I went to the thrift store last week. I had just finished a class and my evening stretched in front of me, warm and bright and free from grading. I had a little time and a little money. I could afford a stop at the thrift store. I visited an old favorite, the Goodwill from which I sourced most of my college wardrobe. It was hot as I parked and walked across the lot and there were too many cars for five in the afternoon. I had selfishly hoped for a quiet store where I could wander and search through racks in silence.
Inside the Goodwill, a Beatles song played over the radio. Another point in favor of this location; they have the best playlist. As I walked to the back corner of the building, an employee calls over the P.A: “All children must be attended by an adult at all times.” I glanced around for the chastised miscreant, for such announcements are never made unprompted, but see none—the parent must have attended to their kid. Then I begin my search. I am not a fun person to thrift with—unless you too have a specific route by which you explore every corner of a store and can commit at least an hour, at best two, to the excursion. As any successful thrifter knows, there’s no such thing as “a quick run” into a thrift store. “Quick runs” are for bread and eggs or a new pack of socks. Fashion, on the other hand, requires study and devotion.
In this location, I start at the back, at the racks of dresses. If I have time to kill, I’ll push aside hangers and look through them one by one. But I’ve long since learned how to discern a high-quality garment from a low-quality one in an instant. Fabric is my first test: I run my hand over the dresses or simply eye them as I walk past. Jersey knit and polyester I pass over; the slouchier, synthetic fabrics I avoid, except in t-shirts, and even then, I prefer a thick cotton. Color is my second factor. I love deep, earthy colors: goldenrod, rust red, turmeric, terracotta, the full seventies shade range. But I don’t wear them. The same goes for high chroma hues: glossy blacks, pure white, scarlet, holly green. I’ve learned by now what colors make my hair look mousy or my skin too pale and which inflect a warm glow and deepened, richer tone across my coloring. Blue is always a good bet; I wear a lot of blue.
So I scan the row of dresses, looking at fabric and color and collars and hems. You can tell everything you need to know about a garment from its collar and hem; its cut, its stitching, and its character. I stop when something catches my eye—blue, sage green, soft lilac, the right length of hem, linen, cotton, or the thicker, sturdier synthetics used in the 90s and 2000s. There is little difference now between a pair of trousers from Ann Taylor or from Shein. One wears out in fewer washes, maybe, but both are thin polyester blends that hold no shape and pill easily. I’ve seen blouses from mall brands with crooked seams and no attempt to hide them, and so learned that brand matters far less than the decade in which a garment was made. Anything from the early 2000s and before likely has thicker fabric and more structure, and therefore is more flattering, at least on me. I am all long lines and sharpness and I like clothes that can talk to that.
That’s not to say I don’t look at brands while thrifting. I do, checking tags on shirts as I move to a new rack. A good brand at a good deal is a good find. I wear J. Crew sweaters and Banana Republic trousers, but I’ve never spent more than ten or twelve dollars on any of them. Decade always beats out brand, though—it’s like a trump suit in a card game.
Dresses, blouses, sweaters, then across the store to the racks of jeans. I’m always on the hunt for jeans, and, unlike many other items in my closet, usually buy them new. But I still look when I’m thrifting, just in case, and two of my three pair were thrifted: a pair of baggy, dark-wash mom jeans, cuffs rolled, and a classic medium-wash slim cut. Between them in my closet sit my Levi’s: a slightly dark wash (but not enough to veer into that 2010s jegging shade), high rise, slightly flared—my go-to jeans. My one complaint with them is that they have a column of buttons as a fastener instead of a zipper. Who decided to innovate that design? I hate it. It doesn’t lie as flat as a zipper and invites the risk of leaving one button somewhere along the line undone and unnoticed all day. But otherwise, the Levi’s are my favorite.
I’m a jeans girl. I’ve tried not to be—I’ve tried to be a dress girl and a miniskirt girl and a trousers girl—and at the end of the day, I come back to the same formula: blue jeans and a button-down (with the sleeves rolled up, either blue or patterned), pointed flats, bold jewelry. I think I’m haunted by Jane Birkin, always struggling to capture her effortless cool. Casual, but not sloppy; boyish, but not masculine; artistic, but not avant-garde; feminine, but not girlish. It’s a balancing act—lean too far in any direction and lose the ephemeral sense of self that a perfect outfit can express. My own style sits somewhere between 90s minimalism and 70s French rocker chic, inspired by Francoise Hardy and Kate Moss and Alexa Chung.
Basic, I know, but let me tell you—when I first stumbled across a photo of Francoise and realized, “She has my bone structure”, it was an epiphany. Gangly, boyish women with strong cheekbones and zero curves are not invisible in the world of fashion—look at the nineties—but in an era where it feels like most women want to look and dress like Sabrina Carpenter, it’s nice to have a few reminders that a strong jawline and a straight torso don’t send you to a style guillotine.
I work with it now, that sharpness and straightness that delineates my profile, my shoulders, my torso, my legs. Button-downs with pointed collars, straight cut jeans, strong brows to frame the angles in my face, short hair to showcase them. I will never feel comfortable in the kind of baby doll dress some of my friends pull off so well, but a single photo of Francoise with her winged eyeliner, her strong cheekbones, and her jeans reminds me that fashion, like all art, is an interplay of harmony and proportion. It is women like Francoise Hardy, who dress for who they are and not who they want to be that impress us as iconic. Think of Audrey. Think of Twiggy. Think of Grace Kelley or Jackie Kennedy or Naomi Sims. Trade outfits between any of them, like so many paper dolls, and disharmony ensues. Grace Kelley in Twiggy’s bold eyeliner and colorful A-line minidresses loses her ethereal elegance. Twiggy in Jackie Kennedy’s tweed suits loses her spunk and playfulness. Women are not paper dolls, I have to remind myself. It’s a lesson not easily learned, in an age of overnight trend cycles and all-pervasive body dysmorphia.
Following my usual route, I move from jeans to trousers, looking for a wide-legged cut in silk or linen. Then, arms draped in clothing, I wander to the back to wait for an open stall beside the Hispanic couple and their daughter, who wears enormous rabbit slippers, and the girl and her boyfriend in matching pairs of ripped black skinny jeans. When a changing stall opens and I take my turn, I begin to sort through my selection.
I used to buy clothes because I loved the way they looked on the rack or because I thought they held some magic to transform me into someone else. Buy the blazer and strappy heels and turn into some East Coast art student with a trust fund and a well-stamped passport. Buy the heavy boots and leather jacket and turn into the untouchable grunge girl that populated Tumblr in my early high school years. Buy the long skirt and floral blouse and turn into some more feminine, more soft-spoken, more “marriage material” version of myself, who fantasizes about farmhouses and gushes over babies, who isn’t scared of childbirth and looks up to the Pioneer Woman instead of Zelda Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf. It never worked. I’d buy the clothes, wear them once, and find that I was still the same, a jeans girl with acne scars and a box-shaped body, trying on someone else’s clothes like a static paper doll.
Clothes have since lost their magic for me. I no longer buy them to alter my identity. Now I am ruthless about my purchases and only buy a piece of clothing if it meets some practical need in my wardrobe or if I like the way it looks on me. No, not only like—I have to be completely satisfied with a garment, with its color, fabric, cut, comfortability, and whether it can assimilate into the context of my life. I only buy clothes I love, so I buy fewer and fewer pieces in every season. Last week, I left Goodwill with a navy button-down (for my teaching wardrobe), an electric blue sweater (because I own few sweaters already and have outgrown many of them), and a pair of black pants that dissolves into ruffles and daring slits along the sides of the legs. I didn’t need those. I already own two pairs of black trousers (one wide-leg, the other cigarette-style) and I cannot wear these to teach or to church or anywhere I usually go. But they make me feel like dancing, and so I bought them. I also left Goodwill with a gilded thesaurus and two CDs, which excited me more than the clothes.
This asceticism is new to me. A year ago, I bought new clothes every other week, because I was scared to look poor. Maybe that’s why I obsess over fabric and brand, having trained myself to spot the difference between high and low quality clothes. This shirt may have cost me six dollars, but it’s secondhand Ralph Lauren, so you’d never know. This sweater looks like an Aran—it’s not, it’s not even pure wool, but it looks like it. This necklace is from Walmart, but someone thought it was Kendra Scott, so I guess you can’t tell.
When I worked as a waitress in college, I was always embarassed by the difference between my life and the lives of our wealthy clientele. “Which boutique do you shop at?” they would ask and I would never give them the honest answer, which was Goodwill, and sometimes, if I was going to splurge, TJ Maxx or Target. I couldn’t even afford to eat at the restaurant I worked at, let alone shop at any of the downtown stores. Another time, a customer’s shirt caught my attention: a white button-down, sharp collar and sleeves, ordinary except for a few crown-shaped cutouts that covered it and showed her black tank-top and the skin of her clavicle. I love minimalist garments with some twist or small, playful tweak and I was enamored. I told the woman—an older, Southern lady with platinum blonde hair and big earrings—that I loved her shirt.
She said, “Thanks, it’s from—” and proceeded to name a brand I’d never heard of.
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Can you find them online?”
She stared at me. “I don’t know. I just go to the brick-and-mortar in Houston.”
Later, I searched up the brand and found the shirt. It cost three hundred dollars, on clearance.
I spent my paychecks trying to cobble together each season’s trends, matching the right colors and silhouettes and accessories, or at least as close as I could manage. But I was always three steps behind the girls who came into my workplace with their claw clips and Miu Miu boots and Italian leather jackets. The irony is: as a small-town Midwesterner transplanted to one of the richest counties in the U.S., this impression that I feared, of looking shabby and out of season and three steps behind the local girls, told my story better than any of the style transformations I’d tried to enact. Even with the right clothes, I still would’ve had crooked teeth and an old Honda Civic and no money for trips to Europe or luxury brands or concert tickets or organic smoothies and personal trainers or whatever else composed the lives of all the girls I met who looked like models and dressed better than I did. But perhaps they also felt that way and feared looking shabby and out of place beside each other or the other women that they saw online. Fashion does little to help us in that practice that Cynthia Ozick describes of “envisioning the stranger’s heart”; we stop at the wardrobe and never see the world beyond.
I hated it, a year ago, but now I wear my shabbiness. I don’t mean in how I dress—I still care about style too much for that—but in how I live my life. I buy less clothing. I also go out less, even though I now live closer to the city. With my time, I teach and attend church groups and see my friends, all contexts where my clothes matter less than my presence. I don’t eat out or see shows (often) or go to bars. When I’m not working, I’m midway up the Sisyphean hill of dishes, laundry, cooking, and cleaning that life demands; when I’m not doing housework, I’m walking, or reading, or painting, or listening to music, or writing—always writing. All things that can be done in jeans.
It’s not that I’ve stopped caring about how I dress. I don’t show up to teach a class in a hoodie and sneakers. But I’ve learned to suit my clothes, not only to myself, but to the context of my life. I’m still aiming for that Francoise Hardy, “cool girl with tousled hair and a shirt borrowed from her lover” kind of look, but I adapt that style to the contours of who I am, rather than zipping myself into an fantasy of how I want to live. The other day, I bought a pair of 90s flares, to round off my fall wardrobe: medium wash, worn soft but still a great fit, and the ideal flare, one that widens from a straight cut. They highlight the length of my legs and balance the width of my shoulders; they might be my perfect pair of jeans. Flares are out of style again, I think, judging by the rows of them that have appeared in my thrift stores. But I don’t intend to part with mine.
