SCENE AROUND: Annual ABC Clothing Sale

 

On September 25 at 7:30 a.m., savvy clotheshorses in Williamstown, Mass., will begin lining up for one of the year’s most anticipated shopping events. They won’t be standing before the doors of a fashion boutique but in front of the annual ABC Clothing Sale, which fills the First Congregational Church at the heart of the Williams College campus with an estimated 10,000 gently used—and often new—wearables.

 

“There were five hundred people in line when we opened up last year,” enthuses sale director Carolyn Behr, who founded the event in 1994 as a major fundraiser for the local chapter of the A Better Chance Program (ABC). The five-hour sale requires about one hundred volunteers and nets approximately $30,000 for ABC, a scholarship organization that provides eight educationally disadvantaged students of color with housing in Williamstown so they can attend Mount Greylock Regional High School.

 

The prices are unbeatable. “I hardly shop anywhere else anymore,” says Jodi Joseph of Williamstown. “Seven [For All Mankind] jeans for four dollars. Mint-condition Patagonia jackets for ten dollars. It’s a mob scene.”

 

The church basement holds hundred of shoes, priced perfectly at $4 per pair. Elsewhere are hundreds of men’s and women’s pants and jeans ($4); more than eight hundred T-shirts and caps ($1 apiece); and designer fashions cram the “Red Carpet Room,” hawked at slightly higher prices ($3 to $25). Jewelry, scarves, outerwear, costumes, vintage frocks, and household linens, not to mention an entire room of Williams logo gear, round out the sartorial jackpot.

 

“It goes from mink coats to great pairs of one-dollar socks,” quips Behr, who curates items throughout the year—even washing up to ten loads of laundry per day in May and June. “What makes it to the sale represents less than half of what we’re given. [The rest goes to local charities.] The quality is so exceptional. Every year I’m amazed that, in this little town, people donate wonderful clothes.”

 

So show up early, wear your game face, and prepare to shop till you drop. [SEPTEMBER 2010]

 

THE GOODS

ABC Clothing Sale 
September 25 at 9-2
First Congregational Church
906 Main St.
Williamstown, Mass.