Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement
2B

Managing Statement Editor

Magdalena Mihaylova

Deputy Editors

Emily Stillman

Marisa Wright

Associate Editor

Reece Meyhoefer

 Designers

 Liz Bigham

 Kate Glad

 Copy Editors

 Madison Gagne 

 Sadia Jiban

 

Photo Editor 

Keemya Esmael

Editor in Chief

Elizabeth Lawrence

Managing Editor

Erin White

P

ink and yellow flowers covered the ovular bead 
that hung on a dainty gold chain swinging in the 
window of BRECA, a vintage shop in Pristina, 
Kosovo. The necklace attracted me from the street on a 
day I’d set out exploring the city which would become my 
temporary home during a summer project. I rushed into the 
store to purchase the piece, and once inside, found myself 
circling the aisles uncovering more jewelry, headwear and 
fabrics like none I’d encountered before. I purchased the 
necklace and perused every other item in the store, feeling 
that I had stumbled on a treasure trove of untold stories in 
the secondhand items. 
When I feel uncertain about a new place I’ve moved to, I 
first head to vintage shops: They feel like places protected 
from the threats of consumerism and corporate harm. The 
items on the shelves bring with them lives, histories and 
stories about which we can only speculate. To what event 
was the silken scarf last worn? Did someone hike a moun-
tain or ford a river in those shoes? Was that ring gifted as 
a sign of affection to an antique love? Shopping at vintage 
stores makes me feel closer to the places I’ve moved because 
the items I purchase are spared the sterility of newness. It’s 
easier to start my own story in such a place because every 
find reminds me that the story does not begin with me. 
The stories uncovered in vintage stores are not the same 
histories popularized in textbooks, with dated details of 
long-gone battles or forged legal codes. Instead, antique 
collections reveal the personal, accidental and private: 
Postcards between long-distance lovers, clothes faded from 
years of wear and diaries with sprawling drawings in the 
margins all fuse to tell the human stories of a particular 
place. Shopping at vintage stores shows me a place’s history 
better than anywhere else.
Vintage store finds harbor more than their own stories, 
too. I grew up performing in the theatre, where clothing 
from vintage shops was a necessity for stocking the dressing 
room shelves. Historical time periods came to life authen-
tically in the costumes we cobbled together with found 
textures and already-worn garments of vintage stores. The 
costumes used in one play were saved in warehouses for the 
next and always worn by someone else, who would enact 
an entirely different storyline — before myself or another 
became the bearer of it. The same piece of clothing served 
countless fictional lives during its tenure in the theatre and 
likely many more in reality, too.
Clothes and thrifted objects seem embedded with stories, 
both real and fake, and when we donate old clothes, their 
meaning multiplies with new ownership. Thrifted objects 
are a way we share stories — they are a physical object in 
which our lives intersect.
Growing up, I loved the story of the “Sisterhood of the 
Traveling Pants,” which imagined a pair of faded jeans that 
magically fit each of the four main characters who tried 
them on, carrying with them the lives of each other. Each 

friend wears the jeans and then writes about the experi-
ence to the others to tell them what type of lives the pants 
themselves have lived. There are stories embedded in the 
jeans, and as the girls go on experimenting in their lives, the 
pants collect and carry that storied trajectory. Collective 
ownership is more meaningful than single-wear, single-use 
purchases. The meaning objects hold multiplies when it is 
shared across lives and experiences.
I recently found a heavily annotated copy of W. H. 
Auden’s collection of poetry at my favorite vintage book-
store in Ann Arbor, Dawn Treader. I picked up the copy 
to find notes scrawled in smudged blue ink from cover to 
cover. The prose in the corners, handwritten by its previous 
owner, was just as resonant as the poems they encompassed. 
By the end of the book, I not only knew the chronological 
publishing of Auden’s work, but the nuances of a personal 
story of grief and heartache that a previous reader recount-
ed on their journey through the poetry. In reading from an 
already-treasured copy of the book, it became clear to me 
how often we write our stories in the margins, and between 
the lines, of others.
Beyond our personal histories, thrifted objects can tell us 
the pasts of places and systems bigger than ourselves, too. It 

is not hard to imagine the many antique tourist items scat-
tered across vintage shops that serve now as relics of places 
which are no longer: a replica of the Notre-Dame Cathedral 
in its fullest form preceding the fire that destroyed its like-
ness last year, or postcards presenting images of natural 
lands across South America now lost to endless deforesta-
tion across the continent.
In this way, vintage shops may also be places of despair, 
reminding us of lives that were, places that used to be and 
times in both personal and political histories which are long 
gone. When living in Kosovo, I wondered if I would ever 
stumble upon a sweatshirt emblazoned with “YUGOSLA-
VIA,” naming an empire that dissolved decades ago in war, 
maybe featuring embroidered skylines now lost. Kitchy 
reminders of a country that went on to carry a dark history, 
serve, too, as important pillars of remembrance. Before sec-
ondhand items can serve as generators of new stories, they 
first are collections of the old. 
Vintage shops, then, can help us understand our place in 
this complex and historical world, in places under constant 
change. The personal and political present themselves to us 
in relics. As any historian knows, what will be always starts 
with what is and what has been.

statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | FEBRUARY 26, 2020

BY EMILY RUSSELL, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Ode to vintage stores

KEEMYA ESMAEL/DAILY

