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TL;DR
Pieces of New York is the References launch collection: an all-secondhand, all-NYC collection of pieces that explores the city’s relationship to fashion—from the tourist-merch icons (the I<3NY t-shirt, the Yankees hat, the Broadway paraphernalia) to the most talked-about New York designers of the current cultural moment (Bode, Telfar, Pyer Moss11) and everything in between.
1. Good reference points for their work and their impact: from the New Yorker, the New York Times & New York magazine’s The Cut.
Every single item in the collection has been sourced from the homes of New Yorkers during the References pilot and our personal collections to tell the story of the New York disorder—look out for the blurbs!—but also experiment with the possibilities of secondhand and examine its seat at the Fashun™️ table.
Launching in December on this website and with announcements coming through the @referencesnyc pages on Instagram & Twitter.
Now for the full story 😋
WHY A COLLECTION
During the first months of 2021, as we were overthinking developing the idea that would become References, we ran a theory-into-practice pilot, to see how everything can/should work. We collected a total of more than 2,000 pieces (mostly) of clothing from the homes of New Yorkers who RSVP’d “yes” to our invite.
The standard process in the world of those who deal with people’s old clothes, from your neighborhood thrift store to TheRealReal, is a process focused on scale: pick a garment > check brand & condition > make a decision to keep or return > price it—and off to next one. Due to the volume of the KonMari’d piles that buyers of secondhand clothes have to go through on a daily basis, their decision-making needs to prioritize the likelihood of something selling as fast as possible.
Our process, even in its very first iteration, was focused on impact: knowing that we would keep absolutely everything meant we would make decisions about an item’s afterlife based not only on its resale potential but on its overall possibilities. Not wanting to push even more clutter to the already overwhelmed resale market by just selling more stuff 22 allowed us to go beyond the face-value trifecta—brand/condition/will-it-sell-fast—and look into its beyond-the-surface components: the quality & the durability of the fabric, the made-in country, the design, the care & repair needs, the demand for any given type of item or textile by designers, nonprofits, recyclers et al.
A slower process for sure, but also one with way more potential.
“Secondhand” in the collective consciousness has forever been associated with the thrift store experience and that distinctive smell—so “Collection” is not necessarily the first thing you’d think about if you had to sort through a trash bag full of worn clothes. But, as the world of secondhand is expanding faster than you can say “Beacon’s,” the too-many-clothes anxieties of modern life have led to a wider realization of what the style conscious have known for years: the possibilities of secondhand are endless. Even the tough-to-adjust fashion industry is catching up.33
Plus: all these clothes we picked up for our pilot weren’t just anyone’s clothes—these are New Yorkers we’re talking about!
3. From Vogue Business: Fashion’s growing interest in recycling clothing.
WHY THIS COLLECTION
We knew all along that we’d find resale-worthy pieces in the piles we picked up from our pilot participants—in 2021 more than ever, one person’s trash is another person’s grail. But more than that, while sorting and analyzing the pieces, we started observing patterns. Some of them we expected (e.g. we got a lot of fast fashion, a lot of Gap, a lot of skinny jeans) but, due to how mixed & varied our pilot sample was, some of them we did not.
There were plenty of common threads that revealed themselves with every bag of clothes we sorted—and chief among them was: New York. Most people had at least one garment with a direct connection to the city. There was a like-new jersey from the Overthrow Boxing Club on Bleecker, a shopping tote from McNally Jackson, the famous Katz’s Deli tee—plus, less obviously, so many pieces by iconic New York designers.
Everyday wear that celebrates your city or state is kind of an American thing but the New York pride is equally special whether you live here or not, popular amongst the locals and the tourists, the fashionistas and the more casual dressers alike.
Everything about the city—its iconic landmarks and pop culture along with the actual clothes that New York fashion designers have been exporting to the global trend cycle, from Ralph Lauren to Telfar Clemens—has come to form a code, an esperanto that has not lost its cool44 despite the think pieces and the red flags.
Spot-the-NY-reference became our favorite people-watching activity: pointing all the New Yorky things people wear in the emptyish streets of the city—the New Yorker totes, the Yankees caps55, the sassy GO (heart) YOUR OWN CITY tees—all while navigating the quieter-than-normal-but-still-very-much-alive city, rolling our eyes over the Is-New-York-Dead false alarms, and pausing all activities every day at 7 PM, to make noise for the NYC essential workers.
And so we knew: the first References collection could be about one thing, and one thing only.
THE PIECES
Collection 01: Pieces of New York is a capsule of 50ish pieces where everything is a New York reference:
A reference to an iconic designer that represents New York fashion’s past, present, or promising future—like Marc Jacobs, Isaac Misrahi, and DVF, but also Emily Bode, Telfar Clemens, and Pyer Moss’s Kerby Jean-Raymond.
A reference to globally adored pop culture that is inextricably linked to NYC—like the musicals of Broadway, Seinfeld, and big-on-Instagram @newyorknico.
Or, finally: a reference to a quintessentially New York garment—like the leather jacket,88 the yellow Timberland boot, and the I (heart) NY t-shirt.
You can have as many “best coast” debates as you want but when it comes to fashion, New York is America at its best—and, to borrow from the Jesse Jackson 1984 DNC quote that the latest MET Costume Institute exhibit welcomes its guests with:
“America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt—many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.”1111
ENCORE
We’re References.
We can’t wait to tell you more about our story and our mission, how it may be different from what you’re used to, and why you should bother.
Collection 01: Pieces of New York is our launch collection—it’s all-secondhand, all-NYC, and, more than anything, it’s an opportunity for us to talk about all the things we’ve been geeking out on for over a year now while developing what started as an I-wish-there-was-something-like-this idea born out of our own experiences with taking clothes to thrift & consignment stores, our treasure hunts at Goodwill, on Grailed, and everywhere in between—and our frustrations with all the vague “responsible recycling” claims1313 that no one could contextualize for us when we asked “so what does that mean?!”
Some pieces come from our own personal collections, a lot were found in the References bags of our early members (and then cleaned professionally1414), and most are products of either unique collaborations or limited-edition, now-sold-out capsules—like the Gucci x NY Yankees beanie, the Supreme x CDG x Timberland boots, and the iconic Protect Your Largest Organ Marc Jacobs tee.
15. 