Deadpop and the Threads of The Dead: An Immortal Thrift Store

The lyrics to `“I wear my grandpa’s clothes, I look incredible” briefly defined the ethos of fashion for our generation. Thank you kindly Macklemore and Ryan Lewis for “Thrift Shop.”

Stores like Urban Outfitters, Reformation, and Etsy offer “vintage sections.” Youtubers claim boldly and often that they source all or most of their clothing from thrift stores. #Goodwill is now a trend and not as much an emblem of an impoverished financial situation. We’re in the midst of a cultural reverse obsolescent: everything old is new again.

But how many people know that a lot of the clothes they’re #thrifting are likely sourced from dead people? As one of the largest non-profit retail organizations in which clothes of any kind can be donated for a small refund, it’s no surprise that many, such as my parents, have used Goodwill to lay their loved one’s items to rest–or rather, to resale.

Therein lies the joke, one man’s funeral garments are another twenty-something’s new “threads” or as my friend Alex once commented on a Goodwill shopping trip “fruits of the Tomb.”

Enter the morbid irony of my project: “Deadpop: An Immortal Thrift Store.” Playing on the thrift app “depop” in which users sell their own clothing, “Deadpop,” focuses on the ways in which “thrifting” clothing is also partially “thrifting” or “recycling” someone’s identity, in this case the identity of the recently deceased (“When Someone”).

Deadpop’s structure is somewhat simple: It’s a clothing store, like any other. However, it’s packaging comes with a story (after all, we all like brand transparency nowadays) and that story is of the item original owner who has recently died.

Link to Website (Private) https://threadedanddeaded.squarespace.com/config/

Password: deadpop

Take for example Deadpop’s feature of Kate Spade, who committed suicide late last year to the horror of many of her brand lovers, and of course, her family. Deadpop claims to offer Spade’s own famous black cardigan. The price–a hefty $16,500–reflects the nature of Spade’s celebrity status and the gruesome quality of her death.

Pricing for each clothing item fluctuates along a slightly different range: the more expensive the item, the more gruesome the death, or the more famous the death-ee, ehem, “recently deceased.” We like to say every purchase comes with a little haunting of it’s own. By this we mean, every package is accompanied with a certificate of death (unofficial), the story of the piece of clothing and its previous owner, along with their listed date of birth. The website’s product description includes digital links to obituaries and/or news articles referencing their death as well as the cause of death. Deadpop additionally offers customers the opportunity to broker a deal. If a customer has had the misfortune of finding themselves with a recently deceased family member’s clothing on hand, they can sell it to Deadpop (with the stipulation that the clothing is not to be washed prior–to keep the “aura” of the previous owner on the item) (Chin 146-147).

Deadpop’s locus of haunting rests in this notion of eeriness. Haunting or ghostliness become traceable in the presence within the buyer’s mind that what they are purchasing has undergone other ownership. We begin to be able to parse the subject of death in society as one inflected immeasurably with capitalism, as materiality becomes a marker of death, so too does property possession. I.e the joke on the website, “do you possess your items or do they possess you?” The “About” page indicates this awareness in its tongue in cheek imperative “Bring fashion back to life.”

On the literary level, a strange turn, this project is somewhat derived from Ernest Hemingway’s rumored “Baby shoes. For sale. Never worn” (though this is a misattribution to the author) (Wright) .In this poem-prose, death is narrated solely through the language of sale. We know a person is dead, because they are not longer in need of the material affects that would have characterized their existence.

The digital shop also plays on notions that the morbid curiosity infused in the pricing of the objects infuse a kind of essence to the objects (Chin 146). By pricing the objects in relation to “aura” rather than cost of production, the website seeks to monetize this essence as tangible “signifier” of death (Baudrillard, Chapter 3). In the same way that Hemingway’s short story parses death through the language of capitalism, Deadpop makes literal the notion of obsolescence as a cultural recycling function (Wright).

The tone of the project is meant to inhabit the kind of insensitive tone regarding memorialization that has characterized many of our class conversations regarding the presence of death within the digital sphere. Call our site a sort of aesthetically pleasing troll. As Whitney Phillips says in her study of “memorial trolls,” Deadpop plays on the unfortunate circumstance that sorting through a dead relatives intimate belongings requires. Part of the task of dealing with dead bodies is the labour necessary to rid and organize/compartmentalize the deceased’s objects and property. This sentimental journey enforces an economic lens onto the dearly beloved’s remaining relatives. Deadpop adds a on-the-nose humor to what is generally an incredibly emotionally taxing and tedious aspect of the afterlife–the emotional and physical junk that remains.

One personal essay published in Racked titled “When Someone Is Gone, But Their Clothes Remain, Jess Bergman reflects on this process as she experiences the death of her father. Bergman writes, While photographs are, by nature, as Susan Sontag writes, already “memento mori,” clothes and accessories aren’t made for posterity, but for people; what to do with them can prove a greater challenge for the recently bereaved” (“When Someone”). Bergman goes on to claim that clothing is more emblematic of a person’s life, than per se a photograph, “This is in part a result of clothing’s symbolic power, but also in part a reflection of material reality.” (“When Someone”). Therefore Deadpop as a project is both grief-centric and haunting-centric. Clothes are both infused with grief and a kind of afterlife.

The theoretical basis of this project rests in the idea of imprinting–that humans leave or perceive to leave by themselves to leave some effusion of themselves in their objects. Their alteration of these objects in turn becomes a kind of living haunting, whether that be through smells, stains, frays, patches, and holes left in a person’s garmentry. Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death,

“The aesthetic of renewal: fashion draws triviality from the death and modernity of the déjà vu.This is the despair that nothing lasts, and the complementary enjoyment of knowing that, beyond this death, every form has always the chance of a second existence, which is never innocent since fashion consumes the world and the real in advance: it is the weight of all the dead labour of signs bearing on living signification – within a magnificent forgetting, a fantastic ignorance [méconnaissance]” (Baudrillard, Chapter 3).

The “fantastic ignorance” of which Baudrillard speaks to the generational propensity to constantly date themselves in clothing that is not contemporaneous, which begs the question, if we’re wearing the clothes of those before us, what is our “new” fashion but the skeletal remnants of those before us.

I want to turn to Elizabeth Chin’s experimental work My Life With Things: The Consumer Diaries to further illustrate the cyclility that Baudrillard touches upon here . As Chin relays her feelings attached to objects of purchase, she evaluates the term “dead pawn,” which essentially means items that have been pawned with the intention of rebuying, but become defunct due to a lack of payments. Chin describes the feeling of owning dead pawn or encountering it as follows,

Dead pawn has been fully alienated from its past owner, removed from circulation within that person’s life, and is now available to be purchased by someone new… Let me clarify: what is creepy and repellent is precisely that the object has not been fully alienated from its previous owner and that the essence of the previous owner somehow imbues the object with added aura (Chin 146).

Chin claims that this specific quality rests in this as a partially familial alienation. Chin writes,“With some objects, this lingering aura would be a positive—with my grandmother’s rings…With a stranger, though, and with an object like dead pawn that speaks of another’s desperation…the aura is a dark shadow, not a halo” (Chin 146-147).

Chin’s feelings of disorientation and discomfort in the face of dead pawn perhaps also represent san issue inflected by the eeriness of the object. As Mark Fisher writes in “Approaching the Eerie,” eeriness is predicated on the existence of nonexistence of the subject, or rather the “liminal” space between “presence and absence” (Fisher 61). in this case, the owner of the pawned object is both present and absent, disappeared and yet also remnant. Bergman notes this phenomena as the “uncanniness” of “remnant” clothing (“When Someone”). In Chin’s piece, the previous owner of the object is both present and not present, and thus becomes auratic.

Therefore, this project is one which understands grief as a “material reality”–one which is suffuses itself in our tangible objects (“When Someone”). Often the most hard to part with objects are those that are the quotidian reminiscence of someone: their eye glasses, the worn scarf they wrapped around their neck winter after winter, a favorite pair of lived-in shoes. Deadpop dwells in this sentimental refrain of clothing and capitalizes on it. What the company ostensibly sells is this sense of intimacy and packages it as buyer intrigue. This is why each of the product description names utilize nicknames generated by the sight–this acts to partially construct a simulated signifier of familiarity with the dead subject. Another notable aspect of the site’s product layout is the way in which the product images are shaped in elongated rectangles to subtly connote coffins. It as if the buyer of the product is reaching into the deceased persons coffin and thieving them of their funeral garments.

Citations:

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, Revised edition., Revised ed.,http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526401496 SAGE Publications, 2017.v Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.

Chin, Elizabeth. My Life with Things : The Consumer Diaries. Duke University Press, 2016.. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374268 Accessed 25 Mar. 2019.

Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. A Repeater Books paperback original ed., Repeater Books, 2016.

Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, Nov. 2010, firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3168/3115.

Wright, Frederick A. “The Short Story Just Got Shorter: Hemingway, Narrative, and the Six-Word Urban Legend.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 2, 2014, pp. 327–340., doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2012.00935.x.

Non-Scholarly Source https://www.racked.com/2017/3/26/15001088/parent-loved-one-grief-inherited-clothing

Image Links:

Barbara Hammer:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi46eCO-ZjhAhXtdd8KHVFVATwQjxx6BAgBEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.interviewmagazine.com%2Fart%2Fartists-at-work-barbara-hammer&psig=AOvVaw2Tupj-kzjbe1bhOLXgDsqj&ust=1553453915973589

Joan Whyte: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mink_coat,_DDR,_1954.jpg

Veronica Sgroi:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/534701406/1930s-corduroy-business-suit?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=vintage&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=&ref=sr_gallery-1-38

Carolee Schneemann:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/479124495/50s-dress-red-shirtwaist-elegant?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=vintage&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=&ref=sr_gallery-2-16

Elizabeth Short:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/479124495/50s-dress-red-shirtwaist-elegant?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=vintage&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=&ref=sr_gallery-2-16

David Caradine: