53: Mapping New York’s top thrift and vintage stores
Fashion star Liisa Jokinen points travelers toward the hippest secondhand clothing and coolest street style in the Big Apple.
Think New York City has gotten too pricey and corporate for vintage clothing boutiques and cool thrift stores? You haven’t met Liisa Jokinen. The Finnish-born, Manhattan-based photographer and fashion entrepreneur produces the NYC Vintage Map, an interactive app and website pinpointing nearly 400 brick-and-mortar secondhand stores across all five boroughs. It’s a free, constantly updated treasure hunt map where users zoom in to discover businesses by location (Brooklyn! Long Island City!) or category (designer, thrift, kid’s, home).
Jokinen also runs the roaringly popular street-style website, Tumblr (120k followers), and Instagram account (77.1 followers) NY Looks. Her main business, Gem, is a secondhand clothing search engine. Gem’s website and app allows users to search for specific items—say a pair of early 2000s Chanel sandals or a men’s 1940s velvet smoking jacket—across many secondhand retailers. It turns up listings across multiple sources, from the bigger resale sites (Etsy, eBay, Poshmark, TheRealReal) to tiny independent boutiques.
I chatted with Jokinen about how the NYC Vintage Map can launch an epic secondhand style crawl across the Big Apple, why she loves vintage, and where to people watch in New York.
How did you get involved in New York fashion?
I am 51 years old, originally from Finland, and now living in New York City! We (me and my husband) moved to the U.S. in 2014 and lived two and a half years in San Francisco before moving to New York in early 2017.
I have always been interested in clothes and style, why people wear what they wear, all the stories the clothes can tell about us and our culture.
Why are you passionate about used clothing?
I have always preferred old clothes to new ones, and I’ve worn secondhand all of my life. When I was a baby, my mother dressed me in hand-me-downs from my sister and our relatives. Later on, I was very particular about my clothes and liked to design and “order” clothes from my mother who was good at making them.
I also learned to sew myself and started thrifting when I was 13 or 14 years old. Sewing and thrifting were the only ways to get the clothes that I wanted in the small town where I grew up.
Your main business is the Gem app for secondhand shopping. Tell me about it.
Gem is a search engine for secondhand and vintage. It’s a website and an app for iPhone and Android. Shoppers can use an image and/or word search to look for items. Gem shows them matching listings across resale sites and online secondhand and vintage stores. One thing that makes Gem unique is that it shows listings from small indie stores, too, not only from big platforms like eBay and TheRealReal. The listings from indie stores are pretty hard or even impossible to find with Google.
Why did you create the NYC Vintage Map?
I needed it when we moved to NYC! I did not know where to go shopping (and shopping for me means always secondhand first), so I first created a Google Maps list of all the New York City stores, then later made an app out of it. Users can browse the stores by name, neighborhood, or category. The map is free to use and take part in—we really want to spread the word about local stores and support them.
I have always been interested in clothes and style, why people wear what they wear, all the stories the clothes can tell about us and our culture.
I add new stores as soon as I find them or they open! There is no curation, we want the map to be complete. We only remove stores if they close. We also created a similar map for LA.
Why does New York have such a rich secondhand scene?
New York City is the mecca of style, and nowadays fashion also means vintage. New Yorkers are never afraid to experiment. And since vintage is the best way to create unique outfits, it is only natural that the city has almost 400 thrift and vintage stores.
What are some of your favorite New York resale shops?
