Growing up with seven brothers had both it's pros and cons. A definite downside was that I didn't have a cool older sister to give me her well-loved hand-me-downs. But the flip side of that was I got to buy new, or "new to me" clothes.
My mom was and still is a huge secondhand aficionado. She will spend an entire afternoon scouring a flea market for one of a kind antiques, or whittle the day away perusing shelves at a thrift store for the perfect teapot.
When I was a kid, I dreaded our "thrifting" days. I was embarrassed to be the kid shopping secondhand while most of my friends and classmates rolled into school in brand new J. Crew duds.
That all changed when I went away to college and all of a sudden, just like that, thrift stores were the epitome of cool. And ever since then, it's been almost a personal mission of mine to see just how much I can buy secondhand. In fact, I often find it difficult to buy brand new because I find myself saying, "I can find this exact same thing for less than half this price."
A lot of my friends say they have a hard time finding good pieces at a thrift store. I always tell them one of the keys is a virtue we all learned in grade school: patience. It's tedious sifting through other people's junk to find something bright and shiny, but it is well worth the effort. The outfit pictured above, minus the tights, was thrifted entirely from Nashville area stores, including the brand new Via Spiga boots.
So I will proudly continue my mom's tradition and hopefully pass my frugality onto my son. Hopefully, he won't be too embarrassed by me.
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