By: Justin Ritchie, Honors Advisor

In 1986, my mother and father purchased a two-piece black and gray sectional that sat largely unused along the east wall of their bedroom. Nearly thirty years later, I was adamant that this “ugly old couch” (as it was now called) should be hauled up a three-story walk-up to my first apartment in Bed-Stuy; it had an inexplicable sentimental quality that my mother failed to notice. It was also free. Six years later, a twelve-pound dog found that the couch’s stuffing had an inexplicably delicious quality, and after he’d savored most of the right arm I was convinced by my girlfriend that it was time to let the couch go.

As a hipster trash millennial, I had furnished my entire apartment from things I’d collected off Brooklyn stoops in walking distance. It was considered a rite of passage for my generation, and every box of books or milk crate of records was an opportunity to seem far more cultured than I actually was. It was also free. When I eventually moved out, I returned everything back to the street, and I was amazed by how fast people had collected what I left outside. I would drop off a lamp, run upstairs to grab something else, and when I’d come back downstairs I’d find the lamp already gone. The hardest thing to abandon was the couch, but within minutes I saw two guys with a dolly working to lug it down the street. In that moment, I wasn’t sure whether I was more comforted in the fact that the couch would live another day or amazed at the synchronicity of the two guys and their dolly’s precipitous arrival.

All of this is to say that when I heard about the Honors Thrift Store event a spark lit within me, igniting a fire that had been dead since selling my soul to the suburbs. Perhaps I’d be able to find happiness again, or at least I’d be able to engage in the collective bartering that once validated my existence. At any rate, I found it admirable that the event was donation-based and that students would be able to pick things up for free. This is in stark contrast to the misguided altruism of the many would-be hipsters who dominated the scene of my youth.

Back in the good ol’ days, indie sleaze felt neither indie nor sleazy. In hindsight I struggle to recall what pop music even was, as it seemed like every basic sorority girl dressed like Karen O and listened to the Strokes, and where Coachella was packed with poseur rave bros who thought of Molly only as a name. I wasn’t much better. I vividly recall one winter vacation where my friends and I simultaneously realized we were all wearing flannel and trucker hats as if we were the hippest kids from the smallest redneck mountain towns in America instead of Bedminster, NJ.  

In his 2010 New York Magazine article, “What Was the Hipster?,” Mark Greif suggests that hipster subculture was essentially white trash appropriation that was eventually co-opted and commercialized by the elite and made popular. Notably it was adopted by college students who, lacking the grit of their survivalist uncles and the street cred of the neighbors they invaded, found a method of embodying while somehow remaining superior to both. Greif writes that “the hipster is that person…who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two,” which in this case is where monied interests are hidden under moral flexing. Worse yet, he states the hipster died before 2010 and insists that my generation, unlike the early craftsmen of artisanal coffee and those who ‘rediscovered’ crocheting, were mere consumers of an image in a world “where Hot Topic sells thick-framed lensless eyeglasses to tweens and Nine West sells a ‘Hipster’ sandal.” In other words, the real hipsters just sold out – we bought in.

Emma Frederickson, a freshman Communications major at Pace University, wrote an article for Her Campus entitled “The Crisis of Consumerism ” where she broke down the dilemmas of negotiating the world of compassionate capitalism. How does one, she posits, balance individual appetites with social responsibility and corporate marketing. She writes, “as consumers, there is a constant expectation to ‘buy better’ while also buying more.” Frederickson and Greif both reflect upon the idea that money seems a prerequisite for doing the right thing. As Greif writes, “the rebel consumer is the person who, adopting the rhetoric but not the politics of the counterculture, convinces himself that buying the right mass products individualizes him as transgressive.” This culminates into something like Beacon’s Closet, a thrift store that only accepts mint condition clothing, pays $5 for flawless ‘donations,’ resells them at market value, and calls it justice. 

This is where the Honors Thrift Store comes in, and why events like this are far more revolutionary than they initially seem. In spite of its name, which alludes to the aforementioned for profit businesses, it is in actuality an offshoot of free-cycle culture where nothing is bought and sold but merely reused and repurposed. Unlike a fast-fashion model of mass-producing that which is quickly discarded, events and movements like this recognize both the inherent value of discarded things and the irrelevance of a middleman who profits off them. All of the items offered at the Honors Thrift Store event came from other Honors students, from Honors staff and faculty, and from Buy Nothing members around the city. One woman and her dog, Balou, met us with boxes outside her Pine Street apartment. “I’m just downsizing, renovating my apartment a bit – oh don’t worry, he doesn’t bite.” Another couple met us on the 64th floor of Gehry’s 8 Spruce Street tower where we picked up books, shoes, and cooking equipment in view of a floor to ceiling window looking north over Manhattan. Each interaction reminded me of my own experiences moving in and out of apartments in Brooklyn, the way in which the community reveled in these mutual exchanges outside stoops and on sidewalks, the joy of both receiving and of letting go, and all of it was free.

As much as I was inspired by the event, I was equally disheartened. In seeming contradiction I overheard both that no one would come to an event to take other people’s clothing and that two of our donation bins were stolen. It seemed strange to steal something that was bound to be given away freely, and it left me wondering if it was out of need or sabotage. It also made me question the way in which we identify with what we wear, with what we decorate our rooms and lives with. For me, taking things off the street was an act of pride. For my girlfriend, it was unsanitary at best. If price is how we denote the value in this world and action is how we judge character, then a shirt found and thrifted speaks volumes more than the same one passed down after your brother outgrew it. Perhaps the subversive act of box theft above labeled one a rebel, as buying into the latest trends labels one chic, while attending a school event just makes you the opposite. Although I find the box theft pathetic, it speaks to the power of identification, of which clothing is paramount, and the ways in which we balance what is right with what is wanted.

As we unpacked boxes and organized their contents around the Honors Lounge, I worried that students wouldn’t show and that the whole enterprise would be in vain. It didn’t take long, however, before the entire lounge was packed with students combing through our donations. What was only an empty lounge a few hours earlier was suddenly transformed into a scene I might have stumbled into in Bushwick in the summer of 2016. Students packed their bags with books and art, tried on new outfits with friends, and stood fascinated by the stories these items told. The thrift store came alive, but unlike the thrift stores of my hipster past, everything was free.

I still think about that couch. Despite its age and multiple dog-induced scars, it was far more valuable to me than any piece of furniture I’ve owned since. It was hard to let it go, but the one thing that made it easier was knowing someone else still found value in it. As I looked around the event, at the clothes and kitchenware and office supplies we spent weeks collecting, I was grateful to see that people still found value in these things too. Perhaps we can overcome our habit of attaching value to price, of our need to validate ourselves with wealth and in vogue trends. Perhaps we can get past the stigma of charity and goodwill, and if so, maybe then we can start investing in things that actually make a difference.