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THE LIFE, DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF SECOND HAND AND
VINTAGE CLOTHES IN AMSTERDAM.
An ethnographic account of the biography of clothes
Veronica Burneo Salazar 10714774
Master Social and Cultural Anthropology
Graduate School of Social Sciences
University of Amsterdam
Academic year 2014-2015
Word count 27,500
Supervisor:
dhr. prof. dr. M.P.J. (Mattijs) van de Port
Readers:
dr. M. (Milena) Veenis
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PLAGIARISM DECLARATION
"Declaration: I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism
policy [published on http://www.student.uva.nl/fraude-plagiaat/voorkomen.cfm].
I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been
properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or
any version of it, for assessment in any other paper."
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Dedication
To Casimiro,
For crossing the Atlantic in my arms, something I would never have imagined even in my wildest dreams.
For never failing to make me smile and give me strength, every day for the last 2 years and 9 months.
To those incredibly inspiring, warm, lovable and hilarious beings called the Burneo Salazar family, which the universe generously assigned to me to be my family.
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List of Contents
Cover 1 Title Page 2 Plagiarism Statement 3 Dedication 4 List of Contents 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7Chapter 1: On becoming vintage: how this status is acquired by second hand
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clothes.
Chapter 2: On being vintage or second hand: the life of clothes in the
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vintage shops and second hand markets of Amsterdam.
Chapter 3: On being discarded, treasured or exchanged: the life of clothes 43
outside of the vintage and second hand commercial circuits.
General Conclusions 60
References 65
6 Acknowledgements
For Mattijs van de Port, for his guidance, patience an enthusiasm. I feel very lucky to have found a supervisor who appreciated my vision and motivated me to turn it into this thesis, teaching me not only how to write it, but how to enjoy the process.
For Kristine Krause, for her crucial role in the first part of this process, always giving her students all the tools and motivation to move on with our proposals.
For Corina, whose inexplicable, wonderful energy to make her thesis great while at the same time giving me and others the best feedback, still amazes me.
For Camiel, whose presence, constant support and love was an inspiration throughout all of this process.
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Introduction
When doing the first exploratory approximations to the field, I was not expecting to find the huge industry of second hand clothing that exists in the Netherlands and Europe. The latter
was probably influenced by the fact that in my home city, Quito1, there are no vintage shops
and one can find only very few second hand markets. The most famous second hand market in Quito used to be a bull ring 70 years ago, and then became a place “where one could find
from a needle to an elephant”2 Nowadays, most of the market vendors in Plaza Arenas are
middle-aged single or divorced women from low socioeconomic status who are the heads of
their families, thus responsible for providing a living for their kids. On the other hand, the Plaza Arenas once had a reputation for selling stolen goods, and some people would go there to check if their recently stolen cell phone or camera, for example, was being sold there. I have borne witness that people actually have found stolen goods there and had to buy them back from the thieves. However, at the moment things at the market have become much more institutionalized and many vendors are paying taxes and the shoppers are getting invoices for their purchases. It was hard to imagine that happening in Plaza Arenas years ago, since the retailing of second hand items was always considered part of the informal work sector, with market vendors not being able to access employment rights and sometimes being caught in criminal networks which stole and then sold things in this market. As for the second hand shops, there are only a few in the city that are run by the wives of diplomats as a charity project. Needless to say that the people going there do not see it exactly as a dream shopping trip, but rather as the only way to buy the things that they need. Hence, there is a stigma attached to second hand objects and especially, to second hand clothes because it is something that is regarded as used only by “poor” people. There are no vintage clothing stores in Quito, and the reasons for that might be connected to that stigma.
This extremely brief description of Quito’s second hand clothing outlets is a testament to the volatility of certain meanings, practices and ideas attached to objects and how we use them. A piece of clothing that is considered ‘hip’ and fashionable on one side of the world, might travel to the other side and be seen as something closer to garbage. In a way, I have followed these particular objects from Quito to Amsterdam. I have appreciated them with a particular lens when I was in Ecuador, and as I changed my place in the world and moved to Amsterdam, I have found them here again, transformed into a completely different thing. This thesis is about that transformation, the many stories connected to it and my efforts to understand the ’life’ of second hand clothes in a different context, in Amsterdam.
1 Capital of Ecuador.
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8 The big picture.
Tranberg Hansen (2004) argues that there are a variety of practices related to second hand clothes in Western and non-Western countries, with the latter receiving a vast amount of clothes from western countries which are crucial as a local clothing source, and the former having niche markets for these items (2004: 385).
Back to the Netherlands, the import and export of second hand clothing has always been a big deal. Trangberg Hansen (2000) explains how the second hand clothing industry has been functioning before and after the nineteenth century in Europe and globally. Until the nineteen century in Europe, used clothes were considered “fashionable clothing”. After that, in the first half of the twentieth century, it was distributed mostly to/by charity organizations.
But in the 1970s and 1980s, some second hand stores transformed into specialized places with “exclusive” and unique items (Tranberg Hansen 2000: 248-249.) It is interesting to point out that by the first half of the eighteenth century “The Netherlands and London were
centers for the wholesale trade in used clothes” (Tranberg Hansen 2000: 249). The latter has
not changed much, with The Netherlands being the third largest worldwide second hand
exporter in the world3. At the same time it was by the turn of the century one of the biggest
importers in Europe, followed by Belgium, Luxembourg and England (Tranberg Hansen 2000: 251), which proves that there is a significant local demand for these items. Along similar lines, McMeekin (2007) and Wilson & Thorpe (2000) (as cited by McColl, Canning, McBride, Nobbs and Shearer 2013), claim that second hand clothes considered vintage have become a “multimillion pound industry” which might be surprising to some people since second hand clothes have always been viewed as commodities purchased by budget consumers.
Those stores “with unique and exclusive items”, have been called since the 80’s in Amsterdam “vintage shops”. I argue that the category of “vintage” is crucial to understand the mechanisms associated to the distribution of second hand clothes globally, and to the ways they are classified also at a smaller scale by the second hand and vintage clothes enthusiasts. At this point, it is important to clarify the difference between second hand and vintage, even when in my opinion such difference never seems to be completely clear.
Vintage clothes are most of the times second hand clothes, but when they have been categorized as vintage, their status among second hand clothes changes, their value is greater. Even so, there is no such thing as a single way to understanding and describing what vintage clothes are, as this concept is relatively new. There is a certain consensus about the paucity of literature on the concept of vintage (McColl et al. 2013; DeLong, Heinemann and
9 Reiley 2005; Downing Peters 2014), however, there seems to be an agreement about the massive popularity of clothes and objects that are described as “vintage” in the western world.
The term vintage originally means a “good grape crop of wine of a specific region or year” (DeLong et al. 2005: 23), or in a slightly different way a “season’s yield of grapes or wine from a vineyard” (Downing Peters 2014: 218). Among the tons of second hand clothes in Amsterdam that are either put in recycling bins, in the garbage or given to market vendors by random people, there is a group of clothes that are not considered only second hand or used. Those clothes are vintage and are hunted by retailers, shoppers and big vintage distributors through a process in which a very specific, almost professional knowledge about fashion is circulating. There is a revaluation process taking place with those clothes, in which vintage connoisseurs learn to recognize brands, materials, shapes and qualities that are supposed to have only existed in previous eras. Some of those brands, materials, shapes and qualities are considered iconic to fashion and to their particular era. Amid those involved in the vintage clothing industry, there is no agreement as to which eras should already be labeled as vintage.
Some scholars have made an effort to come up with a definition of the concept of vintage. Downing Peters (2014) argues that the key aspect to this is how this concept is constructed and performed by the retailers (which she calls “vintage curators”) and the vintage buyers “through performances of mutual understanding, exchanges of highly specialized knowledge and community building” (2014: 215). Her research was done in a vintage flea market in New York, where her focus was on those interactions and how they stimulate the circulation of this knowledge. The author argues that without a community of actors actively triggering a “vintage sensibility” these objects would be just second hand. Hence, it is a contingent category (2014: 235). DeLong et al. (2005) also believe that the involvement in the revaluation and change of status of clothes is the fundamental aspect of wearing vintage, “and only secondarily about markets for resale of clothing.” (2005: 23). They also mention a ‘shift’ in which flea markets and thrift stores “were elevated to becoming acceptable sources of fashion” and the stigma of wearing used clothes decreased. After this, “a differentiation between vintage and used clothing followed” (2005: 25.) Even when the authors do not include an explanation about the reasons to this shift, they stress its key role to the huge change in the perceptions about using second hand or recycled clothes (2005: 25). In the meantime, McColl, Canning, McBride, Nobs and Shearer (2013) have defined vintage in terms of three dimensions: the age of clothing, the style and the quality. During their research with vintage retailers, the participants did not come up with a unified description
(2013:145). JenB (as cited by Venstra and Kuipers 2013: 356.), defines vintage as “a
construction of past images and historic looks which can be achieved with original objects as well as with new ones that look historic.” Therefore, it does not necessarily account for only second hand clothing (some vintage clothing is new), but its style always evokes older, past
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fashion styles. Tranberg Hansen (2000) adds other practices related to second hand and vintage shopping, like re-sales for designer clothes, where the clothes are perceived as art. She also describes thrift shopping “as a past-time activity for vintage connoisseurs on the look for rare finds” (Tranberg Hansen 2000: 250.)
Another relevant issue is what DeLong et al. (2005) argues is a “rebirth” taking place with second hand clothes when they are given the status of vintage, a process which occurs when they are moved from one setting to the other, changing their status this way. Because of the latter, in my opinion, these are not just regular clothes, these are clothes with a certain biography determined by their migration through different eras, places, bodies and meanings. And it is such trajectory that has puzzled me. In the same manner, I argue that besides all of the mentioned characteristics, the concept of vintage and second hand is constructed within the settings mentioned by DeLong et al. (2005), an approach that I will explain in the following part of this document.
I intend to use this research to focus on the different stages and phases that used clothes go through, which as stated before, in Amsterdam are determined to a large extent by their status as vintage or second hand. My research has not sought to clarify the concept of vintage, but to attempt to explain its effects on the changes that second hand clothes in Amsterdam go through. Having said that, it was important to clarify some of the most common definitions of the vintage concept.
Theoretical framework.
The study of clothes in Anthropology is not new, with fashion theory developing an important body of knowledge about the topic recently. However, there has been a tendency to analyse clothes more as “representing something else rather than something in its own right” (Tranberg Hansen 2004: 369). The shift to study clothes in the framework of the debates from material culture studies seems to have changed the latter, conceptualizing them as objects that are worth focusing on, as a ways to reveal the relations, meanings, practices and usages attached to them in a particular context, and as a fruitful method to also understand the implications of the latter. While my argument could take a number of turns in terms of theory and methodology, I would like to explore the theoretical and methodological possibilities of focusing on the materiality of second hand clothes through the metaphor of them having a ‘biography’, precisely to distance myself from an interpretation that might disregard their active role in social relations and in constantly shifting categories and concepts while they move in society. Because of the latter, my thesis is inscribed in the anthropological debates about the role of objects and the theoretical and methodological implications of doing research from this perspective.
11 The objects at the center
Hay lugares habitados por cosas maestras que desconocemos Eduardo Milan4
In this thesis there is a strong emphasis on the objects, and because of this, there has been an attempt to take distance from symbolic or semiotic explanations, in which clothes are generally analysed only as signs or symbols of what people are (Miller 2010: 12), and the methods used to do such analysis are mostly verbal and linguistic-based. To that end, I have chosen a theoretical framework that draws from the contributions from material culture studies, especially those from Daniel Miller (2002, 2005, 2010, 2011 and 2012) and his extensive research on clothing through which he has attempted to develop a theory of stuff (things).
Secondly, with the intention to observe the different changes of status of second hand clothes in Amsterdam, I have embraced Igor Kopytoff’s (1986)5 work about the cultural biography of things, an approach to things that emphasizes the importance of observing their transformation as they are produced, used and moved in different settings, in different contexts. What’s more, this author argues that one can construct the biography of a thing in a similar way that one would do the biography of a person, and this thesis is fundamentally about the biography of second hand clothes in the city of Amsterdam.
With this in mind, I argue that the framework of wardrobe studies (Grimstad Klepp & Bjerck 2012: 373) could be of great help in order to build up on the focus on clothes in the context of material studies, which means that this approach emphasizes the material element of clothes, as opposed to the symbolic, by analyzing how clothes relate to each other on the
whole or in parts of a wardrobe (Grimstad Klepp & Bjerck 2012: 373). The 'setting' that
would allow to embrace such approach is the material frame where the clothes are actually
kept. However, this frame does not refer only to the physical limits of, for example, a closet.
It has to do with an entire structure of different storage spaces with corresponding criteria
for where and what clothes should be kept and how clothes should be moved between them (2012:375.) The concept of material frame of clothes will be of great importance in this
document.
Also worth mentioning is the effort I have made to incorporate photography and the
4 In English: There are places inhabited by master things we don’t know of. Eduardo Milan.
5 It is important to mention that the work of Kopytoff was included in a collection of essays titled “The social life of things”, from Arjun Appadurai, which focused on the idea of “objects having a life” (Appadurai: 2006).
12 internet as places or material frames of clothes. Following Horst and Miller’s (2012) considerations about the internet as a new kind of place “rather than a form of placelessness”. Through the publications of the photographs and stories that resulted from my research in a blog designed for this purpose, this understanding of the internet as a new place for clothes has had significant implications in my way to tell their biography and to understand their materiality.
Additionally, even when on this thesis the concepts of fashion and style are not central, it cannot be denied that they are constantly present, influencing in many ways the places where second hand clothes circulate in the city. My use of the terms fashion and style has been informed by Eicher (2001), Tranberg Hansen (2004.) and again, Miller (2002, 2010, 2011.)
The theory of things
The best way to understand, convey and appreciate our humanity is through attention to our fundamental materiality.
Daniel Miller, Stuff 2010 My understanding of the concept of an ‘object’ and what objects do, will follow Miller’s views on this topic. There are two key ideas from the work of this author that will be crucial for the argument of this thesis. Firstly, the acknowledgement of role of the objects and of the material world surrounding us in “making us”. Secondly, his critical approach to the Western separation of objects and people, which ignores how integral objects are to human actions.
Actually, Miller affirms that he tries to demolish (Miller 2010: 5) the idea that there is an obvious opposition between the person and the thing, the animate and the inanimate, the subject and the object. Through his analysis, he is trying to bring attention to what is on the
outside in a position which criticizes the ideas that affirm that “materiality represents the
merely apparent behind which lies that which is real” (Miller 2005). His intention is to challenge the opposition of the objects to the subjects, as a ways to give a certain agency to the former.
Moreover, Miller argues that things, which he also calls “stuff”, creates us. For that reason, it should not be regarded as only a “form of representation, a semiotic sign or a symbol of the person”. When referring to clothing, the author suggests to see it as an “active part in constituting the particular experience of the self, in determining what the self is” (2010:40).
In order to undertake that type of analysis, Miller first develops what he calls a “plausible and helpful theories of stuff”. By doing that, the author has attempted to pursuit a way to explain the relation between people and things in a radically different manner than the
13 theory of representation in which the role of things is always reduced to social relations (2010:48). Miller is critical to “approaches which view material culture as merely the semiotic representation of some bedrock of social relations” (2005: 4)
To him, material objects can be considered a setting which works most of the time in an invisible way (2010:50). With this in mind, he mentions Goffman’s Frame theory book where the latter emphasizes the importance of the frame “which constitutes the context of action” and adds a clear example of that: when something violent is happening to an actor in a theater play, the audience will not do anything because it is happening in the setting of the theater, and therefore the audience knows they ought to be there only observing, listening and clapping. There is a silent agreement as we take note, in a silent way, “of the place in which the action is set” (2005: 5). Would that violence happen in another place, the reactions would definitely be different. For Miller, this contribution from Goffman is the first theoretically relevant aspect of his theory of things.
The second is Gombrich and his views on art. According to Miller, the former puts also attention, like Goffman, in the frame. However, in his case he focuses on the frame in which artwork is placed, and how that frame’s presence is what actually causes a certain reaction towards art works, but it does this in a silent way. When the frame is appropriate (an art gallery, a museum) we do not really see it. On the other hand, to put art work in a certain places, also guarantees how much money we would pay for it, Miller argues. The latter will be developed further in this document, as when it comes to vintage clothing I also argue that the frame where it is set (a vintage shop, a second hand market, a charity shop or a closet) completely determines every aspect of those clothes status: price, value as a historical-fashion item, strategies deployed to find it, etc. On a similar tone, and through the similar approach of wardrobe studies, I will attempt to provide a detailed description of what Grimstad Klepp & Bjerck (2012) call the material frame of clothes.
Miller´s concept of the “humility of things” is also strongly influenced by the former authors. The latter means that objects work in a most effective way when we do not see them, when we are not even aware of their presence and yet they make us conscious of what is appropriate or inappropriate They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so” (2010: 49, 2005: 5). Now, this invisible influence of things, which Millers calls “the blindingly obvious”, can only be accomplish because they become familiar to us and therefore we take them “for granted” (2010: 50). With the latter, Miller makes a reference to Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his observations about the role of certain objects in socialization processes, as “they become the primary means by which people are socialized as social beings (2005:6).
Similarly, Geller (as cited by Edwards and Hart 1998: 4) even goes as far as to argue that objects can be seen as social actors, in that it is not the meanings of things per se that are
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important but their social effects as they construct and influence the field of social action in ways that would not have occurred if they did not exist. Edwards and Hart (2004) explain the
issue brought up by Miller through the opposition of the animate and inanimate and its relation to the self, by arguing that objects are bridges between mental and physical worlds, as objects are not just settings for human actions and meanings but integral to them
(Edwards and Hart 2004: 4.)
Interestingly, Miller suggests that such definition of things as having some sort of agency, is a direct attack to the dominating ideas about “the sacralised concept of agency as the essential and defining property of persons” which critique the applying of this concept to the non-human world (2005:11). Yet, it is not possible to understand the latter statement if we were to compare the agency of things and persons as one and the same thing, or even worse, things and persons as equivalent entities, because of course they are not. That is to say, our attention should be placed in the network of relations in which objects are involved and play a certain role. From the point of view of Miller, the effect of objects in the networks of relations in which people are involved should not be ignored. “Men do not fly, nor does a B52 bomber fly, but the US air force does”. (2005:12).
Along the same lines, Edwards criticizes certain ideas about objects as only passive entities in social processes, since in her opinion “objects are enmeshed in and active in social relations” (2002: 68) which should be observed on their mundane, everyday lives.
For Miller, there is a material world created before us and during our existence that we need to look as if it was a mirror, to really understand who we are. He states that this is our “material mirror” (2005: 8). The fact that this material world was created before us, and that certain meanings attached to things already existed before we were even born, is a crucial premise to understand when Miller argues that things “make us”. Furthermore, the author argues that there is a “system of things” with an internal order, which we learn through everyday routines in order to be who we are (2010: 53), an idea which again unquestionably still connected to Bourdieu’s theory of practice, as it was stated before and as Miller himself insists.
All things considered, I believe that this theoretical approach is consistent with my intention to put the objects at the center of my analysis, which in this case are the second hand clothes in Amsterdam. Nonetheless, I found that only a concept about what the object is and what it does, while fundamental as a theoretical point of departure and a central theory, could be strengthen in terms of methodologically account for the transformation of second hand clothes in different contexts, and places in the city. Because of the latter, I resorted to Kopytoff’s work about the cultural biography of things, taking the author’s metaphor as a way to show how the stories of objects and humans inform each other (Gosden and Marshall 1999). In the same manner, the methodological approach of wardrobe studies is
15 also extremely useful when trying to understand how these transformations take place in specific material frames.
How to tell the story of a thing
To us, a biography of a painting by Renoir that ends up in an incinerator is as tragic, in its way, as the biography of a person who ends up murdered.
Igor Kopytoff. 1986.
When Kopytoff (1986) argues that one can construct the cultural biography of things in the same way as one does with the biography of persons, he is also inscribing his work in an area of thought similar to that of Miller. The latter means that they both are interested in the relationship between people and things. My approach to this author has been both theoretical and methodological, since his ideas about following these social transformations are quite precise in terms of the particular characteristics one should observe in these traveling objects. Needless to say, the latter does not mean that the author proposes an inflexible, thoughtless “check list” to reflect on these transformations, but his ideas have influenced my methodology in an important way.
Kopytoff agrees with Miller in criticizing the Western obsession with the opposition between things and people, however, he focuses on how things have always been placed in the
universe of commodities, while people have always been connected to the universe of individuation and singularization (Kopytoff 1986: 64). Through the example of slavery, he
explains how this division “is recent and culturally speaking, exceptional” and attempts to approach the concept of commodity with the example of slavery (1986: 64).
People were transformed into commodities in this period of history, but during their trajectory as slaves they changed that status in a process that he explains as a social
transformation that involves a succession of phases (1986: 65). The social transformation of
a slave occurred when he/she was sold first as a commodity, but afterwards, was inserted into a society, a group of slaves, or a family and then rehumanized. If sold again to a new 'owner', the person would be again perceived as a commodity. Hence, the slave was constantly acquiring different statuses throughout this whole process, which I should add, is not lineal. The succession of phases might repeat themselves in a circular way depending of the setting, and the social expectations surrounding the person.
Having said that, it is not the aim of the thesis to focus on the concept of commodity and explore the theories related to it. But with this in mind, when discussing Kopytoff’s text it is unavoidable and it should be noted that he is reflecting on the commoditization process of things. The latter does not imply that the use of his biographical approach on the specific topic of this document is not possible.
16 So, as it has been argued before, one of the characteristics of vintage and second hand clothing is their very particular trajectory, as they migrate from places, time, bodies and meanings in a way in which the cultural markers attached to them change constantly. Now, in the specific case of these items in Amsterdam, one has to wonder why such objects have been given the status of vintage at times, and 'only' second hand at others; why some of them are placed in shops and others are left lying on the floor of an open air market; why sometimes they are quite pricy and at others they are the cheapest clothing option. These are just a few examples of certain transformations.
Citing Margaret Mead, Kopytoff affirms that one can understand a society by trying to comprehend what “sort of biography it regards as embodying a successful social career. Clearly, what is seen as a well- lived life in an African society is different in outline from what would be pronounced as a well- lived life along the Ganges, or in Brittany or among the Eskimos. ” (1986: 66). In the construction of the biography of second hand and vintage clothes in Amsterdam, the previous statement is crucial to account for the expectations connected to these very particular objects, what would be considered a life well-lived in the case of a used piece of clothing? Agreeing with Kopytoff, I believe that this might be possible to observe in the movement of these objects.
For this author, several aspects of the ‘life’ of a thing might account for that ‘social career’ Mead was talking about, like the 'possibilities' and original status of the thing versus the actual realization of those possibilities and status. Also, the origin of the thing (explaining where does it comes from, who made it and description of the trajectory of the thing so far); the traces left in the thing from the ways in which it has been used, but also from the 'ages' and 'periods' in the thing's life. Finally, the 'death' of the thing: describing what happens when it is not going to be used in any way anymore (1986: 66-67). Interestingly, I have yet to observe the death of clothes in Amsterdam, but this issue will be discussed later on this document.
In her study about the materiality of photographs, Edwards (2002) says that “materiality is closely related to social biography”. While her field of study is closer to photography, she also sees the importance to material culture of observing objects in their “continuous processes of meaning, production, exchange and usage.” (2002: 68) and not only in a single point of their life.
Fashion and style, vintage and second hand clothing.
Even though this is not a study about fashion and style, these concepts are inevitably attached to clothes, therefore I would argue that it is important to briefly clarify them, which in this case will be done with the help of Clarke and Miller (2002) and Tranberg Hansen (2004). The former authors disagree with a description of fashion based only on the
17 commercial characteristics of it, with a focus on its system of production. They, on the other hand, view fashion as the result of much larger forces that not always coincide with what the fashion industry dictates, and by doing this, they challenge the ideas about the omnipresence and power of the fashion industry in people´s lives. Actually, Miller argues that there is evidence that people chose their clothes despite of what fashion industry determines (Miller 2010: 33.) Thus, there is a larger social context that determines clothing
choices (Clarke and Miller 2002: 192.) Miller adds that fashion is a collective experience, the
collective experience of following a trend. While style is more of an individual construction
of an aesthetic based not just on what you wear, but on how you wear it. (Miller 2010: 15.)
Even when I agree with the latter, fashion should also be regarded is a type of framework to understand contemporary dressing practices (Tranberg Hansen 2004: 371.) The specific knowledge about vintage and second hand clothing that the different actors of this ‘circuit’ share and circulate, might be explained, partly, by understanding their particular take on fashion and style.
Methodological framework
All clothes contain traces of the ways in which they have been used.
Grimstad Klepp & Bjerck. 2012.
It has already been mentioned that the main goal of this thesis is to construct a biography of second hand clothes in Amsterdam, by following Kopytoff’s biographical approach to things. At the same time, there is an aim to focus on the materiality of the clothes, emphasizing their identity as ‘objects’ from the point of view of material culture studies, and specifically, Miller’s theory of things. The latter implies that I am recognizing the role of clothes in “making us” through their involvement in a network of relations in which their existence should not be ignored or approached only from a semiotic or symbolic standpoint.
In order to accomplish the latter, I have based my methodology not only on the previously cited authors, but also on Grimstad Klepp and Bjerck’s (2014) methodological approach to the materiality of clothing in which the point of departure is the recognition of the material as “active element in the practices” and not just a “carrier of different type of symbols”. This approach is called wardrobe studies. Firstly, the authors clarify that the term wardrobe can be taken literally or metaphorically. Secondly, they suggest one of two options to highlight the material instead of the symbolic, which are to either analyze the relation between the body and the clothes or to study the relationship between clothes “to other clothes within a greater whole (wardrobe) as a way to highlight the materiality of clothing”. The latter is what has been my focus on this research, together with what the authors have designated as ‘the material frame of clothes’, understood as “not only the physical walls of the closet, but also an entire structure of different storage spaces with corresponding criteria for where and what clothes should be kept and how clothes should be moved between them” (2014: 273).
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Both arguments result in an emphasis on the places in which clothes are kept and the ways in which they are classified, organized, preserved and prioritized in a specific setting.
It should be noted though, that the concept of ‘wardrobe” in this particular methodological approach is not limited to the closet and in my research it has been broaden to clothing distribution companies, second hand markets, and vintage clothing stores. Through wardrobe studies, such material frame is analyzed in an 'inventory' type of way, and the individual items are compared to the larger material frame (2012: 365.) The issue of knowledge is also approached by these authors, who emphasis the methodological importance of analyzing what are the categories that determine how the items will be organized in a specific setting.
Another issue these authors remark is that of the registration of data when doing wardrobe studies. I would like to emphasis the latter, not only due to the challenge of doing research about things, but because of the incorporation of visual methods in this registration process. Photography has been a crucial part of the generation and registration of data on this research in order to observe and make visible certain issued that might not be found in interviews, participant observation and even the material frame analysis. Aside from the visual registration, these authors propose a methodology in which the observations from the material are combined with the explanations from the informants (2012: 381). The latter, nevertheless, possess some limitations when doing research, since the verbal statements have been at the center of methodology in Anthropology. , which has been also approached by Hirschaurer (2007) and his considerations about what he calls, the silence of the social. The author brings attention to what appears to be a linguistic bias, or the preference for linguistic primary data, that can only be obtained through interviews and participant observation (Hirschauer 2007: 415.) The challenge then is, to bring the attention also to what happens mutely, as a wordless, inarticulate, illiterate, process...to move the
muteness to the center of ethnographic writing ((Hirschauer 2007: 415.) In my opinion, the
latter can be accomplish, among other measures, by the use of photography in the research of things.
Approaching the visual from a materiality perspective
There is an interesting and undeniable connection between material culture and visual anthropology that I have embraced in order to emphasize the importance of the visual when doing research on clothes, but specifically in this case in which the clothes were at the center of the analyzes and their material frames needed to be described in a detailed way. I argue that two mediums have become crucial to study the latter: photography and the internet. On this document, both are seen as material frames of the clothes as well, in which the lives of these objects continue. As much as second hand clothes are ‘rebirthed’ constantly during their trajectory through the circuits of used clothes in Amsterdam, their
19 presence in photographs posted online can be viewed as yet another revival in which new interactions appear and give way to new meanings and practices motivated by the clothes.
According to Edwards (2002), the direct observation of objects from the point of view of material culture “allow us to question ingrained assumptions concerning the superiority of language over other forms of expression such as visual and material forms, and constitute the objects as important bridges between mental and physical worlds” (2002: 69).
Another key approach in this same direction comes from digital anthropology and its link to materiality (Horst and Miller: 2012), in which there is critique to those who grasp the digital world as “a new form of ephemerality” ignoring what Miller has called “the humility of things” and how we realize of the materiality of things once they fail, as it happens with technology. If our technological devices stop working, they can absolutely break us, revealing like that their materiality (2012: 104).
Visual methods: some considerations
I decided to incorporate visual methods on this research, specifically photography. However, in my opinion the use of such approach should have a clear intention within the whole theoretical and methodological framework. One of those intentions has been described in the previous section, with photography facilitating the visibility of things in ways that linguistic methods can only describe in a limited way. The second has to do with the possibility to include a participatory approach in anthropological research. This is why I have been positively surprised to find that there is an interesting debate about the potential of visual methods for participatory research and strengthening of the public side of Anthropology. The mentioned debates focus on the potential of visual methods and media
in the production of a public Anthropology (Pink 2014: 437.) Nevertheless, there is yet
another aspect that a public, visual Anthropology promotes a debate about and that is the expertise of Anthropologists. By doing the latter, the expertise of the anthropologists is debatable, thus reversing the conventional power relations that often typified fieldwork...in
such collaborative, applied anthropology, expertise is always distributed and co/produced, never invested exclusively in one individual (...) (Pink 2014: 442.) The use of photography and
internet as part of this research motivated a more active role of the ´informants´ in the way they have been represented and a minor yet thought-provoking exchange with fellow social scientists have proved to me the possibilities of what Pink has called a public Anthropology.
Main research question and methods.
The previous theoretical and methodological framework has been constructed in an attempt to answer to the question: How do clothing items transform as they migrate through the
20 This research was conducted in Amsterdam between January and March 2015 as a multi-sites fieldwork in a single city. To explore the biography of second hand clothes in Amsterdam, I followed these objects through different sites: vintage clothing distributors, second hand markets, vintage shops, people’s closets, clothing swap parties, a clothing swap shop and the Facebook pages specialized in second hand and vintage clothes in Amsterdam. The decision to focus on these places was taken based on what proved to be a sort of ´trajectory´ that the clothes were following in which these places played a crucial role.
I was able to establish a network of informants with whom I remained very close during my fieldwork and who each represent the different sites of the trajectory of second hand clothes in Amsterdam. My decision to start and deepen my relationship with this group of informants was related to my intention to understand how they influence the metamorphosis or transformation of these objects by recycling and distributing them to the vintage shops (informant: owner of a vintage clothing distribution company); purchasing them for their vintage shop (informants: 2 vintage shop owners) and selling them in open air markets (informants: 3 vendors in Waterlooplein and Noordermarkt). In the latter I worked as a voluntary assistant to the market vendors in charge of different tasks, from setting up and dismantle the stalls every day to helping with the sales and decoration. In the former places I mostly did participant observation and a series of interviews. I consider this group the “commercial group” because they are mostly involved in the second hand and vintage business in the city.
The second group of informants is more diverse and what they have in common is their role in the circulation of clothes in the city, even when compared to the first group, they do so at a micro level involving practices not related to a commercial interest. The group is formed by 4 vintage and second hand clients/consumers, a group of 6 friends attending a swap party, the coordinator of a swap shop and two women who regularly sell their second hand clothes on Facebook.
I spent most of my time with the mentioned groups of informants, but I also did observations and additional (structured and informal) interviews in several vintage and second hand shops, the Ij-Hallen monthly market, and with fashion designers and clients of the markets and shops.
All of the research process was photographed and the visual part of it (the pictures) uploaded to the blog created for this thesis: clothingtales.wordpress.com. During its time on the air, the blog received 1.328 visitors from different parts of the world, especially Ecuador.
21
Chapter 1
On becoming vintage: how this status is acquired by second hand
clothes.
The place where second hand clothes are turned into vintage items: the warehouse
I went to a charity shop and bought a second hand black velvet jacket when I was 15 and went home absolutely happy about how cheap and unique it was. That second hand store where I got it was a charity project run by the wives of some diplomats from Europe and the United States. When I came home, I showed it to my mother, who forbid me to tell anyone that this was a used jacket; that would make her feel ashamed in front of her family and friends. Additionally, she did not like the thought of the jacket maybe having belonged to some dead person. She quickly proceeded to wash and disinfect it. I never stopped loving that jacket and brought it with me to Amsterdam, and it is there in my closet as it has been the case for many years.
Now, I am standing in the middle of this huge warehouse filled with second hand clothes. I had already heard stories about this place at the outskirts of Amsterdam where second hand clothes were classified to be later on distributed to vintage shops and markets in the city. The stories about rooms filled with cowboy boots and 60s clothes made me think of this place as a sort of a secret haven for vintage clothing enthusiasts, like myself. It really was.
P. is a Dutch man in his fifties, quite friendly, who obviously enjoys his job a lot. I called him6 and explained to him very briefly the details of my research project. He was immediately friendly and open, offering to pick me up the week after that from Schiphol airport to take me to his vintage clothing company. The access to the place was not too easy, as only one bus line was available to get there and it did not go very often.
We arrived at the company, and P. gave me a ‘tour’ of the huge warehouse where the whole organization and classification of the clothes takes place. The warehouse is divided in three big sections. In the first section, three men are standing on 3 platforms overlooking this part of the warehouse, which is filled with hundreds of plastic, see-through bags of about 1 meter high. The three men are picking up clothes from a bigger bag placed in front of them, touching them, analyzing every item which is afterwards placed in one of the hundreds of bags in the room. It takes them just a few minutes to analyze a piece of clothing and to decide where it should be located. I notice that there is something written in big blue letters on every bag. The first one that I read says: “70s sweaters”. I walk in the room and see “animal print”; “silk blouses”; “80s sports”; “Burberry”; “pencil skirts”; “white lace”.
6
22 There are probably at least 500 bags in this part of the room, and I start to wonder how these categories came to exist. 7
The overwhelming amount and volume of clothes draws my attention. P. argues that this is a recycling business. All of the clothes actually come from recycling companies in The Netherlands that have bought them from charity organizations such as the Red Cross, Salvation Army or Humana. Those organizations then use the money for their charity or development projects.
One can find dozens of clothing recycling bins in Amsterdam. Big, green containers are distributed in different places in town. “Clothes with a future”, is the slogan which attempts to promote not just recycling, but solidarity with those “less privileged” societies and it is written on every bin, accompanied by the picture of a woman carrying a bag from the Red Cross that protects her from the strong sun rays. The woman is also wearing a headscarf, which makes me think that she is a Muslim. There are also some instructions written in English and Dutch:
7 In order to be able to see the content of the QR CODES, it is necessary to download from a smart phone or a tablet, an app which is available for free in the google store.
23
What is allowed in the container and what isn’t
Allowed: sweaters, t-shirts, shirts, pants, skirts, dresses, socks, shoes, boots, sport shoes, jackets, , coats,
towels, tea towels, hand towels, blankets/bed covers, sandals, curtains, belts, hats, scarfs,
Not allowed: carpets, blankets, dirty or wet clothes, textile agricultural products, uniforms/professional
clothing, leftovers from textiles, mattresses, cushions.
For everything you deliver, this applies: clean, not dirty, shoes should be paired (together), please put the
clothes in a closed bag
No garbage! Textile and footwear only! Find out what happens with your textiles.
The categories above are much simpler and far less sophisticated than those that are the basis of the work at the warehouse. So, when somebody throws their used clothes into these bins, they believe they are giving them to charity. “People think that in general, their clothes go directly to the poor people. This is not usually the case”, P. claims. When the clothes are collected from the bins, the charity organizations have quite a big bulk. Because the volumes are huge, these institutions sell the clothes to recycling companies, which allows them to get funding for their various projects and to pay for the space they occupy in the city with the bins. “They are supposed to do good things with the money”, says P. Once the clothes arrive at the recycling companies, a new classification is made and the clothes are graded according to quality. The lowest grades go to India and Pakistan, where the clothes will actually stop being clothes and turned into towels, cleaning cloths and similar items. The next grade goes to Africa in general, where other traders will buy them to then sell them to market vendors, “they are pressed in small packages, 45/50 kilos, then the guy from the market takes it, put it on his neck, goes to the market and finally cuts the package open and sells it.” The following group of clothing is considered to be of very good quality and is sent to Eastern European countries and the Middle East. Finally, the best quality is for the Western European countries and this category is called “cream quality”, which is considered “the best of the best” and it represents 5 to maximum 10% of the total amount. Even though the warehouse has 4000 square meters of storage space which is filled with bags with the clothes, they do not really take much from the total volume of the recycling companies, only 0.5 to 1%. When the clothes arrive, they are handed over to the men on the 3 platforms, who spend the day picking them up, feeling the material with their hands, as some of the categories are related to the material only (silk blouses, white lace, velvet dresses, suede jackets, fake fur, among others). Analyzing the design is another crucial part of this procedure, which implies a bigger focus on the shape of the clothes. By talking to P. I learn that an 80s sweater usually has the shape of a butterfly, while the 90s sweaters are straight, longer and more loose. I also learn that bomber jackets are in big demand at the moment, so they have put a special effort to look for them. “The girls use oversized bomber jackets with leggings, they love them. Before, the skin heads used to wear them, now they
24 use them to have a 80s look. It is the same with the fur coats. Before, they were so fancy and elegant and now the girls use them with a legging and sneakers.” There are some bags dedicated to certain brands like Burberry8, Adidas9 and Levi’s10, “quite iconic brands for vintage fashion”, he continues. In the case of the shoes, All Star11 is a very ‘traditional’ brand in the vintage world. This conversation with P. makes me realize his knowledge of the history of fashion is quite impressive, so I ask him if he has studied it formally at the university or some similar institution, but he just learned from the experience of selling these clothes, and the same goes for everyone in the warehouse; nobody has had formal education in fashion or a similar discipline.
It’s just experience, it takes time. In principle, they do what the people in the recycling companies do. They select qualities. They are really good at it. They know what we do. They
know all the styles. It takes half a year or a year of learning, of experience. Some people really don’t see it, which is also possible. People who have no idea about clothes. The best would be like to have a group of hipsters12 here, they are a really good source, and they know
what to do! (Laughs). They have to recognize the styles and be able to separate them (80s, 70s).The more they are into fashion the better it is for us. We care about their ideas. They
have to be able to recognize a 70s looks, or a 60s look. If they don’t recognize it, then it’s impossible, then it’s a problem.
So, the connoisseurs are not only the buyers and sellers: “people in the know” can also be found in charity organizations, recycling companies and distant warehouses. Those are certainly unexpected places for fashion. The knowledge of people working there was not necessarily learnt by doing research about retro aesthetics, but acquired in the direct, routinely contact with these clothes. As it was discussed before, the concept of vintage is strongly connected to a certain “expertise” shared among those who buy and sell vintage items. Downing Peters (2014) also talks about the status of connoisseur that sellers and buyers acquire through the circulation of knowledge about what vintage is. There is not only one way, as previously mentioned, to define what vintage is but what cannot be denied is that here is a specific knowledge circulating, a process that has been described by Gregson et al. (as cited by DeLong, Heinemann and Reiley 2005: 24) as “clever dressing”. The latter refers to those who are considered “knowing audiences” and “those who are in the know”, who are clearly deciding on the categories that define P.’s business.
8 Burberry Group is a British luxury fashion house founded in 1856 (Source:
https://uk.burberry.com/our-history/#/heritage/heritage-1800-1) 9
Adidas AG is a German multinational corporation that designs and manufactures sports shoes, clothing and accessories, founded in 1924. (Source: http://www.global.adidas.com/)
10
Levi Strauss & Co. is a privately held American clothing company known worldwide for its Levi’s brand of denim jeans. It was founded in 1853 (Source: http://www.levistrauss.com/our-story/)
11
Athletic shoes produced by Nike, Inc. through its Converse division. The original Converse model and the company were created 1908 (Source: http://www.chucksconnection.com/history1.html)
12
As defined by the Urban Dictionary, hipsters are a “subculture of men and women in their 20's and 30's that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.” In their rejection of mainstream consumption practices, hipster are important clientes to vintage and thrift stores http://nl.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hipster
25 P. started as a market vendor on the Waterlooplein13 in the beginning of the 80s, selling vintage clothing when it was very popular in The Netherlands already in the 60s. He trains all of the workers from the warehouse about the history of fashion, and the type of clothes that they need. “We do envision certain looks when we choose the clothes”, he tells me, which implies an active effort to keep up with the different trends in vintage fashion that become popular every season. They change all the time, which makes this business very connected to the past and to the future at the same time, because its owners also try to predict which items will be in demand. In this sense, Downing Peters might be right when she argues that one should observe the category of vintage not only as it relates to the past, but as it used in the present (2014: 216).
These categories are not static, it is all very dynamic. We supply to a lot of countries, you have this time frame in fashion of maybe 5 years. Something that is fashionable in one country, its maybe over in another country. In England high street14 is very popular. In Japan
they wear like all kinds of crazy clothes because they don’t have any references to the Western culture. So they can wear Doctor Martens15, dye their hair green and put on a 70s
t-shirt. For them, it doesn’t really matter. England is usually a little bit ahead of The Netherlands. Spain and Greece are a little bit behind compared to other countries in Europe.
Holland is a little bit in the middle, same with France and Belgium. At the moment 90s are very popular in The Netherlands. Silk blouses, sports jackets are very popular, converse sneakers, fake fur was very popular this winter. Every year is a big surprise. I wish I knew
everything up front, but we also just keep guessing.
Our talk continues as we walk up to the second floor of the warehouse, where yet another
man16, is in charge of the bags containing shoes, women bags, hats and belts, which are also
carefully organized in the transparent plastic bags. There is a bag dedicated only to golden belts and plenty of bags with cowboy boots. Then, I recognize these boots which I have seen in pictures of my father when he was young: a pair of 70s men leather boots that were quite scandalous in the Ecuadorian society at the time, because they have a small heel, and for my father’s parents “heels should be worn only by women”. I bit further there is a bag filled with silk scarfs and some fur hats, flip flops, and the ever present Adidas shoes. The tour is almost over and I feel incredibly cold. It is winter and the warehouse does not have a heating system, which does not seem to be a problem for anyone there, except me. This place is quite the opposite of some of the warm and cozy shops where these clothes are going to go soon. It is a rather cold, vast and the bags containing the clothes are piled. Hundreds of bags.
13
Waterlooplein is the oldest second hand market in Amsterdam (130 years). 14
There is a lot of debate regarding the meaning of “high street fashion”but in general, it is refered to affordable clothes that are quite fashionable at the same time.
15
British shoes and clothing company founded in 1960. According to their webs site, over 100 million pairs of Dr. Martens shoes have been sold from 1960 to 2010, and in 2010, the company offered 250 different models of footwear. Source: http://www.drmartens.com/uk/
16
26 The 300 categories which P. offers to his clients are requested by vintage shops and vintage markets all over Europe and Japan, for retailers and wholesalers. And at this point of the tour, after having seen this detailed system of classification and organization, I am puzzled about the previous process, the one that occurs in the recycling companies; which turns discarded-clothing-put-inside-bins-for-charity into vintage items.
P. collects pictures of every item that he needs, and takes these pictures to the recycling companies. “I tell them this kind of dress I am looking for, this kind of jeans, this kind of blouse. We also show it with examples. If there is a lady that is sorting lady blouses we tell her: look, this is the blouse that we want. ” He and his partners do this personally, and they try to find one or two persons within the recycling companies that will help them make sure that the right items are selected and separated, and that everything is clean and in good state. These persons will supervise that P.’s company gets a collection of exactly the clothes that they are looking for. Thus, when the clothes are already in the warehouse, 95% of them are precisely what P. and his partners need. However, the training for the people of the recycling companies needs to be done continuously because, according to P., they tend to hire a lot of people on short contracts, making it complicated to build a permanent relation with their staff. P. sees this as an important obstacle in the circulation of this knowledge.
I had already visited the warehouse a couple of times and interviewed P., yet I was still not able to fully recognize the difference between one piece of clothing or the other, and certainly at that time I was still unable to understand the need to deploy this intricate system to sort out that one 90's US ladies crazy suit jacket, that Italian army jacket, or those 70s basketball shoes.
However, I learned soon that here is no consensus as to what vintage is. As everyone else in this research, P. has his own personal explanation of what vintage clothes are. “Popular culture is where it all comes from.” P. argues, adding that it is crucial for his business to avoid “modern shapes”, they do not want modern looking clothing.
Vintage is supposed to be from another era, from another period. The general word is used clothing, but if you are looking specifically for a certain time period, then is vintage. You can also have vintage furniture, for instance, or vintage electronics. It’s like modern antique, you can also call it like that. The second hand clothing business, that is not vintage, that is just a regular recycling business. When
we started, vintage was called hippie. We were collecting 50s and 70s clothes.
There is one more thing that I found relevant and it had to do with the particular context of Amsterdam and the reasons behind the interest that people have in these objects. In P.’s opinion, the interest in vintage might have to do with the quality of education in The Netherlands, which determines that people make an extra effort to be different and authentic.
Maybe it has to do with people having time and knowledge and money. I think that someone who is working in the supermarket is not so interested in vintage. Maybe in second hand, but
27
not in vintage. Not so specific… Here in Amsterdam, people between 18 and 30, they stay in that period for a long time. Women have children on a later age, and a lot of guys they hang
around and study for as long as they can. Or they work in the bars, it’s a period of a more leisure life. Also, everybody likes to look nice.
The warehouse’s second big room is where hundreds of bags of clothes are already carefully organized according to one of the 300 categories, waiting for the forklift truck to pick them up, put them in a container and go to the next stop: the vintage stores and markets. I would go back to the warehouse a couple more times to interview P. and watch the process again. By the time I interviewed him for the last time, I had already visited many vintage shops and noticed the shortage of clothes from the 50s and 60s. That made me wonder about the sustainability of this business.
We are already selling 1990s and 2000s as vintage. Where does this stop? What do we do after this? Amy Winehouse brought this whole 60s thing, but where do we find that? H&M used to copy a lot what was in fashion in the vintage. I remember that time, we were buying from Eastern Germany, it had just opened, so a lot of clothes were coming from there, and all
of the sudden we saw these styles copied by H&M, and I have to admit their styling was really great. But we try to stay away from H&M. We buy the originals, not the remakes. We
try to stay away from China production, too. Instead of nylon you should look for silk, full cotton, not acrylic, and when we look for jeans, we look for Levi’s. Already with the materials,
you can make a good selection.
McColl et al. (2012) also brings up this issue in the vintage clothing industry. She argues that such scarcity of original old pieces have put them almost in the status of art, “it rivals the collection of art”. Additionally Wiseman (as cited by McColl et al. 2012: 142) explains that the “vintage consumers are being forced to search extensively and even globally to source the desired item”.
Thus, the future of the business might be, as P. and others have told me, the restyling and remaking of vintage clothes, proving that the life of vintage clothes can be much longer than the one of other just regular, less searched-for-as a white whale, piece of clothing.
Chapter conclusions
Concerning the main question of this research, in this chapter I have described a part of the metamorphosis of clothes from second hand to vintage. There has also been an attempt to describe in a detailed way the material frames in which this transformation takes place in order to reveal how these clothes are classified, organized and kept in this particular place, the vintage distributor’s warehouse. That detailed description of materials, styles, rooms and storage places has proven to be fruitful in terms of understanding the metamorphosis occurring here, which is the transformation of recycled clothes into vintage, through a sophisticated system of donating, recycling and sorting of clothes based on hundreds of categories of the pieces that the vintage wholesale distributors and their clients want. Those categories have come to exist thanks to decades of existence of the vintage business, and
28 are renewed constantly as the eras considered ‘vintage’ come closer in time (1990s and 2000s).
Ideas about fashion, taste and style are crucial throughout the whole process, attaching a certain meaning to certain objects which otherwise would not hold any value for the untrained eye. The expertise of the vintage connoisseurs (wholesale distributors), the staff of the recycling companies and the demand from vintage shops, markets and individual buyers creates a network of relations which upgrades some second hand clothes to the ‘higher’ status of vintage and downgrade others to ‘just’ second hand and cloths (the latter actually stop being clothes and are turned into towels, cleaning cloths and similar items). Before vintage existed, it was called hippie, and when vintage clothes disappear one day, vintage inspired clothes will take over. Related to the latter is the transformation taking place by using certain pieces in new sartorial practices, from ‘old fashioned’ to ‘hip’, by mixing them in new ways, which are changing all the time. The ways clothes ‘relate to each other’ which is analyzed through the wardrobe studies approach, is crucial to comprehend the type of knowledge circulating here.
As Miller stated, the people involved in this network play a role as much as the objects, which are integral to it. Miller’s reference to Goofman’s explanation of the “frame constituting the context of action” (2010:50) can be understood in relation to this chapter, in terms of how clothes are dealt with in different ways depending on where they are. This way, a ‘hierarchy’ of clothes is produced that, I argue, will influence the whole circulation of second hand clothes in Amsterdam.
All of the latter is relevant also regarding Kopytoff’s biographical approach, as I have started the narration in this chapter trying to account for the social career of clothes as traveling objects which poses a different status in every stage of their ‘lives’. At the stage described on this chapter, the donated clothes are re-commodified through the ways explained in the previous paragraphs.
The next chapters will follow this career too, in an attempt to continue describing the clothes’ story. The next destination are the places where they go after being sorted at the warehouse: the vintage shops and second hand markets.
