People assume working in fashion means I shop at glossy places with security guards and small candles. Mostly it means I'm thrifting on the Lower East Side on my day off, elbows deep in a bin, hunting for the one good thing.
Tuesday I got off the F at Delancey and walked to the vintage spots around Orchard and Broome. A stylist I trust had tipped me off that one of them just dropped a fresh rack of fall coats. In this industry a tip like that is basically currency.
I found a camel wool coat. Slightly oversized, one button missing, a tiny moth nibble on the inside hem that nobody will ever see. Fourteen dollars. I would have paid ten times that and still felt smug.
Here's the thing about thrifting on the Lower East Side that I wish more people understood. It's not about the deal, even though the deal is thrilling. It's about the story already sewn into the thing. Someone wore this coat through winters I'll never know about. Now it's mine and I'll add a decade of my own.
My work is supposed to be about the new, the next, the drop. But sustainability isn't a trend for me, it's just how I was raised. Nothing in my mother's house ever got thrown away. Saris became curtains became cleaning cloths. You used the whole thing. You respected the fabric.
So when I style a shoot, I'm always sneaking in secondhand pieces next to the samples, and nine times out of ten those are the ones people ask about. A $14 coat from Orchard Street holds up next to anything in the showroom.
I replaced the button with a brass one from the notions shop on Grand Street. Took me ten minutes and a thimble. My tailoring professor would be proud. My younger self, the one cutting up old kurtas in Ahmedabad, would be stunned this became a career.
I wore the coat home on the F and caught my reflection in the dark window between stations and genuinely loved how I looked. That doesn't happen often in this business.
Fourteen dollars, one brass button, zero regrets.
Go check the racks before someone else does.
Love,