I took the L to Bedford Avenue on Saturday with no plan except to dig. This is my therapy, the cheapest kind. Thrifting in Williamsburg is mostly overpriced band tees and someone's discarded ironic jacket, but every so often the rack gives you a gift.
The gift this week was a folded panel of Banarasi silk at the bottom of a dollar bin in a place off North 6th. Deep maroon, gold zari woven through it, the real kind, heavy and warm in the hand. Someone had cut it from a sari, probably to make a cushion or a clutch, and then abandoned the project halfway, the way we all abandon projects.
I held it up and the woman at the counter said, oh that's been here forever, you can just take it. I did not just take it. I gave her five dollars on principle because some things shouldn't be free.
This is the part of fashion work nobody puts in the reel. The detective work. I stood there on the sidewalk thinking about who wore this first. Some aunty at a wedding in the eighties, maybe. The zari was worn soft at the folds where it had been draped and re-draped for years. You can read a garment like a diary if you slow down.
In my actual job we talk a lot about sustainability, and most of it is a slide deck and a hashtag. But thrifting is the real thing. This silk traveled from a loom in Varanasi to someone's almirah to a wedding to a donation bag to a dollar bin in Brooklyn to me. That's a longer life than anything fast fashion will ever have.
I'm going to make it into something. A structured jacket panel, maybe, the zari catching light on a lapel. My grandmother would either be proud or deeply confused, and both feel correct.
Thrifting taught me that nothing good is ever really thrown away. It's just waiting on the wrong rack for the right person.
Five dollars and a small piece of home, off the L train.
Love,