Cassie Cowie, 19, created and runs her own online consignment store, MYEXCLOSET, in three different cities: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.
"Fashion is always coming and going, and what better way to bring trends and styles back with vintage and second-hand. It is a very authentic way of doing it, instead of buying a new version of the trend re-vamped," Cowie wrote in an email.
Luckily, Toronto has a great collection of thrift stores. Plus, there is the Toronto section of Preloved, a company that creates new high-end fashion pieces out of old clothes.
Tess Roby is a 16-year old student at Rosedale Heights School of
the Arts. She mostly shops at Value Village because it's cheap, but she likes to buy new clothes every season from stores like H&M, which she says is very good.But Roby thinks that a lot of stores, like Urban Outfitters for example, "pull their ideas from vintage shoppers" and use them to create more expensive fashions.
"I definitely like that [thrift] one-of-a-kind," Roby says. "Sometimes there can be stories behind clothes." A friend of hers once bought a dress from 69 Vintage that was a traditional hand-made Dutch dress.
Isabel B. Slone also has a lot of thrift clothing. She writes Hipster Musings, which gets 5,000 to 6,000 visitors a week. She picks thrift clothes from the 80s and 90s that are "cheap, outrageous and tacky, which kind of suits my personality," she says.
"Designers are always looking through their archives for present inspiration from the past," Slone says about thrift fashions effecting new fashions. "Everything in fashion seems to get recycled eventually."
*Photo Credits: Alexandra Auger and Isabel B. Slone
