Charity shops – they're where trends go to die.
But with all the shopaholic fashionistas with finite wardrobe space out there, you're bound to find some treasure if you're willing to keep digging.
Canberra's secondhand scene is more than decent with racks often less picked through than those of bigger cities.
This kind of shopping puts one's hunter-gather skills to the test. It is, of course, much harder to find something suitable, wearable and adorable in these shops than when on the prowl in malls.
But diehard secondhanders all have stories of a friend of a friend who stumbled upon a vintage Chanel bag assumed to be fake and priced accordingly tossed in with the junk. And St Vincent de Paul have told me brands as starry as Louis Vuitton and Chanel have indeed ended up in their shops. The real stuff, they say.
The St Vincent de Paul shop in Phillip is small but its treasure quotient is often high. It has stocked rubies, Italian glass, real pearls, real furs and a necklace reminiscent of what rapper would wear – big, chunky and spelling something out in 14 carat gold. Except in this case the word was "Hope" rather than, say, "Hos".
It has been home of Bally shoes (OK, there was a reason why these had ended their life in an op shop – they were wrinkly from the amount of sweat they had imbibed) and Jaeger jackets. Down the road at the Salvos store I've found $7 Keds shoes as pretty and pert as the day someone paid $65 for them at a department store.
I once found a Carla Zampatti tulle skirt with a silk bow at the waist. It fluffs out like a ballerina skirt with lots of volume except it's sultry black. It had a couple of layers that, for some reason, extended down to the floor on an otherwise knee length skirt. An evening at home with a pair of scissors yielded a shorter, bouncier length. It didn't feel wrong hacking it to pieces, it was only $25. Just team it with a crisp white shirt, oversized pearl cocktail ring and 11cm tall espadrilles and flounce around like Charlotte York (screening of Sex & the City optional; potent Cosmopolitan cocktails unadvisable in the daytime and in those shoes).
It's not just glam goods that are great, secondhand lovers also like clothes with secret histories. I once paid $3 for a handbag I didn't want. It dated to the 1980s and wasn't leather. It had, however, been loved in its time – it was flawless but cracking all over with age. I bought it because tucked into a zipper pocket and unnoticed by the woman who relinquished it and charity shop staff were several treasures.
There were rupees – notes and coins dating to the 1980s. Also, there were packaged samples of dried earth in yellow plastic. Stamped on the packages were the words "Mud of Fr. Agnel's Grave", a drawing of Father Agnel Ashram and the words "Bandstand, Bandra, BOMBAY-50".
Of course, Bombay is now called Mumbai and I'm sure the woman who lived there and carried the handbag about two decades ago never dreamed a 20-something Canberran would buy it and wonder about her life.