Luke Fracher created a community out of his vintage obsession

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It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and Luke Fracher is sifting through a mound of vintage clothes on the floor of his narrow shop in downtown New York City. His store hasn’t opened yet — usually that happens “around 1-ish,” or whenever he’s ready to unlock the door to his Lower East Side boutique. 

“Can you hear me if I move around and shit?” Fracher asks as he hangs up some vintage band tees that he’s just unboxed. There’s a casual, DIY nature to the establishment, one that might mirror the laid-back attitude of the vintage shopper who hunts for luxury goods during typical weekday work hours, but Fracher is far from a hobbyist. 

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Opening his namesake shop last December, Luke’s marks the first buy-sell-trade shop for men’s high-end wear in New York of this caliber. However, Fracher's vintage obsession started years before this New York endeavor. 

Fracher was one of the founders of the Round Two vintage empire, a secondhand clothing revolution that redesigned the Buffalo Exchange business model for men’s streetwear. Fracher and his partners Sean Wotherspoon and Chris Russow capitalized on the hypebeast craze of the 2010s, turning their Richmond, Virginia store into a multimillion-dollar enterprise that expanded into nine locations in cities like Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and New York City. But Fracher suddenly found himself more concerned with employee payroll than doing the tasks he loved — brokering deals with sneakerheads and meeting strange characters with niche designer collections.  

In 2022, Fracher left Round Two to open his eponymous business, wagering that the New York market was also increasingly interested in higher-end treasures. Through the process of hitting the ground solo, Fracher was able to reflect on the secondhand clothing business and what gaps he saw in the industry. 

“All the stores that are following in the wake of Round Two do the exact same shit and are following the same playbook we put out eight, 10 years ago,” Fracher says as he busies himself around his storefront, his pointed Balenciaga mules clacking against the wood floors. “I've made a conscious effort to steer the social media in a completely different direction, and do the opposite of what I would've done at the other company.” 

Fracher’s eccentric brand can be found in his personal style — he’s currently sporting a bedazzled “I love Jesus” denim snapback — and in the quirky decor of his shop. While the mounted television fell out of the wall the week prior, the store is usually filled with the sounds of Werner Herzog films or some other “freaky movie that no one's ever seen before."

Just like Fracher himself, Luke’s store is highly curated with humor, antics, and good sense, offering a community-focused experience to modern and vintage secondhand shopping. “We get everything from suburban moms to the older fashion dudes who live in Chelsea,” Fracher explains. “It's a small space, but it's also very intimate.” 

Have you always been interested in fashion?

Yes.

As a kid even?

I come from a small college town in Charlottesville, Virginia. My dad's a shrink, my mom's an English teacher. Fashion was never something that mattered to me or my family growing up. I was wearing fucking Airwalks and shit you would just buy in Supershoes, whatever was cheapest. Shopped in Marshalls my whole life. When I turned about 12-ish, I started being on the internet way more. This was the early 2000s, so NikeTalk was huge. It really started with rap music, hip-hop shit; seeing how New Yorkers or D.C. dudes or Atlanta dudes were dressing and being like, "Oh, this is cool. This is a representation of who they are or the places that they come from."

So who were some of your style icons?

Cam['ron] and Dipset were huge. As I got more into high school, Wayne, Young Dro, a lot of Southern dudes were a big part of it as well. But early on, mainly New York shit.

When were you introduced to the world of vintage?

I was never really a thrifter. I worked at sneaker stores my entire life, from 15 through to when we started Round Two. I tried to do a real job after college, but it didn't really work out. I was never wearing vintage for myself until I got into it through Sean [Wotherspoon] and Chris [Russow] from R2.

So how did Round Two come to be? How did you get involved with Sean and Chris?

So basically I had known Sean for a while, just because Richmond's small, and we would always be in the lines for Jordan releases. He would resell them, and I would just buy them for myself because I've always been into it. We'd be the only two white guys in those lines, and we would just see each other and say, "What up?"

I started working at DTLR, which was this hood sneaker chain from Baltimore. I was working there four days a week, and I was working at the Saks Fifth Avenue the other three days in the Gucci women's handbag section, doing stock associate shit.

Sean was working at this store Rumors. It was basically like a local Buffalo Exchange. You could find a Supreme piece for like 20 bucks before people knew what it was. And Sean was like, "I think we can adapt this model for purely men's stuff." And so there was this store in Richmond called Heads Up, which was like a festy dude store. They sell Seedless fucking hats and LRG and 10 Deep.

The dude who owned that moved to Colorado, and the space came up for rent. Sean and Chris were very much like, "Let's do this shit." They had been working together for a long time. I was the odd man out. But I think Sean wanted me on there because he knew I had retail experience. I was hugely risk-averse at the time, so I didn't want to do it. I was up here for a couple weeks, fucking off, partying.

Up here in New York?

Yeah. And when they were like, "Do you want to do this with us?," I was dragging along and bullshitting. Then I just saw on Instagram that they had signed the lease for this shit, and I was like, "Oh shit.”

"It's happening."

Yeah. "I should probably do this." I was calling them, and they wouldn't pick up the phone. I was like, “I feel like I fucked up." So I took the bus back, and I had $2,500 left from selling weed in a safe. I went to Sean's house and gave him the bread, basically, like, "Here's my buy-in for it. I'm the right person for this.” They called me an hour later, and they were like, "You're in."

We opened in 2013, June, in Richmond, and I think our rent was like 600 bucks at that space. I had just started a job as a teller at Wells Fargo. It was my first real job. The third week we were open, I had just gotten my paycheck from two weeks of working as a teller, and it was $286 or some shit. I come into R2 on a Friday night, and they're like, "Do you want your cash for the day? We're just going to split the cash in the register." And they gave me $350. I was like, "Oh, fuck this other job," and I quit that.

When did you start expanding?

We moved to a bigger space a block down, and then in 2015, we moved to LA. Jermaine from Utmost, a friend of ours who had a skate company clothing line, was living in LA, was like, "You guys should come here. Fuck any other city." We felt we had the biggest support system there, so we went out to LA. And then that's when Round Two really became what it was.

What was the transition from Round Two to Luke's?

How candid should I get with this? Basically, I had wanted to make a move for a long time and not really known what that pivot was. My buddy Alex was working for Grailed and was like, "We're bringing on new sellers, and we're going to charge them no fees." I was like, "All right, well this makes a ton of sense for the company," and my business partners were like, "We don't really want to sell through another platform." I hit Alex up, and I was like, "Can I do it through my name?" He's like, "I don't fucking care."

I had enough stuff personally where I could fill a Grailed page. They pushed [my stuff] on there, I got a bunch of followers on it, and I was kind of buying and selling stuff in the streets via Instagram, higher-end stuff that we wouldn't sell at R2. And I was like, "Oh, shit, I forgot that I'm actually good at this part of the business and I enjoy this," because I'd been doing operations for a nine-store company for three years, and running payroll and all that other shit. 

I realized that this was the pivot that I wanted to do. I was like, "If I make half as much money, but have 10 times less stress, it's probably worth it,” because I felt like I was killing myself, stressing myself out running a company that size.

So basically I was doing that, but brick-and-mortar is all I know. I either wanted a showroom or a storefront. I was talking to my buddy Mike [Bray], who owns Kind Regards, Valentino around the corner, Ding-a-ling. I've known him for a long time in this neighborhood. He was like, "I think there's a space in this building that we just got Bongos in," which was what they transferred Valentino to. He was like, "It's like a shithole and it's tiny, but it's going to be three grand." And I signed the lease sight unseen. It's a small space, but it's also very intimate and easy to carry correctly.

What types of people do you get in here?

We get everything from suburban moms to the older fashion dudes who live in Chelsea, to the R2 customers, to younger kids who are just getting into this stuff. For the first four months we were open, 90% of the people who came in here were people who knew who I was through Round Two and Instagram. But once we did The Times thing and Throwing Fits, word has gotten out that we have the best stuff in New York. More and more random people are coming through.

Have you found that there's a secondhand vintage community in New York? Do you know other store owners?

Obviously, Brian and Jess from Procell are the progenitors of this whole reselling vintage thing. They've been doing it the longest. They've been doing it the best. John from Grand Street Local, Frank from Leisure Center, Xavier from Rare Bodega, Emma Rogue. There's so many people. I think there's less of a culture here doing it than in LA, just because of the flea market culture and the rag house culture in LA, but I think it's done better in New York. 

Tell me about your band music T-shirt collection here.

When it comes to selling vintage, every vintage seller has their own niche, whether they're into only selling Marvel shit and comic book shit or fucking Disney shit. I'm not super into that. For me, it's the music stuff. When we first opened, I had 40 Nine Inch Nails tees because I'm a huge Nine Inch Nails fan. I hate the Grateful Dead, but we get Grateful Dead shit, and it sells. I try to get obscure stuff.

How do you source your clothes?

99.9% of the shit in the store, people bring to me. I do buy, sell, trade. But I'm not outsourcing product because it's difficult to source [these types of pieces] unless people bring [them] directly to you. It also gives me a chance to interact with people one-on-one, get to know them, get to talk to them, and gives them a chance to come see what I have and drive traffic to the store.

Do you have any favorite looks or styles or pieces right now that you're really interested in?

I think obviously jerseys for the summer are really big, just because it's so hot. Everyone's on that Y2K or post-Y2K shit. But I just have been on really freaky dress shoe shit personally. I'm not really into sneakers anymore, but footwear is still the first point of reference for everything.

Do you feel like the vintage market is getting saturated? Is there a next frontier for eclectic dressing and finding cool pieces?

The trends that I see right now are people trying to be unique or just be different from everyone else. Vintage and secondhand is always going to be a huge part of that. As the world legitimately starts to fall apart and people worry more about climate change or shit in the oceans or the piles of clothes in the Atacama desert, people are going to be more and more attracted to secondhand shit. And just as consumerism gets more insane, and as fashion has become more mainstream, there's going to be more secondhand shit. So I think if people are there to facilitate that, it's going to stay around.