The Vintage Scene Has Gone Mainstream, and Business Has Never Been Better

This story originally appeared in a special edition The Main x URBANIA Micromag. Read the full collection here.

From her booth somewhere down aisle 10 of the Marché aux puces Saint-Michel, Carmen Chandonnet has been selling nostalgia for 15 years. With a quarter century in the secondhand trade behind her, she's watched her clientele transform over time.

"It's my best year yet," the octogenarian says without missing a beat. Her sales have jumped at least 20 percent since last year. The former owner of a thrift shop in Bois-des-Filion has noticed young people growing more and more drawn to vintage over the past few years.

And she's far from alone. We went looking for veterans of the scene to find out how it's changed.

A younger and younger clientele

"Vintage is really what [young people] are after," Chandonnet says. "Leather, fur, they love it."

So why the renewed interest? "I asked them. They wish they'd lived in our era," she answers.

A little further along, Chantal Pelletier, who sells "little trinkets" at stand 234, has seen her customer base shift too.

"With the pandemic, we lost a lot of our older regulars. Afterwards, we got a lot more young people," she explains. They may be more numerous, she adds, but they have less money to spend.

From niche to mainstream

When Mélissa Turgeon, owner of the boutique CUL-DE-SAC, opened her thrift shop on Saint-Laurent Boulevard some twenty years ago, the vintage landscape looked very different.

"There were a few thrift stores on Mont-Royal and here on Saint-Laurent, and that was about it," she recalls. "Now, lately, it's just wild."

Since then, she's watched the number of vintage clothing shops explode across Montreal.

Denim jackets, band t-shirts and fluorescent gear: CUL-DE-SAC is packed with pieces from the 1980s and 1990s. "Igloofest, for me, is a good time of year," the shopkeeper jokes.

Further up the Main, Kitsch'n Swell takes you even deeper into the past, with its polka-dot dresses, flared skirts and cat-eye glasses.

The ‘real retro’ is getting hard to find