Critical Shopper: At Round Two, There’s Always a Buyer

The resale market is predicated on the perfect, items bought instantaneously upon release and then put into a commercial deep freeze. There they remain — after the kids wait in line and the bots get to botting — waiting for some sucker to pay the markup. (I am that sucker.) Those items, which appeared and then disappeared, can be yours, delayed but not decayed.

But that marketplace treats T-shirts and sneakers and Supreme ceramic dishes as abstract commodities: soybeans, lean hogs, whatever. Demand screaming out for supply. A low buy begging for a high sell.

At some point, though, the thing should be worn, right?

Round Two is a resale outlet for the less precious, for those who open their sneaker boxes and tear through the tissue paper, and who rip the plastic off their T-shirts when they arrive in the mail. Here, clothes are meant to be touched, worn, cherished, offloaded, re-embraced and more.

This tactile experience is a retort to the museumesque solemnity of Flight Club and Stadium Goods, the logistical speed bumps of shopping at Supreme. The racks are overflowing. The sneaker wall is crowded. The kids get handsy.

And there are always kids. There are dozens of them crammed into the relatively small space. Some look like they’re shopping for rapper buddies, some look like they just bought their first bogo tee.

There are a few BAPE seats for parents who can’t quite muster the energy to stand while their children shop. On busy days, you’ll have to wait outside for a bit before being let in, though the conversations happening on the sidewalk often seem just as urgent as the ones inside.

This is part of a group of Round Two stores. The original is in Virginia, and in addition to this one, there are locations in Los Angeles (the real emporium) and Miami. It is, more than any other store in New York, a true bazaar, a dynamic and fluid retail experience, one that has fundamentally the same shape every day, but varies in the details.

Some of the primo items get shown on the store’s Instagram, but there is no online store. Things move too fast for that.

That’s because Round Two is a place to both buy and sell (and trade, too). Along the back wall is the selling/trade counter. All day long, young men — they are almost all men, as these things go — walk in with bales of sneakers and shirts, flipping for cash coveted items they’ve just bought or pieces that have been sitting in their closet for years.

Then, with little fanfare, those items are placed out for sale. (Nothing here is sold on consignment.)

The clothes are arranged loosely by designer (Supreme, mostly, but also Palace, BAPE, Off-White and others) and, within that, by color. Beyond that, try your luck.

There are never-worn $300 shirts tossed in among $40 ones that have been through a few wears and washes, items released this week mixed in with pieces from a decade ago.

I was happy to find — and take home — a worn-in but not worn-out T-shirt from the first Supreme collaboration with Public Enemy, from 2006 ($200). You could buy Supreme shirts featuring Sade, Madonna and Raekwon & Ghostface Killah (that one running $750).

Nothing is in plastic. Even the items marked deadstock have been handled by any number of shoppers perusing the racks. It reflects an understanding of clothing as a tactile, democratic experience, not an investment strategy.

There is something unexpectedly charming about seeing a yellow Yeezy 500 sitting on the shelf with enough dirt caked to the sole to suggest that the prior owner got his money’s worth, and that you might, too.

To really navigate the store expertly requires a working knowledge of an ever-changing landscape — being able to tell your Pinnacle 4s from your Oreo 4s helps. There were brand-new Acronym Prestos ($500 to $600) and a slightly worn Tiffany Dunk ($160), loud shoes for two different generations of sneakerhead.

And there is a respectable amount of vintage here. On one trip, I grabbed a bootleg Janet Jackson T-shirt I’d never before seen, one based on the art from her steamy Rolling Stone cover ($250). On another visit, I consoled myself over the lavender Troop jacket that didn’t fit me by grabbing a technical fleece vest from Tommy Hilfiger ($80) that I would have happily worn in 1996. (Mr. Hilfiger himself has been spotted shopping for his own brand archive at Round Two.)

On that day, I checked out, paid my tithe to the culture and was preparing to head out when the guy behind the register was suddenly handed one of my actual grails: the Off-White T-shirt made for last year’s Yams Day, with an illustration of ASAP Yams — the hip-hop spirit guide I profiled in 2013, and who died in 2015 — riding on a unicorn.

I have looked for this shirt on and off without luck, and there it was, being placed on a hanger right in front of me. I asked the size (not mine, tragically) and within seconds, a clerk had grabbed it, ferried it over to one of the racks on the far wall and stuck it casually in the middle — one white T-shirt in a flotilla of a hundred. Undoubtedly, within days, it was gone.

Round Two New York 113 Stanton Street; instagram.com/roundtwonewyorkcity