Wearing someone else’s old clothes and buying handbags at your local Rite-Aid pharmacy might demonstrate a reversal of fortune in some cultures, but when having your own style is at stake, anything goes. By now, any serious fashionista should know that where you purchase your clothes matters less than how you look in what you bought.
Take fashion icon Kate Moss. Last September, she was spotted in London, walking down the street, carrying a canvas tote bag from Superdrug pharmacy. The bag, retailing for $2.99, sold out in a matter of hours after Moss’ photo was splashed on every newspaper and blog around town. Actress Kiera Knightley’s 2006 Oscar dress sold for 4,000 pounds on E-bay after the Notting Hill charity store Oxfam displayed the donated gown for a week.
Thrift stores, drug stores, chain stores, department stores, and fast fashion chains such as H&M, Zara, and Topshop—all are fair game. Having a style and developing a personal look is less about slavishly pursuing trends and more about exploring and mixing clothes from every groove on the fashion scale continuum. From London to Philadelphia to New York, women I’ve met may be Scrooge-cheap by necessity or by design, but they never look less than chic when mixing and matching designer duds with low-end finds. Many women’s most memorable finds are almost always in thrifts stores or charity stores and they’re happier spending cash on one-of-a-kind items than plunking down wads of money for the latest catwalk design.
If Kate Moss started using a grande-size Starbucks coffee cup as a shoulder bag, hundreds women would fling out their low-fat lattes and follow suit says London fashion student, Ezsther Fodor. Fodor has her own style. Like some women, she abhors following the fashion pack who studiously peruse magazines looking for the next celebrity to mimic. Instead, Fodor looks at the silhouette in clothing trends to inject coolness into her wardrobe. The shape of clothing isn’t as volatile from season to season, she says. Hence, she slowly transitioned from bootleg jeans to the skinny punk look that’s the cut du jour rather than throwing away one look and embracing the next.
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