Harper-Thames meets Sandra, who has sold vintage clothing on the market for twenty-seven years, has seen every trend come and go, and is politely but firmly done with being described as ‘authentic’
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Sandra has been selling vintage clothing on the Brick Lane market for twenty-seven years. She arrived with a fold-up table and a car full of things she had spent the previous week sourcing from charity shops and car boots across Essex and Hertfordshire, and she set up where there was space, and people bought things, and she came back the following week. She has been coming back the following week since 1997. She has seen the market through its various identities — the slightly chaotic pre-tourist era, the discovery period when journalists first started writing about it, the peak Instagram years when the queue for the bagels extended around the block and people paid forty pounds for a vintage denim jacket that would have been four pounds in 1997, and the current period, which she describes as “post-peak but still decent on a good Sunday.”
Sandra does not own a smartphone. She accepts card payments through a reader that her daughter set up for her three years ago, and she used it because her daughter insisted and because she was losing sales to the card-only crowd that has increased substantially since the pandemic. She does not have an Instagram account, a website, or a listing on the various vintage marketplace apps that have emerged over the past decade. She sells things on Sundays at the market and the rest of the week she sources them, and she has done this for twenty-seven years and she is not planning to change it.
What She Has Seen
“The best years were probably 2005 to 2012,” she says, organising a rack of 1970s blouses with the efficiency of someone who has handled this volume of material for a very long time. “There were more regulars. People would come every week. Some of the same people came for years. They knew what I stocked and I knew what they were looking for and there was a kind of relationship. Now it’s more tourists, which is fine for business but different. They don’t come back. They want the experience of the market more than they want the thing they buy at it. I’m part of the experience. I’m not a person to them in the same way.”
The word “authentic” has been applied to Sandra and her stall by at least three journalists and two television programmes, which she has received with the particular patience of someone who has been told that their ordinary activity is remarkable often enough to have developed a considered view of what the compliment contains. “What they mean,” she says, “is that I’ve been here a long time and I’m not performing anything. I’m just selling clothes. But saying that doesn’t make an interesting story, so they add the word authentic and it becomes interesting. I’ve been authentic my entire adult life. I didn’t decide to be authentic. I just didn’t have the money for a website.”
The Economics of Being There
The market pitch fee has increased substantially over the twenty-seven years Sandra has been trading. The increase reflects the increase in market desirability — more traders want pitches, which gives the market operators pricing power — and the increase in the commercial rents of the surrounding area, which influences the operator’s own costs. Sandra has absorbed the increases because her sourcing knowledge and her established customer relationships produce sufficient margin, and because the alternative — not coming back — would end something she has built over a long time and is not ready to end. Some of the traders who were at the market when she arrived are gone. Some left because the fee increases made the economics unworkable. Some left because their health required it. Some are still there.
“I’ll stop when I want to stop,” she says. “Not because someone else decides the price. I’ve outlasted a lot of things on this street. I’ll probably outlast a few more.” She sells a 1980s leather jacket to a woman from Stockholm who has been photographing the market for thirty minutes and tells Sandra the jacket is beautiful. Sandra says thank you and means it, and the transaction is complete, and the market continues, as it has every Sunday since before anyone decided it was interesting, which is the most accurate description of authenticity available.
Sandra’s knowledge of vintage clothing — the specific knowledge of someone who has spent twenty-seven years handling the material reality of fashion across several decades — is the kind of knowledge that is not available from any digital source and that the market economy has not found a way to adequately price into her pitch fee. She knows what a 1970s blouse looks like that has been altered versus one that is original. She knows which brands from the 1980s made clothes that have held up versus which ones are fragile despite appearing intact. She knows which decades produced clothes in which sizes that now fit contemporary bodies well and which produced clothes whose fit has not survived the shift in average body dimensions over forty years. This knowledge was built through handling tens of thousands of garments over two and a half decades and it makes her stock more reliably good than stalls operated by people who are newer to the practice. The customers who know this come back. The tourists who do not know this sometimes get excellent value by accident, because the knowledge that went into selecting the garment benefits them regardless of whether they understand it. The vintage clothing market, at its best, transfers knowledge that is embedded in the selection process into value that the buyer receives without necessarily understanding where it came from. Sandra has been providing this transfer for twenty-seven years. That it is described as authenticity rather than expertise is a reasonable choice of words and also a slight underestimation of what it actually is.
Harper-Thames writes from Shoreditch for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/harper-thames.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/brick-lane-market-trader-twenty-seven-years-opinions-authentic-harper/
