I took the L to Bedford on my day off, which is a very predictable thing for a person like me to do, and I refuse to be embarrassed about it.
Buffalo Exchange had a bin. You know the bin. The one where everything is priced like the store gave up. I love the bin. The bin is where the real thrifting happens, because nobody has curated it for the Instagram girlies yet.
And there, folded wrong, tangled with a rayon slip dress, was a silk. Deep madder red. Hand-block-printed. I knew the second my fingers touched it. You can feel a real ajrakh-adjacent print the way you can feel real gold.
Twelve dollars.
Somebody's sari had been cut down, badly, into a wrap top by a previous owner who did not know what they had. The border was still intact. That border took someone in Kutch days.
My whole job in fashion is supposed to make me cynical about clothes, and mostly it does. But thrifting like this in Williamsburg, off the L, I keep running into these ghosts. This piece traveled further than most people I know. From a printing table in Gujarat to a bin in Brooklyn to my tote bag going back over the river.
I'm restoring it. Not into a sari, that ship has sailed, but into something that honors the border. Sustainability isn't just a hashtag I put in a deck for work. It's this. It's refusing to let a hand-printed silk die in a bin because someone got bored.
Thrifting in Williamsburg will humble you and haunt you in the same afternoon.
I carried it home on the L like it was a small sleeping animal. The whole car smelled like someone's cologne and my silk smelled like decades.
Buy the sad beautiful thing in the bin. Somebody has to.
Love,