This is what I imagined vintage shopping in Japan would be like:
I would walk into the pearly gates of a vintage store.
It would be loaded the likes of Issey Miyake, Yohji, CDG, Margiela. Cream of the crop 2000s pieces. That one girl posted a TikTok about scoring a $30 Pleats Please top, so I’ll probably find one too…
Somehow everything I wanted would magically fit me. It would be affordable. There are other people in the stores but they are more like NPCs. No one else is competing for the same items as me, there are no awkward moments where we are browsing the rack from opposite sides and decide whether to make contact in the middle.
I would leave the store with two crisp paper bags full of secondhand designer clothes wrapped in tissue paper, one dangling off each wrist. Then I would go to a cute little kakigori cafe and scarf down a mountain of sugar ice, red bean flecks stuck between my teeth, beaming from the post-shopping high. I wouldn’t be able to wait until I got back to the hotel to look at the clothes. On the train ride, I’d be too giddy and rip a little bit of the neat tissue paper to get a glimpse of what I bought.
It’s as romantic as retail gets.