I took the L to the end of its patience this Saturday and ended up in Ridgewood, which is where Brooklyn cool goes to pretend it isn't trying. Thrifting in Ridgewood has become my whole personality lately and I refuse to apologize.
There's a shop off Myrtle-Wyckoff where the racks aren't sorted by anything resembling logic, which is exactly how I like it. Sorting is for people who want to find things quickly. I am not that person. I am a hunter.
And today, reader, I found it. A leather jacket. Real leather, broken in by someone who clearly lived a more interesting life than me. Twenty dollars. Twenty. I nearly cried into the collar.
There was a subway receipt in the inner pocket from 2019 and a stick of gum. I'm choosing to believe this jacket belonged to a woman who dumped someone she should have dumped years earlier. The jacket has that energy.
People ask me why I'm so obsessed with thrifting when I work in fashion and get sample sales and all that. And the honest answer is that thrifting in Ridgewood feels like the opposite of everything the industry taught me to want. It's slow. It's imperfect. Nothing is new and that's the entire point.
The fashion industry produces a horrifying amount of waste. I've seen the back rooms. I've seen perfectly good garments headed for landfills because the season changed. Secondhand shopping isn't going to fix that, but it's the small rebellion I can actually afford.
My nani used to re-wear and re-stitch her saris for decades, passing them down, repurposing the fabric into something new. I didn't understand it as a kid. Now I think she was the most sustainable designer I ever knew and she never once called it that.
I wore the jacket straight out of the shop, walked down to a Colombian bakery, and ate a guava pastry feeling like the richest woman in Queens.
The best clothes always have a past life you'll never fully know.
Love,