Rust Belt Chic is churches and work plants hugging the same block. It is ethnic as hell. It is Cleveland punk. It is getting vintage t-shirts and vinyl for a buck that are being sold to Brooklynites for the cost of a Manhattan meal. It is babushka and snakeskin boots. It is wear: old wood and steel and vacany. It is contradiction, conflict, and standing resiliency. But most centrally, Rust Belt Chic is about home, or that perpetual inner fire longing to comfortable in one's own skin and community. This longing is less about regressing to the past than it is finding a future through history.