Aged to Perfection

"I wanna be the Mick Jagger of secondhand," says Joshua Suzanne.

Suzanne, the proprietor of Chelsea's vintage haven Rags-a-GoGo, is bubbly and full of energy. "I wanna be a rock star secondhand clothing store owner," she continues. Suzanne is a superstar in her own realm; after all, she's been in the vintage clothing business for around 16 years now, so she knows of what she speaks.

A haven for vintage virgins and connoisseurs alike, Rags is a rare phenomenon in the secondhand clothing world. Rather than sell haute couture vintage with low turnover rates, Suzanne opts to vend her secondhand digs at affordable prices. The clothing she sells is "at least half the price, if not a quarter of the price of any other secondhand vintage clothing store," she says. "I'd rather sell 10 in a day for $48 each, instead of waiting for someone who understands the value of a $480 jacket."

In addition to offering great prices, Suzanne serves up the hottest styles in her shop. Not only does she tap into current fashion trends to find the items in their used reincarnations, but she also forges new roads in fashion. "I try to find trends," she says. "The blazer is in. It's not easy to find these blazers, so what I'm going to offer for an alternative is a tiny tux jacket."

If you think Suzanne's low price-high fashion methodology is common in the vintage fashion world, think again. Because of the ever-growing consumer desire to sport unique accents like pins, slips, and purses, the cost of merchandise has sky-rocketed.

At the New York Vintage Show, scores of designers shuffled though the racks packed with raw silks, delicate chiffons, and silver-encrusted clutches. Designers from houses like Michael Kors and Louis Vuitton searched for the pieces that would inspire their next collection and classic designs to resurrect for a new time, a new audience.

While the resurgence of trends is nothing new, clothing store patrons' increasing desire for vintage and secondhand is. As recently as 50 years ago, vintage styles were not considered commodities simply because used attire didn't always connote creativity. Because designers must come up with new ideas all the time, it's no wonder that they turn to classic shapes and cuts to determine what's hot next. For years, designers looked to the past to create new inspiration in the present, making it difficult to characterize the vintage movement as a mere trend. "The infatuation [with vintage] by pop culture is because they haven't seen it. Fashion is cyclical, so if you haven\rquote t seen the hippie, bohemian, '70s, or even '80s, it looks good to you ... The vintage thing represents craft and something of quality that's handmade," says New York Vintage Show vendor and designer Jean Claude.

Suzanne is of the same philosophy, and adds that part of the reason old pieces survive is because quality was so key for designers in, for example, the '40s and '50s. "When you look at a jacket from 1950, and it's made of wool ... the wool you get is going to be a higher quality wool that you can't get today because nowadays everything's so processed," she says. "The more vintage it is, the better the quality and that's why it lasts 40 to 50 years."

It's hard to tell what the future of vintage holds. Suzanne, for one, believes in the potential for an Internet market. "The rents are out of control in New York," she says. She blames the gentrification of the city, and proposes shopping for vintage on the Web as the next plausible alternative. "You go for things that aren't that complicated."

So, while the potential Mick Jagger of the vintage sect plots her next move, the fashion world will continue to love what's old, whether it's in the movies, the media, on the street corners, or in your grandmother's closet. In today's world, with mass produced clothing abound, sporting vintage accents is a way to personalize any outfit and be individualistic.