Saturday I did the Williamsburg thrift crawl, the one that starts at the Bedford Avenue L stop and ends with you regretting how much you carried.
This is the part of fashion work nobody puts on the mood board: the digging. The hours in overstuffed racks that smell like other people's decades. My friends think styling is glamorous and sometimes it is, but mostly it's me on my knees in the back of a vintage shop on North 6th, sneezing.
I found the sari at the third store.
Buried between a puffer jacket and someone's abandoned prom dress, this deep marigold silk with a zari border, hand-woven, real gold thread gone soft with age. Twelve dollars. The girl at the counter had no idea what she was holding. I did.
I held it and thought about my nani, who used to fold her saris with tissue paper between each pleat, who could tell you the town a weave came from by touch alone. She passed before I moved to New York. She never knew I'd end up doing this, hunting for beauty in the discard piles of a borough she couldn't pronounce.
Thrifting in Williamsburg is my quiet argument against the industry I work inside. I see how fast fashion moves. I see the waste, the landfills, the way trends eat themselves. So when I rescue a sari that traveled from some Indian grandmother's trunk to a Brooklyn resale rack, I feel like I'm closing a loop nobody meant to leave open.
I'm not going to cut it up for a "reimagined" piece the way clients sometimes want. Some things you leave whole. I'm going to wear it as it was made to be worn, wrapped and pinned, marigold against my skin, at the next occasion that deserves it.
Sustainable fashion isn't a hashtag for me. It's twelve dollars and a girl on her knees in the back of a Williamsburg thrift store, remembering her grandmother's hands.
I took the L home with silk in my tote and gold on my mind.
Some things aren't found. They're returned to you.
Love,