Secondhand clothing store, Columbus, Ohio. 1938. Ben Shahn. From the Library of Congress.

One of my earliest memories takes place in a thrift store. I am sitting on the floor behind the counter of our local Salvation Army, surrounded by Mexican women who speak to me in a lilting song of half-English, half-Spanish. My doll, Pink Baby, is on my lap and I am staring, wide-eyed, at the frilly pink confection of a dress one of the women is holding in front of me.

“You like this one?”

I nod, too overcome with the beauty of the dress to form a coherent answer in my four-year-old speech. It is baby pink (perfect for Pink Baby), with a fitted bodice and two sugar-puff sleeves capped with white lace. The skirt flares out, kicking up into cascades of stiff white lace ruffles. It is the most gorgeous thing I have ever seen.

The woman smiles at my obvious delight and carefully folds the dress and adds it to a stack of frothy, pastel-hued clothing she has been saving for me. These women are watching me as my mother trawls the aisles, searching for treasures. They fuss over me, giving me Mexican candy and straightening my grubby t-shirt. They set aside the pretty infant clothing for my baby-doll. They do this every week, sometimes more than once – my mother and I are regulars. They will watch me and eventually my baby brother until we move away from the area when I am six. We will come back to the Salvation Army sporadically in the following years, and they will remember us. They will envelope me in their soft arms and I will smell flour and dust and remember frilly dresses. They will send us Christmas cards until I am in middle school. When I say to someone, “I was raised to thrift shop,” it is so very true.

I can’t help but laugh at bloggers who rave about their “thrift store” finds found amidst the racks of places like Buffalo Exchange and Beacon’s Closet. You spent $20 on that? I bought it’s twin sister at Family Thrift Center for $3. You shudder over the thought that someone could have died in the 1950′s dress you bought for $50? I shook a pair of dirty underwear off the one I found for $2. It’s not thrifting until fecal matter is involved.

Does this gross you out? Good. Real thrifting is a dirty business. It involves menstruation stains on a pair of pants tangled up with those perfect 1970s velvet bell-bottoms. A dirty diaper in the .99 cent bin where you find a 1930s tea dress. It’s not for the fainthearted, and part of me is relieved that not everyone has the stomach for it. Keep shopping at your overpriced buy & trade stores – I’m probably the one who sold them that 1960s shift dress for quadruple the price I paid.

I simultaneously cringe and sigh with relief when a blogger posts her “thrifting” finds and provides a link to Crossroads Trading Co. You see, the relief is twisted with a bitter derision that anyone could consider that thrifting. How did that term get so warped? How can we use it to describe the white-washed, Iron & Wine soundtracked experience of shopping at Buffalo Exchange? It is not thrifting until you are singing along to Dire Straits in a dank room that smells like cabbage, sifting through piles of unwashed clothing while some creepy dude in the corner leers at you! Unless you have been assaulted by a 90 year old grandmother wielding a circa-1979 shopping cart that weighs more than an El Camino, you are not thrifting.

Westchester County Thrift Shop. 1921. From the Cornell University Library collection,

We were not devastatingly poor when I was young, but money was tight until my father scored his first overseas job. Many of my clothes and toys were secondhand, a phenomenon not uncommon in inner-city neighborhoods like ours. But necessity wasn’t the only reason we shopped at thrift stores. My mother has an eye for the cast-off and our homes have always been decorated with the quirky, the strange and the incredible. She knows her antiques, and has made some amazing finds in her day. But she also is a champion of vintage, creating beauty with items I would normally scoff at. I always think of her as a quiet pioneer, bedecking our houses in vintage and threadbare before it splashed across the pages of magazines and infiltrated the internet.

I come by my thrifting honestly. It was passed down through the weekly trips we made to our local thrift stores, where the women behind the counters called out to us in their heavy accents. My mother would smile, wave, ask how a grandchild was doing – she was their favorite customer. While she searched the houseware aisles, I lost myself in the clothing. At first, it was whatever caught my eye – usually, insanely frilly Mexican party dresses that make Toddlers & Tiaras costumes look like Easter dresses.

When I hit middle school, I stumbled upon the world of vintage clothing. The first time I can remember being absolutely ecstatic over something vintage was when I found three 1970s pairs of flared Calvin Klein jeans that fit me like a glove. This was during the ’90s obsession with anything ’70s, and I remember clutching those jeans to my chest as I hurried towards the cash register. It was such a thrill, such a high. I side-eyed everyone until I handed over my money, sure someone was intent on swooping in and snatching up my find.

This love of thrift stores has continued. I cannot visit a new city without searching out at least one. When I visit my mother, there is no need to ask “what shall we do today?” It is a given that we will thrift. When I lived overseas I pined away, disgusted with the overpriced charity shops and vintage stores. I returned to Texas on visits and spent way too much money at Goodwill. Today we live in the only Texas city bereft of any good thrift stores and it is breaking my heart.

Back in 2010 when everyone was talking about that Thrift America show Alexa Chung was filming for PBS (what happened to that?), I voiced my derision in several forums. I don’t need some indie hipster Brit coming to America teaching me how to thrift shop! Even the petal-handed Buffalo Exchange shopper knows more about secondhand shopping than Alexa Chung. I have this sinking suspicion that Alexa Chung thinks shopping at Rokit or Beyond Retro counts as thrift store shopping. A clue, Alexa? It does not. I’ve lived in London. Thrift store shopping in the UK sucks.

Now we’re talking about Oxygen and their new pilot, Thrift Wars. Apparently we follow several of New York’s “top thrift store shoppers” around the city as they compete to make the most money by reselling their finds. This could go two ways – the best avenue is that these so-called “experts” spend their time in honest-to-goodness thrift stores, digging through barrels of dirty clothing and choking on their own bile as they extract a 1940s wool suit. But the voice inside my head tells me we’re going to be seeing a lot of the interior of Beacon’s Closet.

Katy Jones is the Editor of The Blind Hem. She is a fashion-school dropout with a Creative Writing BA from the University of Houston. She blogs at Dirty Hems, sells vintage clothing at Moonshine Hill and is usually spilling her guts on twitter. She lives in Texas.