Another Way to Help Save the Planet! The joys of Recycled clothing
Consignment Boutique in Florenceville
For years, I’ve loved shopping for clothes in thrift and consignment stores. Not only is it waaaay cheaper than buying new clothes, it’s always like a Treasure Hunt…. You never know what you might find!
Back when I lived in Denver some 20 years ago, vintage clothing was very chic and hip, and was priced accordingly at specialty vintage stores.
If you wanted to find true bargains you had to have the time and patience to scour through multiple thrift stores. But you’d have plenty of competition!
Professional Rag Pickers, as they called themselves, could make pretty good money by finding the kinds of clothes that were in demand by vintage shops, paying a few bucks for them at the Goodwill or Salvation Army, and then re-selling them to a vintage store.
Who, in turn, would then jack the price up to whatever the market would bear.
It took a special breed to be a successful rag picker, incidentally. There were quite a few of these folks in any big thrift store at any given time, and they knew the delivery schedules and times new stock would be put out for sale.
You could spot these folks instantly because if an employee at the thrift store came out with a new rack of used clothes the rag pickers would materialize like vultures at fresh road kill to begin pouncing on likely looking items.
Rayon bowling shirts were always in vogue, for instance, and vintage western shirts were worth a mint.
I personally still own a nifty salmon pink embroidered rayon bowling shirt I coughed up $80 for! This is a pretty unusual shirt, though, because it long sleeved and it is a spectacular color. In general, a rayon bowling shirt would have sold for about half that price at a vintage shop.
But still, the rag picker pays a couple of bucks at the thrift store for a good find, the vintage store pays them 20 bucks, and then they turn around and sell it for twice that amount.
Vintage Levi jeans could prove to be a fabulous windfall for the lucky rag picker.
Once again, this is 20-25 years ago, but a pair of Levis from the 1950’s could fetch an enormous sum of money in Japan, as in thousands of dollars a pair!
There are now hundreds of brands of jeans on the market, but Levi Strauss created the first denim work pants for miners and ranch hands out west back in the late 1800’s. The original jeans were dyed with natural indigo dye, which has a much richer color than the aniline chemical dyes that are used today. It faded to a different hue as the jeans were worn.
Two friends of mine were fortunate enough to come across vintage 1950’s Levis. Kim found a pair at a yard sale for a mere 25 cents that she sold to a vintage buyer for $400 and Ed found a pair at a thrift store for a few bucks that he was paid $500 for.
These vintage stores in turn would have sold these jeans to their Japanese contacts for around $2,000 and the Japanese buyer would then sell them to a fashion conscious person in Japan for $10.000-20,000.
Sounds crazy, eh?
One vintage buyer I knew in Denver stumbled across the Holy Grail of jeans in an old general store in Kansas. This was a brand new, never worn pair of Levi jeans that had been made especially to use as a window display sometime back in the 40’s or 50’s.
They were an improbable size… they had a 50 inch waist with a 30 inch inseam because they were made specifically to hang in a window to advertise the brand.
But, because they had never been washed and were in absolutely pristine condition he was able to sell them in Japan for a mind boggling $50,000!!!!
The current world economy being what it is I doubt this situation still exists…but you should still check out any old jeans you have laying around your attic!
But back to used clothes in general. When you buy used clothes you are supporting a local business. You are also not paying exorbitant amounts of money to support corporations that employ Third World slave labor to make their products.
Do you remember back in the 1970’s if you wanted to buy a nice embroidered or tie dyed “hippie shirt” you had to go to a Head Shop to find something like that?
These days even top end lines of fashion are assembled in India, or Vietnam or Bangladesh and so on.
Workers in these factories are virtually enslaved. They make a couple of dollars a day, working in abysmal and inhuman conditions putting together clothing that will retail in North America for many times what it cost.
About 50 percent of all the pesticides that are used in agriculture are sprayed on cotton crops. Cotton is the most toxic agricultural product on the planet.
Something we never think of when we buy a new package of t-shirts or underpants… a Caveat, though! I am in no way endorsing used underwear. I’m just sayin’, is all!
We should all be wearing hemp clothing instead of cotton, but that’s another story.
We have access to several sources of good quality used clothing here in the St. John River Valley.
Mama Mia! Consignment Boutique sells fashionable clothing at low prices. Like any used clothing store, however, timing is everything when it comes to finding clothing treasure.
Mama Mia! Is a good place to recycle your own unwanted but still fashionable clothing. You will receive 40 percent of the selling price that is agreed upon if your clothes are sold.
The boutique has shoes, purses and other accessories as well as clothing for women, men and children.
I myself am quite fond of Global Textiles in Woodstock. Again, timing is everything when it comes to finding good stuff. Global buys clothes by the bale out of the Garment District so you can frequently find brand new or barely worn items as well as gently used clothing.
Global carries a lot of kid’s and men’s clothing as well.
If you make it to Fredericton, Saint John or Moncton you can check out the mega-used-clothes mart called ValuVillage. Their prices are a little higher than some thrift stores, but they have everything separated and hung neatly by category and size so you don’t have to paw through weird stuff. I get a little overwhelmed there…it’s just so huge.
I have a personal dislike of touching certain synthetic fibres so I really can’t bring myself to root around in big bins of jumbled clothing.
Guy’s Frenchy outlets I have visited put clothes out like this. That being said, I also know someone some years back who came across a $3,500 Vera Wang designer silk satin wedding gown digging around in one of those bins at a Frenchy’s that she picked up for 7 bucks. It was in absolutely perfect condition, which has always made me wonder about its story.
Seriously, who tosses a $3,500 wedding dress into the discard pile? This was about 15 years ago. Did he stand her up? Did it end in an ugly divorce? Was it a mistake?
I always keep my eye peeled for cashmere sweaters and scarves. In my search for cashmere I have made some funny discoveries. There are a lot of scarves out there in used clothes land that are fake cashmere and they have names like Kashmeer, Cashmore, Cashmere-feel, Cashmink… you get the idea. They have kinda sneaky names that look like they say “cashmere.” But they are all made out of acrylic.
So Caveat Emptor, as they say!
Buying used clothes helps to save the world because:
- You support local business people who sell them
- You are not giving money to giant corporations who use slave labor to make their clothes in third world countries
- Recycling is good! Less waste
- You save money
- Buyer’s remorse is a whole lot cheaper than when you spend a couple of hundred bucks on something new that you subsequently hate!
- Cotton crops use toxic pesticides that pollute our planet and make the workers sick
May you find many treasures if you take up this hobby!
Stephanie Kelley
