The Raspberry Jacket Incident

Some people squander discretionary money on gambling and alcohol, others indulge in pedicures and facials or their daily frozen coffee drinks. My downfalls are nurseries (the gardening kind), TraderJoe’s, and thrift shops. In another post, perhaps, I will delve into my issues with the first two. Today, however, we are going to consider thrift shops and how they beckon and what happens to me there. This exploration seems in order today in the aftermath of the Raspberry Jacket Incident. Allow me to explain.

Monte and I were heading home from Orange County, but he had a meeting in Ventura and dropped me off to wander around downtown for an hour or two. I looked at paintings in the Channel Island art gallery, paused at the Earle Stanley Gardner building and imagined Perry Mason there, and ventured into a series of shops that seemed to fall into three basic categories: patchouli-scented hippie-esque, floral and frilly feminine, and the beach-surf variety. It got boring very fast.

I had recently cleaned out my closet and drawers and purged them of all the peculiar and ill-fitting garments that I never wear, and I'd been enjoying this new sense of order and space in my life. The last thing I needed was to get back on the road to accumulation. But a simple fact must be faced: the main shopping attractions in this part of town are the supermarket-sized thrift stores.

And did I mention I was bored? Against my better judgment, I began to make the rounds. One of them was crowded, and the second smelled musty, but as with Goldilocks, the third one felt right. It had potential, somehow. Potential does not necessarily mean that you will find something in particular that you need (althoughI am sort of looking for an old-fashioned ice-cream maker) but rather that there is a chance here of discovering something you sort of maybe want, and because it is a thrift shop, this vague wanting is enough to provoke the purchase. Even if you come to your senses afterwards and realize that you have just bought something strange and creepy that someone else purged from their closet, it didn’t cost you much and you can soothe yourself with the knowledge that the money has gone to help poor people, abused women, or whatever worthy cause the shop funds. You can then hang the item in your own closet for a suitable amount of time before donating it to another thrift shop, thereby doubling its philanthropic mileage.

But that’s enough pretense to virtue. The real lure here is the amusement of the hunt and the momentary thrill of discovering something unique and special and worth much more than its price tag. Granted, some folks are immune.“It’s depressing,” is one friend’s take on it, “smelly old stuff. Other people’s rejects.” And sometimes I can see her point, but as any connoisseur can tell you, there are different grades of thrift stores, ranging from the sad, unappealing ones that smell like dust and mildew, to well-stocked collection points for the gently used discards of the affluent, with most falling somewhere in between.

Maybe one reason I am not offended by the idea of other people’s used items is because I grew up on hand-me-downs. In the olden days, families with children routinely passed along outgrown clothing to families with younger children. I remember my sister and I going through bags of clothes from the big Irish family down the street, happily choosing what we liked and what might fit, all of it new to us.(It was nice the way people simply gave things away back then rather than trying to sell them, and I wonder if that’s something healthy that we’ve lost in this day of garage sales, consignment shops, Craig’s list, and e-bay…but I digress.)

Anyway, that hand-me-down view of myself in my formative years not only explains my ease with second-hand stuff but may well have affected my sense of style for all time, or more accurately, it may account for my lack of style. Like the little girl going through the giveaway bag, I simply choose from whatever is randomly available, and you never know what will catch my eye, although I do seem drawn to colors and embroidered flowers and nostalgic detail. I am not guided by a sense of an overall look and I do not have any clear view of what I “should” be wearing.

Which brings me to the garment in question. I thought it was one of my better thrift store finds, a brand new linen jacket (still bearing its original tags fromNordstrom’s) in a color called raspberry that reminded me of bougainvilleas. There it is, in the picture. Are you wincing? The name on the label, Cynthia Steffe, is the same one on the label of my favorite blouse, and although I am (obviously) not much of a fashion follower,I’d begun to think that she might be a designer that I liked. I was a little ambivalent about the ivory crochet detailing, but I decided that it was cute and boho-chic. At $17.98, the jacket seemed pricey by thrift store standards, but a steal for what it was. 

Now I pulled it out of the bag and held it up for Monte's appraisal. “What do you think?” I asked, hopefully.

He didn’t hesitate for an instant. “Sarah Palin,” he said.

In my world this is not a compliment.

And he went on to elaborate, digging the hole deeper. “Seriously,” he said, “it’s tacky and ridiculous. Trailer trash chic. Everything about it is wrong for you:the color, the style, the cut, everything. And what’s with the doilies?"

It was a harsh critique, and it brings up the question of whether it is possible to be honest without deflating someone quite so thoroughly. My standard is, if it’s too late to undo it, you lie a little. This definitely applies to haircuts. And I think it should apply to an item already purchased and not returnable. Then again, if one is going to look ridiculous in said item, I suppose the bluntness is a kindness. 

In any case, my small sweet moment felt besmirched. I know I shouldn’t give so much credence to his opinions, but my pleasure in the purchase had evaporated entirely and I could no longer imagine myself feeling jaunty and pretty in the raspberry jacket, whose fate is yet to be determined. One possible outcome is that I will wear it defiantly, imagine I look good, and grow to love it. More likely, I will donate to a thrift store.

And maybe, just maybe, it will end up saving me a fortune over time because whenever I am tempted to be impulsive in the future, there will be the indelible image of a raspberry jacket with doilies. So it was a great deal either way.