Style star gets creative, saves in vintage shops
Style star gets creative while saving money with thrift-store finds, Aleesha Harris writes.
When Joseph Knowles decides to go shopping for clothes, he ventures to the same place most people go to send their closet castaways: the thrift store.
“At least 90 to 95 per cent of my clothes are thrifted,” the 26-yearold Vancouver man says. “I haven’t bought anything retail in almost three years.”
So, why would he rather “treasure hunt” through racks of discarded items than casually comb through a curated selection at a retail store? For one thing, he enjoys the thrill of the hunt.
“I actually get bored when I go retail shopping now because everything is so cut and dried. It’s all right there. You have everything in every size that you want. The thrifting, for me, is really about the creativity. You’re given just what’s there. If it doesn’t fit you, you have to try to alter it to make it fit you — or you have to move on to something else.”
And the lower prices help, too. Like many millennials, Knowles is more interested in experiencing things rather than shelling out on clothes.
“I have a lot of expensive hobbies, so when I was first starting out, it was basically just a means of buying my clothes because there was no way I could afford going retail,” he says. “Once I started making it a hobby, I enjoyed the creative aspect of thrifting.”
Since then, he says it has become, “a bit of an obsession.”
So, just who is thrifting in Canada? Value Village recently conducted a survey of thrift shoppers and found that 82 per cent of Canadians say they shop at thrift stores, with women (87 per cent) outranking men (72 per cent).
And, apparently, these shoppers prefer to hunt for their secondhand finds alone, the survey says.
Regardless of whether this predilection for shopping solo arises purely from a personal preference, or is one of the last vestiges of the various stigmas attached to shopping second-hand, Knowles says you need to keep an open mind in order to succeed at thrifting.
“I know a lot of guys get frustrated because they go and don’t find anything. If you’re going to go thrifting just to find something, you’re not going to enjoy it,” he says. “You have to enjoy the process of it before you can find stuff. Because, if you don’t enjoy it, you’re not going to go often enough. And if you don’t go often enough, the chances of you finding something aren’t going to be high.”
While savings can be big, successfully thrifting requires a significant time investment. And after seven years of full-time thrifting, Knowles’ hobby has gone beyond a creative way to save money on clothes. It has become a business.
Knowles says he sells many of this thrifting finds — which have included full-length fur coats and even designer threads from the likes of Ermenegildo Zegna, APC and Dries van Noten — online, mainly on the website Grailed.com. So far, his biggest profit has been $300 on a $5 purchase.
“It’s beer money — and beer money in the sense that it pays for my clothes,” he says with a laugh. “It has got to the point where I don’t actually spend any of my own money to buy clothes.”
Knowles has also developed an online following through the website Reddit, where people check in to see his latest finds, how he’s styling them — and even to ask him questions about thrifting and styling through his username jknowl3m.
“I think it’s more than 650,000 people who are subscribed to the community now,” he says of the online style forum. “I never thought it would transition into guys messaging me asking me what they should wear to their wedding.”
But it has. And Knowles says his favourite element of thrift shopping and sharing the looks on social media and online is surprising his friends and followers with how stylish second-hand garments can look.
“My goal, when people look at my style is for them not to think, well, that’s a good fit for a thriftstore item,” he says. “My goal is for them to say that’s a good fit. Period.”
I actually get bored when I go retail shopping now because everything is so cut and dried.