I took the L to Bedford on Saturday morning before the crowds turned it into a scrum. If you're thrifting the Williamsburg vintage fair, go early. By noon the good racks look like a locust passed through.
I work in fashion, which means I spend my weekdays staring at trend decks and my weekends trying to unlearn them. Thrifting is my penance. It slows me down.
The first rule of thrifting the Williamsburg vintage fair: touch everything but buy almost nothing. I used to grab anything that gave me a flutter. Now I ask the boring questions. Will I wear this more than five times? Does it fit the life I actually have, or the life I'm pretending I'll have?
I found a camel wool coat from the 80s. Oversized in the right way, lining intact, one button loose that I can fix with ten minutes and a prayer. Forty dollars. In a store that coat is a careless three hundred.
But the thing that undid me was a silk scarf in a bin by the back table. The print was unmistakably sari silk, probably cut up and resold, a little bit of Gujarat somewhere in its past life. The orange and magenta my mother would call loud and I call home.
I stood there holding it near the Metropolitan stop end of the fair, feeling ridiculous, blinking too fast.
This is the part of sustainable fashion nobody puts on a hangtag. Clothes carry people. Someone's grandmother wore that silk to a wedding once. Now it's in a plastic bin in Brooklyn and I'm taking it to Astoria.
I bought the coat and the scarf. Walked out, got a coffee, and felt richer than I have all month.
Thrifting the Williamsburg vintage fair isn't about saving money, though it does. It's about refusing the idea that newness equals worth.
Buy the thing with a past. It usually has the best future.
Love,