Yesterday was a special day for The Unfashionista—National Secondhand Wardrobe Day!
Pretty
much all my wardrobe is secondhand, barring the occasional piece that I
received or bought myself as a gift (more on that later?), but today I
challenged myself to wear the most secondhand of the secondhand—featuring a
reincarnated top and a resuscitated skirt.
The top, originally sourced from Swap.com, you may recognize from previous posts. I converted it from a long-sleeved dress to an open-shoulder dress (back when that was still somewhat trendy) in 2017, and then the next summer, hacked off the sleeves
and turned them into a belt. The garment achieved its fourth and final
form in 2020, when I dramatically raised the bottom hem and made it into a blouse with a waist tie. Four lives for one piece of clothing? That might be a new personal record!
And now, because I've worn the dickens out of this shirt and am tired of it, I think I'm going to donate it, making it assuredly not just a secondhand, but a thirdhand wardrobe piece.
Meanwhile,
the skirt that I chose for this occasion had held a long and rich life of
its own, a portion of which was spent waiting unworn in my closet. I
no longer remember how or when I got this skirt, but I realized it was
completely unwearable when I got it out of storage this summer to find
that the smocked waistband had lost all its elasticity and wouldn't stay
up. Never one to let a good skirt be kept down, I flipped it inside out
and stitched an elastic waistband (undoubtedly salvaged from some elder
pair of pants or skirt) to the inside. It's a quick and dirty fix, but
no one looks inside the waistband of your skirt!
