Snake Q&A 024: Charlie Morgan
Author, scholar on Ralph, Dondi, Santa Fe, and the rich-guy Manhattan thrift triangle
Snake covers design and explains it. For a representative sample, read the best selections from this week’s auctions, and the most recent designer profile and explainer.
Today on Snake: Every other Friday or so an interview with a person in good standing of the newsletter whose taste in vintage, furniture, and adjacent is worth recording. Sellers, buyers, artists, adjacents, etc.
Charlie Morgan | IG, book IG | UK | Fanboy made good.
What to say about Charlie—he’s a head, a head’s head… a font of knowledge about a handful of disparate aesthetic scenes (Ralph, graffiti, older running shoes) as well as what must be a half-dozen others that he keeps close to his chest. Charlie recently released his book Heated Words, co-authored with Rory McCartney, a work of reportage and nuance on a secret, undocumented font (more on it below) that was central/clutch to a bunch of scenes and movements. He also grew up in Cambridge (England) around real life George Smileys. Never know what he’s going to come up with next; thanks Chuck for the interview.
Q&A 024
Fav flea market?
The provincial Sunday 'car boot sales' of my youth hold a special place in my heart. (For the uninitiated, a car boot is kinda like a garage sale meets a swap meet, you roll up in you car, open up the boot (trunk) and sell all your random crap.) But Rose Bowl and Brimfield both exceeded my pretty high expectations.
Best flea market day ever—what did you get?
We were in Manhattan early one Sunday and decided to go to the Chelsea Flea to kill time (and see if the guy who looks like a 1920s silent movie villain was there). It was the usual mess of picked-over crap and salty old timers bitching about other vendors. On a table stacked with detritus culled from the streets and dumpsters of Manhattan I spotted some large clear acrylic POLO 'point of sale' logo blocks. After a bit of digging I found more Ralph-related stuff, including some blue ring binders, related RL licensees, like wallpaper and interiors; the last one I picked up contained every Polo footwear catalog from the late ‘80s to mid ‘90s. This era for Polo was before they licensed out their footwear, and quality and design fell off a cliff. The 'vendor' wanted 10 bucks per catalog but I talked him down to 20 for the lot.
Best eBay purchase?
For the last eight or so years I've been digging into the life and times of an obscure typeface, a bastardized form “olde English” that existed exclusively as Iron-on flock lettering, It turns up within all these different subcultures; it's kinda the perfect storm of type/design/fashion/streetwear/culture/photography. The project ultimately coalesced into a book. A few weeks before the final print deadline I was up in the middle of the night with my then newborn son, and in my zombified state I somehow spotted an auction of full boxes of the original letters amongst cases of more contemporary iron-on type. Over the years I have managed to acquire 20 or so vintage garments featuring the lettering, but the actual letters themselves, in their unapplied state, had always eluded my co-author and I. The seller had no idea what he had and was initially adamant on local collection only but I eventually talked him round.
Best Craigslist find?
We moved back to the U.K. last year, and the local equivalent, gumtree is slim pickings. But having signed the lease on an unfurnished house, and with what little furniture we had sitting in a Brooklyn storage unit, I had to hustle in order stay true to my pledge of no more (new) IKEA. Most of what we got was Scandinavian (or adjacent) teak stuff that was around—nothing incredible, but i can live with it. The one steal, however, was a huge HAY table for the equivalent of 50 bucks. It had been used in a showroom and the top was in rough shape. I took a few feet off of the ends and routed the sides, exposing a nice ply edge.
Best LiveAuctioneers find?
Another platform that doesn't have a true analog the U.K.
IG seller account you hang out on/look at their stuff the most?
@geek_out_store
Thing you most regret passing on?
An Eames plywood splint, still in the wrapping. It was cheap but shipping to the U.K. seemed extortionate.
Best thing you got for insanely cheap?
A copy of Alan W. Vincent's Bangy Book for $4.75 on Amazon; a 1970s La Pavoni Europiccola for 10 bucks, at Big Reuse, the old Gowanus location. God, I miss that place.
Best thing you overpaid for?
A Chouinard Hawaiian, the one with all the carabiners. After more than a decade of holding out for a bargain, I saw one in the flesh and pulled the trigger. By no means exorbitant, but I would have loved to have found one cheap.
What’s one thing you own that you won’t ever sell?
Just before we moved back to the U.K. we found this Grete Jalk-style kids chair in Seattle. It doesn't have any markings, but is obviously well made—maybe an apprentice piece. The store owner didn't know much about it and he said it had been his kids’ when they were small, and had intended to refurbish it and sell it on. We were shipping what meager possession we had with us in Seattle to England the very next day, and convinced him to let us have the unrestored chair for $100. When we got back to England, my dad, who used to work as a furniture maker, pulled it apart, reglued and refinished it. Obviously, my son doesn't particularly care for it, but we have a soft spot for it.
Piece you have now that you despise and want to replace?
Nothing I truly despise; a stopgap IKEA desk that will be replaced when I find the right piece, size is the issue.
Who do you think sold more records: Nelly Furtado or Three 6 Mafia?
Three 6, if you include all the posse cuts.
Secret spot that you love but won’t tell anyone about? (please describe as judiciously as possible while omitting any identifiable characteristics)
Pre-COVID, I used to be in the city a few of times a week for “meetings” (the kind that usually happen in church basements). After I would take a long walk and hit that seam of rich guy thrifts around “Gramercy,” a trifecta composed of a Housing Works, the City Opera Thrift and the “Vintage thrift” on Third Ave. It was always astounding to me that you could regularly find gems in the middle of Manhattan. Picked up two Olympus MJUs, an early edition of Hollywood Babylon (Not the French one) and a Polo Sport Hawiian that I have never seen anywhere else.
Rarest/most canon vintage thing you have but never wear?
The Chouinard is probably now high on that list. A lot of the Polo pieces start to look a little cosplay, especially when it's shirt, shorts and cap all in the same repeating 'toss' pattern.
Most jealousy-inducing thing you’ve seen? (e.g. I saw a guy in Foremost jeans once in 2012 and I’ve never gotten over it)
A friend has a framed sheet of uncut Fiorucci stickers, and another acquaintance has an original Dondi sketch.
Favorite Russian novelist?
Isaac Asimov was born in Russia, does that count?
Is there a field of collecting are you looking to get into in the near future? (Furniture era/paper/autographs/stamps/model trains/computer shirts/90s Harley shirts/digital watches/lighters/slot cars/faberge eggs/Amish quilts etc)
Original paintings, Taos sort of stuff, whimsical early 20th century paintings of Santa Fe, similarly Fred Harvey jewelry.
What’s the item that’s been on your watchlist the longest without you having pulled the trigger?
Apparently it's a red Akira Kurosawa “Rhapsody in August” (1991) promo crewneck. The price seemed extortionate when I first saw it, but reasonable given the climate for anything with a vaguely highbrow set in a serifed font. Conversely, it could easily be mistaken for a bootleg now, given current trends.
Is the best vintage/furniture online or in the wild?
If you have the time and the inclination, the wild. But if you can't justify IRL digging, then trawling dark corners of the internet in the small hours with ever more elaborate google operators is a decent substitute.
Has all the cool shit been discovered? (Yes or no answer only)
No
Any vintage accounts you want to rep or boost? Furniture? (feel free to include local spots)
@woodensleepers
@pillowheat
@blue_room___
@ditc_store
@supersoldiersurplus
@delasurp
@roots_bk
@tanakasosuke
@nike_server
@serverior_
Follow Charlie on IG | Buy Charlie’s book | Read previous Snake Q&As | Subscribe
Auctions for furniture ending this weekend:
Sottsass floor lamp, Bedford NY $400 (unlocked from Monday’s newsletter)
Reverse housekeeping:
RIP Martin Greenfield; necessary and thorough and touching obituary in the Journal c/o Jacob Gallagher. It’s over.
Nice round table on Dries Van Noten (retired) from Sam Hine at GQ, great collection of thinkers here; nice final word on his career. The Philip pant is an all-timer that gets worn more than it’s discussed… arguably the 501 of church pants? One of the best.
This Ohtani story with the translator is going to unravel baseball.
Has anyone picked up RM at Clinton Hill lately? How are the lines?
Post Q&A god-tier aesthetic video of the week:
Thanks for reading.
Snake