I took the L train to Lorimer on Saturday with forty dollars and a mission, and I came back with a bag full of other people's history.
Thrifting in Williamsburg is a whole sport. The vintage shops along Metropolitan Avenue are picked over by 11am, so you go early, you go patient, and you go with a plan or you drown in polyester.
My plan, as a fashion person who genuinely believes fast fashion is quietly killing the planet, is simple: buy what already exists. The most sustainable garment is the one that is already in the world. I say this at work and people nod and then go buy a new haul anyway.
But I mean it. Thrifting is not just aesthetic to me. It is the actual job of loving clothes without pretending they come from nowhere.
Saturday's find: a silk scarf, olive green with a gold border, twelve dollars, buried in a bin. It is not a sari. It is nowhere near a sari. But the way the gold catches the light reminded me so completely of my Ba's collection back home that I stood in that shop holding it for a full minute.
My grandmother had a steel trunk of silks she rewore for forty years. That is sustainable fashion. We just did not call it that. We called it not being wasteful.
I styled the scarf three ways when I got home to my Astoria mirror — knotted at the neck, tied through belt loops, and wrapped as a top over a slip. That is the thing about thrifting: one twelve-dollar piece can do more than five new ones if you actually know how to wear it.
Also got a men's oversized blazer, cream, slightly too big in the best way. Eighteen dollars. I will wear it to a meeting and let everyone assume it cost three hundred.
If you want to start thrifting off the L, go early, check the men's section always, and touch everything — the good stuff hides.
Buy old. Wear it loud. Let the planet breathe a little.
Love,