Thrifting and Sleuthing

I haven't really been big into thrift-store shopping for a number of reasons, but mostly because I tend not to find anything that I like. This has to do with fit, quality, style, taste, and the fact that I'm a very fussy human being regarding my clothes.

But since I came across the blog An Affordable Wardrobe a while back and saw that its creator lives and thrifts in the Boston area, and has similar taste, I have been thinking that this is something I should be more open to exploring. I'm also seriously jealous of some of the deals Giuseppe at AAW has scored, like a pair of Bill's Khakis, new with tags, that retail for $98, for $1. Yeah, a dollar. Are you kidding me?

So on Saturday we went over to Davis Square for some sustenance in the form of burritos from Anna's. Next door, where there used to be a video store, there's now a place called Buffalo Exchange that opened a couple of months ago. This is a national chain of stores that buy and sell gently used clothing. I'd never heard of it before it landed in Davis, but it certainly seems like a logical location for it.

We weren't in any hurry, so we went in to have a look. At first I wasn't even sure they had any men's clothing, but a quick walk down to the back revealed the men's racks. I saw some fairly high-end stuff I wasn't expecting; I recognized one Italian brand that I think is sold at Louis, or at least used to be, and one fashion-forward and pricey UK brand with a store in New York that I've never bothered to visit.

I was almost finished going through a rack of shirts when I found a traditional button-down (the collar, not the front) in narrow red and white stripes. The cloth was finer and nicer than oxford cloth, and the tailoring was a notch above the usual (you don't see a two-piece back yoke on a typical department store shirt). It was even my size, but there was no brand tag. None of the other shirts had missing tags, so it wasn't like a Building 19 situation where they are not allowed to reveal the brand in order to protect its prestige.

There was a tag that said "all imported cotton" inside the collar, a laundry tag on the end of the hem, and a small size tag at the neck that also said "made in USA." Well, how about that? The shirt, like all the other long-sleeve shirts I'd looked at, was priced at $17. Not exactly what Giuseppe (or anyone) would consider a thrifting bargain, but Buffalo isn't really a thrift store in the traditional sense. Regardless, it was a decent price for an American-made shirt, and I still got the feeling that I should go ahead and buy it.

When I got home I took a closer look at the shirt. Sometimes there are markings on the buttons, sometimes there is a secondary laundry tag on one of the inner side hems, sometimes there is a season tag telling you when a garment was produced and sold. The shirt had none of those. But all the tags were green, which was ringing some sort of bell in my head, and the style of lettering on the "cotton" one looked familiar. Older J. Crew clothes had green tags, but this seemed too nice for J. Crew, and I didn't think they had manufactured in the US in a really long time, if ever.

There was one other clue: the laundry tag had an RN number. Maybe you've never noticed this, but all clothes have it. It's a way to identify the manufacturer. I remembered seeing a reference a while back on a blog to a Federal Trade Commission database where you could look up these numbers. I just couldn't remember on which blog I'd seen it. I knew it wasn't AAW, so I spent a little while going back through some of the other style blogs I frequent, and eventually I found the link, on The Trad.

The database revealed that the shirt was made by Gitman Bros. of Pennsylvania. They've been around for over 60 years, and still make all their shirts in the US. I used to see their shirts at Syms when they had a store downtown; if you look at the lower right corner of their home page at that link, you can see their logo on a green background, which is what their labels look like and why this shirt was seeming familiar to me. I could still see the thread holes in the shirt from where the label had been removed. Maybe it was irritating to its former owner's neck?

Domestic manufacturing is of course now more costly than having your products made overseas, so Gitman's shirts sell for north of $100 each. So I guess I ended up getting a pretty good deal after all.

(If you're interested in doing some sleuthing of your own, the database can be found here. Of course, your mileage may vary.)