E-Mail This Article to a Friend RACK VINTAGE Proletariat relocates BY CAMILLE DODERO

It’s a Tuesday morning, and Kerry Simon has just scored big. He’s in his native state of Texas, rifling through an enormous stack of secondhand clothes, and he uncovers a highly coveted buried treasure: a black-and-gray Chicago T-shirt from the cheeseball band’s 1982 tour. Soon after, he finds 40 pairs of "good-looking Levi’s." Over the phone from Texas, he says, "It’s been a good day."

As the 26-year-old proprietor and chief executive clothes digger of the Harvard Square vintage-clothing store Proletariat, Simon has recently enjoyed a string of good days. This past January, Proletariat lost the lease on its JFK Street basement space, beside Planet Records, and it looked as if Harvard Square’s astronomical rents had claimed another retail victim. But fortunately for Simon, the landlord at the Garage Mall down the road liked his store — it is, after all, one of the few local shops where you could find a brown WE’RE NUMBER ONE IN THE NUMBER TWO BUSINESS T-shirt — and offered Simon the second-floor spot occupied by the soon-departing gift shop Mi Casa. Proletariat will settle into its new digs on March 1 and open approximately two weeks later. "I’m really pumped," he says. "I’m not in this shady basement where it reeks every day."

Since college, Simon has managed to parlay adversity into opportunity. Hired as a DJ in Texas, he lost his job when a larger radio-station chain snatched up his alternative station. So, in a desperate move to make money, he randomly decided to sell all his stuff. "I pretty much emptied everything out of my closet and rented a space for a month and I was just like, ‘Well, we’ll just see what happens.’ It was like a garage sale in a store." Such was the start of his retail endeavors. That one store led to two: one outside Austin and another in a small town called College Station. Then, over a year ago, the Dallas/Fort Worth native relocated from the Lone Star State to Cambridge when his then-girlfriend/now-wife opted to get her PhD at Boston University. And with the move, Simon’s monthly rent multiplied by a factor of 11. "A year’s rent in Texas is like a month’s rent in Boston," he says. "It’s insane."

Proletariat doesn’t stock only jerseys with ironic intentions. It also offers old-school threads like cast-off hooded Izod coats, track-suit jackets, worn Pumas, red patent-leather pocketbooks, knit caps, studded belts, even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bed sheets. Furthermore, with this move, Simon’s adding still more variety to his store. He’s collected 1000 iron-on decals and bought an iron-on machine. He’ll also be hawking graffiti spray-can caps, which are rarely sold around Boston. He has around 400 Life and Time magazines coming, plus 50 issues of Rolling Stone dating from the mid ’70s to mid ’80s. And he’s stocked up on vintage belt buckles, including one with an actual dead scorpion cast inside. "That one’s going to be hard to part with because I’ve already got it on now."

If Simon does decide to sell the dead-scorpion buckle, he might just find it en masse somewhere else. One time a product designer from Urban Outfitters bought a Maxell cassette-tape belt buckle from Simon, and he later spotted knockoffs on the store’s shelves. "I also had a guy from American Eagle buy some stuff from me in Texas. And within like three months, I saw three of my vintage T-shirts in the American Eagle line. They had just wiped off [the phrase] ‘Virginia Beach’ and put on ‘American Eagle.’ " He scoffs, "It’s so lazy. I just expected more out of the people with millions of dollars to create things."

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