One morning in March, Emma Rogue jumped on the black Nissan Rogue she shared with her brother and pulled it out of the parking lot opposite the Vintage Shop on the Lower East Side. RogueAnd set her Waze for goodwill in South Hackensack, NJ
She recently updated the app audio to Christina Aguilera. It was piped when she drove Allen Street.
Thirty minutes later she arrived. She wore an orange Nike / Supreme Collaboration SB Air Force 2 and buggy jeans, she nodded to her shopmates along the way, raised her hair in a ponytail, and messed up a trash can of chaotic clothes. I started looking. It was the beginning of a day cleaning northern New Jersey to raise inventory for her store, which will celebrate its first anniversary next month.
Simply put, Rogue has become one of New York’s most important and unpredictable new retail adventures. This is where the famous TikTok clears the closet, where the mean young clothing designers stage runways and pop-up events and find their signature wear in a mismatched relationship in the studio. Every weekend, Rogue hosts at least one event and builds a community of baby T-shirts or rave pants at a time. The result is a curious, vibrant, eclectic and chaotic energy that hasn’t been seen in downtown retail stores since the peak of VFiles in the mid-2010s.
“Rogues are bigger than just vintage,” she said late in the afternoon, drinking chicken and corn bread at one of her favorite restaurants, Boston Market. “Yes, vintage is where we started. But now my vision is to empower the next generation of creativity. We are the starting point for the next person. We are the store. Anyone in stock at, they have a valid check, do you know? “
Refreshingly, Rogue’s group of fashion fanatics doesn’t have a general style. Her expanded community is less tied to a particular aesthetic, era, silhouette, or ideology. Many of the most adventurous dressers boldly combine styles, fabrics, times and shapes to make fluidity more comfortable without being tied to subculture identification.
“People are beginning to dress in ways that make them happy, or they represent different parts of themselves all in one outfit,” Clara Perlmutter, also known as. @tinyjewishgirl, One of the most vibrant and unique dressers on TikTok. She was talking among fans of her greetings at a closet sale in Rogue in late February. She likens the moment of her current style to the hybrid nature of post-Internet art. “It’s like a collage, you’re a canvas.”
Rogue’s own style is overkill and accessible, making it a fun home for Y2K. Often she wears at least one oversized garment and often wears huge boots. (She has a specific dealer for them.) She dyes her hair strips and leans towards theater eye makeup.
After spending an hour in a Goodwill bin, 26-year-old Rogue headed to a warehouse-sized thrift shop not far away. In just 30 minutes she pulled out some vibrant items. A patchwork denim maxi skirt, a black top with Ed Hardy’s intimate gold logo, and Avril Lavigne’s obsolete Abbey Dawn line T-shirt. A perhaps flammable white mesh turtleneck, adorned with motivational phrases (“Choose Happy”, “Make Yourself Proud”). Gorgeously faded buggy jeans that are three or four steps past the recent revival of True Religion.
Bella McFadden, also known as Internet girlBecame famous as a seller of depops in the late 2010s and now has its own brand. iGirlI met Rogue a few years ago when I was working at Depop and saw her break out on her own.
“She definitely takes advantage of the 2000s revival, a very nostalgic core,” McFadden said. “Most of her work was what we wore when we were kids. Now we’re even more inclined in the 2010s and Emma definitely uses it.”
Born in Emma Roderius, Rogue grew up in New Jersey. I grew up in Jersey City first and later in the sleepy town of Bedminster. Both her parents worked in real estate. In her high school, she focused on science, hoping she would one day become a plastic surgeon.
But by the time she arrived at New York University in 2014, she was ready to be freed from the experience of a small protected town. She said, “I don’t think she could understand how outgoing she was until she arrived at New York University.” Eventually, she met a group of skateboarders and introduced Supreme and other streetwear. This is her gateway fashion education.
When she graduated in 2017, she hadn’t landed completely on her personal style yet. But in early 2018, she started selling items she saved with Depop. Later that year, she worked as the manager of a Depop retail store in Nolita, where she observed how her products sold in real time and went beyond the Y2K problem she personally enjoyed. Has begun to expand.
“Even if I don’t wear it, if someone wears it, sees a bomb walking down the streets of New York City, and imagines wearing it, I’ll get it. “She said.
In the summer of 2019, Danielle Greco, then Depop’s content director, placed Rogue in front of the camera to host the content for the Depop / VFiles joint runway event. “She had this formula that she could teach other children,” Greco said. “She has the know-how and spoke at their level. She is friendly, passionate, friendly and has a good style.”
That year, Rogue also became a regular at New York City street fairs, blending carefully selected styles. Brian Procel, a downtown vintage-seller magician, first met her at one of such trade fairs at Bushwick.
“She offered a combination of brands to people of her age, but also pleased a critical New Yorker like me,” said Procel, one of Rogue’s main inspirations. Told. (She routinely wears the Muslin Air Force 1 released at Nike in 2019.)
“She will meet Westwood, Rick Owens, and Mandy and Wetseal, followed by No Limit’s Ecko Unltd — a fusion of all this,” Prosel continued. “But what makes her stand out is her particular presentation and the ability to provide it to the TikTok generation.”
Social media was important for Rogue to grow from selling dozens of items a week to downtown agenda-settings at Depop. Early in the pandemic, she began filming a TikTok video that meticulously stuffs people’s orders. It was soothing to see the sometimes chaotic clothes being sent to a new home in an orderly and loving manner.
Rogue hires sales staff to help with social media, but most of her work remains a single female show. While wandering around the New Jersey shelves, she was pulled away to approve the social media content she needed to post and called about a stylist who visited without notice to pull an item on a TV show. She also posted photos of the items she purchased on her Instagram story and polled her followers’ likes and dislikes.
“It’s like an institution that does all this in-house, but she’s the only one,” Prosel said.
It took her about two months from the time she decided to find a physical location to the opening date of the store. “How bold she is, the fact that she wanted to open the bricks and mortar is amazing,” McFadden said. “I said,” Why do you do that when everything is happening online? “But after seeing her move, I said,” Wow, bricks and mortar are still alive. ” It seems like. The store was visited by influential Avani Gregg and Gauge Gomes, model Devon Lee Carlson, and social media Chameleon Frankie. Jonas, musician Steve Lacy, Holly Humberstone and more.
But Rogue is more focused on her inner circle, growing creative groups from scratch. “Emma is honestly one of the best networkers I know, but she’s generous in sharing the spotlight and attracting all viewers,” Perlmutter said. rice field.
Part of her magic was to stay ruthless at the pinnacle of fast-moving microtrends. “Yesterday, Addison Rae went viral and what did you wear on TikTok, which everyone is commenting on?” — And what the most advanced dressers might want to wear months ago. To predict. She described one of her recent discoveries, a relatively simple, dazzling “blessed” shirt as “2012, 2014 junior high school”, but the model can already imagine it. Look at low-rise jeans. Put it on the floor and see if anyone can get it. “
She added:
Rogue has also been in the habit of discovering the best styles and brands so far, though not in the limelight, for the not too distant past.
After she came across a cash of dead stock items from a mall brand Happy bunnyCombining cute illustrations with tart phrases, she contacted her author, Jim Benton. He sent her some items from his personal archive so that she could sell them in a pop-up of the day.
“Frankly, she’s a kind of natural force,” Benton said. “You meet people who have a bright inner light and think,’You will be important.’ She is one of them.”
Benton was from Michigan to New York for an event attended by about 300 people. He said the store was an “adorable magnet.” Encouraged by Gen Z’s interest, he is in the process of reviving the brand later this year.
Such a crowd became Mr. Rogue’s deligale. On weekends, her block (Stanton Street between Eldridge and Forsyth) can look like an instant runway show.Recently she has been woven Newyork NicoA tapestry of colorful city characters. He took Post Malone to the store, where he bought a vintage T-shirt, tried on a denim shirt layered with patchwork Louis Vuitton logo leather, and a string made by one of Rogue’s designer friends, Ari Serrano. I decorated it with. “This place is amazing!”
In the future, Rogue wants to make more independent designer friends. She probably wants to bring her own design clothes as well. And her plans go beyond retail locations. She has about 575,000 followers between her personal and shop accounts on TikTok, she becomes a street interviewer and chats with people coming to her shop about their outfits and style preferences. I am.
She sees it as the beginning of a media platform. She is also looking at where the crew will spend the day wandering and building a cafe for evening parties. This is an all-in-one rogue experience, clothing retailer, music performance, panel and carnival game.
“I don’t want to work on the terms of others,” she said. “Sometimes I come up with these crazy ideas that I know my mind is too fast to do now. But for example, I want to be very bad.”