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The interior of Object Limited, with racks of clothes along a wall.
Courtesy Object Limited

Object Limited Is the Secondhand Solution We’ve Been Yearning For

Aileen Kwun

January 11, 2020
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With increasing awareness and reporting on the ongoing climate crisis, we’ve learned more about the top industry offenders and culprits with the largest footprints. Fossil fuels and agriculture top the list—but the clothing and apparel industry takes a significant toll as well, accounting for 10 percent of humanity’s carbon emissions and a major consumer—not to mention polluter—of the planet’s water supply. Producing a single pair of jeans requires 2,000 gallons of water, on average, and laundering synthetic fibers are to blame for nearly a third of all microplastics found in oceans. Meanwhile, 85 percent of all textiles end up in the dump, as fast fashion feeds an appetite for constantly buying new, cheaply made garments. (To go deeper into all of this, we recommend Tatiana Schlossberg’s new book, Inconspicuous Consumption.)

The stark figures make for a compelling case for shopping vintage and secondhand, and with a plethora of online sellers, boutiques, and marketplaces, from eBay and 1stdibs to Etsy and Depop, there is a style and budget for everyone. One of our favorite places to browse is Object Limited, an online shop and app that offers highly curated sales hosted by vendors who are vetted and selected by application. Its founder, Anna Gray, a vintage hound, writer, and sometimes model, started the easy-to-navigate platform after a cross-country road trip yielded a literal truckload of thrift and antique store finds. “It opened our eyes to how much stuff is out there, just waiting for a good eye to show it to someone that needs or wants it,” Gray says, adding, “Everything ‘new’ and trending—fashion, home goods, etcetera—is a remake of something else. You never have to buy anything new, except for tech and underwear.”

Buying vintage not only makes for more conscientious consumption, it’s perennially in vogue. Virgil Abloh, for one, thinks streetwear will soon be a thing of the past: “I think that fashion is gonna go away from buying a box-fresh something,” he recently told Dazed. “It’ll be like, hey, I’m gonna go into my archive.” While buying vintage clothing alone won’t save the planet (and may come with hidden environmental costs), at the very least, giving a secondhand garment another life always makes for one less piece of clothing in the trash.

# Fashion# Planet# Climate# New York

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It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.