I took the L to Jefferson Street on Sunday for a vintage fair, and reader, I came home a changed woman.
Thrifting in Bushwick is not for the faint of heart. It's elbows and racks and other stylists who all clocked the same rack you did. But there's a rhythm to it, and after two years in this industry, I've finally learned the dance.
My job in fashion is a lot of things — mood boards, fittings, emails that could've been texts. But the part I love, the part that reminds me why I did a Fashion Design degree in the first place, is finding a garment that already lived a whole life and giving it another one.
I found a 1970s blazer. Rust-colored wool, slightly boxy shoulders, a lining someone had lovingly repaired by hand. Thirty-eight dollars. In a real store that silhouette would run you three hundred and it would be made in a factory that pays someone nothing.
There was another girl eyeing it. We did the thing. The circling. The pretend-casual glance. I picked it up first, so it was mine by the sacred laws of the vintage fair, but I felt her heartbreak so I told her about the coat vendor two stalls down. Solidarity.
Here's what thrifting in Bushwick keeps teaching me about sustainable styling: the best pieces have already proven they last. That blazer survived fifty years and three trends. It doesn't need to impress anyone. It just is.
I wore it home over a plain white tee and my mother's old jhumkas, and on the L back into Manhattan a woman asked me where I got it. I said Bushwick, Sunday, get there early. Slow fashion is a chain letter you're happy to pass along.
The industry wants you to buy new. Bushwick taught me to buy again.
Good clothes, like good people, get better with a little history.
Love,