Except for underwear and shoes (size 13 double Es, hard to come by), Jack Drumke can’t remember the last time he purchased clothing and can’t imagine why he would. Drumke is nattily attired in a pair of black Pierre Cardin corduroy slacks and an Italian-knit cashmere sweater from the men’s shop at Bonwit Teller. That store bit the dust here in 1990, but that’s no problem for Drumke, who would be loath to set foot in the place anyway. His entire wardrobe has been assembled from Dumpsters.
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Drumke’s friend Craig Connolly is wearing a navy Eddie Bauer turtleneck with Levi’s loose cut jeans. He looks like he stepped out of a Gap ad, but he never buys clothes either. “Even if Gap straightened up and never had used sweatshop labor, I wouldn’t want them to have my money,” he says, summing up the Dumpstering manifesto. In this radical inversion of status shopping, no store is good enough.
Drumke and Connolly are gearing up for the bonanza that accompanies May 1, the day when thousands of the city’s apartment leases expire. On the following weekend, they’ll be cruising the alleys on bike or on foot, plucking and plunging. It can be a messy business: an apartment building Dumpster is a rich stew of decay and possibility. But in their Uptown neighborhood, they say, people are conscientious about do-it-yourself recycling: they put the usable goods out–boxed, bagged, or stacked–away from the slimy stuff.
