Smell the Roses
The Rose Bowl Flea Market and Vintage Reflections
The sun is rising over Pasadena casting muddy orange streaks into the dark morning clouds. I’m bundled in my grandmother’s green LL Bean coat sipping yerba matte and searching for a parking spot. The coat is one piece of a considered and overthought uniform: Pink Floyd tour tee, high-cropped Boro denim, and red Blundstones for easy slipping on and off. I am hoping for innocuousness and a recognition of the ability to recognize - goals so I may achieve conversation and avoid potential price gouging. At 6:30 AM I arrive at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. I am here for garments.
When I first became interested in clothes I was, for better or for worse, constantly on the stretch of Fairfax between Beverly and Melrose. Essentially, the Golf Store up to the Melrose Trading post and then around to Round Two. This area of the city fostered a vibrant streetwear community composed of mainstays like The Hundreds, Huf, and Supreme and more malleable but no less iconic draws like the Odd Future/Golf store. These spaces defined Fairfax as inseparable from the the hypebeast and the reseller, the skater and the poseur.
The area also was home to a Sunday flea market, a Buffalo exchange, and bulk vintage shop Jetrag. In these high school days, you could find a niche, semi-local brand you liked in the mix with the vintage. Last season’s Awake hoodie in all its thick cotton glory, pristine Born x Raised tees, and the occasional slightly marked down 424 pieces. However, there was still a distinction between the teenagers rummaging through piles of dirty cotton and tarnished silver rings and the Supreme kids with fake Off White searching for a shirt Asap Rocky once wore.
Sean Wotherspoon opened two of his Round Two resell stores on Melrose in 2015. The stores sold sneakers primarily alongside collector streetwear brands like Supreme and Palace. Also an avid vintage collector, Wotherspoon also stocked a bevy of vintage tee shirts at high resell, some famously sourced from the Rose Bowl (I saw him there once with Mason Ramsey). Three years later his winning Nike Airmax 1/97 design catapulted him and his brand into hypebeast stardom. The inspiration for the shoes? Vintage Nike hats, washed denim, and old corduroys. The hypebeast world’s hottest name was redirecting conversations around his products to the arena of the old, and people were listening. Things on Fairfax were changing
Electric blue French workwear, bootcut denim, a denim jacket, or whatever else comes my way. These are my goals. Coming to the Rose Bowl without a semblance of an idea of what you want is dangerous business. It’s a huge market where anything vintage, valued, and known can be found. It attracts international collectors, obsessives, and freaks in search of the specific in bulk. This is where, years ago, many Japanese collectors came and bought bulk amounts of the old loom, pre-80’s Levi’s alongside American military and sportswear.
Within an hour I find 1970s bellbottom Levi’s for 200 dollars, a gorgeous and ethereal Type 1 Levi’s denim trucker jacket from my Grandparent’s infancy, and eventually multiple pairs of tattered thousand-dollar Levi’s. Japanese designers of the 90s onward speak about denim like this behind glass for tens of thousands, meticulously copied and reconstructed. Here, I stare at the real thing. The sources. Some may say that these prices are insanity, that a reproduction or modern pair will do, and that many of these garments are in complete disrepair. The difference between these pieces of denim and your modern equivalents is minute: quality, duration of use, and refinement of fit. The decision to wear these pieces as opposed to their reproductions or fakes is almost symbolic, an understanding of a sublime source.
A man selling 70s Lee flare denim rapid fire teaches me the tells for authentication, the zipper, the tag placement, and the backtab quality. Another seller insists I don’t call his 70-year-old denim (including an original Lee 91B jacket) a collection. He is no longer a collector, he is selling what he has decided would be improper not to wear. The most incredible thing about the Rose Bowl’s denim world is it is more than purchasable and historic, it is tactile. Every seller will insist that these 70, 80, and century-old garments can still be worn.
The details, that which differentiates rareness and thus cost, is a knowledge that defines more than subservience to product and capital. This is the philosophy that places denim behind glass. However, knowledge and love of these details are just as much what defines an appreciation of and harmony with this denim. It is what gives it a meaning and a relation to us, and serves as a sort of positioning between one’s self and the denim ideals they serve.
I may be back for this denim one day, but today I settled for perfectly baggy 90s Ecko Unltd denim in a dark wash.
The melrose trading post stopped being cheap. Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads became increasingly picked through. Celebrities wore tee shirts valued at thousands of dollars. It was a vintage boom. Discourses began about wealthy hypebeasts picking through goodwill stores, Carhartt and Dickies started upcharging their basics, and resellers of hypebeast wares infiltrated flea markets and vintage spaces everywhere. In one sense, an aesthetic was being appropriated, but in another, vintage sellers and resellers began copying each other’s tactics until they began to blend.
In this world, I discovered the tee shirt obsessives. Some are on Instagram, some have small hole-in-the-wall stores in major cities, and some sell in decorated flea market stalls decked with memorabilia and a Bluetooth speaker. While sellers vary in the theme of their tees, (90s, sports, punk, classic rock, rap, film, humor, politics, advertisements, etc.) all hold a belief in a new ideology: that an old, stained, threadbare tee shirt can cost upwards of fifty dollars.
A tee shirt is bold. It can be the loudest and oftentimes the most easily destroyed garment one wears. In vintage tees, I found beauty in individuality, in obscure and tumultuous hunts, and in garment storytelling. I began to lock designs in my head, excited at the opportunity to see one in person.
The world of vintage tee shirts, I believe, also has the potential as one of the most openly materialistic of vintage clans. What is the longest time you have owned and worn a tee shirt? They are stories with short lifespans compared to the decades within denim, old military, workwear, and luxury. The following function as observable status symbols far more discreetly (minus the latter) than tee shirts can, and while tee shirt designs fluctuate with changing tastes and values (imagine owning a Kanye tee shirt) other vintage can be far more ubiquitous, and timeless. The camp of hunters searching for old tee shirts, and many of those who frequent the beforementioned “tee shirt guys“ become populated by the hypebeasts, those with disposable income for whom an extra fifty dollars and an upcoming replacement tee is no issue, and those who only seek to resell.
Two millennial stall owners call across to each other “there’s so many kids out today!“. Two women pass and chuckle. “We’re laughing” they explain “because you two literal babies!“. Alongside the 90s kids selling their favorite cultural moments on cotton tees, the millennials obsessed with tattered Carhartt and 50s varsity, there are the wizened and wise. Japanese denim stalls, old school bulk buying of every garment imaginable, the Western veterans who collect every camo concocted, and amassers of anything from leather, 50s camp collars, and suits. Obsession is multigenerational.
Seeking the vintage category of French workwear (sold for extravagant prices by hipsters everywhere but found cheap here) I meet a crew of three seemingly British military garb obsessives discussing their drinking and slapping each other’s backs. We discuss how lovely it is that Swiss camouflage contains red, the desired collars for WWII deck jackets, and methods of knowing if pants will fit without trying them on. This conversation knocks twenty-five percent off my 60-year-old azure choice. Walking around before, he nudges a pile of the blue French trousers, “it’s all just stuff. It’s meant to get knocked around“.
I hear this at almost every obsessive’s booth. They reject preciousness, they reject hoarding (mostly), and they reject compromise. They encourage the hunt. They want people who will wear these things they have found, who will cherish them, who will understand them and what they can do. These people are running small businesses, but they also happen to sell stories and dreams.
In 2019, at the explosion of streetwear and his appointment to Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh said this:
At the time, hypebeasts freaked out, or rather, wondered in ways they hadn’t before. Two years later, with many of Abloh’s purportedly “streetwear“ contemporaries as heads of couture houses, what is the landscape? Fairfax is clogged with sneaker resell stores I have never seen occupied by anyone but tourists. Round Two’s resale store closed last month, yet their next-door vintage store remains. Even statisticians and economists have come to agree with Virgil, Business of Fashion writing that “After dominating fashion for the better part of the last decade, streetwear is finally falling out of style.”
Celebrities are increasingly seen donning archive fashion and select vintage from popular sellers in different arenas. In the years since vintage exploded anew, there is clearer infrastructure and definition between camps. The Rose Bowl, in its largess, will never be only for the hypebeasts in the way the melrose flea became. The Rose Bowl is a democratic space of recognition, in which those who know what they want, search for it. There is so much there that one can only tune out that which they do not seek. And yet, it is all there.
Of all the things the Rose Bowl can be, I find it most to be a space of devoted study, of learning, of experiential discovery. Here is where you can be told how to date a pair of denim, new designs for Beastie Boys tour merch, the colors that WWII deck jackets were produced in, and when fat-tongued Nike Dunks were made. It is a place to share, to learn, and to find.
But it’s a lot. I spoke to many that day at the flea about obsession. The perfect leathers, tee shirts with your favorite band, varsity jackets, and unknown glories surround you. Sometimes you must look away in the name of restraint, focus, and specificity, but other times the sublimity of an unknown will show itself and you will be welcomed into a new world in which you know nothing. Accepting this world is why I left with a surprise and a beauty, this patina-streaked leather motorcycle jacket.
This was a new skin. A new naturalized part of myself I had achingly desired yet never truly articulated until I felt it on my body. It was more than a storied and well-made object, it was something cracked and worn that made the feeling of wearing comfortable. In other words, it wasn’t something precious. It was functional and flexible.
What Abloh, the fashion market, and the military seller agree on is that to be a collector is only worth so much. Knowledge and obsession of a slice of the clothing world does not mean you must wear, own, or touch it. The very nature of Abloh’s luxury, often runway-only garments is that they may be seen and understood and obsessed over but do not require ownership to participate in them. The Rose Bowl, in its infinitidue reminds us we will never own all that we obsess over, and that is by design. It is those who wear who reign supreme.
