Recovered treasure
A great op-shop discovery can become the jewel in your wardrobe crown.
My sister-in-law, Odette, has a regular second-hand shopping route, which she takes whenever she volunteers at a charity store in Newtown in Wellington.
“I don’t buy jewellery from the places I work though,” she says. She’s a trained fine jeweller, and has a personal code about these things.
When at the store she volunteers at, Odette spots the gems from what has been donated, and fixes and cleans the decent stuff. With a good clean, and knowledge of what they’re selling, the store might sell an item for a few hundred dollars, instead of the much lower price it might have gone for if put directly on sale.
To Odette, the profit she makes for the charity store is a kind of penance for the great finds she’ll occasionally pick up cheaply elsewhere on her op-shopping route.
But in both cases, Odette’s eye for quality is preventing beautiful and old objects from possible destruction.
Every week, metal traders traverse the same second-hand circuit in Newtown that Odette does. Traders are looking for the same heavy, well-made jewellery – but they value it based on the weight of its metal components when melted down.
There are companies that buy second-hand jewellery and put it in acid to extract the gold, silver and copper. Metal traders get paid a couple of thousand dollars for a whole pillow case of jewellery found cheap in op shops.
So by cleaning and revaluing jewellery, or buying underpriced jewellery for her friends, Odette is helping these objects to survive.
“I’m a jeweller, I want them to live on,” she says. Odette’s finds can take on Antique
Roadshow proportions. There was the 18ct gold Swiss chronograph she saw being thrown in a skip and rescued. A pearlscattered, hand-made gold brooch from the 1950s.
Then there was the watch on this page. My husband kept pinching mine to wear for shows, so I asked her to keep an eye out for one. Within days this had arrived in the post, with a text to explain.
“Automatic wind-up watch, keeps perfect time. I put a new French made leather strap on for him. All stainless steel. 1950s.”
You can wear this watch with anything as far as I’m concerned, so here’s a few bits of local menswear that have caught my eye.
1. Op shop watch, $50
2. Thing Thing Heist pants, $119 3. Working Style WP check jacket, $599 4. Salasai Man Dream State shirt, $180 5. Rembrandt woven belt, $149 6. Workshop men’s slim fit selvedge jeans, $349 7. Shjark T-shirt, $149
8. Karen Walker wallet, $175
9. Rolla’s Tim Slims cord pants, $150 10. Rembrandt silk pocket square, $59 11. Allbirds Tree Topper sneakers in Nikau, $195