The power of Brian Procell

The man behind the vintage shirts of the celebs

His name probably doesn't mean much to you, that's okay, two days ago I didn't know who he was either, until I came across an interesting article about the best man on my personal favorite The New Yorker. ‘The Ephemeral Appeal of the Four-Figure Vintage T-shirt’ was the title. Indeed, a T-shirt with a price tag of four digits. Now this is normal when you're talking about a vintage designer bag or possibly shoes or these hideous pants from Vetements in collaboration with Levi’s, but with vintage T-shirts I often think of everything you can score for a pittance at a store like Episode or something similar.

That's not the case when it comes from Brian Procell's store, also known as Procell Vintage, in the Lower East Side of New York. A store where you regularly run into designers and celebs who are searching for vintage goodies from a slightly higher price segment. Think of a Drake and a Rihanna. But also of Alexander Wang for example, who even collaborated with Brian for his flagship store in NY during the last NYFW. Wang wanted to sell shirts that would reflect (music) influences from the nineties and voilà: Alexander Wang x Procell was born.

Brian opened his store in 2012 because he was disappointed with the vintage offerings in New York. What he missed were stores that catered to the trends of the youth in the Big Apple. Too many vintage stores did their buying not based on ‘what was in demand’, but more based on the year it came from. What was ‘in demand’ were items from the nineties, something Brian capitalized on. Since he was eighteen (he is now thirty-four), he has been collecting items, which means he now has one of the largest collections of, among other things, shirts with artists who were big in the nineties, vintage Chanel pieces from those same years, ‘cult classics’, as he calls them, from brands like The North Face, Polo Ralph Lauren and the old school Tommy Hilfiger items that you see a lot on the runway and on the street again because it is, as I just said, in demand and trending.

But let's be honest: a shirt for which you have to shell out a four-digit amount is quite exaggerated. Even if it's a one of a kind vintage T-shirt with Foxy Brown on it for fifteen hundred euros, or something with Dr. Dre for which you pay 2K (these were the prices for the collaboration with Alexander Wang). But for Brian, it's the most normal thing in the world with clientele like Drake, Frank Ocean and Rihanna. So if you wear something from Brian, you at least know that you are the only one on the planet who has it. That secretly has its charm too. But I prefer to just rummage through stores like Episode, because you can definitely find – if you look well – vintage gems there.