For those of you who took the No New Clothing Challenge earlier this year and have tried to keep up with the mission of the challenge...it turns out you are not alone. Be it a recession, or a new collective awareness for the environment, vintage shopping is in!
When Conscience and Closet Collide
By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: June 12, 2008
REVIEWING her wardrobe earlier this season, Elizabeth Marvin had a moment of reckoning. “How did this closet become so massively overstuffed?” she mused, disconcerted by the sight of so many Marni jackets, Chloé bags and Jimmy Choo shoes jostling for space on the racks. “From my green perspective, part of me feels guilty about being such a major consumer.”
“People are really resenting designer prices,” she says.
But Ms. Marvin, the New York sales director for the National Audubon Society and a self-described “major environmentalist,” felt neither so guilty nor so strapped that she planned to stop shopping cold turkey. “Instead of buying that Chloé jacket that I want right now,” she said, “I’m much happier purchasing something at a consignment store that is much less.”
In recent months, high-end designer resale shops have been the beneficiaries of a subtle shift in consumer thinking, as fashion lovers, even those who can afford to splurge, reassess their priorities. Unsettled by continuing recession fears and the soaring prices of designer clothes, and assailed by queasy consciences as well, many find these shops a way to update their wardrobes without seriously denting their bank accounts — or their sense of social propriety.
“Everyone is feeling the pinch these days or knows people who are feeling the pinch,” said Linda Kenney Baden, a prominent lawyer in New York. “It’s good to buy a used car again, and it’s chic to buy used clothes.”
Article Continued on-line New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/fashion/12CONSIGN.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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