In junior and senior year of high school, I thrifted nearly every weekend.
There was something so innocuous about Goodwill. Goodwill never discussed party plans I wasn’t invited to in front of me, badgered me about another scholarship I needed to apply for, and certainly wasn’t Bass Library, where I wrote my college application essays. It was an escape from my increasingly unbearable academic responsibilities; Goodwill allowed me to explore a blossoming love for fashion on my budget.
So on Saturdays when I finished my APUSH homework early, my dad and I would whizz off to the Goodwill twenty minutes away.
Goodwill was overwhelming and exhilarating. The aisles were bursting with unique pieces of clothes, remnants of the people who donated the items and the lives they lived. I spent hours every trip combing through the coats and cardigans, hoping I’d get my hands on something special. Sometimes I’d find something designer — which was always exciting — and other times, I’d find a particularly eccentric piece that I’d never seen before. Goodwill’s low prices and heavy “color-day” discounts made the hunt even more rewarding — so what if I had to sift through thirty hole-filled sweaters to find one pristine cashmere one? Now I get it for $7 instead of $15 — which is still a steal from the original price of $100.
Within my two-year-thrifting spree, I was practically wearing a new outfit to school two out of the five days of week. I’d scour “Vogue” and “Who What Wear” to keep up to date on the latest fashion craze. I began watching runways — not to enjoy the new collections — but to get ahead of trends that would trickle down from designer houses to everyday consumers. I experimented with clothes within the microtrend bubble: I wore my plaid skirt over baggy jeans, copied outfits from Pinterest and used a leather hobo bag with keychains as my school bag. By the end of high school, my style had evolved from preppy, private school uniform-esque silhouettes to a trending vaguely 2000s-inspired wardrobe.
Who did I become? While it’s not unheard of for a teenage girl’s style to change between freshman and senior year, I had always been a champion for the classic East Coast student style — yes, even before I went to Yale. In middle school, I got my first pleated plaid skirt and black knee high socks, which marked the beginning of my journey of dressing like a Catholic private school student.
Somewhere in the Goodwill aisles, I became lost in the overwhelming number of options. I thought my style set me apart from others, but I was just any other fashion-obsessed girl who followed the mainstream. I was *gasp* trendy.
This realization came to me this Thanksgiving break, when I went back home in low spirits after accepting some academic failures.
Seeing my pitiful state, my dad, wanting to cheer me up, took me to my old stomping grounds: Goodwill. I scored an embroidered suede jacket, a cashmere grey cardigan and my magnum opus: a suede shearling coat with fox fur trim.
I bought it without a second thought; I’d been wanting to thrift a fur jacket for a year. But when I got home and tried on an outfit, it just felt like a costume — a poor imitation of an actually stylish person, someone who had their life together.
Wanting to feel productive without actually having to put thought into something, I decided to mend my mom’s old fur-lined trench. With the help of an episode of SNL and a couple loose buttons, I fixed up the coat in about an hour. I hadn’t thought about the coat in years — I had saved it from the trash in 2018 when my mom was going through a closet clean-out but it remained untouched in my closet since.
Styling the trench didn’t feel like I was trying to be someone else. The coat wasn’t perfect, but it did its job of keeping me warm and didn’t get in the way when I rode my bike. With its fur lined hood, it was unique enough to be memorable, but basic enough to be styled in different ways. I had found my perfect fur coat, not in Goodwill or in a department store, but in my own closet.
People say to dress for the job you want.
Who did I want to be? Someone who goes out to parties and gets perfect grades, is a social butterfly and reads for fun. Stylish but not trendy, fashionable but not replicable. I thought thrifting would buy me the lifestyle I wanted, but all it made me was over-consuming.
I am a girl who’s Credit/D/Failed her MATH 112 class, underestimated the utility of office hours until three-quarters of the semester had passed, and come to accept that she may have prioritized chasing the carefree teenage years she missed out on over her scholastic responsibilities.
Some day, I’ll be my dream girl. A girl who wears a fur shearling coat and doesn’t feel like she’s pretending to be someone else. But until then, it’ll live in my closet.