People think working in fashion is glamorous. This week working in fashion was me sweating through a linen top in four different Williamsburg thrift stores off the L train, hunting for one specific blazer for a client shoot.
Thrifting for work is nothing like thrifting for fun. When it's fun you drift. When it's a job you have a mission and a budget and a girl named Dani texting you "any luck??" every eleven minutes.
I hit the L at Bedford and worked my way down. The first place was picked clean. The second place smelled like a basement having a bad day. The third place had potential but everything was priced like it was couture, which, my friends, a stretched-out Zara cardigan is not.
But the fourth place. The fourth place on Grand Street. That's where I found her. A '90s oversized blazer, structured shoulders, this deep oxblood that photographs like a dream. Sustainable, secondhand, exactly the silhouette we needed. And so did the woman reaching for it at the same time.
We made eye contact. Two fashion girls, one blazer. It was very DDLJ, if the train were a blazer and Kajol were a stranger in a Carhartt beanie. I let her know, warmly, that I would fight. She let me have it. I think she saw the desperation in my eyes.
Sustainable fashion is not a soft, gentle hobby. It is a full-contact sport played on the L train with a MetroCard and a dream.
The shoot looks incredible, by the way. That oxblood blazer is the whole story. And it cost eighteen dollars.
Good clothes have lived a life before you. That's the whole point.
Love,