shop cheap. look loaded.

My bag sale booty prompted a slew of thrift-related questions; questions I’ve been asked before on numerous occasions; questions that, for me, should be easy enough to answer. On June 12th @ 9:51 AM, Sarah wrote:

When I go thrifting, I am often overwhelmed by the bad smell, and by my lack of knowledge of how, physically, to find good stuff. Do you look at every single item, or what? The only designer item I have ever found in a used clothing store was a clearly FAKE (and not very nice) black plastic Prada bag with a ‘Made in Thailand’ label inside it. How in the world do you FIND a Vera Wang top amongst all the stinky, stained, cheap and nasty even when it was new and now it’s at least ten years old stuff?

Any chance you could give even MORE detail about how you physically DO this?

I mulled over this comment for the entire weekend, so much so that it started bugging the shit out of me. I can refute anti-thrift arguments like a high school debate team champ. But ask me a general question like How do you find things in a thrift store? and I can’t give you a straight answer. Shameful, I know.

I used to think happening upon coveted brands secondhand was a question of chance, that finding gently-worn clothes as fab as their retail price counterparts depended on good old-fashioned luck. Yet chance and luck alone do little in the way of explaining my stellar thrifting track record. How is it that whenever I shop secondhand, I always find something worthy of my wardrobe? What’s the one thing I’ve learned to employ whilst shopping that consistently yields me my positive results?

The culture of stuff in which we live tells us it’s okay to overspend on things we don’t need: Shopping, in the traditional sense of the term (i.e. paying retail price for new goods), requires a certain capacity for vice. We buy in spite of a lack of funds, time, necessity and/or all the above. New stuff makes us feel better, and that’s reason enough to pony up the dough impulsively. Shopping secondhand, in contrast, requires a certain capacity for virtue, one in particular. Being a closet astrology geek tends to illuminate the shortcomings of one’s sun sign, and while I can’t claim expertise in the discipline, I can attest to the fact that what’s generally true of Aquarians is particularly true of me. The virtue in question is the Achilles heel of Aquarius, one we water bearers possess zero natural capacity for, one that causes us no small amount of agony if we’re forced to learn it in spite of being really, really bad at it. It’s called Patience.

I don’t have enough space to detail the heinous extent of my own innate impatience, so I’ll just say this: I find any situation that prompts a feeling of time wasted almost unbearable. I didn’t start shopping thrift because I suddenly discovered the art of patience. I came to it as a last resort and left empty-handed on multiple occasions, disgusted at the amount of time wasted attempting to uncover brand-name gems among minefields of used shit. I don’t know why I kept at it. I just know that one day while browsing a Goodwill, I stopped letting the end dictate how I felt during the experience of pursuing that end. I stopped being pissed off that the uber-cute $7 BCBG top didn’t fit, and started appreciating the fact that a brand like BCBG could be had for so little. In lieu of forcing myself to find something I could buy, I forced myself to view the world of the gently-worn like a high-end boutique I couldn’t afford, a place where I’d tell an enthused saleswoman I was “just looking.” If I found something, great; if not, no biggie. Lowering my expectations took the pressure off, and an hour into browsing on that very same day, I found a Tahari Blazer for $12.99. Ultimately, what made the day triumphant wasn’t the sartorial score; it was my triumphing over my own nature, my discovering how to enjoy the process as much as the prize.

How do I find things in thrift stores? By letting go of the expectation that I’ll find anything at all. It’s a total mindfuck of a response, an obnoxious pseudo-philosophical answer on par with there is no spoon, but it’s all I got.

My advice to anyone struggling with the transition from shopping retail to shopping thrift? You have two choices. You can take the red pill and continue to shop in a world that makes blowing your dough on shit you don’t need all-too-convenient, one where material ends trump the means to those ends. Or you can take the blue pill, embrace the unfamiliar, and learn via the lost art of patience how to enjoy the process of finding things, regardless of whether or not you find anything at all.

Summon the gusto to choose the latter, and I’ll make it my biznass to be your Morpheus. ;)