“If you don’t have hope or some type of imagination for the future, where are you gonna go? Nowhere,” Emanuel “Manny” Edwards tells me as he reflects on Goody Vault being named Time Out’s No. 1 secondhand store in Chicago . He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of his Wicker Park storefront, in a makeshift conversation pit carved out of weathered secondhand couches piles of vintage clothing—his preferred way of grounding himself in the world he’s been building since 2018.

What his imagination didn’t include, at least at first, was supplying hand-mended vintage to the costume department of or to stylists who dress the likes of Charli XCX. Edwards’s aesthetic—an alchemy of hand-mended sportswear, militaria and workwear dating as far back as the 1800s—stands out precisely because it is

See Full Page