as a reminder that no matter how big and overstuffed the city gets, New York remains a cult brand.
Procell has sold shirts like these for years, with a special emphasis on city institutions like museums. “Coming across one is like a luxury,” he said. “It’s the ultimate souvenir.”
In recent years, I’ve filled out my wardrobe with shirts from places I happily patronize. It began to seem ludicrous that I might spend several hundred dollars on an item of clothing I may wear just a couple of times, but not $20 on a shirt from a place I go several times a year.
At Joe’s Pizza in the West Village, the cashier rolled his eyes when I asked for one, then disappeared for several minutes tracking one down, holding up a long line. The options at the Randy’s Donuts store in Inglewood, Calif., near Los Angeles International Airport, are vivid and colourful. I bought a shrieking-loud tie-dye number from the Varsity in Atlanta.
Wearing these garments is unusually revealing, as if you’re wearing a shirt with your own face on it. It starts conversations, and it’s a kind of recommendation engine.
But mostly it is a map to my private life, a hint of some of the stuff I’m made of. It’s why I keep eBay alerts in hopes I may one day find a Crazy Eddie T-shirt that’s not a filmy sausage casing.
Or maybe someone will dig an El Greco shirt from the bottom of a storage unit and offer it up for sale, a lock in search of a key. I’ll be there.