I can still remember the first vintage purchase I ever made. It was a drop-waist, neon pink, polka-dot, 50s-era day dress, and I paid $35 worth of my babysitting money for it at the Manhattan Vintage Clothing Show, which I first scammed my cool aunt into taking me to in 2007. I honestly don’t remember ever wearing the dress (there aren’t that many opportunities for an eighth-grader to cosplay as Doris Day, it turns out), but I was so proud just to have it hanging in my closet, an eye-catching sentry among my drab uniform skirts and off-brand Lacoste polo shirts that reminded me there was more to me—and to life—than being continually overlooked at school. Someday, I vowed back then, I’d have an entire closet of gorgeous vintage clothes, ones I’d actually wear.
True to my word, I kept shopping primarily from vintage and used stores for the next decade or so, supplementing my Madewell basics with floaty witch dresses from the Goodwill near my college campus in Ohio and expensive jeans I’d pick up for a fraction of their original cost at Wasteland on Melrose once I moved to LA after graduation. I did my best to unearth old clothes, jewelry, shoes, and purses everywhere I went, shyly showing up again and again at my best-loved stores and eventually making friends with vintage dealers everywhere from Moscow to Maine; vintage clothing provided a community for me when I was badly in need of one as a weird, too-online kid, showing me that my peculiar sense of beauty could be appreciated by people out in the real world. Maybe that’s why it hurt so bad when it all—quite literally—stopped fitting.
After a childhood and early adulthood spent mostly skinny but fearing fat constantly, I gained a significant amount of weight starting when I was about 26. After a predictable period of floundering around hating myself, I decided I was done; I still loved clothes passionately, and I didn’t want to hide my body in drab navies and grays when I could be draped in color, bejeweled, bedazzled, and generally visible despite (or because of?) my fatness. Unfortunately, the vintage world I’d once found solace in didn’t seem too psyched about my new proportions; my usual favorite shops tended to max out at a size large—or maybe, if I was really lucky, extra large—in just about everything, and when I brought up the issue tentatively with a vintage-shop proprietor I’d known for years, she shrugged and told me: “There’s just not a lot of plus-size vintage clothing out there. People used to be smaller.” (Does it go without saying that she was thin?)
For a while, those words daunted me, mostly because they felt true. I didn’t know where to look for plus-size vintage clothing, and once I was told by what I considered to be a reliable source that it pretty much didn’t exist, I stopped trying; I was living in Austin by then, home to some of the country’s best vintage, but I mostly kept my shopping to random knicknacks and vintage UT Austin memorabilia, cowed by the notion that my body (and my newfound confidence in it) didn’t belong in clothes from the past. All that changed, though, when I discovered the Instagram account @historicalfatpeople, which features exactly what you’d think: fat people throughout the years, living their lives, as it turns out we tend to do despite the ill winds of fatphobia and bigotry that so often shift our way. Following the account and getting daily exposure to all kinds of bodies in all kinds of clothes emboldened me, and soon (although I wish it were sooner) I was ready to dress like myself—or for myself—again.
I’ve spent the last few years cultivating a deep bench of vintage, thrift, handmade, and reworked clothing purveyors who I can generally rely upon to help me find something in my size that I genuinely love, from Luvsick in Chicago to Vida Vazquez Studio in the Bay Area to The Op Shop in Rochester, New York. I treasure my finds from these spots, and I treasure my relationships with the dedicated, eagle-eyed, often also fat proprietors and makers who lead me to them even more. But I have to admit that the process of finding items online, ordering them, waiting for them to arrive at my current apartment in LA, then trying them on in my room alone can get old; I’ve been craving the kind of sartorial camaraderie I felt when my high school best friend and I would spend hours after-school trying on fast-fashion knockoffs we still couldn’t afford at Urban Outfitters. But that sort of in-person community can be hard to find when you’re a fat vintage shopper. Or, that is, it was until Thick Thrift—Los Angeles’s first all-plus-size flea market—first arrived on the scene last year.
“People are always like, ‘Oh, you really found a cool niche,’ and I’m like, ‘Girl, it’s not a niche!’” says Rachael Frank, the cofounder of Thick Thrift along with Aya Kajikawa and Mia Fernandez. “Most people are plus-size, and the average person is around a size 18.”
Frank notes that one of their favorite interactions with a customer came from a teenager who had asked her parents to bring her to Thick Thrift for her 17th birthday in lieu of a party. It’s not super-journalistically objective to admit it, but I got choked up when Frank relayed this story, picturing what my own 17th birthday might have been like if I’d spent it shopping for earrings and purses and jeans in the company of hundreds of beautiful, celebratory, unabashedly fat people. What would my adult life—or any of our adult lives—have been like if we’d gotten the message early on that our bodies were worth adorning just as they were?
“We were sick of going to other, more curated places and finding nothing and just standing there looking at necklaces or whatever,” says Kajikawa as the Thick Thrift trio walks me through the event’s evolution from a laid-back yard sale to a mega-market that regularly draws more than a thousand people (and was spotlighted in an NPR write-up last summer). Thick Thrift, at its core, feels like a rebuke to the experience that I’m depressingly sure almost every fat person can relate to: standing around while your thin friends try on clothes that don’t come in your size, smiling vaguely and wondering how long it will be before you can leave—or at least take refuge at the mall Sephora, where nothing is fabric and, thus, everything fits.
When I tell Frank about the “people used to be smaller” comment I fielded from my vintage-dealer faux friend, they take care to situate the misconception in its proper cultural context. “I’m not sure that people were smaller necessarily, but I think that fat people were even more marginalized, and people weren’t making clothes for us,” says Frank. “A lot of the time, if you find vintage pieces in larger plus-sizes, you can tell that they were actually custom tailored for these individuals. It just points to really interesting things about class and status. The clothes weren’t made for us, which denied us access to spaces where we would look like we didn’t belong because we had no options to look cool or fashionable. People didn’t see fat as being acceptable, so they didn’t want us to look acceptable.”
Acceptability seems to be the last thing many Thick Thrift attendees are concerned about, sartorially speaking. Show up when the market first opens and the line to get in circles around the block, and you’re sure to be dazzled by an army of fat people in tube tops, horizontal stripes, sequins, miniskirts, cropped shirts, bright colors—pretty much every style and trend that fashion has consistently told us isn’t for us is represented, out there in the open like a fat-positive Instagram feed come to life. At the last Thick Thrift event, which took place on April 7 in an alleyway in Downtown LA, shoppers snapped up everything from wide-calf Wray boots to reworked Carhartt jackets to corsets reading “CUNTY” in embroidery to truly top-tier cups of boba. The event boasted upwards of 70 vendors, some of whom had never sold IRL before and some of whom are already fixtures of Southern California’s fat sustainable-fashion community.
One of the vendors in the latter category was Jessica Hinkle, the owner of Proud Mary, a shop in Highland Park that has been offering vintage clothing in sizes 12 to 32 since 2011 (and where, anecdotally, I recently found the sickest ’80s-era black Ralph Lauren jeans and green vintage skirt with knee-length fringe, but that’s beside the point). “The store is named after my grandmother, Mary, who had a lot of grandchildren and also had really zany style and did not care—I used to go thrifting with her a lot,” said Hinkle when I spoke to her in advance of April’s Thick Thrift market. “When I was in high school, there weren’t the options there are now. Things went up to size 16 if you were lucky, so I’d wear business casual and people just thought I was a teacher.”
Hinkle opened her shop to provide the community she now lives in with more choices than she’d had growing up as a fat young person. She admits running a fat-focused business can be hard in a city as image-obsessed as LA, but after passing through Chicago, Las Vegas, and Florida, she’s thrilled to be selling at her store and vending at Thick Thrift specifically. “There’s fatphobia all over, but there are also fat people all over, and there are a lot of fat people in LA, even though people think, Oh, only skinny, actory people live here. LA has such a rich history, and not everyone is trying to be an actor, but there are fat actors and fat people and a fat community in general.”
I’m not sure there’s a way to describe what it feels like to shop at Thick Thrift after years (or, in many of my fellow shoppers’ cases, a lifetime) of eschewing color, print, pattern, and anything eye-catching in favor of nondescript, body-hiding plus-size schmatta. Or, at least, there’s not one coherent way, although descriptions I heard from shoppers at April’s event ranged from “fat paradise” to “everything I ever wanted in a market” to perhaps the most popular sentiment of the day: “Seriously, why the fuck hasn’t this existed before?” As Frank says, plus-size buyers are firmly the majority of the American consumer base at this point, so why is addressing our needs (and, more capitalistically relevant, harnessing our spending power) still treated like a novelty?
With Thick Thrift in the mix, and vendors like Proud Mary, Zoe’s Vintique, Used Work Clothes, and Cantiq peddling their wares from its booths, it’s hard to imagine the however-slow march of fat progress (within the relatively small world of the Los Angeles vintage scene, at least) going backward. Personally, now that I’ve seen the Promised Land of almost a hundred vendors all gleefully offering items in sizes the mainstream fashion industry has long eschewed, I’m forever hooked on the notion of having options. After all, don’t we all—and by we all, I specifically mean fat people—deserve to try one shirt on, hate it, try the next, pose in the mirror, pout our lips, fall in love, fork over the $20, chat a little bit with the vendor, and go get a boba in the sun with our friends?
