Luxury brands
that once
destroyed and
even burned
unsold
merchandise
are now thinking
of ways to
reinvent it.Illustration by Radio 17Tip By Malia WollanHow to Swing on the
Monkey Bars‘‘You need to get a good swing going,’’
says Bella Palmer, 13, a competitor in all
three seasons of ‘‘American Ninja Warrior
Junior,’’ a program on Peacock based on a
Japanese show called ‘‘Sasuke.’’ Last year,
Palmer won the competition in the 11- and
12-year-old bracket, making her the show’s
fi rst female champion. Palmer’s favorite
challenge in the contest is called Spring
Forward, a sort of extreme monkey bars
where the rungs are roughly six feet apart.
Start on the fi rst bar and get a feel for
the oscillating movement. As you kick
your legs back, push your palms into
the bar to maintain your grip. As you
swing forward, release your dominant
hand and reach for the next bar. Trustyourself and use the momentum of the
swing to propel you. If you skip bars,
or fl y through the air between them
like Palmer does, don’t catch the bar
with your arms fully extended, because
you can dislocate your shoulder or
elbow. Instead, keep your arms bent at
a 90-degree angle using your arm and
back muscles to hold your weight.
‘‘When you start, you’ll get blisters
that will pop or tear,’’ Palmer says. Give
them a day or two to heal before you try
swinging again. Soon you’ll begin to see
a thicker, protective layer of calluses
developing on your palms and fi ngers.
The more you traverse the monkey bars,
the less it will hurt.
Palmer estimates that if you practice
every day, you’ll most likely be profi -
cient in a week. It helps if you’re natural-
ly inclined to dangling. ‘‘I always liked
hanging on stuff ,’’ says Palmer, who was
8 when she went to a birthday party at
a so-called ninja gym near her home in
Woodbury, Minn. ‘‘I was just swinging
on everything, and I loved it,’’ she says.
These days she practices 30 minutes to
an hour daily in her basement, which is
outfi tted with mats, high metal bars and
other obstacles.
Don’t worry if you lose your grip and
drop to the ground; falling is part of the
process. To cushion the landing, swing
over something soft. When you do go
down, attempt to land on your feet to
safeguard your other extremities. ‘‘Just try
not to land on your head,’’ Palmer says.seemed ready to spring to life, like actors
of a certain age waiting to be rediscov-
ered by Quentin Tarantino. As the years
went by, and the 1 percent inched closer
to making up 100 percent of the town’s
population, the summer people began
to drop off some jarringly pristine items.
I’ve dug out perfectly wearable A.P.C.
sweaters and COS shirts, and a family
friend told me about fi nding a Ferraga-
mo bag with leftover cash inside it. My
father found a fi ne sweatshirt from a posh
private school. ‘‘Did you go to Brooklyn
Friends?’’ people would ask when he
wore it. ‘‘No,’’ he would answer, ‘‘I went
to the Swap Shop.’’
When I began thrifting and scroung-
ing my way to some semblance of per-
sonal style, there was still something
shameful about admitting that your
clothes had a past, unknowable-to-you
life. I’ve spent a decade and a half cov-
ering fashion (I’m Elle’s fashion features
director now), and over that time I’ve
seen the industry awakening to sustain-
ability and reuse. Luxury brands that
once destroyed and even burned unsold
merchandise are now thinking of ways
to reinvent it. Salvage and resale have
become antidotes to the conveyor belt
of fast fashion, wherein clothing behe-
moths like Shein off er thousands of new
styles every week, social media users dis-
play their latest avalanche of purchases
in ‘‘haul videos’’ and Instagram infl u-
encers post themselves in new outfi ts
multiple times a day. When some have
so little and others are drowning in a
surfeit of options, the fl aunting of abun-
dance — so long the central driver of our
screen-based existence — starts to feel
like bad manners.
Making new things out of others’ cast-
off s is something small-town America
has done for decades, in a sort of munic-
ipal precursor to Freecycle or Buy Noth-
ing groups. The importance of sharing
resources became increasingly clear as
the Covid-19 pandemic raged. For more
and more people, getting free stuff from
neighbors went from being a quirk, or a
fun excuse for a day’s outing, to being a
necessary form of mutual aid.
Covid taught its lessons about mutu-
al aid, but of course it also challenged
every community that tried to live by
them, and it’s not yet clear what any of
us are taking away from the last two
years. During the pandemic, the Swap
Shop closed, leaving the area without its
social escape valve. When it reopened
last summer, it might as well have been
a hot new downtown club. Indeed, my
fi rst trip back felt like somewhat of a
velvet-rope experience — the town had
begun more vigorously enforcing its
$100 access permit. I went with a friend,
and to my relief, the place was still a
dump — full of water-damaged paper-
backs on past-life regression, back issues
of defunct magazines, baby shoes often
worn. We helped a family lug several
boxes marked ‘‘garage’’ into the Swap
Shop, and our reward was taking the fi rst
run at their contents. I walked away with
a bracelet and necklace that must have
belonged to a kooky aunt. The bracelet
had split in two, but I fi gured that witha little superglue it could be restored to
its midcentury splendor.
The social slippage that has led the
world to become a macrocosm of the
Swap Shop — so many of us free-diving
for usable ephemera, pooling our limited
resources with one another — is not some-
thing to celebrate. The division between
the haves and the have-nots seems more
sharply drawn every day, and the fact that
the former can bestow a designer item
on the latter when they tire of it is hardly
a balm, especially when even that slight
gesture is available only to those have-
nots who have enough to pay the price of
admission. But still, there are small joys
to be snatched in those moments of com-
ing together, a vision of something better
amid the refuse.Véronique Hyland
is the fashion features
director of Elle. Her
debut essay collection is
‘‘Dress Code: Unlocking
Fashion From the New
Look to Millennial Pink’’
(HarperCollins, 2022).