Ugly Christmas sweater season: When trash is treasure

Elbow deep in ugly, the Christmas sweater connoisseur is immersed in a daily ritual: bows and bears, sequins and shoulder pads, gold glitter thread woven into nondenominational holiday wishes, snowmen of the literal button-nosed variety and ...

"I know it is here," she says, digging to the bottom of the pile.

Santa has a velvet rucksack. Carrie Kraft has black plastic trash bags. Fitting, in a way, because at some point all of these sweaters were somebody's trash. Her boyfriend Stan Darke (who owns the Factory, the vintage shop in Fairfax, Virginia, where she works) has the receipts to prove it. Two years ago, he bought between 200 and 300 sweaters. Last year, 600. This season: 1,600 ugly Christmas sweaters, all of which must be sorted, priced and hung to await their festive future.

"At first, it was just college kids and young people," Kraft says, finally locating the light-bulb laden masterpiece of a garment she was looking for. "Now, it's everybody. Ten-year-olds need them for school. This 80-year-old guy for his office party. Someone came in and said they were having an ugly Christmas sweater day at the bank."

For $22 and an "aw, cute," you can purchase basic ugly: a tree on a sweatshirt, a candy-cane vest.

For $38 and the visible, spread-across-your-face kind of joy, you can give ugly a whole new meaning: 3-D angels with sparkling wings, furry white collars, an amount of sequins that should be allowed only on a child's dance costume and ...

"Sweaters that match, so you can put one on your dog!" Kraft says.

It's highly possible that the same people who owned these gaudy Christmas sweaters decades ago - when they were festive, not ironically festive - are in search of them again. And with years of commercializing the Christmas spirit under its (Santa-suit) belt, the economy has answered the call. Ugly is available in bulk, at department stores and even from your favorite sports team.

Kraft first ironically donned an ugly Christmas sweater for a party during her sophomore year at West Virginia University in 2009. She hadn't before heard of such a party, but proudly scavenged an obnoxious green vest from Goodwill. She drank a peppermint-flavored something, blissfully unaware that her textiles degree would end up furthering the future ugly sweater industry.

Another Christmas came, and at a college on the other side of the country, four fraternity brothers were throwing the same kind of party. There is not a dire need for sweaters in the warmth at San Diego State University, but there is always a need for a good time.

"Our inspiration," Wesley Flippo explained, "was that people just need to let loose a bit."

For Christmas 2011, Flippo and friends made "National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day" a thing. Or rather, they made a website for it, so good enough. And so it was declared: the second Friday of December (the day of the party, of course) would become National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day.

The phenomenon was churning.

In Philadelphia that year, in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse, a woman kept getting phone calls begging for Christmas sweaters of the ugly variety. Amanda Saslow lives in a world you probably don't know exists: she is a bulk supplier of vintage clothing. Boutiques call her up and order "women's '70s blouses" and "men's western shirts" by the pound, like chicken at Costco. Her supply comes from shipments of clothing that have been disposed of and recycled all over the country. She started putting the Christmas sweaters in a special pile.

Another Christmas, and Urban Outfitters was selling them.

And this year, in addition to the NFL collection, you can find them at Target. You can rent them from high-end fashion lender Rent the Runway. You can buy a kit to "make your own" at Macy's. The charity Save the Children got involved in promoting Flippo's National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day, which falls on Dec. 12 this year. The guys maintain and promote their site, without profiting from it. (Their party is no longer, but a bar crawl among the brothers lives on. Flippo's sweater this year has a T. rex holding a tiny teddy bear on it.)

Saslow estimates she has sold 25,000 pounds of ugly sweaters this season, more than ever before. Dozens of trash bags of those went into a U-Haul rented by Kraft and Darke so they could be crammed into the barely-wider-than-a-hallway Fairfax store.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early December, Kraft is attending to only one customer. "But it gets prettyyy crazy in here," she says, playing Christmas music on Pandora.

Her corner of the ugly Christmas sweater economy has been in the works since October. She and Darke made the sweaters a website and Twitter account. They passed out coupons at Metro stations. They asked local bars to throw ugly Christmas sweater parties - on Dec. 12, of course.

On Pandora, someone is singing, "He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake," when Kraft's customer is ready to check out.

One more sweater down, about a thousand more to go. If they sell all 1,600, they're taking a trip to Thailand. That would be Kraft's visible, spread-across-your-face kind of joy.

"Going to a party?" she asks the man, folding his bulky crew neck of choice.

"Nope," he says. "Just, uh, to have for the season."