Loathing in Clothing: Episode 2: Pittsburgh Flea Pop-Ups: The answer to thrifitng sustainably?

 

Keira Leal · (Loathing in Clothing EP2) Pittsburgh Flea Pop-ups: The answer to thrifting sustainably?

Description:

Sustainability motivates both thrifters and thrift-store owners in Pittsburgh–but how sustainable is thrifting, really? Questions linger after our first episode’s investigation. 

Armed with curiosity and a keen eye, Keira stumbled upon a flea market pop-up on Craig Street while studying at the Tepper School of Business, where she met a shop owner eager to share tips on curating a high-quality thrifted collection. Once she started looking for them, Keira realized these pop-ups weren’t rare at all– they seemed to appear every week throughout Pittsburgh’s spring, summer, and fall seasons. Intrigued, Keira and Lovina set out to explore these local thrift pop-ups to see how Pittsburgh’s small businesses live up to the promise of sustainability that drives both shoppers and shop owners alike.

Bios: 

Keira Leal (Host):

Keira is a sophomore at CMU studying statistics and machine learning with an additional major in Decision Science. She grew up and loves her hometown of Austin, Texas. As a lifetime hobby sewist and lover of thrifting, she was impressed by Pittsburgh’s pop up thrifting scene.

Lovina Xiong (Host): 

Lovina is a sophomore at CMU majoring in Statistics & Machine Learning. She became interested in investigating thrifting in Pittsburgh discovering that the majority of clothing stores near campus are small, personally-owned thrift stores. This is very different from where she is from, Beijing China, where many people still shop for clothing in large malls. Her personal experience with this stark cultural contrast was part of the inspiration behind this season of Loathing in Clothing.

Dillon Rush (Editor)

Dillon Rush is a sophomore at CMU studying Statistics and Data Science. He grew up in his hometown of Plum, Pennsylvania, located in the Pittsburgh area, where he was introduced to thrifting by his mother. She would take him to thrift stores near home as well as antique stores, where he was given an old telephone that looked like a car. Dillon has recently become more interested in the thrifting scene due to living in the more centralized part of the city. He hopes to put all of his past experience into making the Loathing in Clothing podcast a one for the books. 

Chloe Han (Producer):

Chloe Han is a freshman at CMU and is currently undeclared under the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She calls Seoul, South Korea her home, and it is there that she was first introduced to the world of thrifting through the numerous vintage stores that lined the streets of popular hangout places she enjoys frequenting with her friends. As a Pittsburgh newbie, Chloe hopes to learn more about the thrifting scene and the Pittsburgh area in general through Loathing in Clothing. 

Elizabeth (Interviewee)

Elizabeth is the owner of Thanks It’s Vintage, a pop-up thrift shop selling period vintage pieces on Poshmark, Depop, and Instagram. Elizabeth also owns and operates the Vintage On Tap Vintage Market, a carefully curated vintage market in Bellefonte, PA.

Ricky (Interviewee)

Ricky is the co-founder of Heat Check,  a thrift store on Walnut street. Heat Check  offers a unique collection of primarily vintage clothing. But they also carry art, plants, jewelry, ceramics, and other home goods made by local artists, creatives, and small businesses. Heat Check partners with Boredom Coffee to provide shoppers with a unique, cafe experience in the shop.

Relevant Links:

https://www.shopheatcheck.com/

https://www.instagram.com/pittvintagepalooza/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/thanks.itsvntg/

Credits:

Emma Chamberlain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZLt2R2IgFE

Vogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOg0mUoi9Q

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Loathing in Clothing Intro Music

[00:00:35] Speaker B: I love shopping vintage because you get to find really special pieces that no one else is wearing. If you check out the kind of, like, chic or old lady neighborhoods, you can always find really good secondhand stores. So I feel like that's a good secret. I got this one in a de Provent in Paris, like a secondhand consignment store.

[00:00:53] Speaker C: I don't know. I like it.

[00:00:54] Speaker B: It's sort of an uncommon Hermes purse. Like a bucket Kelly, maybe. I don't really see these ones too much around, so it's a. I love vintage, like 1930s or any kind of sort of slip dress. This one is vintage. Hey, guys, it's Emma.

[00:01:15] Speaker D: Today I'm going to be doing a thrift haul.

[00:01:17] Speaker A: Yes.

[00:01:18] Speaker C: This is my second thrift haul.

[00:01:19] Speaker A: I'm going to be showing you a little coachella haul.

[00:01:22] Speaker D: So let's just do another haul.

[00:01:36] Speaker C: Welcome back to Loading and clothing. I'm Kira.

[00:01:39] Speaker A: And I'm Lavina.

[00:01:41] Speaker C: And this is episode two, Flea pop ups in Pittsburgh. Is this the answer to thrifting sustainably?

[00:01:48] Speaker A: To start off, what are you wearing today, Kira?

[00:01:51] Speaker C: I'm wearing a wrap skirt that I got in a random market in Spain.

My shirt is just a plain white T shirt that I got somewhere in Belgium.

Jewelry is all gifts. And my shoes, of course, Boots. Black leather boots for the win. I have four pairs of them. Staple of my wardrobe. How about you?

[00:02:12] Speaker A: Okay, I can start with my shoes.

I own two pairs of boots total. Both of them are doc margins. This is just one of them.

I realized, though, that my Chelsea boots are already fraying and they're supposed to be new, so I don't think I'm buying Chelsea boots ever again.

[00:02:29] Speaker C: Okay.

[00:02:30] Speaker A: And then pants. Miss 60 jeans.

All three of my jeans are Miss 60 shirt is Uniqlo. Actually, I've noticed that Uniqlo shirts do hold up more than one season, which I'm very happy about.

And then jacket is Weekend Maxmra.

[00:02:47] Speaker C: Uniqlo is the best clothing store in the universe.

Big, big enthusiast, best retail. I actually find things that I like there.

[00:02:59] Speaker A: I think it's a good place for kind of simple staple pieces because there's not.

I think they don't have any logos, really, on any of the shirts. Actually, no. They now do collaborations with other brands and have cartoon characters on some of them. But you definitely can find good, plain things there.

So in the first episode, we got a surface level understanding of the thrifting scene in Pittsburgh. Both of the people I spoke to placed a decent emphasis about how sustainable and affordable Thrifting was, but this wasn't really the narrative thrifting I'd personally seen on YouTube, which I can kind of broadly place into two categories. Number one is people doing these thrift hauls in the same kind of vein as fast fashion hauls. And the second one is these celebrities and models thrifting for vintage luxury pieces that are typically still very expensive. And I'm kind of wondering, is this kind of the experience that you have? Like, what is your kind of typical conception of thrifting?

[00:04:00] Speaker C: I think that there are a few voices that are most loud, which are those that we see online of looking for those extreme luxury pieces or doing like the bundle buys where you just buy like a meter of clothes and just unpack it.

But I, I still think that the average thrifting consumer does shop more in general moderation, especially in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh I found to have a pretty impressive thrifting scene, especially when it turns to neighborhood flea markets and pop ups. I do think there's definitely something special here.

[00:04:41] Speaker A: Actually, you mentioned to me before that this is pretty different from what you see at home in Texas, right?

[00:04:46] Speaker C: Yeah, I live in Austin, Texas. It's a pretty low key city.

Everyone's a hippie. So you would expect there to be a big thrifting scene. And there is. But a lot of these are brick and mortar stores that have their own like cemented identities, most of which sell strange collectible, whatever, strange eccentric items. But what I found to be very different in Pittsburgh is that there are a lot of very regular pop ups. For example, in my hometown, which is bigger than Pittsburgh in population, I have to go driving for half an hour to find a thrifting pop up and they have them like every month here just by walking around. I can go to like four in a week in Pittsburgh.

So I found that to be incredible and to be very different.

Additionally, all the pieces are very diverse. There's kind of something for everyone, which I think also adds to their popularity. That's kind of what I found.

[00:05:59] Speaker A: So I would say that I also have found that the surfing scene in Pittsburgh is pretty different from what I see where I'm from, which is Beijing, China. Because when I was in Beijing over the summer, it seemed like the only thrift store. It's not really a thrift store, it's more of a secondhand store. The only kind of second hand clothing secondhand store that I saw that people frequented often was this very large store for purely secondhand luxury bags. So they had kind of the cheapest ones were in the front, but they're already not cheap because it's Coach, and Longchamp is at the very front of the store. And then you kind of go back and then it gets into lv and then at the very back, there's Birkins, and they're all in little plastic containers. So, yeah, definitely. I think Pittsburgh has this very unique thrifting culture. And based on our investigations in the first episode kind of came to this question, is there something very special about thrifting in Pittsburgh? What are people in Pittsburgh doing to make thrifting sustainable in kind of our present society where clothing over consumption seems to be the norm?

Okay, so I would say that for me as well, my experience is pretty similar to Kira's in the sense that I also discovered that Pittsburgh seemed to have this very special thrifting culture. And that brings us to the driving question of this episode, which is that we were wondering whether there was something that made thrifting in Pittsburgh particularly special, and what are the people in Pittsburgh doing to make thrifting especially sustainable here.

So, Kira, I heard that you just kind of happened upon a flea pop up last week. Could you tell me about how you found this pop up?

[00:07:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I was just studying in the Tepper School of Business and some of my friends just decided to go walk around, get food, etc. And one of them came back and said, hey, by the way, there's a pop up on Craig Street.

So I did what any rational person would do, ignore the assignment that was due in half an hour and beeline to Craig Street.

The two reasons was, number one, the thrifting there is incredible, and number two, I'm doing this podcast, so it may be useful to go to a thrift pop up.

When I got there, they were already closing down a bit. I think it ended at 7. I got that around 7:15.

So I just walked to the most open looking store that I found.

[00:08:33] Speaker A: And.

[00:08:33] Speaker C: I started talking to the store owner and I got some very interesting insights on how she sources her clothes, how she deals with quality, and all of these kinds of things.

And what I. What I realized is there's a lot of care that goes into selecting what is sold, into making sure that the people pieces are of good quality, which is different from some of the things we see online of these, like thrift bundles where you just buy a meter of clothes.

So I did find it was very interesting to see how these store owners kind of shape their business models and interact with the community.

[00:09:20] Speaker A: So after Kira found this pop up, she also sang in the group chat these other pop ups that she found online and on Instagram. So we realized that once we began to keep an eye out for them, Pittsburgh didn't just have these flea pop ups randomly. They were almost every weekend. So in addition to the Southside works flea that I visited last episode, we realized that there was this pit Vintage Palooza, which hosts regular events at Shilling Plaza that aggregates a lot of vendors together. And if you kind of look on their Instagram Instagram page, they host these regular events that are advertised by really bright colored posters. And they always have this very striking picture or drawing of the Cathedral Learning at the University of Pittsburgh in the center. And these events are pretty impressive because they aggregate 19 to 20 shops every time. And it's hosted specifically by one thrift shop in Pittsburgh. It's called the Closet Pittsburgh. It prides itself on bringing the biggest and best curated Pittsburgh drops around. According to its website, this particular event capitalizes on the University of Pittsburgh's recent, though lively, history of thrifting. Since 2013, Pitt students, they founded this free the planet club, which then hosts an annual clothing exchange event called a Swapalooza.

And this event happened for several semesters, and they allowed students to drop up on washing clothing and leave with something new.

[00:10:48] Speaker C: This honestly reminds me a lot of something that's kind of trendy in Europe right now. There are these clothing swaps that allow people to bring clothing and exchange their old clothes for new clothes. So Pittsburgh is kind of ahead of its time in the clothing swap idea.

[00:11:03] Speaker A: Yeah.

And not just that. The event at Fitness Pit was so popular that the students ended up establishing a permanent location on campus for students to bring unwanted clothing. And it's called Thriftsburg, which is a student run off campus thrift store that has regular store hours, online sales. They even host this annual fall New Year's rummage sale for clothing, household goods and furniture.

But back to the Palooza. To enter the question of what made thrifting in Pittsburgh more sustainable than other places, I went straight to the source.

These are interesting.

Unlike the Southside work spree, the Pittsburgh Vintage Clothing Palooza is clothing only. It's held in this large outdoor tent area at Shenley Plaza, right in front of the Cathedral grave.

[00:12:00] Speaker C: That's an income.

[00:12:14] Speaker A: As I looked around, creative approaches to upcycling immediately stood out. For example, at a jewelry stand, we saw this shop owner displaying bracelets on wine models.

Oh, this is interesting. I've never kind of thought of storing bracelets on wine bottles before.

In addition to this very Creative display of bracelets. We also saw a very great abundance of merch from University of Pittsburgh and Steelers around the same.

[00:12:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't think it varies too much because there is still like a.

[00:12:47] Speaker A: Demand for Steelers merchandise because I'm more Pittsburgh $10 Steelers. Yeah.

[00:12:56] Speaker C: And what kind of T shirt is it?

[00:12:58] Speaker A: Oh, it's a Steelers T shirt, not.

[00:13:00] Speaker D: A Steelers T shirt.

[00:13:01] Speaker C: I see it's kind of damaged.

[00:13:04] Speaker A: Oh, it's pretty damaged actually.

[00:13:06] Speaker C: And you can probably get one new jersey that's $50.

[00:13:11] Speaker A: Nike authentic apparently 60 bread.

So after taking a general look around, I made my way over to a stand that seemed to have a healthy mix of both local Steelers merch and other more commonly branded items. This is the shop owner, Ricky.

[00:13:27] Speaker E: I'm Ricky from Heechen. We have a shop in Shadyside on Walnut Street.

[00:13:32] Speaker A: Kind of an icebreaker question that I like to start with is can you introduce kind of what you're personally wearing today?

[00:13:36] Speaker E: I'm wearing a boredom coffee T shirt with vintage vintage camo pants and some new balances.

[00:13:44] Speaker A: And where did you get your vintage pants from?

[00:13:46] Speaker E: From B sides in Millville.

[00:13:50] Speaker A: Nicheck is a thrift store and it offers this unique collection of primarily vintage clothing, but they also carry art plants, jewelry, ceramics and other home goods. What's kind of interesting about this store is that they also have a coffee shop inside, which I thought was quite interesting because it reminds me a lot of the actually pretty luxury brand stores where they now integrate a coffee shop or pastry shop inside. So it's kind of interesting how a thrift store is also going in on this trend.

[00:14:22] Speaker E: So we've been selling for about 12 years now.

Started in my parents basement, just listing stuff on the email.

Moved to like a warehouse spot and homestead and then we took the jump and opened our cafe vintage store in Shadyside last year.

[00:14:42] Speaker A: Geetcheck sources their clothes carefully and from a variety of places. They do something called wholesale buying. And that's when a distributor purchases clothes in large bulk quantities and that allows them to get a lower price all over.

[00:14:57] Speaker E: Do a lot of like wholesale buying.

Trucks travel a lot out of like the state, different states and stuff and just other smaller sellers.

[00:15:07] Speaker A: So I asked him about how he got into thrifting.

[00:15:14] Speaker E: I don't know, to be honest. Me and my business partner Brendan were always into fashion and stuff and we sold shoes for a little bit.

The margins just weren't as good.

So we moved the clothing and. Yeah. And just kind of took off from there.

[00:15:30] Speaker A: Ricky's answer kind of reminded me of the answer that madison gave in episode one, where she talked about how she grew up with thrifting. For madison and ricky, both of whom grew up in Pittsburgh, Thrifting seems to be a natural extension of their interest in clothing and fashion. In pittsburgh, it seems like when someone likes to experiment with clothing and style, Their default is not to necessarily buy something new, but to thrift for it instead of. I asked ricky about how he thinks Pittsburgh developed this very rich thrifting.

[00:16:00] Speaker E: I'd say it's pretty tight knit. It's getting bigger every single year.

And I think a reason for that is a lot of the vintage clothing is made better, and it can be more affordable. Obviously, you get some pieces that are more sought after than others, which, you know, rise in the cost. But for the most part, it's. You get very good quality at a much lower price Than you would, say, go to the mall and get a new sweatshirt.

[00:16:31] Speaker A: In the early 1970s and beyond, Pittsburgh's economic identity, which was once very rooted in steel manufacturing and heavy industry, it started eroding. So then when the steel mills closed and jobs were vanished, Populations declined and neighborhoods began to become disinvested. So in many corridors, these traditional retail stores struggled to stay afloat.

And as the city contracted in both wealth and resources, this parallel shift took hold, where reusing, repairing, recycling, and secondhand commerce became more than just niche preferences. They became practical modes of survival and creativity for locals. Specifically, thrift stores and resale shops, which historically served as social safety nets, Began overlapping into the domain of alternative culture, style, and entrepreneurship.

To conclude, I asked Ricky the question that brought me here in the first place. How does sustainability play into his business?

[00:17:30] Speaker E: Because making new clothing uses so much energy and water.

And I think I always see this, that like six or seven generations past us can just wear the clothing.

Saves money and resources.

Yeah, I think it's really in the process of doing that, There's a lot of new stores popping up and, you know, pushing for that secondhand business. So I think Pittsburgh doing a pretty good job.

[00:18:05] Speaker A: So it makes sense that store owners who focus a lot on sustainability in their business and pay a lot of attention to it Would create a community where sustainability is very central to how thrifting is done.

But something else that I noticed a lot of people mentioned Is that thrifting is affordable.

But as I looked around the store after talking to Richie, I found some of the prices kind of surprising.

Some of the prices are not necessarily more affordable, at least to us. I found a coat that was $60 a T shirt that was 20. A pretty beat up hoodie. That was $35. And what really surprised me there was a Steelers jersey for $50. I thought the answer behind this pricing could be where the flea markets are hosted. According to the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, north and south and the south side works where the flea markets are typically held Are relatively low disadvantaged communities.

This means they don't take advantage of a lot of social welfare programs. These are perhaps the result of gentrification.

[00:19:10] Speaker C: Could you remind us what gentrification is for those of us who may be.

[00:19:15] Speaker A: Unclear in general if the AP human geography definition still stands? The gentrification is the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving into it. So this does lead to improvements in housing and attracting new businesses, but it does cause prices to go up a.

[00:19:35] Speaker C: Lot which will displace the people who already live there because their neighborhoods are getting more expensive and they can no longer afford to live there.

[00:19:43] Speaker A: Gentrification in Pittsburgh specifically occurred in large part due to post industrial economic restructuring that targeted urban redevelopment policies. So after the collapse of the steel industry in the 70s and 80s, the city lost a lot of its blue collar employment base and population.

Local leaders pursued a strategy that focused on what they called EDs and MEDs. So expanding sectors tied to universities, hospitals and research institutions and later also tech investment. So, so this gentrification could be reducing how affordable thrifting is. And this kind of brings us to the question of is need based thrifting really still feasible? And does being more sustainable mean that prices will necessarily go up?

[00:20:29] Speaker C: The question here is complicated. Thrift stores and these secondhand usage are historically affordable because the clothes are not of high quality, they've been used for many years, they're often discarded or otherwise would have been thrown in the garbage by their previous owners. It could be possible that the reason why prices are going up is because clothes are being donated earlier in their lifetime and are thus already of better quality to be sold.

Additionally, it could be possible that thrifting has now gone from every day clothes to a little bit more higher end clothes, which would necessarily increase the price.

While these higher prices may be more than they were previously, they could still be proportionally less than how much they were purchased newly.

So this brings us to the question, is this gentrification actually increasing the prices themselves or is this gentrification shifting the nature of these markets that we see here?

To find out more about this, I spoke to a shop owner in a thrifting pop up in Craig street called thanks. It's thrifted.

And I asked her about the quality of her clothes.

[00:21:56] Speaker D: It's the face center in Bellefont, Pennsylvania and they were actually in their Halloween section.

[00:22:02] Speaker C: In their Halloween section.

[00:22:03] Speaker D: So that's one of the tricks to finding good vintage is go to any thrift around Halloween because they put all the vintage stuff out with the Halloween stuff.

[00:22:11] Speaker C: That's interesting.

[00:22:11] Speaker D: Yeah.

[00:22:12] Speaker C: And how do you know if it's like actual vintage?

[00:22:14] Speaker D: So there's a lot of ways to tell. Quality is a big one. You can just tell like based on new fabrics. They just made it better back in the day.

What are these called? Zoom zippers. If they have metal zippers or if the zipper says Talon. Talon was the first zipper to ever be manufactured.

And so metal zippers can tell you a lot about the age, especially if it has a brand on it, like YKK versus Talon versus all that kind of stuff. Then there's union tags. So these union tags were made between the 60s and the 80s, so that can date it. You know it's pre 1980s and then as well, well as like any kind of advertising on stuff.

So in the like 50s to 60s they did more of like the dainty cursive on tags. And then in the 70s it kind of went to the more psychedelic big bold brands. And then towards the 80s it became the big bold stuff. But more.

Yeah, not as, not as far out as the 70s stuff. So that's kind of just all over the place. There's a lot of research, especially when stuff's handmade and there's no tags in it. You just have to go buy. Like I said, the towel and metal zippers, fabric content, all that kind of.

[00:23:30] Speaker C: When I was looking through these dresses, many of them had prices in the sixty to eighty dollar range. Although they could probably be negotiated for a slight discount.

This $60 to $80 range is generally higher than you would assume in a thrifted or second hand market.

However, these dresses did look to be in very nice condition. They were not stained, they were not ripped, they were not broken.

If I was wearing it and you didn't know I had bought it thrifted, you probably wouldn't have known. This furthers our question. Instead of the items getting more expensive, could we just be selling higher quality and higher end items? Instead of selling old T shirts, are we just selling nicer clothes themselves? Additionally, these items may not just be higher end and newer, but they may also be of higher quality due to a potential rise in mending and upcycling for example, Thanksitz Thrifted sells a selection of fur vests, many of which have been mended to restore quality. Potentially previously they could have been sold as is for a much lower price.

However, when they are mended to return back to new quality, obviously the price will increase due to the quality increase.

However, the two ideas of quality and gentrification may go hand in hand.

While we may not be seeing an increase in prices just for the sake of increasing prices, it is totally possible that gentrification is causing this changing landscape and it does have a very real impact on need based shoppers.

Need based shoppers may be unable to afford these clothes regardless of the quality increase.

Maybe the story behind this gentrification is that the general items being sold are more geared towards the middle class who may not be able to afford or may not want to buy these items new, but still want to buy higher end or higher quality items.

For example, if you want to buy a prom dress, instead of going to one of those stores and purchasing one for $200, you could go to a thrift pop up and get a pretty nice dress that looks nearly new for 70 bucks. And while maybe a need based shopper may not be able to afford afford a $70 dress, it's still decently affordable in comparison for maybe a middle class shopper who is looking for something nice that they can wear over and over again without breaking the bank.

So this brings up the question, who is the target audience for thrifting in Pittsburgh?

[00:26:14] Speaker A: In doing this deep dive into thrifting culture in Pittsburgh, we realize that thrifting is a very rich topic for investing here. There seems to be multiple narratives converging on each other. We've established that thrifting is very sustainable in Pittsburgh because all of these very sustainability centric and very careful shop owners have created this very nice community of thrifters. However, we're now kind of converging on two narratives of how well and who are the shoppers served by this thrifting command. So I think it would be very interesting to talk to shoppers and see how the audience for thrifting has changed over time with how the city has developed in both education, technology and economic development.

[00:26:58] Speaker C: Thank you for listening. We've been your hosts, Kira and Lavina, and we hope to see you again soon. On the next episode of Loathing in Clothing.