'BEWARE OF ALL enterprises that require new clothes", American philosopher and homesteader Henry David Thoreau counsels in the first chapter of his wonderful Walden, "and not rather a new wearer of clothes".
Sound advice, surely, for our current economic climate, though to be honest I’ve always preferred second-hand threads to new gear at the best of times.
I'd worry more about this proclivity, if I didn't know others who feel similarly. Take, for example, a friend (and for that matter, former employee of The Irish Times) who, when I complimented him last year upon his smashing gorse-green Donegal tweed jacket, told how he'd picked it up for a song, along with his half-belted, moleskin-lined German overcoat, at a Dublin charity shop. Not unlike another friend who informed me "Friends of the Elderly's Spring Collection", after I'd admired his sports coat. Or yet another pal who confessed how she'd once joined a multi-ethnic scrum of women, all but elbowing one another aside, as they avidly rummaged through a large, curbside container of discarded women's wear outside a Boston boutique back in the early 1980s.
To be sure, I haven’t the fashion sense of another stylish friend who makes it a point to track down charity outlets on her holidays, whether in Nerja, Spain or NYC. Nor anything like the discriminating eye of my elder daughter, who returned to Dublin from a Boston summer in 2001 with black plastic bags full of haute couture from, no, not some High Street shop, but rather The Garment District, where you pay $1.50 per pound for vestments you’ve selected from various piles on the floor. Nor have I, come to think of it, the equally keen eye of my younger daughter, who espied a brand new pair of red Italian leather shoes – sling-backs, I gather they’re called – in a city-centre skip, which she salvaged and wore every weekend until they eventually wore out.
For myself, it’s as much the memories that come attached to the clothes – the sunny afternoon in Thurles in the 1990s where I turned up a lovely, second-hand, blue-checked gingham grandfather shirt, or an overcast afternoon last April in a second-hand shop on Aberdeen’s historic Union Street, where I spotted a first-hand, handsome, maroon dress shirt still in its original plastic wrap.
There’s also the memory of the American friend who bequested me a purple and pink silk shirt, which a member of the Thai royal family had left behind in the Massachusetts house she’d shared with him one storied summer in the 1970s. Or the pair of freshly ironed jeans in perfect nick put out on trash day when we ourselves were living in Boston nearly 30 years ago; put out perhaps in the hope that somebody might get there ahead of the binmen, which is precisely what we did, after our six-year-old son spotted them while pedalling past on his Big Wheel.
There was also the neatly named Clothes Basket on the peninsula in rural, coastal Maine to which we moved at the end of that same summer, and where a year later my beloved, now dearly departed, mother-in-law found a smashing, good as new, green trenchcoat, which she resolutely took home to Dublin for one of her sons, despite my every effort to get it from her for myself. And which, bless her heart and memory, she as resolutely set aside for me, despite the equally covetous entreatments of another of her son-in-laws, after the coat proved too long in the sleeve for the intended son.
To be sure, caveat emptor applies every bit as much in the second-hand rag trade as it does on Carnaby Street or Rue de Rivoli. Take, for example, a niece of ours who brought home a second-hand woollen jumper in a plastic bag, only to throw it onto a bedroom shelf and promptly forget about it until 10,000 moths emerged three days before her Leaving Cert and routed her, schoolbooks, revision notes et al, down to study at the kitchen table.
And consider, too, the experience of a friend, Kevin, who picked up a suit for next to nothing in a Rathmines charity shop of a Friday, which he proudly donned for a Roscommon wedding the following day. As the evening progressed, the band livened things up by having a ladies’ choice which paused halfway through to allow the aforementioned ladies to take off and replace their dancing partner’s jacket, after having first turned it inside out. And so it happened that Kevin, initially bemused by the widest smiles on the other waltzing couples, was the last one on the dance floor to see, if not delight in, the large white poster card, stuck with a safety pin to the back of his jacket, with “Royal Lifeboat National Institute, £6” emblazoned on it in large, red letters.
Kurt Cobain, lead singer for the grunge band Nirvana, was seemingly a keen habitué of second-hand clothing shops. But last word here goes to Chairman Mao Tse Tung, whose credo for architectural design in Communist China might have served equally well as Henry David Thoreau’s dress code, or mine. So much so, in fact, that I jotted it down a few years ago, and have it taped still to the inside of the door to my wardrobe of largely second-hand clothes: “Function, economy, and appearance when circumstances allow”.