⬜ The anti-SEO of vintage Etsy
Searching for ties and Missoni sweaters.
Nate Gallant: Where does one go these days to wander on the internet without getting caught in some rat maze of late capitalism? Certainly not social media. Probably not Zillow, either. You could shop for things you could actually afford, but algorithmic culture has made this an increasingly bland, siloed experience. Like many people, I find myself battling the increasingly interlocking spaces of efficient consumption online, not to mention my own deeply internalized habit of experiencing pleasure in purchasing crap. However, I have also found a nice space for a kind of pleasant, low-stakes connoisseurship on Etsy. Specifically, tie Etsy.
Here, the objects onto which I can cathect my wandering desires feel refreshingly small. Soft. Obscure. Even better, they're buried in the comforting chaos of Etsy’s wonderfully terrible search function. There are no models sporting impossible dimensions. No boring, top-down copy and paste of contemporary ready-to-wear fashion. No well-oiled algorithmic recommendations. Just input "vintage ties" and drown yourself in thousands of disorganized posts, a surprising number of which are not ties at all, or if they are, are not uniformly vintage, used, or deadstock.
On the chaotic Etsy search page, you get the cheap, sublime thrill of inexhaustible pages to scroll through. But you have to do the sorting yourself, and I have nearly always happened upon a few absolute gems: strange patterns and colorways, evidence of past aesthetic moments from fashion history.
A search on, say, The RealReal would produce a smoother, finely targeted, and well-curated surface of extracted metadata. This, for me at least, shapes an experience dictated by an imposing choice between brands or current trends ("platform sneakers" or "Bode suits"), with very little navigable distance between the search and the buy button. Freewheeling exploration is discouraged.
Etsy searches, in contrast, yield an entropic series of rabbit holes. Messy collections of brand names, descriptions, and sizing, often in Craigslist-esque language (“CDG VINTAGE ARCHIVAL UNUSED ULTRA RARE BLAZER COAT”), scatter search results across many pages. The sprawl generates numerous curiosities and potential mysteries to solve. Why do I keep seeing this kind of Missoni gilet? Why are there so many vintage YSL blazers sold so cheaply from collectors in Southeast Asia? What was this time period when everyone produced ties that look like the floor in the Red Room from Twin Peaks?
In this way, Etsy can be a place to turn a habit of consumption into a habit of digital collection. My journey started with gathering particular stores, such as Livido Milano (standard slew of designer stuff, very fun "categories" if you can call them that), Stag on the Hill Vintage (beautiful, generally brandless European collections), and TwoNine Vintage (vintage prep and lots of Japanese designer brands). I am not always successful at resisting the buy button. Still, as my girlfriend reminded me after I had purchased one too many ties with the excuse that they're less than $20, you can also favorite any item and create your own little archive. Here's mine, for the curious. (Ed. from Kyle: Etsy favs are a little like what Tumblr used to be, a personal curation of images, or Svpply if you remember that, a careful construction of consumer taste.)
Items, as far as I can tell, stay in your favorites even after they have sold. This allows you to admire your small collection far, far away from the noise of influence and class signaling endemic to social media. I'd like to think this space to wander also led to some discoveries in how I might like to dress, which kinds of design are accessible to those who can't afford new designer clothing, and which fashion archives are available to those who don't work in the industry.
Inevitably, this and many other liminal spaces on Etsy will vanish. Over the last year or two, the site has been inundated with an obnoxious glut of bots, ad-laden search results, and large-scale manufacturers masquerading as local artisans. Some may view its chaos or even this drift from authenticity as a UX problem. To me, the cracks in slickly designed efficiencies of consumption online, short-lived though they may be, furnish the possibility of fun in the murky, archival depths.
From Our Readers:
Our previous newsletter, Connecticut is a trend, was our biggest hit yet! (Out of 3.) That’s probably because NYC suburbs trigger everyone — as I have said, there needs to be a New York Magazine about Connecticut. Responses included:
An elegiac mini-memoir from Kyle Toman in the comments, on house-hunting in the NYC burbs and moving back to CT after growing up there: “The search dragged on for close to a year and we expanded into CT - my wife had no feelings about this but it seemed unthinkable to me, since I thought I left that place. But we found it - the perfect midcentury ranch on a quiet street…”
NYT columnist and intermittent CT resident Lydia Polgreen replied to the headline: “Sure is. Also, I hate it.”
Friend of One Thing (FOOT) and a fav writer Ana Kinsella says she’s “really enjoying” our monographic approach.
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Delighted to be a FOOT hahaha
A quaint corner of friction and chaos on the web indeed. I love Etsy, and it’s app actually is rather okay.
On the note of appreciating private collections of images, items etc, can I give a shout out to the pleasure of private Pinterest boards for collecting the ephemera of the internet.