This is a version of the newsletter Weeding with Chris Black, In which the columnist throws light on the burning topics of culture. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Thursday.
Like most of you, I spend a lot of time online while reading this. Some of that time can actually be called work; The rest of it is spent watching Instagram reels about viral Kool-Aid pineapple sales in the Southern United States and watching Hunter Biden blossom as a Twitter power user. A great place to shop online. Of course, I’d love to have an expertly organized retail store with a great in-house scent, soundtrack, and nice staff who are attentive but don’t give you your full attention, but in 2026, those will be few and far between. I’m mostly interested in vintage, whether it’s another pair of orange-tab Levi’s 505s, deadstock Made in the USA Converse Chuck Taylors, or a real XL 1990s Son Volt shirt. These items are not coming from Mister Porter or Tres Bien; They’re coming from independent vintage sellers who have taken over Instagram.
I’ve been vintage shopping ever since my friend Jamal worked at The Clothing Warehouse at the corner of Moreland Avenue and Euclid Avenue in Atlanta’s Little Five Points. I clearly remember him taking me to the actual warehouse to see bulk deliveries, a treasure bought in giant pallets that would require hours of digging to find the perfect plaid cowboy shirt, my uniform of the time. I was not interested in that process. I’m not an American forager – the hunt (and the smell) doesn’t bring me joy. There are plenty of hot guys in cropped zip hoodies in flyover cities willing to do the work: trolling basements and setting up eBay searches to make it easy for me to buy stuff from my cellphone while waiting to board a flight.
The market is booming because people have discovered that old clothes look better. They’re lived-in, they have personality and now it’s easier than ever to find them. Your favorite actors and musicians are on press tours wearing vintage clothes that show off their new projects, and the streets of Soho are lined with racks of vintage shit sold by the world’s worst people blasting music from JBL speakers blocking your way to get a sandwich. A certain sect of cool youth dress like 2nd Street, appearing to be wearing whatever they found on the dressing room floor, following the person before them. We’ve reached peak vintage, and strangely, this has had no effect on its cool, only its price. Things are priced higher than they should be, but the market is the market; Sometimes you get a deal, and sometimes you have to pay more for what you want.
My problem is with language. What happened to calling a shirt a “shirt” or a pair of jeans “jeans”? Everything is now referred to as a “piece”, whether it’s a T-shirt with holes that most people consider unfit to wear, an ill-fitting hat with the Rolex logo, or a pair of True Religion jeans. Before it was a widespread term, “piece” was a term used only by a certain kind of enterprisingly logged-on fashion nerd, describing pricey Rick Owens leather jackets and dresses by Belgian designers that should only be worn late at night on ketamine. A vintage store is now known as an “appointment-only collection showroom,” meaning a concrete box with no air conditioning in downtown Los Angeles, where two guys in chrome hearts, who smell like weed, ignore you while looking at their phones. Of course, you can’t just stop and spend the money; You have to DM and hope they get back to you in time so you can plan to navigate the traffic and get to your allotted shopping window as if it’s the DMV. This is fake exclusivity, and it’s running on such a large scale in this universe that I have to admit that it works.
Using language where it doesn’t fit seems to be a ploy to get it taken more seriously and charge more money in return. A showroom is defined as “a dedicated physical or virtual space where businesses display products, new collections or services for exploration, demonstration and evaluation.” I understand you can’t call it “storage space full of old clothes”, but it is exactly that. Shopping should be fun; Forcing people to jump around and play games makes the process laborious and annoying.