Two vast and trunkless legs of denim stand downtown. Near them, a more traditionally sized pair of jeans stands rigid and puzzlingly stiff, as if worn by a ghost, in the captain’s seat of a fishing boat that also serves as a cash register. It’s 2pm on a Monday inside the newest location of internet-famous thrift store Shirtzenpantz, and a few dozen people wander the aisles, investigating old Nike jumpsuits and Patagonia sweaters. Toward the back, a giant throne upholstered with 50 pairs of jeans sits empty, lording over the 6,000-square-foot shop and museum of the absurd.

Shirtzenpantz owner Ethan Gail (pictured at top, right, with brother Owen), 24, meets me under the towering jeans, which he reports are the world’s largest. “You can walk through them like the Colossus of Rhodes,” he says, taking me up a flight of stairs past a collection of Betty Boop figurines in can-can dresses, a 2006 Waterfront Blues Festival poster, and a 1970s copy of an Aristocats board game. At the end of a row of brightly colored shirts, behind an unmarked door, there’s not much more than a set of wobbly desks with peeling paint. “We’re going to turn this room into an Olive Garden,” he says. “You’ll be able to make reservations, we’ll hire a waiter…. We just won’t have food.”

Ethan and his twin brother, Owen Gail, opened the first Shirtzenpantz in March 2025, taking over a tucked-away Hillsdale storefront. But the brothers had started selling clothes long before then. As high schoolers in Wilsonville, the Gails would trawl Goodwills and list their finds on Depop or Poshmark, sticking them in the mail after class. Ethan wasn’t just in the clothes resale business, either: At 16, he organized “The 2nd 6th Annual Wilsonville Parakeet Race,” an event held in an Albertsons parking lot with tortellini, a blender raffle, and zero parakeets (other than Pinky Tuscadero, a parakeet-chicken mix who took home the title by default). The twins went their separate ways for college—Owen to Brandeis, near Boston, where he studied business, and Ethan to Cal Poly, where he majored in manufacturing engineering—but the former didn’t give up clothing resale. In fact, when he graduated, Owen went all-in, digging through the famed Goodwill Outlets, a.k.a. the Bins, and flipping what he could.

But as Owen started dedicating himself to clothing resale full-time, he noticed that everything felt overpriced: Space Jam T-shirts he saw at Goodwill for $4 now selling for $40, flimsy Shein dresses at prices higher than what they originally sold for. Anyone who has thrifted on Hawthorne knows that those T-shirts will sell for that price, albeit slowly. Owen had a different thought: What if you sold that T-shirt for $16 instead, so you could make more sales more quickly? It worked online, but Owen was burning out. (“It’s all very solitary.”) Ethan suggested a real storefront, and they landed on a space in the recesses of the Hillsdale Shopping Center, next to a nail salon and an Edward Jones office. Foot traffic was basically nonexistent, so Ethan leaned on his specific flavor of irreverence as a marketing strategy. Long story short: Owen began kicking a rock.

“Day one of kicking a rock around Hillsdale until it turns into a sphere,” Owen says in an Instagram post from April 14, 2025. He places on a scale a somewhat pyramidal stone, which clocks in at 923 grams, and then begins kicking the rock around the parking lot of the store. By day 5, the rock, dubbed Christosphere, had developed a following. Within a few months, the stone lived up to his name, successfully tumbling across the state until it became an almost-perfect sphere—and garnering millions of views.

By then, Shirtzenpantz had become a phenomenon, both locally and around the world. Visitors stopped by to see Christosphere in person, but at the shop they’d find genuinely well-priced secondhand clothing, often made with natural fibers and from well-known brands like Land’s End, Pendleton, and Eddie Bauer. Shirtzenpantz was also a brick-and-mortar home for the Gail brothers’ eccentric brand of humor: Customers who wrote a poem for the shop could get anywhere from 1 to 30 percent off their sale, depending on how much the owners liked the poem. Instagram-promoted sales ranged from naming someone on the Epstein list to pinching your fingers into a little heart at checkout. Ethan had started stuffing jeans and hanging them from the ceiling, suspended above the racks and frozen in a jog.

The Hillsdale shop got a St. Johns sibling in the fall of 2025, in the old Consign Couture on North Lombard. A house behind the main building is outfitted like a perpetual estate sale, wooden bowls and ’90s novelty glassware crowding the kitchen counters. They also placed a gumball machine next to the $5 bin, dispensing little plastic capsules filled with “missions” rolled up on pieces of paper—if customers fulfilled the “mission” (say, walking on a lava field) they’d get a discount, often upward of 40 percent. Any day of the week, you’ll see students from nearby Roosevelt High trying on jerseys and flipping through the racks as soon as the final bell rings, if not earlier.

The decision to open downtown was born mostly of necessity: The brothers kept acquiring large things (giant jeans, a phone booth) that didn’t fit in the other two stores. When they found the 6,000-square-foot space on SW Washington Street formerly home to underU4men, they thought they landed on a major score. Friends and colleagues saw it differently. “Everyone said don’t do downtown,” Ethan says, but the twins were undeterred. “When people are coming to Portland, they’re staying downtown for the most part. We wanted somewhere for people coming to town.”

On my visit to the newest Shirtzenpantz, which sits within a few blocks of the Ritz-Carlton, Woodlark, Dossier, Benson, and other hotels, I hear no fewer than four different languages spoken by the people lingering in its clothes-packed corners. A woman who looks to be in her fifties, rocking New Balances and a Lululemon tote, texts in the leather chair next to the domineering denim seat in the back. Her companion walks over in a maroon sweater adorned with a Sasquatch. “What brand is it?” she asks.

“Patagonia,” he replies, fingering the tag attached to the sleeve. “Look at that! $18. Hilarious.”

Next to the phone booth, one rack holds a sundress covered in bicycles, a white Dickies coverall for $20, a silk shift with watercolor flowers, and a 1970s Butte Knit chore coat–esque dress. It’s priced at $24; 1970s Butte Knits online generally cost over $50. It hangs next to a genuine, handmade kochi dress, a garment worn by various nomadic communities throughout Afghanistan and Iran, embroidered with metal jingling coins.

Across from the rack of dresses, I see another benefit of a larger space: A room guarded by a taxidermy bear in a flannel shirt. Inside, a flock of stuffed geese soar over a room holding vintage bomber jackets and Levi’s. This is where the true rarities lurk. I find myself drawn to a Popsicle-red button-up shirt with a turquoise pattern across the chest. I rub the sleeve between my fingers, and it’s slick, like waxed canvas.

“Good eye,” Ethan says, checking me out at the register. “You found a Brushpopper. I think I made a few videos in this one.” (The same shirt is going for $100 on eBay.) He packs the 1990s button-up into a garbage bag; the store had run out of branded bags that weekend.

As Ethan packs up my shirt, I watch teenagers pose and take photos in the giant denim throne, upholstered by Owen and Ethan’s 87-year-old grandmother, Juanita Hall. Hall has become a Shirtzenpantz character in her own right, hiding in the secret room behind an armoire at the St. Johns store or helping pass out cookies on Free Cookie Fridays. She constructs many of the stuffed denim creatures that hang from the ceilings of all the Shirtzenpantz stores, including the massive jeans chandelier in the downtown location. “My grandma, in all the stores, her artistry is part of it,” Owen says. “She spent 50 hours reupholstering the giant chair.... She said, ‘Give me a week and 50 pairs of pants.’” Look on her works, ye mighty, and rejoice.