This week's assignment: pull together a summer lookbook for a small sustainable brand, budget almost nonexistent, deadline aggressive. Classic fashion job.
So I did what I always do when I'm broke and inspired. I took the N to Astoria and went thrifting like my life depended on it.
People sleep on Astoria for secondhand. Everyone's crowding into the Williamsburg spots paying Brooklyn prices for the privilege of a curated rack. Meanwhile the shops along Steinway and Broadway are full of real treasure and real prices.
I found a silk slip dress for six dollars. Six. It had a tiny tear at the hem that a lesser woman would've walked away from. I am not a lesser woman.
The whole point of sustainable styling is that clothes have lives before you and lives after you. That six-dollar slip already lived a whole story before it got to me. My job is just to give it the next chapter.
I took it to a tailor near 30th Ave, a Greek grandmother named Sofia who runs a shop the size of a closet. She looked at the hem, clicked her tongue, and fixed it in eleven minutes while telling me I was too thin and needed to eat.
Between Sofia and my nani, I am clearly destined to be scolded lovingly by older women forever. I've made peace with it.
The lookbook came together beautifully. A linen blazer for eight dollars, styled over the slip. A pair of trousers I cropped myself on my kitchen floor. Everything under forty dollars total, and it photographed like it cost hundreds.
That's the thing I keep trying to tell people about sustainable styling. It's not a sacrifice. It's a superpower. You stop shopping for pieces and start hunting for stories.
Growing up, my mom altered and re-altered the same salwar sets for years. Nothing was disposable. I used to be embarrassed by it. Now I understand she was the most sustainable stylist I ever knew.
The brand loved the shoot. Nobody guessed the star piece was a six-dollar rescue with a Greek grandmother's stitches in it.
Buy the thing with the tear. Someone will fix it. Someone always does.
Love,