The Black Student Board (BSB) Vintage Fair … where do I even start?
It was incredibly mid! But I can’t really blame BSB for that. Yes, BSB did organize the event and the vendors there, but they couldn’t control the prices. That’s just the nature of all vintage fairs: everything is overpriced, and it is hard to find anything cute.
At this point, I would say well over half of my closet is made up of second-hand clothes, and I have gone thrifting all over North Carolina. All of this to say, as an avid thrifter, I know a little bit about how much second-hand clothing should cost.
I have been to quite a few vintage fairs and vintage markets in my time, and I have only ever bought one item of clothing. It was a sweater vest that cost $15… was the sweater cute? Yes. Was it worth that much money? Likely not.
In my experience, “vintage clothes” are exorbitantly expensive because the word “vintage” is slapped onto the front of them. But in reality, it is just something that the vendor bought from a thrift store and marked up by $20.
At the BSB Vintage Fair, I walked up to a booth that had racks of t-shirts. I was thumbing through some of the red shirts when I came across a Popeye shirt. This thing looked like a Target graphic tee that had been bought by a middle schooler and then donated when they graduated from high school. When I tell you this shirt was worn into the ground, the print on the front was faded and cracking, the fabric had picks, and so much more.
But then I looked at the price tag and I saw a whopping $20. $20! Are we joking here? This would have been worth maybe $15 at Goodwill! Unless this was some collector’s edition Popeye shirt that you couldn’t buy anywhere else, then there is no way anyone would pay $20 for that rag.
Don’t even get me started on those “vintage NC State” vendors that only sell NC State gear from the 80s. These sorts of vendors are the most expensive and stupid, in my opinion. They’ll have a big varsity jacket that will cost somewhere around $250 or more. But if you were to buy it new, it would be almost $100 cheaper. However, to give them some credit, they are also the highest quality of the bunch.
Maybe I’m not the right audience for these sorts of things, since I am a broke college student. But then, who would be the right audience? I can almost guarantee that 75% of the students at NC State are in the same boat. I would rather take a risk and go thrifting, hoping that I get lucky, than drop a whole paycheck on something at a vintage fair when they had probably found their stuff at a thrift store.
Out of everyone I saw walking around the BSB Vintage Fair, which was not very many in the first place, I did not see a single person with a purchased item in their hand. People would wander around, look through the stands, and then leave … just like I did.
I also saw very little advertising for this event, only the original post announcing the vintage fair on the BSB Instagram as part of Pan-Afrikan Week, and one follow- up post for the specific event. There was no explanation for this event or many of the other events hosted by BSB, either, besides the fact that they were fun for students (or were at least supposed to be). I was under the impression that even if they weren’t directly a part of the Pan-Af Week celebrations, all of the events were connected in some way.
With that being said, I am failing to see the connection between the Vintage Fair and Pan-Af Week. If there was one, then I missed it. That means this was either a fail or a wasted opportunity. They could have invited POC vendors and food trucks and tied it into the rest of Pan-Af Week. However, seeing as I didn’t enjoy the event, maybe it is better that they kept it separate.
