“If you don’t have hope or some type of imagination for the future, where are you gonna go? Nowhere,” Emanuel “Manny” Edwards tells me as he reflects on Goody Vault being named Time Out’s No. 1 secondhand store in Chicago. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of his Wicker Park storefront, in a makeshift conversation pit carved out of weathered secondhand couches piles of vintage clothing—his preferred way of grounding himself in the world he’s been building since 2018.
What his imagination didn’t include, at least at first, was supplying hand-mended vintage to the costume department of The Bear or to stylists who dress the likes of Charli XCX. Edwards’s aesthetic—an alchemy of hand-mended sportswear, militaria and workwear dating as far back as the 1800s—stands out precisely because it isn’t engineered for an audience. It’s a reflection of himself. His stitches, his patches, his instincts: All of it emerges from self-knowledge rather than trend forecasting.
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“What’s tied into people dressing the way they do?” he asks. “It’s your self-esteem, how you view yourself, how you view the world, what you can afford.”
Edwards didn’t enter adulthood imagining he’d dress anyone. Before all this, he spent nearly a decade working for the Department of Defense—an office job equipped with leadership training, a life coach and other resources he credits for the deep self-knowledge that now anchors Goody Vault. One afternoon, a coworker—a retired colonel—asked how he spent his time outside of work. When Edwards admitted he wasn’t doing much of anything, the colonel urged him to build something of his own. That nudge sent him down the rabbit hole of secondhand clothing.
Goody Vault began, quite literally, in storage—a rented unit in Huntsville, Alabama. The project grew quickly, eventually catching the attention of figures like Derek Guy, the kingmaking fashion critic behind Die Workwear. By 2021, Edwards committed to it full-time, not because he’d reached financial safety but because he’d run out of reasons to wait. And just as Huntsville began to feel like solid ground, life rerouted him: His father fell ill, and Edwards moved to Chicago to care for him. Another move, another storage unit, another beginning from scratch. And Edwards met it with the same steadiness that had carried him this far.
“Going through hardship makes you realize you have nothing to lose,” he tells me. “I’ve been through really tough times in my life, and that makes these big decisions a little easier.”
Goody Vault’s signature hand-mended pieces were born from that same austerity. The stitching that now defines Edwards’s work didn’t begin as an artistic gesture; it was a matter of survival. He couldn’t afford a seamstress to repair the ripped and battered garments he sourced, so he taught himself—binge-watching American Pickers, training his hands to speak the language of repair. Necessity became expression; expression hardened into identity. In his hands, a tattered Ralph Lauren polo becomes a canvas of varsity patches and constellations of bold zig-zag stitches; a blown-out pair of Levi’s turns into a vessel for salvaged quilt scraps.
“There’s a lot of people doing vintage right now,” Edwards tells me. “People always have something to say, but I know that my perspective is coming from a place of work. It’s taken me years of telling my own personal story and digging into my imagination to translate that into the physical form of clothing and objects.”
He’s content with where that process has brought him, but not complacent. “I’m happy with where I’m at—but I also know I have more growing to do. At least what I like is authentic to me.”
That authenticity is now housed in the iconic Flatiron Arts Building, which overlooks the trendy neighborhood's famously bustling “Six Corners” intersection—a far cry from the storage unit where it all began. The Goody Vault showroom feels part gallery, part memory chamber. Paintings by his late father hang on the walls, including an unfinished canvas of two ships passing: one richly colored, the other rendered only in delicate linework. Portraits of his parents hang amidst talismans, gifts and a sprawling Lions Club Picnic banner.
As Edwards leads me through the space, he invokes Chicago artist Theaster Gates’s reclamation philosophy—the idea that objects carry spiritual charge and embedded histories, even when those stories aren’t immediately visible. Gates often speaks of rescuing discarded materials and elevating them through care, context and community; in his view, preservation itself is a devotional act. Edwards sees the Goody Vault the same way: a space where objects and clothing don’t just decorate a room, but radiate the lives they’ve touched.
“If I’m not in the room, you can at least get a taste of what’s in my brain,” he says. “The curation is everything I’ve experienced—childhood, food, travel, relationships. All of it shapes what I choose.”
Visitors can experience the Goody Vault in a few ways: book an appointment online, wait for Edwards to drop the day’s door code on Instagram Stories, or sift through the curated racks he plants around the city—at Drip Collective in the West Loop and at The Center of Order and Experimentation. Each rack is tailored to its environment, like a dialect of the larger Goody Vault language.
Remaining faithful to the brand’s motto—“Repair. Rework. Reimagine.”—Edwards is always reshaping the Goody Vault storefront. When I met him in mid-November, he was preparing to host a small concert that evening, fretting over furniture arrangements for the optimal communal experience. He’s held mending classes (“Mend That Sh&t!”) here, too. His default mode is forward motion: toward the next great find, the next chapter, what he calls “ultimate self-actualization.”
Edwards thinks constantly about the future—his own, his brand’s, the world’s. His clothing speaks with the same clarity he does. As for what’s next for Goody Vault, he’s cautious but not opaque: “I want to be more flexible with the times,” he says. “To make myself accessible to the community and connect more.”
Whatever direction he chooses, it will be unmistakably his—stitched with intention, shaped by imagination and as one-of-a-kind as the treasures hanging on the racks of his vault.