When Amrit Tietz combs through packed flea market fields, she is on the hunt for gems like vintage Levi’s jeans, hard-to-find band T-shirts and fringed leather jackets.
Not for herself — for her 3-year-old daughter, whose wardrobe, she estimates, is roughly 70 percent vintage.
“I would rather buy that than a ‘Frozen’ Elsa costume from Amazon,” said Tietz, 38, who lives in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn and started collecting children’s vintage even before she became a mother. “It feels more thoughtful.”
Parents have long dressed their children in hand-me-downs and secondhand clothes as a matter of practicality. Toddlers seem to outgrow sweaters almost overnight. But lately, the used clothes some parents seek are from rarer provenances and require setting eBay alerts and sifting through pages of Etsy search results.
A recent surge in interest for vintage baby clothes has turned what was once a niche corner of the resale market into a “gold rush,” one observer said, sometimes sending prices of OshKosh B’gosh overalls and bitty 1990s tees to eye-watering heights.
The trend reflects what is perhaps an eternal parental desire: for one’s child to share in one’s tastes. For those who favor one-of-a-kind garments with healthy patinas over mass-market fast fashion, that means making sure their children’s outfits have the same aura of cool they seek for themselves.
“A big part of why you go for vintage and thrifted pieces is because you want something that you’re not just going to see everyone else wearing on the street,” said Caley Clocksin, who runs Cosmo, a secondhand and vintage children’s clothing store, with her friend Shanna Cooper. “I think it’s the exact same for dressing your kids.”
The shop, which opened on a corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn in June, is mainly a place where customers can sell children’s outgrown clothes for store credit or cash, creating a circular fashion ecosystem for local parents.
But Cooper, 32, has also begun to plump up the racks with vintage children’s wear she sources herself. Cosmo has now joined a constellation of brick-and-mortar stores — including Darling in Brooklyn Heights and Parachute in Greenpoint — that have cropped up over the last few years selling miniature vintage and secondhand offerings.
It’s “a lot of hunting on eBay for different brands and special things,” she said, like a houndstooth dress with a Peter Pan collar by Armani Baby from the early 1990s. Cooper and Clocksin priced it at $30.
On a recent afternoon, a pair of OshKosh B’gosh overalls ($40), a DKNY logo T-shirt ($12), and a onesie with colorfully printed airplanes and parachutists ($22) hung on the racks. Also for sale: a tiny pair of Levi’s Orange Tabs that once belonged to Cooper, displayed on the wall behind the cash wrap.
“I think there’s definitely a world in which things like this are worth a lot more,” Cooper said, holding up the Armani Baby dress. “But part of it is we want to price things to sell, and we want these to be recirculated.”
Elsewhere in the expanding world of vintage baby clothes, though, prices can quickly become stratospheric.
Recently, Leah Rebne, who writes the newsletter Recycled Threds, witnessed an eBay auction of a vintage romper featuring Eeyore that sold for over $3,000.
“Nobody wanted them back four years ago,” said Rebne, a 37-year-old mother of three in Green Bay, Wis. “I couldn’t give these things away.”
“The Clifford and Winnie-the-Pooh overalls, if I had those four or five years ago, I’d maybe get 10 or 15 bucks for them,” she added.
She has been buying and selling vintage kids’ togs since around 2016, after becoming interested in the classic OshKosh B’gosh and Gymboree she remembered from her childhood. At the time, she said, few vintage buyers or dealers paid much attention to the small garments. She noticed that the market started to expand around 2020 and 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic helped spur a broader interest in vintage clothes.
Rebne now mostly sells wholesale to other sellers, including some as far-flung as Japan. She also counts celebrities like Halsey and Erik-Michael Estrada among her clients.
She’s happy about the new interest in children’s vintage, but “I don’t necessarily like the price and the competition,” Rebne added.
Audrey Gelman, the owner of the Six Bells hotel in the Hudson Valley and a founder of the Wing, compared the hype around vintage children’s styles on Facebook pages like 90s and Y2K Kids BST (BST stands for buy, sell, trade) to that surrounding Supreme.
“You have to apply to join them,” she said of the Facebook page, which has over 12,000 members. “And then sometimes someone will post a drop and everything you want is already bought in 10 minutes.” (Gelman has been a member for about a year.)
Still, she usually enjoys herself as she hunts for brands like Patagonia and Healthtex for her two toddlers. “It’s a way to make shopping for your kids’ clothes, which can be an annoying task, into something that’s fun,” she said.
There’s also a nostalgic appeal: Parents born in the 1990s sometimes dress their kids in the exact clothes they wore at their age. Gelman concedes that building a vintage-heavy wardrobe for her children is “mostly for me, but it’s a victimless crime.”
And as many shoppers place a renewed emphasis on quality and natural fibers, buying vintage for children also just seems sensible to some parents.
Tietz, who runs Spread the Jelly, a media company focused on motherhood, said she had noticed that vintage children’s clothing “really stood the test of time, because it’s cotton, it’s linen, it’s cashmere, it’s less synthetic.”
A decades-old baby sweater may have a moth hole or two, but that’s fine. There’s a sense that these clothes can take it and may look even better with some wear and tear.
“I like things to feel and look worn,” Tietz said. “I don’t mind stains and patching something up — I think it looks cooler.”
At times, though, her daughter has “definitely gotten oil on a sweatshirt,” she said. “And I’m like, Damn, that was a good one. But whatever, she’s 3.”
