National Secondhand Wardrobe Day

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!

The final piece to this masterpiece is the shoes, which I also purchased on Swap.com. Do you know how hard it is to find green shoes? Hard! But after months of searching, I finally managed to drop these green ballet flats in my cart for only $12.50. They are an almost-perfect color match for the green skirt, and they're even real suede leather. A true steal and source of secondhand celebration!