A secondhand style

Who needs Dior when you have endless racks of merchandise at $2 a piece and a license to dress as strange as you want by shopping at thrift stores?
I’ve long been a thrift-shopping enthusiast – I even worked at a Goodwill Store for a while. Secondhand stores give you the power to be as wild as you want at low, low prices.

So last week I was hired to go on a thrift-shopping spree; I checked out three of the most popular secondhand stores closes to campus: the Goodwill Store, the Salvation Army and Cactus Flower. The first two are traditional straight-up thrift stores, while Cactus Flower is a vintage consignment shop that’s kind of like a thrift store “best of.”
The Goodwill stores in Bloomington, both the one close to campus, 840 S. Auto Mall Road, and the one out by Wal-Mart, 1284 S. Liberty Drive, might be two of the cleanest and well-organized thrift stores on the planet.

Asst. Manager Laura Williamson at the Goodwill on Auto Mall estimated about 40 to 50 percent of the shoppers at that store are college students, who come in looking for “dress-up clothes.”

“I’ve seen guys buy gowns,” Williamson said. “It’s a good place to buy special-needs things.”

One of the most exciting parts of secondhand store shopping is taking advantage of the freedom it gives you to bend expectations: gender expectations, style expectations, expectations that the world’s supply of Superdrag tour T-shirts is confined in attics, etc.

The low prices at thrift stores make for a great excuse to redefine fashion. I never would pay $40 for a men’s dress shirt to wear with my short women’s shorts and wifebeater, but the colorful selection at Goodwill for 1/10 that cost makes seizing androgyny appealing.

And while you might have returned that $300 red tweed suit blazer had your grandmother given it to you last holiday season, wearing its less-than-$10 equivalent might get the hipster chicks swooning.

Becky Napier, the manager at Bloomington’s Salvation Army, said “the weirder the better” is the motto for the college crowd that comes into her store.

Bloomington’s Salvation Army, 111 N. Rogers St., isn’t as clean or organized as its Goodwill counterparts, but the prices are cheaper and it has fewer shirts that have shrunk in the dryer.

Thrift stores are not a great place to try to find good fitting clothes, but trying to find fitted shirts is an especially poor idea. I have a theory that the cause of most ill-fitted tops in thrift stores is the donators' inabilities to work their laundry machines’ temperature dials. Consequently, 99 percent of these shirts are useless unless the length from your shoulders to hips is eight inches.

Stick to the sections of suit coats, dresses and skirts, ironic T-shirts, dress shirts and sweaters. It’s much easier to pass these items off as intentionally ill-fitting or distracting.

Cactus Flower, 322 E. Kirkwood Ave., is the only one of the three shops mentioned here where you have a chance of finding well-fitting clothes. The vintage upstairs section of the half-new-merchandise, half-consignment shop is the most expensive among these three stores, but it has the most consistently cool set of wares.
The store specializes in vintage clothes from the ’50s to the ’80s, according to its Web site. It has particularly impressive sections of leather jackets, vintage jeans and dresses.

It also has a section of T-shirts that have graphics that read “We have sand,” and “Show me your Rackk” on the front with the back reading “Random Acts of Circle K Kindness.”

“T-shirts are very popular,” Vintage Section Manager Jessie LaJoie said.

When shopping for clothes at secondhand stores, the most important thing to remember is not to go in with expectations. Go in with an open mind ready to turn whatever you find into your own style. And don’t be afraid to be bizarre.