Fashion

Re: second hand clothes. In 2017/18 I decided to try one year only buying my clothes from charity shops. What I found was that you have to visit pretty often to find stuff you both like and that fits you. Generally you’re getting fast fashion cast offs but occasionally some nice stuff appears and then even more occasionally it appears your size. For things like t-shirts, unless they’re near enough new then there’s not much advantage (environment aside, obviously) as a couple of t-shirts in H and M is (was?) about 8-10 quid. It was no problem to do but you then find the clothes, being mostly high street brands wear out quickly and you’ll sometimes go through a patch where you’re low on jeans or whatever until someone of your size (and taste) has a clear out and you find a couple of pairs.

Have picked up a few bits from here and also branched out into eBay but the biggest issue I find is that charity shopping has skewed how I value clothes. The prospect of paying more than £5 for a pair of jeans is hard for me to get my head round. The other thing with eBay is I find I get things where the sizing was just wildly different than I expected or the description was whack. Ultimately buying all your stuff second hand is completely doable and it’s what I’ve basically done since then, but there is something about just finding the thing you really like, in your size, trying it on and then buying it knowing you’ve got something good which is nice. /CSB