Hello and welcome to des lettres, which loosely translates from French to Letters. This is where I (Sarah Renée) write about fashion, personal style, thrifting, and what it means to live a beautiful collected life.
I often say that I found my personal style through secondhand shopping, so today I’m writing the first part of a story about how that came to be. If you want to be notified when part two is live, share your email and subscribe below.
Flea Market Cool Girl
An old friend and I used to have a running joke. It started when we took an English Lit class together in university, and she found herself doing a group project with the epitome of the UBC cool girl: full sleeve tattoo, heavy straight bangs, and outfits that gave flea market deadstock fabric chic. She was absolutely perfect and her confidence in her own sense of style seemed entirely unattainable to me at the time.
One day in class, cool girl asked my friend where she got her scarf (the ultimate compliment to be asked by such a woman!) and my friend had to take a deep breath and say… H&M. 😂
We joked that cool girl probably shuddered, having hoped for an answer more like “Oh I got it from an artisan at a market stall… that isn’t even there anymore… off the side of the highway in Tofino…while I was hitchhiking back to my Westfalia.”
This was long before I started thrifting and found my own personal sense of style, and it still comes to mind often because I used to be so intimidated by—and longed to be more like—those who seemed to have that unique je ne sais pas to their own wardrobe choices.
Back then, I felt my classmate was (and by default, I wasn’t) the type of person who could “pull off” shopping vintage and secondhand in a cool way.
To me, thrifting had been a childhood necessity, something that my family did because we’d had to. Something that with mending and ironing, we’d hidden from the world, not boasted.
Of course, I don’t feel that way anymore, and I’ve come to have a whole new perspective on both fashion in general as well as secondhand shopping specifically.
This realization has come to me slowly over time, and I think it’s worth sharing here because it might resonate with you and your own approach to styling your wardrobe and expressing yourself. So let me tell you the first part of my story of how I eventually found my own personal style. Grab an iced coffee or make a cocktail, and let’s dive into part one.
The Early Days
Growing up, I was exposed to incredibly stylish women as my grandmother, mum, and aunty (three of the four adults who had a hand in raising me) were all impeccably dressed women who resembled Princess Diana.
I can remember sitting on my Nina’s bed, watching her pick out her clothes; staring in awe as my mom blow dried her hair and put on makeup; rummaging through my aunty’s suitcase when she came for a visit, looking to see what beautiful silk scarves and leather boots she’d packed for the trip to BC.
It’s worth mentioning that all three stylish rellies of mine were lifelong thrifters, well before it was cool. Stigma be damned, in their opinions.
Perhaps they were the OG flea market cool girls.
It was my own childish hang ups and embarrassment that had me wait in the car and shield my face from any passersby while they hit up thrift shops. My own insecurity and anxiety (shared with any friend who ever also admitted there was thrifting in their family) whose face grew hot if anyone ever asked in public, Where did you get that?
I’d eventually grow out of it, of course, but I’d take my time.
Khakigate
All that being said about how stylish they were, my family’s love for fashion didn’t always match my own tastes as a tween. I can distinctly remember feeling stifled and way too old for my them to be picking out my clothes by around age 11.
In the peak of the leggings and an oversized tie-dye t-shirt days (what all my peers were wearing at the time in the mid-90s), one morning before school, my mom laid out on the bed for me an outfit that consisted of khaki chino shorts, a white t-shirt, and a vest that matched the shorts complete with cargo pockets.
It is worth mentioning that I was highly suspicious of any clothes that were bought for me. Knowing my aversion and embarrassment about thrifting, they’d constantly disguise something I knew was used as something brand new to cajole me into wearing it. Oftentimes it had nothing to do with the outfit itself, and everything to do with classroom bullies who pointed out anything remotely different about me, of which there was plenty already.
Being poor enough to have to wear cheaper clothes felt like a difference I couldn’t survive being teased about.
But this day in particular, when I saw the khaki getup she envisioned me wearing TO SCHOOL NO LESS, horror music played in my preteen mind.
I picture it now and still cringe.
I refused to put it on. My mum pushed back. Tantrums were had. Threats were made.
Stay in my bedroom forever?! If you somehow wrangle me into this clothing, that will be happening anyways, thank you very much!
After many tears (mine and my hers) I was given up on and set free to choose my own clothes.
The Mall Days
And so began my preteen years in which my friends and I would beg our parents to let us go to the mall, where we would try on every pair of low rise jeans in Off the Wall, and every baby tee in Thrifty’s (which was, I should clarify, NOT a thrift store, because as previously mentioned thrifting was a highly embarrassing and shameful activity. Thrifty’s was the store we now call Bluenotes or Aeropostale to give you a sense of my frightening young fast fashion preferences.)
This was an era of tearing Got Milk* and Jennie McCarthy Candie’s ads out of Tiger Beat and YM magazines, binging Much Music for a glimpse of Britney Spears (millennial Canadian girls who were deprived of MTV, do you feel me???), and staying up all night at sleepovers watching Titanic or—on one tragically sad back to school weekend—Princess Diana’s televised funeral.
Shopping independently from family by this age, shamefully hiding thrifted clothes was replaced by sneaking our Zellers bags inside our backpacks or a reused Bootlegger bag to disguise the fact we’d bargain hunted.
In my later high school years, YM gradually was replaced with Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and InStyle magazines, Britney was replaced with Gwyneth Paltrow, Sienna Miller, and Kate Hudson as my fashion icons, and The Mall Days naturally became what I’ll call… The Aritzia days.
To be continued…
For now, I’ll leave this story here, friends. I hope that this tale of my complex childhood history with fashion and clothing has brought about some nostalgia and minimal trauma.
I’ll continue with my story of my unravelling of the trope of flea market cool girl in my next post. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your particular version of growing up as a human who had to wear clothing. I think these stories say a lot.
*Can we talk about those Got Milk ads for a minute? Millennials, were we okay!? Can anyone really fault us for our oat milk lattes when we once were advertised to by a whole food group?!