Guest post written by author Lauren Bravo
Lauren Bravo is an author and award-winning freelance journalist who writes about fashion, popular culture, food, travel, and feminism. She is the author of What Would the Spice Girls Do? and How to Break Up with Fast Fashion—which was inspired by her yearlong fast-fashion ban—and a contributor to the intersectional feminist essay collection This Is How We Come Back Stronger: Feminist Writers on Turning Crisis into Change. Lauren volunteers once a week at her local Crisis UK charity shop, which provided rich and bountiful inspiration for her debut novel The Second Chance Store (as well as a chance to get first dibs on all the best clothes).
Last week I bought a vintage skirt. It’s beautiful – a gauzy midi skirt in an abstract pastel plaid – and notable, because in all my years of secondhand shopping I’ve never seen one like it. It’s an unashamed ice cream sundae of a skirt, the kind of skirt that compels strangers to cross the street and coo over it. Even my husband stopped in his tracks to compliment my ‘dress’ (like many men he is hazy on the difference between a skirt and a dress, and after 13 years I have given up trying to teach him).
It was one of those cinematic meet-cutes. A flash of fabric caught my eye. The print winked at me from the rack. The scene around us melted into soft-focus as I crossed the store to get a better look. I tried to keep browsing but something magnetic kept on pulling me back to the skirt (definitely a skirt). Immediately I could picture our future together; brunching, dancing, strolling through the park. Paired with a strappy cami in the summer, layering up with knits and boots in the winter.
But the clincher was the label. It wasn’t by a fancy designer, but Damart – a brand known, if anyone knows them at all, for selling thermal underwear and comfy shoes to seniors. In the later years of my grandmother’s life, my mother used to have to go to Damart to buy her girdles. It became a running joke between us that she was incapable of completing this errand without telling the salesperson “they’re not for me! They’re for my mother!”. (I guess she hoped they might reply: “But ma’am, that was obvious, for you are so very youthful.” As far as I’m aware they never did.)
Vintage has long been the wardrobe choice of the die-hard romantic, and it’s not hard to work out why. To paraphrase J.P. Hartley: the past is a foreign country – they dress better there.
For all of us who like to believe we were ‘born in the wrong time’, thrifting is a way to try different personas on for size. It’s a joy to escape the ubiquity of modern trends and cherry-pick the clothes that call to us from across the decades instead. Plus there is something irresistibly fatalistic in secondhand shopping. Knowing there’s only one of each item, and you can’t ask for another size or another color, all adds up to the star-crossed feeling of finding something that seems to have been placed there just for you.
Then there are the stories that live in every seam, all those previous owners lending their spirit and essence (and yes, occasionally their scent) to each preloved piece. Wondering about the who, and the where, and the why, is as important a part of the vintage shopping process as the ‘what’ we end up buying. In my debut novel The Second Chance Store, I use the setting of a London charity shop to explore these unseen histories. The main story of protagonist Gwen, a lost soul in her late-30s rebuilding her life after redundancy, is interwoven with short vignettes that tell the story of different items donated to the store, how they’ve come to be cast off and who goes on to buy them.
Love might not cost a thing, but clothes and objects can often be vessels for our relationships. Long-buried memories can be dusted off by an old piece of clothing, a retro print or the feel of a certain fabric between our fingertips. At the shop where I volunteer, customers often get excited when they find clothes that remind them of something their parents once wore, or a #Y2k relic that brings their teenage hormones rushing back faster than a waft of Bonne Belle lipgloss. In the book, a pair of jeans that are doomed for one person become ‘lucky jeans’ for another. A cheap tie reunites old lovers. A pair of hotel slippers give an agoraphobic a taste of the wider world, a hat exorcizes a bad break-up and an ugly coat becomes a symbol of a life rebuilt.
My new-old skirt doesn’t just evoke a personal story but a cultural one too. As well as cherished memories of my Granny, I find it fascinating to know that dowdy old Damart once had its finger on the style pulse. Maybe there was one rogue designer desperate for a creative outlet? Or maybe, in the way even a stopped clock is right twice a day, they just happened to sell a skirt in 1993 that 2023-me would adore.
But all clothes have a story, whether explicit or unseen. Fast fashion might seem like the mass-produced antithesis to one-of-a-kind vintage finds, but all those billions of cheap garments have stories sewn into their seams too – stories of the human hands that have touched them and the continents they’ve traveled, though the brands would rather those stories went untold. One of the vignettes in The Second Chance Store traces the journey of a ‘going-out’ top, from a Cambodian sweatshop to the UK high street to a warehouse to a secondhand shop, to the Nigerian market where it is exported to ultimately become another community’s problem.
“When it becomes clear that still nobody is going to take the top out dancing, it will be relegated to a rag bag, a Cinderella in reverse, and cast off again, across oceans again—this time to Accra and a vast mountain range built from all the other clothes that nobody wanted.”
While contemporary fashion is more about lining billionaires’ pockets, perhaps vintage feels more emotive because it shows us what it means to make clothes that last. Shopping secondhand challenges us to commit to a garment for the long haul and take care of it; for better or worse, for richer for poorer, come rain, shine, spillage or tears. I have a special fondness for seam allowance, the vintage holy grail, which used to be included as standard and allowed for a garment to be taken out if the owner goes up a size or two.
Give me a few years or decades and perhaps I’ll be hunting for Damart girdles myself, but I hope my new skirt will still be in my wardrobe too. Clothes that change and grow with us over time – what could be more romantic than that?
