I’m spending the summer in Paris, my third such summer in the last 6 years. It’s a long, strange trip that shaped me into a regular visitor to the City of Light, and some day I’ll likely share the details of that journey. However it happened, here I am, curled up on a couch in a pleasantly dilapidated apartment building in the 8th arrondissement.
My daughter Molly will be arriving for a visit next week, and we have big thrifting plans. While other mother-daughter duos make their Parisian pilgrimages to Galeries Lafayette, the Bon Marché, and Hermès, we will be scouring the city for second-hand treasures. I’ve made a checklist of 44 thrift stores in the greater metropolitan area. And to be clear, there are no designer thrift stores on this list. You see, Molly and I are feral thrifters.
Curation plays no role in feral thrifting. The kind of thrifting we like doesn’t happen in upscale consignment shops, vintage stores, or resale boutiques. There is nothing wrong with this sort of second-hand shopping, of course, and for many it’s the only acceptable option. It’s just not feral.
Feral thrifting takes place in feral stores. The kinds of places where people pull up in back alleys, open their trunks, and start piling boxes and bags of unwanted goods onto a loading dock. Maybe their closets grew too full, their bodies too large or too small, their hemlines too outdated. Perhaps they painted their living room a different color or bought a new sectional and none of this stuff matched anymore. Maybe their mother died and after a year of enshrining her belongings in the garage they awoke one morning to find the grief had shifted just enough for them to move on. Marie Kondo, I’m certain, has inspired and will continue to inspire legions of folks to haul trunks full of joyless goods down to their local charity’s retail arm.
Whatever the motivation, people are booting all sorts of perfect, imperfect, immaculate, soiled, whole and broken objects out of their lives and onto that loading dock, raw and uncut, history clinging to every item like a scent. Within days – possibly even hours — it will be on the shelves and ready for us.
We are feral, too. We like the way history smells: smoky, musky, slightly sweet. Google “thrift store smell reddit” and you will find hundreds of people sharing their distaste for the scent of thrift stores and trying to get to the bottom of why all thrift stores smell the same. I’m always surprised at how many people think this smell comes from a detergent or disinfectant. Wishful thinking maybe.
Like Soylent Green, the ubiquitous scent in your local Goodwill is PEOPLE, people. I understand why the general populace finds it repellant, the stink of humanity is not typically listed as a selling point. But, for me, walking into the familiar smell of my local Salvation Army is as evocative as walking into my grandmother’s kitchen 50 years ago. Comforting and full of promise.
Many of my friends tell me they “don’t have the patience” for thrift store shopping. Or that they “never find anything.” Yes, patience is required. The patience of a hunter. And if you’re not finding anything it’s because you’re not looking at absolutely everything. Yes, you really may need to paw through that entire bin of frayed scarves for the single silken reward; to shuffle through long racks of coats like a blackjack dealer – quick and thorough – to find your cashmere or camelhair prize. Thrifting is Easter egg hunting for grown-ups. A variable reward extravaganza, your brain flooding with sweet dopamine when you unearth those soft leather boots from the box of worn footwear.
Garage sales were my gateway into thrifting. I started my love affair with garage sales at a very young age, back when we rode bicycles around the neighborhood all summer long and had pockets full of allowance money to spend. I could ride to Quik Stop and buy a Big Hunk for a quarter in 1979, or I could stop by the garage sale down the street and come home with an electric card shuffler, a rabbit foot keychain, or a slightly-used Yo-Yo that lit up as it spun. As young as age 10 I fully recognized and appreciated these amazing bargains.
A voyeur by nature, garage sales were also an efficient way to investigate the lives of our neighbors. To see what books they read, what clothes they wore, what toys they had outgrown and tools they had replaced. I could live out my considerable Harriet the Spy ambitions and own a light-up Yo-Yo for the cost of a candy bar? Seriously, what’s not to love about that?
When I was in junior college I spent a semester abroad, knocking off some general education units at the American Institute for Foreign Study in London. To stave off my considerable homesickness I would often roam the massive Portobello Road market after school. On Saturdays the antique vendors were out in full force, but on weekdays you’d get the normal folks selling a hodgepodge of clothing, jewelry, housewares, and books. Portobello Road on Tuesdays was a garage sale on steroids.
I had emptier pockets as a college student, and the markets were less about buying and more about discovering. I was an archaeologist with an endless appetite for digging down into clothing racks, jewelry trays, and damp boxes full of jumbled bric-a-brac. I didn’t want to possess these things as much as I wanted to inventory them.
My school provided students with an array of low-cost travel opportunities, from day trips to Oxford to a homestay system allowing us to spend weekends with families all over England. I took advantage of these extracurricular options and then branched out to taking occasional weekend trips on my own or with a friend. Most of the towns in England have multiple charity shops on their high streets, and with the Portobello Road serving as my gateway drug, I started visiting them. Oxfam, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Barnardos. By the time I returned home to California I was hooked.
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