Hollywood’s Favorite Vintage Dealer Just Landed in New York

This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.

The vintage dealer Tommy Dorr is just an email or an Instagram DM away, but his appointment-only showroom, Mothfood, still feels like one of the best kept secrets in fashion. Since opening his studio in LA’s Mount Washington neighborhood in 2015, Dorr has become the go-to source of airy white midcentury button-ups and sun-faded pocket tees for stylists, editors, fashion designers, and a generation of budding pop idols and Hollywood starlets.

As of last week, Mothfood—like many of the insiders who shop there—is officially bicoastal. On Friday, Dorr cut the ribbon on Mothfood’s New York outpost, a bright floor-through loft just off Canal St. in Chinatown filled with the understated but deeply interesting Americana garments he’s known for. That afternoon, I walked out of the elevator as Dorr was unpacking bottles of mezcal for that evening’s opening party. Dorr was expecting a familial crowd, having texted the invite to several dozen New Yorkers who, like me, used to trek out to Mount Washington whenever they were in LA.

“I feel like the New Yorker’s eye is very detail oriented—they like to nerd out on the same pieces that I really like too,” Dorr said, adding that despite the size of the space, he is planning to keep it to private appointments. “I want it to be an intimate spot where people can take their time to really look at stuff and not be bothered by anything else.”

In case you haven’t been vintage shopping in New York lately, the experience tends to be the opposite of intimate and unbothered. The city is in the midst of a vintage style renaissance, with downtown gallery openings and impossible-to-book restaurants filled with twenty-somethings proudly rocking paint-splattered Carhartts and billowy made-in-USA shirts, accessorized with archival designer bags and sunglasses. Vintage menswear transcended hipsterdom years ago, but it’s only more recently, as luxury pricing has gone truly haywire, that old clothes have truly become a cornerstone of the modern style zeitgeist.

Which makes trying to pick your way through the city’s crowded thrift stores and ephemeral street racks an increasingly chaotic and disorienting experience, with good pieces—and good deals—becoming rarer by the day. Sifting through a rail of crummy (but expensive) mass-produced shirts and foreign-made Levi’s at a buzzy secondhand shop recently, I felt like I was facing down vintage menswear’s existential crisis: was I being taken for a ride, or was this truly all that was left?