Brian Procell Explains Why the Fashion World Started Taking Vintage Seriously
When I enter the cramped confines of Procell on Delancey St., flashbulbs are strobing off the white walls and curious passersby are lingering outside the glass front. Inside, a half-dozen kids with cool haircuts—dressed in an assortment of vintage Fendi, vintage Stone Island, and...Crocs—pose among double-stacked racks of denim and T-shirts for GQ Style’s photographers, who are there to shoot the Procell crew for the holiday issue.
The store’s bearded proprietor, Brian Procell, hangs near the back, next to shelves full of vintage Polo flat-brims. He’s wearing a firetruck-red Herman Miller tee—vintage, of course, and incredibly rare, like everything else in the store. (I later scour eBay for something similar—nothing.) Among all the stores that made our list of the six raddest retail destinations in N.Y.C. right now, the tiny Procell has arguably been the most influential on the current fashion landscape. It’s not just where Frank Ocean, Drake, and Kendall Jenner come to dial in the fits—featuring Aphex Twin tees and Gauthier denim—that set the standard for style-chasers everywhere. Concept designers from huge brands stop by to check the pulse on what’s cool. Alexander Wang and Dev Hynes have tapped Procell for collaborative capsules. And behind the scenes, Brian sources rare pieces for the design teams at some of the biggest brands in the world. The original reference behind your favorite track jacket just might have passed through Brian’s hands at one point.
Though the store bears his name, Brian prefers to remain behind the scenes, and let customers interact with the squad of young musicians, students, photographers, artists, and designers who man the register during the store’s semi-regular hours. He’s more a Rick Rubin than a Kanye West—and like Rubin, he has a magic touch. The shop is curated like a sick record store, with every genre of ’80s and ’90s fashion represented. Original Prada Sport jackets hang next to stonewashed Versace jeans and iconic Chanel accessories. Hole merch and Grateful Dead tie-dye join a greatest hits of rare hip-hop bootlegs from ’90s N.Y.C. When Procell opened in 2012, curated vintage was relatively new, and fashion’s wave of throwback designs hadn’t yet crested. Now, every city has a good luxury vintage spot—but not everybody has Brian’s archive (at 25,000 pieces and growing) or his dogged determination to collect, celebrate, and spread the cultural history of clothing. We sat down for a rare conversation about how he became a downtown fixture from his humble origins in Elizabeth, NJ, and how he changed the vintage market in the process.
GQ Style: My sense is even five years ago you'd be able to find some of the stuff in here at a Goodwill or thrift store, but now that people realize the value of this stuff it’s gotten quite a bit harder.
Brian Procell: The number one culprit is social media. There's a level of transparency online that allows for a lot of businesses to kind of give away education. We do our social media in a very natural way—I don't mean it’s negative. We do have to publicize what we do, and the effect is that a lot of people are influenced. But the reality is any of the pieces that are in the store right now, the chances of finding them on your own in the wild is equivalent to winning the lottery.
So do you think that you’re sort of responsible for creating a market for a lot of these vintage categories?
Yeah, absolutely. Take for example designer sportswear—in 2008 I did a collection for Opening Ceremony, and that was the first time a department store was showcasing runway versions of streetwear. So you had Hermes sweatshirts, you had Moschino and Gauthier version of “sport” from the ’80s and ’90s. Then I juxtaposed that with Nike, Adidas, and all the other brands. That had never, ever been done before. The demand was amazing. The audience was just insatiable. So I saw that as like something that was going to be around for a very, very long time. And then I went full throttle. I've always been just like thinking about this as a craft instead of a job. I want to innovate. I wanted to be a painter as I was growing up. A lot of my moves in New York city were really about making advances in the art world, but I just didn't have the pedigree and the funds to roll the dice that way. So what I wanted to do in the world of vintage, like any painter or artist that’s respected in their field, is innovate. Also, that was my first piece that seeing designers come in, to reappropriate some of the stuff. So I saw that as calling. That's really the bread and butter of the business. It's not the store—
It's the consulting.
It's the consulting and behind-the-scenes work.
Do you ever see something you sold a designer appear pretty literally interpreted on the runway and get kind of bummed out?
No, not at all. It shouldn't be looked at through a negative lens. Right now we are living in a really funny time where designers are being called out for reappropriating and carbon-copying. I can kind of understand ’cause I think a lot of world didn't understand the way the industry worked. But these designers have to deliver samples and product on time. And I think in a sense they're educating the rest of the world. They’re shining a light on something that was literally discarded, you know? I really admire that. I think it's really cool. They are elevating the status of something of that was thought of as mundane or just thought of as literally trash.
So it sort of raises another question, which is who does all this fashion history belong to?
Totally. I think the most important thing is that. And we can literally say it how it is: It is for the youth, it's for the kids. At the end of the day, trends and fashion and this culture is for the kids. I mean that in the best way possible. It's really inspiring for me—that's why I really loved having the shop, because at the end of the day for me it’s a focus group, and it really helps to sharpen the skills and really hone in on what’s going on in real time.
Since you opened this place in 2012, so much new, youthful energy has erupted in the fashion world. How has this shift affected what you do?
Well, I think there's a lot of intra-dealer shopping going on in this world because the demand is so crazy. The idea of vintage is very accepted now. It has hit critical mass.
Vintage is now a luxury good.
Exactly. Which is what I had always hoped it would be. I always thought our approach was this is a luxury, not a thrift store. The first year that we opened that was still a very big thing, there was the stigma with the second hand. People are like, "Oh cool. This is a thrift store.” We were like, "Dude, that's not what it is." Like you go to a thrift store when that’s your only option, or you're literally shopping out of an institutional thrift store, which is for that purpose. Right? It's a sensitive conversation because what was happening was before people were literally like, "You're basically collecting cans, or you're just digging through garbage." They didn’t understand it. My whole thing was like, I can take any of the things that change your life and show you a parallel in clothing. The most powerful movie of your life has a promotional item that we can place in a fashion context. And it doesn't have to be about nostalgia. For me, I can take all of this, take it like a bouquet of wildflowers, and put a look together that's going to break everybody's neck at a fucking party.
What are you searching for right now? What have you been into and what are people asking for?
Whenever I get asked that I think you have to understand that this process at this point is very formulaic. If anybody ever wants to look into the temporary trend, they should analyze the last 10 to 15 years. It’s about the youth frame of reference. Because if you look back at something that's 10 years old to somebody that's 20 years old, it's brand new to them. Every year something comes out that cements itself as, like, the future for trends. For example, 20 years from now, without a doubt, people are going to look at Eckhaus Latta, because it's fucking cool. That's a no brainer. So it's like it's really easy for a person to ask, "What's next?" It’s like, "What's now?"
What’s your ultimate grail for your personal collection?
I'm really into shit that I've never seen before. Just yesterday I bought a David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Phillip Glass T-shirt. I have never seen that shirt before. It's crazy. That's a sick fucking shirt. I mean there's that one Aphex Twin shirt—“Come To Daddy”—that I've been after now for five years. We put it on Frank Ocean, we literally sold it for X amount, and every time we get offered it it’s literally seven to ten times what we sold it for. I think we've had the opportunity to buy it twice in the last five years. And it's been for thousands of dollars, and I can't pull that trigger.
How has the internet changed what you do? Are you sourcing stuff on eBay?
When I was physically exhausted from sourcing, I always say that my thumbs still worked, and my eyes still worked. So in the evenings I would lay down and search eBay until I fell asleep. That was literally the dedication it took at the beginning. There's that one documentary about the Bones Brigade, where [Rodney] Mullen is talking about how he missed out on a lot of things his childhood because of how dedicated he was. He starts to break down and cry, and when I saw that I'm fucking crying myself. In order to be successful you have to give it your full fucking life. My family lives in New Jersey but I barely get to see them because I'm so involved in what I do. But I was raised below the poverty level and now I'm at the point that I can finally help my family out. I'm trying to have my father not go work anymore, and my mother, too. To tie it back into how the internet has changed everything, I think the culture has reached a level where my parents can now understand what I do, which is awesome. They didn't get what I was doing before. I had a suspicion that for a long time they thought I was dealing drugs [laughs].
Is there one piece of vintage that really sticks out of your mind as kind of revelatory, something you acquire when you were young that got you hooked on this world?
Well, it was really taboo growing up. We weren’t allowed to go into thrift stores. It was all about status. If you were thrift shopping for your clothes, that meant you had no money, and we had to fake it growing up my whole life. I went to high school three blocks away from what became in my life one of the greatest Salvation Army honey holes. I didn't step foot into it until after I graduated high school. It was not until I became an adult and started to get really serious about this that I went back to my hometown and I hit it and I found some incredible pieces there. That was the first time I ever pulled out a vintage New Order shirt designed by Peter Saville. It's an incredible shirt. I'm in Elizabeth, New Jersey pulling out 1988 Sugar Cubes, New Order, and Public Relation Unlimited concert shirts. It blew my mind, and I would go back and find a lot of the Ralph Lauren Polo collection that I have in my archive today came from that store. It's just funny that I walked by it thousands of times before ever feeling confident enough to like step in. It was nuts. As I got older I got pissed off it was like, "Fuck man, if I only knew." If I only had the balls to be like, “I got to do this.”
And now you’re at least partly responsible for flipping the taboo on its head.
Full circle. It's bonkers, it's fascinating. It's now an aspiration to become a vintage dealer [laughs].
Let’s All Go Shopping
Chopping it up and trying on clothes with the fashionable kids at six of New York's raddest retail destinations.
