Thrift Your Way To Personal Style

Thrifting has been good to me over the years. It has given me an amazing closet, plus helped me to minimize my environmental footprint and keep my budget under control. It has brought me many learning moments; I’ve discovered new brands, re-discovered old ones, and learned a lot about quality and design. But maybe most important of all, thrifting has played a key role in the development of my personal style – and even my understanding of personal style.

Thrifting is vastly different from the typical retail experience and people who don’t realize that upfront are more likely to be disappointed and/or frustrated and decide that thrifting isn’t “their thing”. Retail is organized and prescriptive; it directs you to certain items and even offers helpful suggestions for how you might wear those items (via mannequins and in-store displays and media). Each store has its identity and point of view, and it tends to impose a sort of tunnel vision so that customers see the clothing through the lens of that store’s brand vision.

Thrifting offers zero help. It is chaotic and non-prescriptive. It doesn’t tell you what’s good and what’s trash – in fact, prices are a useless metric in that regard; it’s up to you to decide what’s worth buying, and how to wear it.

Now, given those considerations, you might think that already having a strong sense of personal style is a key requirement for being a successful thrifter. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Certainly, going into a thrift store with a clear vision of how you want to dress will make that trip a much faster, more efficient one. More akin, perhaps, to a regular retail experience. You can go in, home in on pieces that suit your personal style, purchase, and leave.

But that isn’t the only definition of successful thrifting, in my opinion.

Instead of looking at a thrift shop as simply just another kind of clothing store, think of it as a giant style laboratory. It is a place to acquire clothes, yes, but your real goal is to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. You don’t have to go in with a complete vision; you can go in to figure out what your vision might be.

Viewed from that perspective, the greater and more random – aka chaotic – a thrift store’s inventory is, the better. It gives you so much more material to experiment with! Don’t be stressed about finding the perfect thing. The key is to just look. See all the different colours, patterns, styles, fabrics, design elements. The more, the better – your eye will get trained all the faster. Touch things. Find out what feels nice and what doesn’t. Figure out which colours and patterns you like, and which ones makes you want to hurl. Maybe you’ll see some things that intrigue you and tempt you to buy. Do it … even if you’re not sure those things are “you”. Especially if you’re not sure. Thrifting offers a low cost, low risk opportunity to experiment.

If you still feel overwhelmed by the idea of being left to your own devices to sift through a thrift store, you can take a 2-pronged approach. First, visit the mall and take notes about clothing that catches your eye. Not the brand, but the specifics: colours, patterns, lengths, cuts, sleeve details, necklines, etc. Then, go to the thrift store and look for similar things. You don’t need to find something identical; you’re just testing different things.

That being said, even if you go into the thrift store with an idea about what you’re looking for, stay open to other possibilities. The beauty of thrifting is that it exposes you to a much greater number of ideas and trends all at once – today’s trends, yesterday’s trends, trends from 5 years ago, and trends from 20 years ago. All that exposure … it’s the best kind of style education you can get.  

Getting a handle on what you enjoy and don’t enjoy wearing is Step One in developing your own sense of style. Individual pieces are the building blocks of style, but we don’t all need to use the same building blocks. For example, I prefer skirts over pants, and long skirts over short ones. My version of a “preppy” aesthetic will be informed by that and will look different compared to the aesthetic of someone who prefers short skirts and jeans. Knowing what buildings blocks are out there, then knowing what building blocks work best for you is the starting place for developing a personal style point of view. Personal style is not about echoing what someone else is saying; it’s about figuring out what you want to say. Fashion provides the communication tools; your style is your message.

Thrifting lets you try out all kinds of tools to find out which ones serve your message the best; it doesn’t tell you which tool you need but gives you the space to figure that out on your own. Success in thrifting can be measured by metrics other than “I bought the thing and the thing was exactly what I needed right at that moment.” Success might look like the exact opposite of that: I bought a thing and it was TERRIBLE! Because, you know what? You probably learned something from that “fail” – about how a certain thing makes you feel, about how you like to feel, about what to never buy again, etc. In science, an experiment isn’t successful only when it proves a particular hypothesis; it’s successful if it helps to advance our understanding of the world. Or, in this case, our personal style.

The downside of fashion experimentation is, of course, waste. In an ideal world, there would only be as much clothing as people actually wear. If 50 people loved a fuchsia dress with chartreuse butterflies, 50 fuchsia dresses with chartreuse butterflies would exist, and no more. Obviously, the real world doesn’t work like that. But thrifting can reduce the impact of style experimentation. If one person buys a pair of wide leg jeans, realizes the style doesn’t work for them, and donates it … this can mean that the next person who wants to try out wide leg jeans doesn’t have to consume a brand new pair, they can just thrift one. And if they don’t like the jeans either, no harm done – there is still one less pair of jeans in circulation, and the existing pair (if re-donated) still has the chance to find an owner who will love it.

I can speak from experience: thrifting has reduced my retail shopping to almost zero. Multiply that across a larger population and the scale of the impact will make itself felt. Thrifting will never replace retail shopping entirely, if for no other reason that at some point, new clothes will need to be brought into circulation. But, in my view, that isn’t the point anyway; I don’t see thrifting as the answer to the problem of clothing over-production (which, btw, is driven by corporations’ profit motives rather than consumer demand). Thrifting can be, however, one answer to the problem of unwanted clothing. In other words, it doesn’t stop more clothes from being made, but it does keep existing clothes in circulation longer (and out of landfills). And that’s a good thing for those of us who love style.