Cool As Quahog

The operation was set up with one white regatta tent outside the main mail office on the University campus. From a distance, it seemed as if it were another school-board sanctioned activity, like a food-truck festival, or any of the other bread and circus acts they allotted the undergraduates over the course of the year. Upon further inspection, however, the rag-tag, hastily put together construction, coupled with the man carrying  a clipboard on the lookout for campus security, told a very different story. The tent was loaded with clothing: black and turquoise snapback hats, chuck tees, and all manner of jackets both appropriate and otherwise for the tepid mid-autumn climate. Students milled in and out, a crack of laughter rising from pairs trying on clothes?  They had no thoughts of purchasing, and serious fashion collectors pawed through hangers as if they were handling gemstone necklaces in a jewelry store. I went up to the man serving lookout and took note of the clean sweatshirt he was wearing from Tyler the Creator’s designer line, GOLF, his Nike sports cap, and the fanny-pack he had repurposed over his shoulder as a cash bag.

Once it became clear my intention was not to turn the operation over to the administration, he visibly relaxed, telling me that his name was JP. He couldn’t answer questions while handling the mock-register, so he called over his business partner, JC, another young man wearing faded blue jeans and a NASCAR branded long sleeve white tee-shirt. He told me that they hit up universities across the northeast with their moving thrift store. I asked him what he liked about thrifting, which he laughed at. “I don’t thrift,” he said, beaming, “I curate.” I considered the pop-up scene for a while and wondered what this meant for the secondhand clothing market at Providence, including the Providence flea market I had attended a week prior.

I had been excited to learn that Providence, Rhode Island was home to a Sunday flea market. Better yet, it was one described to me by the liquor store owner as “very weird.” Providence was first described to me as being “weird.” This quirkiness is in part an artificial operation. There are local campaign slogans which read “Keep Providence Weird” and “Don’t Let Normal In.” Regardless, I was very excited for the Providence flea market. I adore thrifting.

I should be clear. I love the idea of thrifting. When I look in awe at torn jean jackets and collared shirts with pearl buttons, I can no longer admire it with the same certainty that I once had that the indie (usually bearded) person wearing the attire got their look from a tiny speakeasy in Brooklyn. The aesthetic of “thrift” has become an antithesis to itself. What once existed as a pragmatic solution for finding cheap and good-looking clothing has become idealized and copied. Though people wanted to look as if they had taken those sweet jeans off a secondhand dealer, they don’t really want to smell like it. And sure, it was a nice enough idea that you were going to go to that little shop downtown someone tipped you off for, buuut, that Urban Outfitters is much closer, isn’t it?

Admittedly, I am guilty of faux thrifting myself. I have a propensity for buying jackets with pre-worn qualities: green fabric frayed, but in the softest most manufacturable way. But still – in the wake of questionable authenticity – a flea market then is the ultimate thrifters’ pleasure. The crafty coupon-collector pinches savings from hand-me-down booths. The voracious haggler gets to demonstrate their business acumen. The environmentalist is filled with the pride of upcycling. Finally, the antiquarian finally gets the missing piece to their private museum of eccentricities. Truly, flea markets are bug traps for the weirdos, oddballs, and edge residents. That’s not even mentioning the sellers!

The Sunday flea market officially begins at the start of a pedestrian bridge in a neighborhood called Fox Point in Providence. In actuality, it languishes out before and after its intended area. Whether this happens by logistical errors or by the addition of unregistered tents would be hard to say. As if they were a line of ants determining the best way to cut up and carry off a leaf, potential customers and window shoppers enclosed the perimeter of the market. When the ants move around their query, it gives the impression that the market were in motion – always marching towards you.

The bazar took up a small patch of grassland which separated asphalt road from one of Providence’s brackish canals. Most of the tents were white with the odd black or beige colored tarp. While clothing sellers took up the majority of the stalls, another joy of the flea market was the endless supply of knick knacks also on display. Necklaces, candles, furniture, records – the flea is a nostalgic love-letter to the renaissance of yard sales before the economy of random item-selling was swallowed by Facebook marketplace.

One of the best skills I learned in going to markets is to never buy anything the first time around. As with Farmer’s Markets, many people feel uncomfortable passing through stands, picking up this, sampling that, while at the same time knowing that they will not be dropping a dime as they do so. However, the buyer’s remorse that one feels after committing to three pints of mediocre cherry tomatoes, only to find a pallet of in-season heirlooms, feels far worse and is a quickly correcting force. Anyways, touring the stalls with an air of indifference can be a powerful thing once you’re past shame.

The large open markets of New York City are apathetic to your existence while you peruse. While preparing to match a similar energy to what I was familiar with, I was surprised when the proprietor of each stand in the Providence Flea smiled happily at my gaze. Some even went so far to answer questions I didn’t ask: “They’re made from real cast iron,” or, “The deal is for everything on the shelf.” I noticed that the visual uniform of the different stalls tended to lean into the idea of progressive, dark rebellion. That is to say, a majority of the hobbyists’ tents boasted tarot cards, books on wicca, and plenty of “I’m a witch and a democrat” pins. It was unclear if the outjie boards were representative of the approaching October holiday or whether Providence was just simply a spooky town. What I didn’t fail to notice, however, was the diverse array of patrons who perused the aisles of the different haunted figure sets.

As is often the case, there was my expected mix of goths, style icons, and neighborhood residents making up the general crowd. However, there tends to be something of a code for these groups. The goths get the occult stands. New couples get the scented candle outlets. Environmentalists lug their bucket of mystery compost into the drop off point, then they leave without doing anything else. These archetypes keep to themselves, and when they pass each other, they do so quickly and quietly with the purpose of people with places far better to be than near each other. The status quo is preserved.

In the flea market by the waterfront of Providence, this couldn’t have been more untrue. Grandparents picked up crow skulls, admiring their weight. Record junkies smiled at stamp collectors. Pastel colors embraced a shadow, and I realized a goth was being hugged! By someone in tie-dye! I tried to express my concerns to one of the more niche store owners: a man selling antique travel booklets and maps. He laughed. “There’s so many weird people here,” he told me. “They just like each other.” And they were weird. It was impossible to explain. Small mannerisms and ticks, clashing color combinations, and off-mainstream greetings exchanged. Even the layout of the event itself was weird in retrospect. Although the outermost parts of the tents faced the adjacent canal, the middle section of the tents followed no pattern at all. It appeared that they had been thrown in haphazardly with walls only as much as they felt like putting up. I realized that this effectively created the rotating movement of bodies that I had observed before. There were no straight paths or roads to get from tent to tent; one moved by their interest and their fancies. There were no cordoned sections for this thing or that. In a way, you are forced to explore and to meander beyond your interest. It was more than mob psychology which moved the people around the tents cyclically. The strange phenomenon was, in fact, promoted by the venue. It was strange. No, it was weird.

Why belittle the “weird?” The weird is just the authentic unrecognized. I don’t mean weird in the “quirky” sense. I mean it in the bizarre sense, the lifestyle decisions which turn heads. Weirdness is tenacity. It’s spontaneity. It’s a man selling records, but he’s a photographer, so he’s transposed images of his black and white photos over the records, rendering them useless and unplayable. I passed by the photographer and asked him for his prices. He didn’t have any. I don’t think he sold anything that day; he was just there for the ambiance.

Rhode Island itself is a weird state, I suppose. It’s 1/173rd of a Texas. It was the last state to ratify the constitution. Just living in Providence is to be a part of an inside joke. While they maintained a certain tackiness, there was also an unabashed genuineness to these stalls which hosted images of Lovecraft and road signs pointed to the fictional town of Quahog from “Family Guy.” I viewed them first as tourist magnets: something like an “I ❤ New York” shirt. I hung out near one of the booths selling particularly egregious Rhode Island swag and asked anyone who bought anything where they were from. Every one of them said “somewhere nearby”.

Here in Providence, the peas and carrots mixed. The grown-up versions of middle school cliques somehow came to terms and ignored ancient and unwritten laws of separation. Furthermore, the concept that you do not buy your city’s tacky souvenirs was disregarded. The flea market did not regulate itself to sell items with necessary value. Really, many of the crafters didn’t even intend to sell! They came out for the crowds and the weirdness of them, offering their own little corner of abnormalities to the curious.

Despite an aura of a niche and frugal market, research shows that second-hand sellers are on the rise. According to a survey conducted by GlobalData, 33 Million more people purchased clothing from second-hand vendors in 2020 than the prior year. Besides the economic incentive of purchasing used goods, environmentalists have long praised the beneficial impact of thrifting. By buying previously owned clothing, consumers are able to keep excess fabric out of landfills and reduce the carbon footprint of the fashion industry, a notoriously large contributor to CO2 emissions worldwide. There are many factors that could be attributed to the rise in second-hand consumerism – notably the COVID-19 pandemic forced many indoor retailers to be shuttered and caused buyers to search for alternative shopping options. However, many predict that the second-hand market will continue to grow post-pandemic. Data shows that thrifting is more popular with Millenials and Gen Z than older generations, and thredup’s (an online second-hand clothing distributor) 2021 Fashion Resale Market and Trend Report expect secondhand clothing sales to more than double in the next five years. In numbers, that would mean going from $36 Billion in 2020 to $77 Billion in 2025. Remember, this is only in garment sales.

Clearly, there’s real money to be made in thrifting. JC told me that he used to be a construction worker doing 40 hour shifts in construction. He met JP in a thrift store (of course), and having quickly hatched a plot to sell to college students, they set up shop and split the profits. JC made more in one day than in a week of construction. Upon hearing this, I also noticed that there was a distinct difference in the price tag of their goods than that of the flea market. Whereas a jacket at the flea would cost $10 on the pricier side, JC and JP were selling hats for $35 a piece. Yes, all their stuff was pristine, but I wondered if something was lost in that. They didn’t have weird little pins, and the student cliques that moved through the merchandise kept a wide berth. The only real difference between their tent and a fashion retailer was brick and mortar. Theirs was a pop-up situation, soon to move on to the next college and then onwards in another city. Maybe JC was right. Maybe it was a different kind of thrifting; maybe it wasn’t thrifting at all.

On my way out of the market, I noticed that I had yet to purchase anything from the vendors. I had spent so much time looking at the different people and taking in their foreign personalities, I had made a full four circles through the place without taking a single item to the counter. I looked over at a flag and handkerchief tent. While mainly centered around feline prints, the store showed off the same pride of weirdness that I’d come to expect from the location. I walked into the interior of the store and checked if there was anything I might want for whatever reason I could think of. My eyes passed over a flag, nearly flush on the ground, showcasing a goofy clam wearing sunglasses with the absolute cringe-worthy slogan “Rhode Island: Cool as Quahog.” The flag was stained and a bit wrinkled. I laughed, turning away from it. I thought about how utterly outside the item was from the design of my room, before slowly turning back. There was a quality of strangeness to the thing – an outlandish essence of ridiculousness and shameless local love that I felt a newfound attraction to by the end of my trip. I paid the man at the front of the tent for my clam flag, and to this day it hangs above my bed.

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