THE FASHION CYCLE: Chronicling the Epic Reincarnation & Globe-Trotting Adventures of Our Hero, the Trucker Hat

by Mara Hvistendahl March 2005 HIDALGO, Mexico—For a few months of 2003, no fashion-conscious young man dared venture out of his loft apartment without a mesh-backed, foam-billed “trucker hat” on his shaggy head. Born in the suburbs and educated at the finest schools, these urban cowboys hungered for the authenticities of the rural life they had never led. Many paired their new mesh caps with rodeo belt buckles, western-style shirts, and cans of working-class beer, perfecting, it seemed, the art of ironic style. When the trend grew stale, the hipsters gave away their hats to charity, and the charities auctioned them to private used clothing dealers, and the dealers sold them to vendors in the developing world, and the vendors sold them to the very workers who for decades have been manufacturing mesh caps and other goods to satisfy Western trends, and I ended up on a bus in northern Mexico in October of 2004, facing a man with a hat that read “Associated Supermarkets,” while a few seats away sat a man wearing a cap printed with—and it must be understood that this man's skin was rather brown—“WHITE TRASH.” Now, that is ironic. A fashion like the mesh cap can survive only so long after Old Navy begins widespread manufacture before it arrives in the aisles of your local Salvation Army thrift store. The moment of total, absolute death occurs around the time that Todd Oldham's version of the trend appears in K-Mart. For the developing world, though, the K-Mart appearance is the beginning, for it is the point at which those who lack the luxury of disdaining Old Navy goods (although, in many cases, they stitched them together) begin to have access to U.S. leftovers. And, while it might make sense to some that their clothes would be simply doled out to the less fortunate, soup-kitchen-style, the vanity of human beings is such that no matter how poor, we care about how we look. In reality, the used clothing industry mirrors the high-fashion one. It has its tastemakers, its wholesalers, and its profiteers. It has its fleeting trends. And it has its Milan. *** Hidalgo, Texas, is best known for the Africanized killer bees that crossed the Mexico-U.S. border here in 1990, and are now commemorated with a twenty-foot-long yellow and black fiberglass bee outside the public library, but the town really revolves around the used clothes trade. Hidalgo is one of a few small cities along the Rio Grande Valley that manage the bulk of the 1,000 or so tons of used clothes that the United States exports daily. The town's business strip begins at the American Postal Center and ends at the border. Hulking warehouses filled with used clothes overshadowing the dollar stores and pawn shops and even the red-and-white “W” of the Hidalgo Whataburger. Many of the warehouses have specialties to set them apart from the competition—some sell more shoes, for example—but all sell clothes to dealers from Mexico and Latin America. For a Notre Dame T-shirt discarded by a disenchanted graduate, Hidalgo is the last stop en route to the developing world. On election day, which was also the Day of the Dead, a Hidalgo warehouse called La Esmeralda was abuzz with activity. On the left side of the warehouse, high-volume buyers combed through thousand-pound bales of clothes that they had bought for $370 apiece. In the center of the space, women who had crossed from Mexico clambered over mountains of unsorted clothes, searching for items to sell in their rickety booths. On my right, meanwhile, mustachioed men on humming lifts drove bundles of clothes from the front of the warehouse to the back, where they stacked the bundles as if they were bales of hay. Above it all, in one corner of the warehouse, a large box with Plexiglas windows hovered awkwardly on stilts. The owner of La Esmeralda descended from it to talk with me. I asked for his name, and, his eyes accusingly fixed on my notebook, he asked, “Do you know the word ‘backstage'?” “Do you mean ‘background'?” I asked. “Yes. You see? I know these things,” he said. He thought I might be investigating profiteering by the nonprofit charities that sold him his clothes. Alternately, I might be a spy for the Mexican government, which, following payoffs by the Mexican clothing industry, made most importation of used clothes into Mexico illegal. Lately, he said, the government had been sending English speakers to find out the names of the dealers who were passing large amounts of clothes over the border. “If my clothes end up in Mexico,” he said, “I don't know about it.” While I considered pointing out that La Esmeralda was less than a quarter of a mile from the border, he started to tell me about the other countries where his clothes end up: Brazil, largely, and points throughout Central America—by boat, of course, to circumvent Mexico. A tractor operator told me that clothes from the warehouse also go east to Brownsville, Texas, a port from which clothes are shipped to points around the globe, but the boss denied this. He was more forthcoming on the difference between the two coasts. “I don't know why, but people in California wear their jeans until they've got holes here.” He pointed to the thighs of his jeans, which were stiff with newness. “People on the East Coast wear things once or twice and throw them out.” His clothes, he said proudly, came only from Boston and Chicago. I climbed on top of the most central mountain of clothes and dug. Extricating clothes from the pile was strenuous—many long dresses and pants were wrapped around deeply buried items—but it was also exciting. This was, after all, the runway for the season's fashions. I found frilly aprons, curtains, and muumuu-like dresses; clothes from L. L. Bean and J. Crew catalogues that are probably still lying around American bathrooms; and lots of lingerie. The jeans were largely Levi's (which are made in Mexico) but there were tags from Chic, Jordache, and Gitano as well. There were clothes that would have drawn a high price in a thrift store—a faded navy blue T-shirt emblazoned with “California Sweetheart,” for example, or a low-waisted green corduroy dress. Lone shoes, gloves, socks, and shoulder pads frequently surfaced. I found a hospital gown, a pair of size sixty-two denim shorts, and a green and white silk scarf imprinted with bits of Irish lore—including, ominously, “Night of the Kerry Dangers” in one corner. There was no way to make sense of this. Looking for patterns here would be like trying to come up with the season's trends after examining only the Versace and the Bill Blass collections. I dumped my booty—five T-shirts, a pair of Express velour jeans, a nightgown, and an H&M scarf—on the linoleum-covered table near the door, and the cashier looked up from her Anne Rice novel to weigh them. Three pounds. My bill came out to ninety cents. For the equivalent of couture boutiques, I had to go down the street to a vast, open-air bazaar that pops up near the bank of the Rio Grande, behind the U.S. customs and immigration complex, five days a week. There—along with lawnmowers, suitcases, toasters, perfumes, fat-burning kits, stereos, ironing boards, bicycles, wheelchairs, curling irons, saws, baby strollers, washing machines, bedpans, stuffed animals, telephones, and tubs of Vicks VapoRub—were clothes that vendors had selected from the warehouses, sorted now, folded, and, in some cases, neatly displayed. I took along Yesenia Quiroz, a friend of mine from Reynosa, just across the border. The market, which has dozens of permanent stalls spread across nine or so city blocks, is officially called the Hidalgo River Market, but shoppers know it as la pulga—“the flea.” It is the best that the season has to offer. The vendors visit the warehouses often, and they know which warehouse does less business on Tuesdays, which has good jeans, and which has the cheapest shoes (which typically sell at a higher price per pound than other clothes). In a reversal of the high fashion process, this is also—barring the warehouses—where clothes are at their cheapest. T-shirts sell for between twenty-five cents and a dollar, and most basic items are priced below two dollars. Many of the vendors had the world-weary toughness of county fair carnies. A few simply recreated the mountains of the warehouses in their booths and watched disinterestedly as people dug through them. The clothes in one man's pile still bore red Goodwill Industries tags. Marta Hernández keeps a cleaner shop. She rents a small plot of market land for twelve dollars a day. After she parks her van, the space that remains for her clothes is about the size of a walk-in closet. On the day I visited her booth, most of her clothes were stacked in neat piles on a long wooden table, with the nicer items—all small, delicate things—hanging from the roof of the van. Marta sat below them, dangling her feet, smiling halfheartedly. Her husband was in jail in a nearby town for crossing illegally, and some days she made barely enough to cover the rent for her stall. Curiously, she pays more than the vendors near the entrance, who pay around $120 a month to rent permanent spaces about twice the size of Martha's. She wants to move back to Mexico, she said. I bought a scoop-neck white T-shirt from her and moved on. There were vendors who specialized in leather jackets and others who sold mostly shoes. Fur-trimmed coats were big. There were racks and racks of skinny jeans made of thin, stretchable denim. I found a few pairs of the low-waisted sweatpants that were ubiquitous on 116th Street in East Harlem last summer. For some, a trip to the pulga is an outing, a thing to do, a sort of window-shopping. Yesenia brought Laisha, her 20-month-old daughter, along for the day, and spent much of her time keeping the girl entertained. Later, we sat outside a nearby dollar store, eating nachos, while Laisha slept in her mother's lap, and Yesi reflected on how much she had spent: $2, half of which went toward two cans of Coke. She seemed content. While she didn't bring anything back for the clothing stand she sets up outside her sister's house most weekends, she had seen what was out there. Still, despite the tamale, nacho, and hot dog vendors, and its often garage-sale-like appearance, la pulga retains an atmosphere of business. Unlike Marta, who seemed lonely and eager to talk, the vendors made clear that those who weren't going to buy were not wanted. In this manner the stalls functioned like buzz-in boutiques in SoHo. At the pulga, the power of one's purse is determined by the enthusiasm with which a shopper inspects clothes or inquires after prices, not by the cut of one's clothes or the arch of one's eyebrow, but the effect is the same: you don't feel like you are at the mall. *** This is why all northern Mexican cities, and, reportedly, metropolises further south, are dotted with tianguises, sprawling markets dedicated to used goods. Yesi shops at one that pops up around a dusty field in her neighborhood every Saturday and Sunday. Two days after she accompanied me to the pulga, Yesi was busy tending her own clothing stand, so I visited the tianguis with Verónica, her older sister. The city of Reynosa is not known for its beauty. In the eight months I've spent here over the last four years, I have never seen a tree in a residential area aside from the topiary bushes surrounding the homes of the narcotraficantes. The soccer field that anchors the tianguis is filled with piles of brush mixed with trash, and the swamp onto which the market has expanded is a de facto garbage dump. Reynosa is, rather, a place of industry. Vanity Fair bras are assembled in one of the city's seven industrial parks, and parts for General Motors vehicles in another. For five years, Verónica worked here stitching together Chuck Taylors. As Verónica searched for a PlayStation controller (her mother's rabbit had hopped inside her house and chewed through the cord of the last one), I strolled the market. People in the neighborhood sometimes jokingly referred to the tianguis as “el Wal-Mart,” or, more ambitiously, “el mall,” and as I browsed through the booths, I came to understand why. There were stalls filled with children's clothes, stalls with pajamas and bras, stalls with coats. There were electronics shops, carts stocked with pineapple and melon and lemon “aguas,” taco stands, and, at a table manned by a thin young man with a labret set through his lip and leather bracelets studded with chrome spikes. There were leather jackets smelling of stale cigarettes, off-the-shoulder knit 1980s shirts, and whiskered jeans galore. There were, too, T-shirts emblazoned with the like of “Solomon Schechter Day School of Raritan Valley,” tables piled with underwear and halter tops reminiscent of Selena. There was, above all, lots of color. Suddenly conscious of the all-black wardrobe that I had hung out to dry earlier that morning, I bought a pair of gray sweatpants with sparkly blue stones running up the sides. More than once, Verónica asked after prices and then raised her eyebrow when she was given them. There were worn-looking T-shirts for ten pesos each, but for a decent sweatshirt, one had to cough up sixty pesos, over half of the item's retail price. The vendors paid the city a mere thirty pesos a day to set up shop in the tianguis, but they had to absorb the cost of clothes confiscated at the border—an increasingly common problem, according to the owner of La Esmeralda—as well as make up for the time spent transporting the clothes in small, inconspicuous loads. Then, too, the prices might have merely been the result of human enterprise. While clothes could be had much more cheaply at the stands set up outside people's houses, only the tianguis proper offered ambiance. This was a place to sit and leisurely eat tacos, to be seen, to reconnect with friends. As Verónica rounded the corner of the soccer field, a man tending two huge vats of boiling oil filled with all manner of cow parts gleefully saluted her. He had been a co-worker of hers at Converse. “So,” he asked as he handed her a taco dripping with oil, “are you married yet?” *** Later that afternoon, Verónica's youngest sister, Eunice, called me to her room and tried to convince me to accompany her to the disco that night. As we discussed the idea, the black-and-white mesh cap hanging on her wall caught my eye. Eunice had bought the hat new a few weeks ago at a stall that just sold caps at the tianguis, but I had covered the whole market that morning and hadn't seen the stand. Could the life cycle of this fashion trend have been so quick? But the developing world is vast, and Reynosa was merely the first stop in the hat's South American tour. The same process that brought it here will carry it down to Peru and Bolivia and Brazil, to places still poorer than Reynosa. The mesh cap will live on, ascending to ever higher levels of irony. One day, of course, it will die, but its death will not be an absolute one, for it won't be too long before the manufacturers deem the cap to be “retro,” suitable for turn-of-the-century parties, essential to achieving the 2003 ironic look. Mara Hvistendahl lives in Shanghai.