The first day of New York Fashion Week was chilly and sunny, the kind of contradictory weather that calls for complex outfits and unnecessary accessories: sunglasses for standing in the shade, or jackets for draping over shoulders. In SoHo, at the Alexander Wang flagship store, where tourists and models browsed the rose-gold-hardware-studded accessories that are a trademark of the downtown designer’s work, vintage T-shirts on racks swayed in the breeze coming from the open front door, their cotton made light by the wear, and perhaps the sweat, of previous owners. There were shirts commemorating the tours of Puff Daddy and Dr. Dre in the late nineteen-nineties, which, according to plaques on a mirrored wall, ranged in price from three hundred to two thousand dollars. Hanging on one wall was a Foxy Brown T-shirt that cost fifteen hundred dollars. Two T-shirts featuring Dr. Dre, priced at two thousand dollars apiece, had been sold the day before. Inside each was a tag that read “This T-shirt is a vintage, one-of-a-kind item. Any wear, flaws, and age is indicative of its vintage quality and not a defect.” And, above the label, was the credit: “Alexander Wang x Procell.”
Brian Procell, who is thirty-four, is an archivist, a pop-culture historian, and the owner of Procell Vintage, a store on the Lower East Side that is frequented by fashion designers, pop stars, and brand representatives looking for vintage T-shirts. In addition to designers like Alexander Wang and brands like Opening Ceremony, Procell works with stylists like Mel Ottenberg, who is known for collaborating with Rihanna. Frank Ocean was recently photographed in a rare Aphex Twin T-shirt that came from Procell’s private archive. One of Procell’s most loyal customers is Drake, who appears periodically on Procell’s official Instagram account, and who recently purchased a shirt from Procell with imagery from the film “Belly,” featuring DMX.
Procell grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at a time when, as he says, “thrifting was not cool.” Since then, he said, “there’s been a total shift in how secondhand is perceived: you’re not a hippie, you’re not poor.” When he was in his early twenties, and new to New York, T-shirts featuring metal bands were in fashion, but Procell sensed that the metal revival wouldn’t last and that people his age were going to want vintage clothing that reflected their own youthful tastes rather than those of previous generations. More than that, he had a sense for which brands, on both the high and the low end of the fashion spectrum, were due for comebacks. “I’m a brown guy with a beard, a heterosexual dude,” he said. “And I know how to buy early-nineties Chanel.”
His perception of what is about to be cool led him to anticipate a vintage market for Chanel’s nineties-era interpretation of JNCO pants and Galliano newsprint, which he pointed out as I flipped through racks in his store on my first visit, last spring. Today, customers of discerning tastes and high incomes pay for his eye and his inventory. When I asked Procell, who has consulted for Supreme, Nike, and Gap, for details about his collaborations, he explained that he “signs a lot of nondisclosure agreements.” What he could say is that he offers certain clients access to his private archive, which contains items that are not normally for sale: a concert T-shirt from a band that is not ready for a nostalgic embrace by the masses; a brand currently overexposed but due for a return; or something that hits a personal note, like a T-shirt that reminds someone of the first concert she ever attended. Procell once showed Jeremy Scott, a designer known for finding inspiration in children’s animation, T-shirts printed with “Looney Tunes” cartoon characters. The following season, in his role as the creative director for Moschino, Scott presented an entire collection inspired by “Looney Tunes.”
On my first visit to Procell’s store, he was wearing what I came to realize is his uniform: Nikes, sweatpants, and one of his own T-shirts under a hoodie. He pointed out three T-shirts featuring the likeness of the Notorious B.I.G.; the life and death of Biggie Smalls is an emotional touchstone for the demographic to which Procell caters. “Those are all pre-assassination,” he said. “Very difficult to come across, because when people think of vintage Biggie shirts they’re thinking memorial shirts. Pre-death Biggie shirts, that’s some holy-grail shit.” Procell had found one of the B.I.G. shirts in Tokyo several years ago, when he happened upon a former secondhand-clothing importer who was cleaning out his garage. He paid fifty dollars for the shirt. When asked what its current retail price was, Procell demurred, before telling me that it would be the equivalent of “a tax return.” For what income bracket was unclear; he clarified that he meant he was selling it for a minimum of four figures. “And not just to anyone,” he said. “You have to be somebody who I think is worthy. I want them to know how special it is.”
The four-figure vintage T-shirt is, even to those used to making peace with the mixed messages of fashion, somewhat of a contradiction in terms. T-shirts are considered universally practical—according to MOMA’s exhibition “Items: Is Fashion Modern?,” the white T-shirt has had a “strong impact on the world”—but they are also unusually personal. You cannot deny that you attended the concert of an embarrassing band if the tour T-shirt is buried in the back of your closet. As a teen-ager, Procell worked at the chain store PacSun. He knows that, in his business, “the real money is in the ninety-nine per cent”—the customers who will happily buy a new T-shirt designed to look vintage by Urban Outfitters or Forever 21. Those are not the T-shirts Procell loves, and they are not the clients that Procell is after. But, in supplying the reference material to high-end brands, he is insuring that the next wave of fast-fashion merchandise will be mall-market copies of the vintage prints that the kids crave.
Procell and I have spent a few afternoons together, both while he tends to customers and when the store is closed, and after each conversation I would go home and look at my own collection of vintage T-shirts, thinking of the afternoon that I found the soft-gray shirt printed with a still of Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver” at my neighborhood vintage shop, or the time I bought, for just two dollars, a truly absurd pink shirt that features a bootleg E.T. ripping open his chest to reveal a scarier alien inside. A friend of mine still has the T-shirt she bought in the mid-nineties at an early Smashing Pumpkins tour. “Keep it in good condition,” I advised her, as I reminded myself to fold my T-shirts with the care they deserve. Who knows what they’ll be worth someday?
