Vintage Never Came in Her Size. Plus-Size Shoppers Are Building Their Own Markets for It.
Indianapolis got what WISH-TV called its first two-day size-inclusive vintage market in June. Cleveland's Secondhand Stare shows it isn't a one-off.
Photo by Anastasiya Badun on PexelsAll eight vendors at Poppin' Buttons carried sizes L to 4X and up — a floor rarely posted at vintage markets, because most of them don't stock that high. Indianapolis got what WISH-TV called the city's first two-day size-inclusive vintage market on June 5 and 6, 2026, and it came from two vintage-shop owners, not a national brand or a nonprofit. Poppin' Buttons ran a First Friday preview from 5 to 8 p.m. on June 5, then the full market from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, June 6, at Market Vintage, 9 Johnson Avenue in the city's Irvington neighborhood. Admission was free. They were Final Girl Vintage, Kitschcraft, Satellite Vintage, Gracias, It's Thrifted, Birdbrained Etc, Spare Time Creations, and Magpie Vintage.
The market's co-founders are also two of its vendors: Vern Jensen, who owns Final Girl Vintage, and Clare Cummings, who owns Kitschcraft. (The market's own site also credits a third co-founder, Megan of Magpie Vintage.) Jensen has been plus-size her whole life and has struggled for years to find vintage that actually fits, according to WISH-TV's report on the launch — the frustration that led her and Cummings to build the market themselves rather than wait for one to show up. Since June, the market's own site says it has appeared twice on Fox59's "Indy Now" and once on WISH-TV's "Life.Style.Live!" — local broadcast coverage on top of the original launch story.
“There is this misconception that maybe there's less, that there were fewer bigger people back in the day, and so now there's less vintage to choose from, but we are here to show you that is absolutely not true.”
“A real celebration of natural bodies and what real bodies look like, especially in today's society that just kind of wants everyone to shrink.”
Not just Indianapolis
Poppin' Buttons isn't the only place this is happening. In Cleveland, Alysse Dalessandro — who has run the body-positive fashion blog Ready to Stare since 2012 and was named a Cleveland Magazine honoree for body-positive community work — started Secondhand Stare in 2023: a resale operation, per her own site, focused on accessible price points in sizes L through 7X, sourced from estate sales, garage sales, and flea markets and stocking vintage pieces from the 1970s through the early 2000s. It's a different format from a weekend market — Secondhand Stare sells online rather than running its own pop-up market day — but it's built to answer the identical gap: mainstream resale and vintage curation stops short of plus sizes, so someone who actually wears them built the alternative herself.
“My closet sales were filling a need that mainstream fashion wasn't: a sustainable and accessible way to shop plus size clothing.”
Two cities, two different formats, the same diagnosis: it isn't that fewer plus-size people existed to leave vintage clothes behind — it's that the people sorting estate sales, running thrift racks, and curating resale never prioritized the larger sizes that were always there. Neither market is a national chain, and neither is a fix for a shopper who doesn't live near Indianapolis or Cleveland — that gap is still open, and nobody covering this yet has offered her one.
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