I've always loved hunting through thrift stores and digging through discount bins looking for old stuff to pass off as trendy vintage style. Growing up, my mom often took me to thrift stores to find me the cutest, silliest little-kid clothes, and while I no longer go there for purple leggings and plaid pink jumpers, I never gave up the sport entirely. Much of my closet still comes from Goodwill, or the Salvation Army, but because fashion so often circles back on itself (and vintage is always in), the humble origins of my outfits are always a surprise to people. After all, if you do it right, a twenty dollar outfit from Goodwill can look like the retro fashion of Modcloth or the throwback styles of Urban Outfitters. Fashion tends to look back and pick up again what was in-style a decade ago, and then update it for today. So while stores in shopping malls are filled with pieces meant to look like you dug them out of the back of your aunt's closet, thrift stores are bursting with similar(and authentic!) retro cloths just begging to be appropriated into some fashion forward or (or backward -- it's really the same thing, after all) wardrobe.
Take, for example, the oversized blazer. A few years ago these shoulder-padded numbers were considered one of the Great Mistakes of the 1980s (after, of course, "Mr. Mister" and the Iran Contra affair, respectively), and as such, the thrift stores have been chock full of them for years. But lo and behold, they're leaping back onto the scene!
Rihanna rockin' it in black silk.
Courtesy: rihannadaily.com
It takes a certain amount of confidence, of course, to pull this look off, as the stuck-somewhere-between-one-and-20-years-ago haters will surely take notice. But I personally love this look because of its casual disregard for the soft curves and sweet edges which characterize so much of women’s fashion, and its absolute refusal to appropriate menswear to flatter a woman's body more traditionally. It's not a woman's version of a blazer. It's just a blazer on a woman. And it looks mad primo.
Another one of my favorites (for absolutely opposite reasons) is the maxi skirt. Though whoever came up with that name needs to take a little lesson on psychological word association, whoever brought it back on the fashion scene has my thanks! I've always loved the elongating quality and free-spirited texture of floor length skirts, so you can imagine my joy when I started seeing them in the windows of stores and around the ankles of young women. But while American Apparel mannequins started sporting them only a year or so ago, they've been on the racks at thrift stores for ages at a fifth of the price. You can find bohemian styles and more city chic varieties among the other (often admittedly regrettable) skirts in Goodwill easier than you can find them in more expensive stores, as long as you're willing to do a little digging.
Courtesy: Opium Poppies
So my advice is this: if you want to be ahead of the curve and also save some serious dough, pick up some interesting pieces from a thrift store and be one of the first (of this generation, at least) to make it work in 2012.
