'Just regular people': Vintage fashion no longer caters to a niche market

The Star

26-05-2025

'The New York eye is the best,' said Tommy Dorr, the owner of Mothfood, a vintage clothing business that this month opened a showroom in Lower Manhattan.
'I mean, people here have the best taste in clothes.'
Dorr, 43, is originally from Michigan, where he got his start as a vintage seller working at a bowling alley turned flea market in the late 1990s. He later started a few of his own ventures, including Lost and Found Vintage, a shop he has kept open just outside Detroit since 2003.
Mothfood is probably the project for which New Yorkers know him best, largely because of the Instagram account Dorr used to establish the brand more than a decade ago under the same name.
'I don't even remember why I picked it, but it's just a great tongue-in-cheek kind of name,' said Dorr, who considers it a good litmus test for customers.
Are you in on the joke, or do you find the notion of moth-eaten clothing kind of, well, gross?
He likes garments that are well worn – sun-bleached jackets, paint-splattered denim and holey T-shirts. They're not everyone's thing.
Tommy Dorr (right), with Llewellyn Mejia at the new Mothfood showroom they run together on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Photo: The New York Times But over the years, Dorr has found a devoted following that counts celebrities, stylists, designers and everyday vintage hunters among its ranks. They are accustomed to ordering from his e-shop or visiting him in Los Angeles, where he opened the first Mothfood showroom in 2015.
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'I've been wanting him to come to New York,' said Emily Adams Bode Aujla, a New York designer and a friend of Dorr's who has been buying vintage pieces from him both for personal use and for her brand, Bode, for longer than either of them can remember.
'I think that I always have thought his business would do so well here, but I'm selfish,' she added with a laugh.
Bode Aujla got her wish in April, when Dorr started moving into a 1,000-square-foot space on the second floor of a nondescript building on the corner of Allen and Canal Streets.
On a recent afternoon, light poured in through a wall of windows, the door to the fire escape was cracked open and Dorr was sitting in a gray armchair wearing a thrashed baseball cap and canvas shorts, appreciating some quiet moments before he invited customers into the space.
The shop, like his Los Angeles location, is appointment only.
It's a casual system – anyone who wants to come by can reach Dorr by email through his website or shoot him a direct message on Instagram (though Dorr warns that direct messages risk getting lost in the shuffle).
The goal isn't to exclude anyone, Dorr said, but rather to make the shopping experience more intentional.
When he experimented last year with a pop-up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn – in the former location of Chickee's, a vintage shop run by Kathleen Sorbara – he found that the foot traffic was mostly people biding their time while they waited for tables at nearby restaurants.
'Most of my good customers were ones I already knew,' Dorr said, or people who had set out to check out the brick-and-mortar version of his Instagram account.
Lately, more intimate retail experiences are on the rise in New York, with some shopkeepers eschewing traditional storefronts by inviting shoppers into their studios or even their apartments.
'There's a value to these places because I think people want privacy in general,' added Llewellyn Mejia, who opened the Allen Street showroom with Dorr.
People like 'just being able to shop on their own', he said, noting that appointment-only spaces were 'already booming'.
The new Manhattan space is decorated with antique furniture and folk art Mejia sells from his shop Trinket. It is pleasantly filled – not crammed – with vintage clothing spanning the 20th century.
A rack of Japanese hemp and linen suits from the 1930s at the new Mothfood showroom on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Photo: The New York Times Mejia's home furnishings and objets d'art, including a hand-carved statue of a poodle priced at US$450 (approximately RM1,890), were arranged on a gallery-style wall.
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Elsewhere, a 19th-century church pew served as a display for Dorr's stacks of vintage work wear double-knee pants.
So far, visitors to Dorr's new showroom have included people from around the neighbourhood, which is home to a vibrant crop of well-curated vintage stores like Leisure Centre and Desert Vintage (not to mention the robust community vintage institutions just across the East River in Brooklyn, such as Front General Store and Crowley Vintage).
A few stylists, costume designers and fashion world people he is friendly with have also dropped by.
Dorr estimates that about 75% of his business is from these industry types. He has supplied styles for period pieces like the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and has helped dress musicians like Boy Genius and Paramore.
Though he sources mainly men's clothing and sizing, his customers are pretty evenly split between men and women.
In his showroom, Dorr walked around the racks pointing out some of his favourite pieces, like a simple cotton 1960s white dress shirt, a 1980s western-style Carhartt chore coat, a stack of 1990s Champion reverse-weave sweatshirts and a World War II-era anti-gas pullover with splatters of paint from its second life as a painter's smock.
'When I started, vintage was only for hipster kids and weirdos,' Dorr said.
Nowadays, he added, the average vintage shopper is more likely to be 'just regular people'. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.