My brief for the week: build a fifteen-look sustainable lookbook out of secondhand pieces, budget tighter than my jeans after a wedding season. So I did what any self-respecting stylist does. I took the L train into Bushwick and gave myself one full day.
A Bushwick thrift haul is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to pace yourself. You have to eat something first. I did not, and by store three I was making questionable choices about a fringe vest.
I started at the big warehouse spot off the Morgan Ave stop — the one where everything's sorted by color and smells like other people's decades. This is where I found the crown jewel: a pair of deadstock Levi's, tags still on, from god knows when. For a sustainable lookbook, deadstock is the dream. It's the thing that already exists that never got worn.
The client's actual words were "vintage but make it now," which means nothing and everything. What she means is: don't make it look like a costume. So the trick with a Bushwick thrift haul is buying the bones — the great trouser, the perfect boxy blazer — and letting the styling do the "now." A vintage silk blouse reads costume with a curl and a red lip. It reads editorial with a slouchy trouser and bare face.
By the fourth store near Jefferson St I had two overstuffed IKEA bags and the arms of a woman who lifts nothing at the gym. I hauled them back onto the L, sat on the floor honestly, and mentally built the whole lookbook on the ride home.
Here's what I keep learning about a sustainable lookbook: the story isn't the sourcing, it's the styling. Anyone can find old clothes. The job is making people want them again.
I dropped everything on my studio floor at 10pm, laid it out, and felt that specific dopamine — the same one my Ba got laying out saris on the bed before a function, deciding what goes with what.
Steaming forty pounds of thrifted linen is my Sunday. Send help. Or a chai.
Love,