Let me tell you how I got involved in the business. Alright. So my father was a tailor in the Middle East. He started buying used clothing and repairing it and selling it. And little by little he’d buy more, and eventually he started buying a huge amount, way too much for him to repair. He would buy clothes from the Europeans and sell them. He finally opened a store in Beirut, and found that the European clothing was getting worse and worse. He left his two nieces there to run the store, and he came to the U.S. in 1946 or 1947, and started buying used clothes here.

At that time the market was on the Lower East Side, in what’s now Chinatown, around Delancey Street. All the stuff he would buy, he would take to a very small warehouse on Cherry Street. My dad would tell me stories about how, when you needed to move bales, you’d go to the Bowery and give the drunks a couple dollars.

He’d take the clothes up and bale them and send them to Beirut and Lebanon, where his nieces would sell them. That business grew, until he bought a Free Zone warehouse in Beirut, which meant you didn’t have to pay import duty. They’d send merchandise there and sell it in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. In the mid Seventies there was a terrible civil war in Lebanon, and everything was actually exploded and destroyed.

In 1963, he finally bought a warehouse on the edge of Hoboken, where we still are today. I would go to work with him as a teenager in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and I eventually expanded the export business into West Africa and East Africa. That’s the logistics of it. Now I’m going to tell you the down and dirty of how it worked in those days.

People would donate their clothing to Goodwill and Salvation Army. Goodwill and Salvation Army would sell their ‘Number One’ products – the cream – in their own retail stores, then bale all that junk that wasn’t sold and give it to graders, like ourselves. A three-cents-a-pound pack of commingled used clothing, once you separate it out, sells for various prices. Children’s baby rummage at twenty cents. Cotton shirts at twenty-eight cents. Cotton pants at twenty-nine. 

You’d grade, oh my god, a few hundred different items. One hundred percent cashmere sweaters were sold to Italy for reprocessing. For jeans, nowadays it’s all about torn this and torn that, but thirty years ago pair of jeans with a hole in the knees used to be cut up and sold to the Navy. You’d clean your machinery with these wipers. One hundred percent polyester wipers would go to computer places, where you can’t have any lint whatsoever, ok? The best kind of wipers were made from men’s underwear, called gansies. So there’s like, a hundred different grades of wipers.

The overseas people would distribute clothes to people who would take bales, put them on their heads, and take them over to a local market, which very often would straddle railroad tracks because they’re wide and long. And they’d open up bales and sell them. And after that, just the hardship of being in Africa – the sweating and the salt in the body – would just disintegrate the clothes and then they’d need more clothes. Our claim to fame in those days was we could deliver a pair of pants overseas for the cost of a postage stamp.

One of those few hundred items you’re grading would be vintage clothing. Looking for vintage is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The vintage market changes drastically from year to year. One year the Japanese want over-sized printed T-shirts, the next year they want super small ones. One year denim jackets are in, button-down Oxford shirts are in, the next year they’re not. The way people service the vintage industry is the vintage buyers come in and train the graders as to what they’re looking for. The dredge of the industry for one period was men’s polyester pants, thick double knit pants. Those used to sell for six cents a pound, twelve cents a piece. Ten years later, those same pants were worth $15 a piece.

Eventually for me, grading two hundred different items became way too much. And what also happened was the overseas customers started to buy the goods directly from the Salvation Armies and Goodwills, and take them overseas and grade them themselves. This meant for $2 a day they could do what I was doing, paying $70 per day for a labourer. So that’s the way the business kind of works nowadays. You sell to India and India will grade them and send to Africa. They can’t even afford to sell it in their own market. You know, some countries are too rich and they don’t want used clothing. And if they’re too poor they can’t buy any clothing.

There are still graders here in the States that do well, but it was just too much for me. I was making money, alright; I didn’t need to have eighty, ninety people working for me. So I stopped. This was in 1995. That was the end of it. I said to myself, I have to go vertically down. I have to become a primary source. So I started collecting my own clothes the way Goodwill and Salvation Army do but under a for-profit banner. Which is what I still do. I don’t do it in New York because most of my customers come from tropical countries. I have about a thousand bins in Florida. When people buy them, no one has touched the clothes; no one has creamed it out, taken the best Levis. They’re in the original bags. It’s called credential clothing.

I got a degree in economics from City College. But my father asked me, ‘How many millionaire economists did I know?’ And I told him I didn’t know any. And he started rattling off people that had made millions in the used clothing business. It inspired me. I enjoy the business. I couldn’t envision myself as a 9-to-5-er sitting behind a desk wearing a tie and jacket. I was much more of a ruffian. I was more interested in being an entrepreneur. I had some luck for a long time. I sold a lot of goods. I never hit the big big times but I never went bankrupt either. I made a handsome living for many years, like a doctor would make a living.

There was a time where I would wear a different vintage shirt every single day. It was basically like, find something in the vintage barrel, wear it for a couple of weeks then throw back and pull something else out and wear it for a while. Oh my god, I’ve worn so many different clothes. Everything that I found and picked out was pretty cool, you know tweed jackets, three-button jackets, what do you call them… Oxford shirts. Hawaiian shirts. The sleazy slimy silk and nylon shirts. The T-shirts, the vintage Harley T-shirts, the rock and roll T-shirts. I’d wear all of them. If you ever watch Seinfeld and you see what Kramer was wearing, that’s basically it. I didn’t spend too much money. When I did have some money, I’d buy some Matsuda clothes, or Gucci or Yves Saint Laurent. But basically, I would wear what I found in the rags.

Now I’ve gone through the phase. After twenty years or thirty years of just picking this and that one out, I don’t do it anymore. First of all, I don’t have real access to the clothes, because we don’t go through the bags. And it’s played out. I do have about a dozen items that I’ve kept. Three or four Hawaiian shirts, and a couple of shirts with nice big fat polka dots on them. But I don’t have a closet of vintage clothes. In New York we only have so much closet space.

I don’t know what my dad thought of all this. He had a very hard life, you know. We were Christians in Turkey and we were exiled. We spent fifteen years in Aleppo and fifteen years in Beirut and finally found our way to Brooklyn. He was a very hard man, and not much of a talker about personal things. On his dying bed he’d ask, ‘How’s the business going?’ And I‘d say, ‘It’s going good,’ and that would make him happy.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York City.

The seventh issue of Vestoj, ‘On Masculinities,’ is in stores this month. In conjunction, Vestoj Online is publishing a series of articles on the same theme.

IN 1977 I BOUGHT my first flat cloth cap – in navy cotton twill with leather detailing on each of the crown sections and a striped lining. It was a souvenir from a family trip to Jamaica, bought from a Rastafarian man selling his own designs at a stall in Kingston. At the time I saw the purchase as a defiant act: the feat of a post-colonial religious activist. Rastafari religion emerged in Jamaica in the early 1930s and gave allegiance to the Emperor Haile Selassie I, formerly Ras Tafari. His followers advocated ‘Africa for the Africans.’ In Jamaica during the 1970s, Rastas, as they are also known, were seen by conservative sections of Jamaica as being on the margins of society – hence my defiant act. Internationally Rastafari was gaining ground as a religious, musical and style force, notably in Britain. Back home my cap was admired by Rastas and non-Rastas of Jamaican heritage who longed for authentic objects from ‘back home.’ I wore it extensively until the 1980s – so much so that the seam of the cap’s peak wore away into a frayed edge.  

The flat cloth cap emerged in the complex landscape of Victorian society, representing a form of revolution. As an accessory worn by all classes, the cloth cap became an axis around which each of the classes revolved. The middle-class man’s adoption of the cap, for example, mirrored his place in the gradual evolution of industralisation and social strata. In tandem, its espousal by a large number of working class men helped to establish their identity within the new mechanised society and to assert their existence and class against the domination of the middle- and upper classes. The basic design of the cap and its usage as part of ‘civilian dress,’ i.e. casualwear, makes it one of the few nineteenth-century fashion garments to retain its original values.

The term ‘flat cloth cap’ does not refer to a specific design, rather it is a vinculum – a generic term which refers to the basic form of a soft flat fabric crown with a stiffened peak. The cap has a diversity of designs and associated names –  ‘golf,’ ‘bicycle,’ ‘The Handicap’, ‘Baker Boy’ and ‘Newsboy’ cap being but a few – nomenclatures given to the accessory to identify it with its represented activity, though for many it’s just a ‘cloth cap.’ The segmented flat cloth cap was developed in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century for the upper classes as sportswear, notably golf and its associated leisurewear. London and Manchester were the two main areas of cap and cloth cap manufacture at the time, but the cap proved so popular that consumers were encouraged to get their own made, and in 1895 a pattern for the ‘New Golf or Bicycle Cap’ featured in the menswear magazine Tailor and Cutter, produced for the first time by the journal in response to a reader’s request for such a pattern ‘so that any tailor who makes a suit for golfing or bicycling can make the cap to go with it of the same material as the suit.’¹ 

The use of the flat cloth cap quickly spread to the middle- and working class for leisure and work wear to the point where it became a ubiquitous feature of everyday life. Within the working class the cap represented genres of work, respectability, subcultures and politics. The historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that it was ‘the badge of class membership of the British proletarian when not at work.’² There is extensive photographic evidence that the flat cloth cap was used by working class men to define both their work and leisure time, while the politics connection was partly due to it being worn by the Scottish Labour Member of Parliament Keir Hardie on his initial entry into British parliament in 1892, making the cap a symbol of the Socialist Labour Party. It was a conscious political stance as the cap went against the dress code conventions of the Top Hat customarily worn within the Houses of Parliament. During this period, Britain was also instrumental in exporting the style to different parts of the world, with an especially healthy trade to British colonies like Australia, New Zealand and Trinidad as well as the United States, where the cap became popular thanks to English and Irish immigrants.³ 

In the twentieth century the flat cloth cap continued to have various social and cultural meanings. During the 1930s, for example, it simultaneously represented the economic struggles that marked the Great Depression, worn as it was by both criminals, as in Brassai’s famous 1930s night portrait of ‘Albert’s Gang,’ and royalty like Edward, the Prince of Wales. In more recent times, the flat cloth cap has been worn by a catalogue of pop cultural icons from The Beatles to Rihanna to David Bowie, and its popularity has been rebooted even more recently due to the success of the current BBC drama ‘Peaky Blinders,’ which apparently has ‘sparked an eighty-three percent rise in sales of flat caps.’⁴ 

In 1990 anthropologist David D. Gilmore summarised masculinity in a way that remains worryingly true: ‘male gender identity [is] a problematic, a puzzle, an unresolved cryptogram.’⁵ And if masculinity is a cryptogram, then the ‘components of dress,’⁶ as a system to assess the possible definitions and meanings of masculinity, is just one cipher of the cryptogram that is, as cultural studies scholar Jonathan Rutherford says, ‘doing and being a man,’⁷ for masculinity is a ‘cultural construct, open to change’ and thereby a ‘practice.’⁸ 

The flat cloth cap is one cipher in the cryptogram that is masculinity.

Carol Tulloch is a professor of dress, diaspora and transnationalism at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art.

All images courtesy of the International Center of Photography (www.icp.org) unless otherwise noted.

1. New Golf or Bicycle Cap’ in Tailor and Cutter, 28 November 1895, p. 481 ↩

2. E Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914 (263-307) in E Hobsbawm and T Ranger The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, 1983. p.287 ↩

3. N Braithwaite, ‘Flat Cap’ (pp. 123-124) in A Lynch and M D. Strauss, (eds.) Ethnic Dress in the United States: A Cultural Encyclopedia, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London, 2015, p.123 ↩

4. A Starkey http://metro.co.uk/2016/05/30/peaky-blinders-has-sparked-an-83-rise-in-sales-of-flat-caps-5912641/. 30 May 2016. First accessed 28th July 2016 ↩

5. D D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, Yale University Press, New Haven, London,1990, pp.5-6 ↩

6. J Ash and L Wright, Components of Dress: Design, Manufacturing, and image-making in the fashion industry, Comedia/Routledge, London, New York, 1988 ↩

7. J Rutherford, ‘Preface’ in Bethan Benwell Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, Malden, 2003, p.1 ↩

8. Ibid p.1-5 ↩