The Resale Revival

How did used clothing lose its proverbial and literal stink? An episode brought to you by The RealReal https://www.therealreal.com/?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=articlesofinterest&utm_campaign=podcast_evergreen_articlesofinterest. To see images of all the many lives of resale, including inside the enormous Real Real warehouse, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com https://articlesofinterest.substack.com Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Avery Trufelman?

  This is a sponsored episode from The RealReal, which I am jazzed about because I have loved and used The RealReal for years. It is an amazing place to buy upscale secondhand clothes. It helps me look much more glamorous and fabulous than I actually can afford to be. And I'm not alone. Last time I went to the RealReal store in SoHo, it was mobbed. Oh, my God, this one's like unworn. Secondhand shopping is now not only extremely socially acceptable, it is really, really popular. Dare I say, The RealReal was more crowded than many of the actual firsthand boutiques all around it.

• 0:37Avery Trufelman?

  And this is all a gigantic reputational overhaul for used clothes. Once upon a time, used clothes were not only socially forbidden, they were also considered dangerous. And there were all these parables about what happens when one submits to the detrimental siren song of secondhand clothes. My favorite example is this positively bonkers story called "The Blue Silk."

• 1:02Speaker 01

  And this is 1882, '84, somewhere around then, in Saturday Evening Post story.

• 1:07Avery Trufelman?

  This is Dr. Jennifer LaZott.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  I am Associate Professor of History and Material Culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

• 1:15Avery Trufelman?

  She is also the author of "From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies." Do you remember the plot of "The Blue Silk"?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I do. So, a young woman in a pretty big family without a lot of disposable income really wanted a dress for a party. And she asked her dad if she could have some money. And he's like, "No, your old dress is fine." So she goes to a Jewess, as they say in the story, proprietor.

• 1:41Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, we'll get into that.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  And buys a blue silk dress. And then she goes to the party and she's called out. Her dress is recognized as somebody's thrown away garment. Somebody's saying, "Oh, I think that was Becky's dress that she wore last season."

• 1:56Avery Trufelman?

  Which is essentially social death, mortifying. She cannot go out to a party ever again.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Not only that, but she has unbeknownst to herself brought home yellow fever, a communicable disease of some kind. And it ravages her whole family. And they end up surviving, but she's somewhat marked. Her beauty is marked by whatever disease she brought home on the blue silk.

• 2:19Avery Trufelman?

  The moral of the story was, "Used clothes will ruin your looks and endanger your entire family."

• 2:26Speaker 01

  So the clear instruction here is, "You'll get your comeuppance if you try to exaggerate your status, your station in life." So if you're buying something you couldn't usually afford secondhand, then you are representing yourself falsely.

• 2:42Avery Trufelman?

  That's crazy. Like, has no one read Cinderella? Like, why is this not... Why is this so frowned upon?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  That's a good point. I do think it has to do with the urbanization.

• 2:52Avery Trufelman?

  In the mid to late 1800s, people were flocking to rapidly expanding industrializing cities. New urbanites were largely anonymous individuals who'd been separated from their background and their families and their context. So one's standing was not very easily placed in a city full of strangers.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  So there were a lot of etiquette books in the 1850s that would say, "Beware of judging people by their clothes."

• 3:19Avery Trufelman?

  Especially in the United States, anyone could be anyone from anywhere. A good quality secondhand suit could easily disguise a huckster as a gentleman.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Everyone's just anxious that someone's going to pull one over on you.

• 3:31Avery Trufelman?

  Right, it's the era where we get the con man.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Their Herman Melville book, "The Confidence Man", relies so much on this theme of dressing in order to fake people out.

• 3:43Avery Trufelman?

  So not only was secondhand dressing considered actively deceitful, most damning of all was that the used clothing market was largely run by Jews.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Secondhand commerce, especially old clothes, were very associated with Jewish peddlers. And so antisemitism weighed very heavily on the disapproval of secondhand shopping.

• 4:06Avery Trufelman?

  This comes up again and again in the history of fashion. It is an industry that used to be overwhelmingly dominated by my people. We were tailors, we were rag sellers. It's just one of the few shadow economies we were legally relegated to.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  The Jewish predominance in secondhand clothing dates all the way back to Europe and the Jewish diaspora and the fact that they were not allowed to pursue a lot of mainstream jobs. So there's just a long tradition of them really knowing how to resell clothing.

• 4:35Avery Trufelman?

  Especially when my ancestors arrived to places like New York.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  In New York City, for example, there would be parapetetic peddlers who would have push carts full of used goods of various kinds. And they might wander residential neighborhoods yelling, "Old clothes, old clothes."

• 4:54Avery Trufelman?

  And then they would get so tired of yelling that phrase over and over again that they would shorten it to "old cloe." It sounded like this.

• 5:07Avery Trufelman?

  How cool is this? This is from an archive of historic New York City sounds assembled by Princeton Professor Emily Thompson. But listen, this is how you bought and sold used clothes, off a push cart.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Hey, ma'am, you buy our clothes? You buy our clothes? Just a minute.

• 5:25Avery Trufelman?

  You can hear this lady haggle with the clothes peddler, trying to sell him a suit. And I love their squeaky, old-timey New York accents.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Seven and five cents.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, look.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Ninety cents.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  See? My husband's selling it two years, not a whole.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Ninety cents.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  A dollar five cents.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  All right, so.

• 5:47Avery Trufelman?

  So this was where you got used clothes. Haggle with a peddler on the street, or maybe going to a pawn shop. Either way, it was considered seedy and Semitic.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Its association with Jewishness really did make it already sullied. But then you get the 1890s, the 1900s. You start to see the more mainstream acceptance of germ theory. And so the germ theory gave it added justification. It wasn't only, you know, kind of a metaphysical filth. It became a real concern about dirtiness and uncleanliness.

• 6:24Avery Trufelman?

  And so, at this juncture in history, the thrift shop was invented. And these stores were presented as a really clean, reliable alternative. They were stationary. They had set prices on the tags.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  They would have pamphlets that talked about their giant sanitizing washing machines.

• 6:43Avery Trufelman?

  And crucially, thrift shops were Protestant.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  They changed the association from Jewishness to Christianity.

• 6:53Avery Trufelman?

  The most famous pioneering thrift stores were founded by Methodists.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  I mean, you can go back and think about John Wesley and his notions cleanliness is next to godliness.

• 7:03Avery Trufelman?

  I did not know he said that quote.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:06Avery Trufelman?

  Cleanliness is next to godliness was said by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. I always thought it was like Martha Stewart or something.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  So I think it's connected to the cleanliness is next to godliness. They couldn't rely as much on tithing or direct giving from their congregations. So they sought other means of pumping up their mission funds and were very successful through these service stores, as they were called.

• 7:29Avery Trufelman?

  One of the earliest service stores had been started over in England. They were called the East London Christian Mission. And when they came to New York City in 1897, they started like all the other used clothing peddlers, gathering abandoned clothes and material in push carts, which they would mend and sell.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  But then they expanded into storefronts.

• 7:48Avery Trufelman?

  Which, to this day, are branded "The Salvation Army." The organization had a bit of a military theme.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  This very militaristic hierarchy, where General Booth was the granddaddy of the whole organization, and they would rank their members all the way down.

• 8:03Avery Trufelman?

  And then there was the American response to the Methodist thrift shop.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  They started a few years after Salvation Army had their push carts going in New York City.

• 8:11Avery Trufelman?

  In Boston, the Morgan Memorial Cooperatives Industries and Stores started gathering secondhand clothes in 1902.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  And they would have these bags. And they would give them to people in the congregations, housewives in their neighborhood. They could just put their old clothes in it and they would go buy and collect it.

• 8:30Avery Trufelman?

  Eventually, the bag was nicknamed "The Goodwill Bag." They started to stamp the name on the bag and the organization became known as Goodwill.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  So they sold it really as, "This is something good you can do that's convenient and actually doing you a favor because this is an easy way for you to get rid of things that you might want to because then you can go buy new stuff."

• 8:49Avery Trufelman?

  Which is key.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I think what rebranding these stores as thrift stores does is it makes people more comfortable with the idea of getting rid of clothing that is still viable, that you might have felt guilty for because you're being generous. They gave it a philanthropic.

• 9:07Avery Trufelman?

  Guys, thrift stores keep consumption turning while giving it this virtuous feeling. Did Salvation Army and Goodwill invent the term thrift store?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  It's not entirely clear, but both of them start to employ it in the 1920s. And I think that's really interesting timing because it's a period of history in America, of course, where we're really becoming a consumer nation.

• 9:32Avery Trufelman?

  Ready-made clothes are an all-American invention. We made it so that, definitely by the 1920s, it's no longer that you go out and buy cloth to sew it or to take to your tailor. No. Instead, you admire racks of already assembled clothes. And you browse through them and you try them on. You no longer haggle because there's a price on the tag. It is the modern practice of shopping. And it is as American as apple pie.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  A big part of assimilation, Americanization, which was absolutely required if you wanted to succeed in this country, no matter what other nation you were coming from, was to dress like an American.

• 10:10Avery Trufelman?

  No headscarves, no traditional craftsmanship, ready-made clothes only. This is what newcomers needed to wear.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Many people saw it as more important than even speaking English and getting a job was dressing the part.

• 10:23Avery Trufelman?

  And even with very little money, you could learn how to shop, how to become an American consumer at the thrift store.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  A lot of literature shows that when they first got off the boat, if they had a relative in New York, the first thing they would do is take them clothes shopping.

• 10:39Avery Trufelman?

  And so by the 1920s, you can really feel the public sentiment towards thrifting start to shift.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I think the stigma of that quote-unquote dishonesty, lying through how you're representing yourself, is dulling a little bit by the 1920s.

• 10:54Avery Trufelman?

  Wearing clothes that you couldn't otherwise afford was still considered a little bit of class deception, but now that's kind of fun.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Taking advantage of what you can there, right? Even if it has this presumed dishonesty.

• 11:05Avery Trufelman?

  And you can hear the change in the 1923 hit single "Secondhand Rose" by Fanny Brice.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Fanny Brice was a Jewish performer, comedian.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  She played up her Jewishness. She was one of the first major stars to use that.

• 11:28Avery Trufelman?

  You might recognize the name Fanny Brice from the play Funny Girl. That was about her life. Barbra Streisand played her.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  The song, which became a big hit, "Secondhand Rose," is just this spunky woman telling a story about her dad being a Jewish proprietor of a secondhand store and how everything she gets is from there. Everything she owns has been owned before. Even her man was married before. But it's not altogether sad or depressing, right?

• 11:55Avery Trufelman?

  Honestly, it's pretty catchy and funny.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  It's interesting because by the mid to late 1920s, this isn't as damning as it was in the blue silk in the 1880s.

• 12:20Avery Trufelman?

  She's playing up the Jewishness with a little bit of a like yaididdlediddle accent.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  She's not hiding her Jewishness. She's not reporting it as necessarily a detriment while also supporting a stereotype of it.

• 12:31Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, the key thing here is at this point Jews are starting to be seen as white.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely, especially as there are other immigrants who appear less white.

• 12:40Avery Trufelman?

  Much of the pushcart secondhand business was taken over by black Americans over the course of the Great Migration.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  What happens to the pushcart dealers? They get regulated out of there.

• 12:49Avery Trufelman?

  In a lot of major cities, pushcart sellers had to get licenses or stick to designated locations. Often, these were the plots of former open-air food markets, which couldn't compete with shiny new grocery store chains.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  The giant public markets for food in places like New York City, A&P is crowding them out. Well, we've got secondhand peddlers to pick up the slack.

• 13:10Avery Trufelman?

  Oftentimes, these empty grounds became flea markets. But then they fell on hard times. I imagine the Depression changes a lot of attitudes.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, Depression is an interesting period for the life of the stores and flea markets.

• 13:24Avery Trufelman?

  To my surprise, the Great Depression was not a good time for secondhand clothing.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Because on the one hand, you got a lot more demand. On the other hand, you got a lot less supply. People stopped getting rid of their stuff. When I was looking at corporate records of Goodwill and Salvation Army, they really stagnated in the 1930s.

• 13:42Avery Trufelman?

  And it wasn't until after the Depression that there was both supply and demand for used clothes. Secondhand clothes became a little bit socially acceptable, kind of.

• 13:58Avery Trufelman?

  You see this very clearly in the 1942 film Tales of Manhattan, which features an absolutely stacked ensemble cast as a secondhand tailcoat ricochets around the city, magically bringing reversals of fortune to all the many wearers who encounter it.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  You see fabulously rich man who buys this coat ends up in the gutter. On the other hand, a poor guy who gets his hands on it becomes fabulously rich.

• 14:27Avery Trufelman?

  So it's not just that old clothes will curse you.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  So it goes in both directions this time.

• 14:33Avery Trufelman?

  Sometimes they can also be lucky.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  You can take some of the mystical qualities and make something good about that.

• 14:39Avery Trufelman?

  Which is why in the 1940s...

• 14:42Speaker 01

  You also see the rise of vintage.

• 14:44Avery Trufelman?

  And this is where we really get cooking, once the term vintage finally applies to clothes.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  It was really only used to describe wines for a long time. It didn't necessarily mean anything good, quality, anything. It just meant the year of. It was like, they are of the vintage 1923.

• 15:01Avery Trufelman?

  And then the word became a way of getting less precise about the year.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  On wine, they would say circa vintage. So it was used to kind of fudge the details on what they knew.

• 15:10Avery Trufelman?

  The word slowly started to apply to other fancy old things.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  It starts to attach itself to other goods in the 1920s, like old cars. Furniture could be vintage, and it took another good 20 years to make it to clothing, as far as I could see.

• 15:24Avery Trufelman?

  Again, it wasn't until the 1940s that the term vintage starts to apply to clothes, because this is when the used clothing market is finally picking up. After World War II, Goodwill's income increased by 580%. People were getting rid of clothes and buying new clothes. Nice ones.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  After World War II, you start to see the word vintage popping up in association with clothing, but it's in quotes, which shows it's kind of a new usage.

• 15:50Avery Trufelman?

  But here is what finally removed the quotation marks from the word vintage.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  In 1957, a couple living in Greenwich Village, the Saltmans. Mr. Saltman was an architect. He had a pretty good job, but they were also young and hip. And Sue Saltman really liked to dress like she was from the 20s.

• 16:11Avery Trufelman?

  This was a way that a woman could respectably shimmy out of the big skirted, tight-waisted styles of the 1950s, dressing in old flapper clothes.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  She wore blue-black lipstick, cloche hats, dripping beads. And they were at a party one day, and Sue Saltman is retelling the story of how she was at a Goodwill, and she saw a raccoon fur coat from the 1920s.

• 16:31Avery Trufelman?

  Raccoon fur coats had been a huge fad in the 1920s, particularly among college boys, so much so that there was this hit song from 1928 called "Doin' the Raccoon."

• 16:56Avery Trufelman?

  So our hero, Sue Saltman, a woman in 1957 who likes to dress like the 1920s, finds one of these old raccoon fur coats at a Goodwill.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And she was considering buying it, but by the time she walked around the store again, somebody had snatched it up.

• 17:09Avery Trufelman?

  And she was telling the sad story about the coat that got away at a party.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Well, somebody at the party said, "I've got tons of those."

• 17:16Avery Trufelman?

  A lot of these old raccoon fur coats had been kept in storage, and they got cut up to supply the raccoon hats for the 1950s Davy Crockett hat trend.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And so then Sue Saltman and a friend of hers discover this repository of these genuinely old coats, some of them are moth eaten, et cetera. And they start selling them. Theater company wants to buy some, et cetera. But where they really get in are like mainstream department stores.

• 17:43Avery Trufelman?

  Lord & Taylor and Macy's and Peck's and I. Magnin all started to sell genuine old raccoon coats and proudly advertised them as vintage, no quotation marks.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  So now vintage has made it to clothing, and it has imbued it with some sort of imaginary significance, cultural meaning.

• 18:05Avery Trufelman?

  It is seen as a benefit, not a detriment, that the clothes have this previous life. It is in fact a reason to buy a vintage raccoon coat.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Post-war, college kids are expressing imaginary affinity with the rich 1920s kids. So you can clearly imagine the Great Gatsby parties that Ivy League kids in the 1950s are having, wearing these moth eaten raccoon fur coats.

• 18:29Avery Trufelman?

  Vintage clothes had stories and legends to them, and they required knowledge to understand where they come from and how to get them.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And in the 60s, you really see an uptick in donations.

• 18:40Avery Trufelman?

  Then the 1960s becomes, obviously, the heyday of vintage, and the secondhand market booms.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  And so smaller thrift stores like Purple Heart Thrift Store, they're supporting veterans. There come all of these in the 50s and 60s that are differently themed.

• 18:54Avery Trufelman?

  There's the Catholic Saint Vincent de Paul, the Mormon Deseret Industries.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  There's a lot of different religious affiliates. And sometimes the goods are just more than they can keep up with.

• 19:04Avery Trufelman?

  There are, in fact, so many piles of unwanted clothes that thrift stores start to make money bailing up all their excess and selling it off. And they sell it to a new kind of client, the for-profit thrift store pioneered by Savers or Value Village, which started in 1969.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Savers is taking advantage of a kind of new market as secondhand goods become more popular.

• 19:31Avery Trufelman?

  So Savers would buy up in bulk all the excess clothes from a smaller charity shop or thrift store.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Savers operates on a kind of Walmart mentality, low overhead, high amount of goods, I'll sell at a low amount. But this means that they want to process an enormous amount of goods.

• 19:50Avery Trufelman?

  And maybe you know where this leads. These piles and piles and piles of unwanted clothes become such a burden that most get offloaded to other countries, sometimes as charity in crisis situations, but more likely bulked and sold by weight for profit. In fact, today, if you donate your clothes to a thrift shop, it's probably ultimately going to get sold off somewhere else and end up clogging some foreign landfill. But this is not actually a story about the piles and piles and piles of carelessly donated clothes that are choking up the planet. This is actually about another system that emerged throughout this whole post-war secondhand boom.

• 20:33Avery Trufelman?

  A slightly alternative model arose, one for people who didn't want to just donate all their clothes in garbage bags or dig through bulk bins, a way for people who wanted to buy or sell something really high quality, something beautiful, something special and treasured.

• 20:53Avery Trufelman?

  These were the kinds of people who came to the consignment store.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a consignment shop doesn't rely on just donations. It is a bit of a co-op, really. So people who have a large supply of nice clothing might come in there and say, "Hey, look, if you sell this for me and give me part of your profits, I've got some good clothes." So it's a partnership between the organization and the clients.

• 21:21Avery Trufelman?

  Consignment stores have always been a little bit higher end and a little bit more selective.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Consignment stores involve a fair bit more curation than Salvation Army. So consignment stores are making you a promise that the zipper's not going to be broken.

• 21:36Avery Trufelman?

  But historically, in their co-op-y kind of way, they have been extremely small and regional.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  So one example that I saw was in DC. Several pretty high-end consignment stores gained a footing in the post-war years, and they seemed to be used by a lot of diplomat and ambassadors' wives, who might have all these functions to go to and didn't want to repeat expensive gowns. So instead, they could put their one gown on consignment and then use that money that you might make as part of the profit from that and invest in buying more gowns from the same place, right? If you look historically, rarely are people only buyers or only sellers. They're doing both. They're just swimming in this world of recirculation of materials, and they're using it on both ends.

• 22:24Avery Trufelman?

  But this model, the consignment store, which sells your clothes for you and then gives you a portion of it, used to be extremely local until it was brought into the modern era by The RealReal.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  I think The RealReal is in the lineage of consignment stores, but that is marketing it to yet another demographic.

• 22:46Avery Trufelman?

  They are, again, the sponsor of this episode, but The RealReal truly did revolutionize the consignment store because they brought it online. They created the possibility of connecting shoppers and consignors who live thousands and thousands of miles apart. And on their site, you can search for almost anything, from famous household name designers to weird, obscure, small brands. These are now all available to anyone with no gatekeeping.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And so to be able to go to a place where you know they're going to have designer clothing that you maybe won't encounter the same kind of snobbery or perception you might at the firsthand shops and at a fraction of the cost, RealReal is a really good repository for that.

• 23:29Avery Trufelman?

  The RealReal has made consignment work for the way we shop now, on a massive, massive scale.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Thank you. Come on this way.

• 23:39Avery Trufelman?

  Whoa.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  We're gonna, yeah. You don't really truly understand how big it is, I think, until you come here and see it all.

• 23:47Avery Trufelman?

  I was at the massive East Coast warehouse of The RealReal out in a generic, unbranded office park in New Jersey. No one would ever know that this was packed with thousands of priceless designer clothes and diamonds and watches.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  This is our largest warehouse on the East Coast. Collectively, we have over 1.3 million square feet of warehouse.

• 24:09Avery Trufelman?

  Rachel Weisman is the Vice President of Merchandising Operations at The RealReal, meaning she oversees the entire process for the 10,000 new items that get added to The RealReal's website every single day. Where does it even, it's so labyrinthine.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  I know.

• 24:25Avery Trufelman?

  Where does it even start?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  It starts sort of, if you kind of squint that way, you can see the dock.

• 24:30Avery Trufelman?

  Trucks were depositing piles of packages into this unfathomably Borghesian hangar.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  And we take in all items here. Retail store drop-offs are coming here. People are shipping in here directly from their homes.

• 24:46Avery Trufelman?

  And all those clothes head to the cubicles and cubicles and cubicles of workers, who will then scrutinize and vet them. There's so many desks.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  There's so many desks.

• 24:55Avery Trufelman?

  And everyone's doing receiving.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Everyone's doing receiving here.

• 24:58Avery Trufelman?

  And one person doing receiving in one of those many, many cubicles was Tyree, slowly working his way through a towering pile of boxes, taking out one garment at a time and assessing each one.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Extremely nice things, extremely expensive things.

• 25:16Avery Trufelman?

  What do you do in a day?

• 25:18Speaker 04

  On a good day, about 200.

• 25:19Avery Trufelman?

  I watched as Tyree carefully unfurled a black Chloe jacket and scanned its label and its care tag and measured it with a very souped-up Bluetooth tape measure so that all the dimensions went right into the computer. Although measuring designer clothes can be a bit tricky.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  I've seen a lot of funny-shaped wardrobes.

• 25:37Avery Trufelman?

  What do you mean?

• 25:38Speaker 04

  More like Met Gala wardrobes, where they have like a metal band in the waist or around the collar.

• 25:42Avery Trufelman?

  Right, so it must not always be obvious how you measure things.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 25:47Avery Trufelman?

  Everything gets a trackable label, and it gets put on a clothes hanger.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  And from there, everything goes to photography.

• 25:53Avery Trufelman?

  And I thought the endless array of cubicles in receiving was dizzying. The photography station was kind of mind-blowing. How to describe it? It's like rows and rows of white backdrops and people just dressing mannequins as quickly as possible and shooting them.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yes, we've got two at each station here.

• 26:11Avery Trufelman?

  There are two mannequins at each white backdrop station, and each mannequin has a dedicated human running around, rapidly dressing and undressing it, moving through clothes. I'm watching someone stuff an arm into a dress. Like, dressing a mannequin is not the easiest thing to do. And now, every garment and accessory has a photograph and a measurement and all this data that's been fed into The RealReal's proprietary AI system.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  And the system is going to take all that information and tell us what to do with that item.

• 26:42Avery Trufelman?

  The RealReal's proprietary AI system is sort of a wonder. It assesses every single garment on 188 different factors, considering the garment's brand, color, condition, style, year, amount a designer is searched on their platform and on other platforms. It takes all of these elements into consideration and assesses the right price for a single item so that it sells in a reasonable amount of time.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Do I have my price? Do I have the photograph? Yes, I'm ready to be shipped to a customer.

• 27:13Avery Trufelman?

  But sometimes, there just needs to be one more step.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Or it may say, "I'm an Hermes Birkin. I need to be seen by one of our authentication experts. I'm going to go to authentication from here."

• 27:26Avery Trufelman?

  Every single thing on The RealReal is certified authentic, and it all goes through rigorous checks. But there are some items that truly need an extra thorough look. And so there, in the warehouse, there are specialists standing by.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Hunter is our Director of Authentication, and he's gonna walk you through this process.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:46Avery Trufelman?

  Hunter demonstrated some of the many ways he and his team test for authenticity, like one method on a handbag is testing the metal hardware.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Nick has our XRF machine here, so...

• 27:57Avery Trufelman?

  It's like a huge gun-looking thing. It's bright orange.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 28:00Avery Trufelman?

  The XRF machine doesn't just say "authentic" or "inauthentic." It gives a precise percentage breakdown of all the elements in this alloy.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  This is where your periodic table from high school comes in handy, right?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  What does it mean?

• 28:14Avery Trufelman?

  I have no idea what the percentages of all these various elements mean, but there is one particular element that is worth paying attention to if you are assessing, say, a Birkin.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  This element right here.

• 28:27Avery Trufelman?

  It is the element abbreviated MO.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Molebdom, so...

• 28:31Avery Trufelman?

  I would not know.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:32Avery Trufelman?

  For some reason, there tends to be a higher level of molebdom in authentic handbags.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  So it seems like it's something that they added to increase the corrosion resistance, but obviously, the fake one doesn't quite get it correct in the same percentage.

• 28:44Avery Trufelman?

  It's just one that we know that counterfeiters miss, so, yeah. And then, to make extra sure, they will put bags and shoes in an X-ray machine to look at stitching and to see if the hardware was properly riveted in. And there's a machine for black and blue light.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  That machine actually is something we can put sneakers in, and we're able to see trace lines. A lot of counterfeiters have trace lines on their shoes, and that pops under that light.

• 29:07Avery Trufelman?

  You mean like they draw a trace line?

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 29:10Avery Trufelman?

  Although, a lot of counterfeits aren't what you would necessarily suspect. They're not all accessories or handbags. Like Zimmerman dresses get knocked off a lot. And vintage clothing gets knocked off a lot.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, there were counterfeits being made of these pieces back when they came out, and there are counterfeits being made now of pieces that came out, let's say, 30 years ago.

• 29:33Avery Trufelman?

  Vintage clothes are a little harder to assess with X-rays and blue light machines. They require a little more pure, raw expertise.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  My name is Dominic Halas. I essentially run all of the operations and expertise for the vintage team here at The RealReal.

• 29:51Avery Trufelman?

  So what is the definition of vintage here?

• 29:53Speaker 03

  So the company's official definition is items that are 15 years or older, but we specifically look at pieces that have cultural and design impact.

• 30:03Avery Trufelman?

  There is a squad of people in every RealReal warehouse who just researches all the fantastic vintage clothing that gets sent their way.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  And the team members here are basically going to go through these items, assess their authenticity, of course, and also then do research on what season the item is from, who the creative director was at the time.

• 30:23Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, was this Celine under Michael Kors or Phoebe Philo?

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Whether it was worn by a celebrity, whether it's held in a museum.

• 30:30Avery Trufelman?

  Everybody on the vintage team was scrolling through runway photos, zooming in on celebrity snapshots. I mean, their work screens look like my procrastination screens.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Certain people on the team will specialize in various brands. So like, older helmet laying, I can usually date by looking at it. We manually price every item that we process.

• 30:49Avery Trufelman?

  Really?

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:50Avery Trufelman?

  Because there is a sort of genèse quoi about assessing vintage, especially today.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Oftentimes, we'll pass on things that are inherently dated because the best pieces in terms of resale value are the ones that were so ahead of their time when they were designed that they're still super relevant.

• 31:08Avery Trufelman?

  In other words, old clothes that don't really look that old.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  And that's really what makes a vintage piece successful by today's standard is how it can be worn today without looking costumey, without looking sort of cosplay-y.

• 31:24Avery Trufelman?

  Sure, there are some communities that like to dress like they've stepped out of the past, but by and large, for the most part, in the midst of this current secondhand boom, the consignment customer doesn't want to look like they're from an entirely different era. According to Dom, this is the way that the vintage market has most changed.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  I went to my first Manhattan Vintage Clothing Show in 2010. Going there at the time, vintage mostly resembled the eras that it was from. Versus now, there's something special to the fact that you can still wear it and still look amazing. And you can see this in a lot of design that comes out today. It's constantly referencing these older collections.

• 32:06Avery Trufelman?

  Vintage is interwoven with the way we dress now. Whether new styles look older or older styles look sort of current, we are referencing, at this juncture in history, so many different styles from so many different eras. Because almost everything is out there. Instead of hunting through bins or looking at the limited selection in your local consignment shop, the key to shopping vintage these days is to figure out what you want.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  I always tell people, start internally and understand what your values are, what your taste in culture is, completely outside of fashion. What movies, music, art do you like and find yourself gravitating towards? And what are the values shared across those mediums? See what your favorite musician was wearing back in the day. And then I would start searching on The RealReal, searching generally by the designer with the word "vintage." At least personally, that's how I shop. I know not everyone's going to shop that way.

• 33:05Avery Trufelman?

  Are you allowed to get first dibs on things?

• 33:07Speaker 03

  We are only able to purchase items when they go live on the site.

• 33:11Avery Trufelman?

  Because it's all consignment. Everything in there belongs to other people.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  So we can't purchase anything before it's live on the site.

• 33:18Avery Trufelman?

  That's funny. Even though all those clothes are still tantalizingly present, held in the back of the warehouse.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  The world's biggest closet.

• 33:27Avery Trufelman?

  Rachel Weisman walked me through the rows and rows of clothes in The RealReal's holding area. Huge.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:34Avery Trufelman?

  Aisle 211, aisle 212.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  And if you think about it, we're selling items so quickly, most within 90 days, that you can think of it as almost like a temporary holding spot.

• 33:46Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah. That is, until they get consigned again, and again, and again, and again, for all their next lives.