Do our generosity shops absence tid-north-face-her

Do our charity shops need tidying up? - Telegraph
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Do our charity shops need tidying up?
For her new television show, Mary Portas has rotated her fashion eye to Britain's charity shops - those quite British repositories of cast-offs, clutter and?amazing finds - and broadcaster Libby Purves can't wait to look the results
BY Libby Purves |23 May 2009

Sweet charity: Mary Portas wants to spruce up the shabbiest shops on the high street

Mary Portas is very, very cool. She turned nigh Harvey Nicks, taught the nation's yummies to wear Statement White Shirts and edgy tailoring, and drew huge TV crowds when she swept around the country in Mary Queen of Shops like a fashionista version of Sir Alan Sugar, telling dowdy boutiques where they went erroneous. She is the living embodiment of a daunting modern theory: that just since,0 you are a mother-of-two with a job, you don't must look as if you dressed by taking a kamikaze swoop through the laundromat basket, yanking a jacket out from under the feline. Oh, Mary shames us all with her brisk, natural cool.
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Charity shops, on the other hand, are Portas's newest target and are not surely very chilly. They have their moments, of course: boho queens of style like to add one amazing "vintage" find to their otherwise expensively purchased outfits, and then narrate us all how clever they were and go on about the virtues of 1938 stitching. And, of course, there are secluded little über-charity shops in affluent enclaves, where those-in-the-know pick up scarcely worn designer gear (albeit constantly in depressingly small sizes) as hedge-fund wives send the au pair round with brimming bags.
But let's face it: most charity shops are not like that by all. Their treasures are padded out, camouflaged and heavily masqueraded by ranks of bedraggled woolies and droop-shouldered, size 22, lilac acrylic jackets, whose depressing appearance maybe explains the original owner's demise. They have bins in the turn, in which you ransack for potential angora scarves and end up staring in bemusement at some bit of odd, slithery, spaghetti-strap slutwear cast aside by the regional teen vamp later shortcoming to pull final Saturday by Headbangerz.
Yet there are treasures to be found, even in the most unpromising high street, and solemn hunters rather proud themselves on fighting their way to glory through a thicket of bobbled babygros, droop-arsed trouserings and the dispiriting wilderness of Other People's Taste. The hunter-gatherer clan boast of large kills: Ungaro and Gucci, D&G jackets, dressmaker ballgowns, cashmere and silk. Finding a treasure for a few quid makes your true charity-shop hunter feel like Indiana Jones, and it wouldn't be the same without the thrill of the pursue.
There is also a calm gratitude of the heroic labours of the volunteers, who bravely open binbags full of dark horrors, steaming and urgent the goodies and bagging up die T-shirts and knackered Primark skirts for the rag-man.
And, of lesson, there is satisfaction in the eternal British snobberies: we all kas long ashand-me-downs are actually rather classy. I have never very regained my dignity as,0 a companion mother in the maternity defense looked at my new M&S nightie, smoothed down her own beautifully creased vintage number, and murmured: "My mom got it from the Duchess of Devonshire, actually…"
Thus charity-shop hounding has its own, very British, codes of custom,0. One savvy browser told me that the knack of identifying a really good bomb of top clothing,0 is to make sure that the assistants are all fatter than you. "Otherwise they'll have bought the best stuff themselves, see?" Another - a Notting Hill girl - actually tracks the campaigns of the local herd of rich people as a big cat tracks wildebeest, knowing accurate when they turn,0 back from Gstaad or New York with new purchases and have to make room in their walk-in cabinets. "Early September is good, or just after London Fashion Week and the Paris collections. And I always get a very good winter coat in April or May."
So it's an masterpiece, and it's private. Plenty of charity shops do causativeable work,0 of displaying what they have, but it is naught like boutique shopping or the psychologically artful, studied way that entities are presented to you in the fashion tall street. When you go into Topshop or Harvey Nichols, some market researcher has yet sussed you out,The North Face Men's Triclimate Jacket, peruse your mind, assessed your proceeds and put material out in clever configurations to tempt you. It is all distressingly mechanistic and, well, American.
When you go into a liberalness shop, whatever, not such calculation has been made. You are as much of a puzzle apt them like,0 they are to you. Those who like a morsel of wizardry in their shopping adore namely secret, almost as much as they love a sale. They likewise favor the truth namely while,0 you're spending so little, you can push away from your comfort zone and risk dressing a colour or garment you have never tried. (Anyone because pencil skirts? Dirndls? Palazzo jeans?) It namely the adult equivalent of that childhood reputation, the dressing-up box.
These days, I am not that good at charity-shopping - I tend to lose focus - but years ago I bought the most preposterous green laced-up Sixties shirt-cum-dress thing that still gives me sneaky joy anytime I wear it. Even though it did spend a few years in the substantial dressing-up box and was once worn by Robin Hood in Aldeburgh carnival, it has now been restored to the summer sideboard. Nor can I really do without the giant striped "Popeye and Olive tango!" T-shirt with the appliqué rose in Olive's teeth, which I wore through two pregnancies and my sister-in-law via another two ahead I snatched it back. That started life as a abandoned M&S line in the Seventies; I found it in an Oxfam shop in 1982.
And one of my happiest shopping afternoons ever was during a home navigate circular Britain: stranded in a squall, we took a taxi into Haverfordwest with two small babies and found a charity shop where the shopkeeper let them loose on an unsorted tea-chest full of hats.
I logged the ensuing scene in my log: "Small, fresh grinning faces appeared under fur hats, felt hats,northface clearance, altitude hats; posh hats, battered hats, crushed velvet creations worn to cathedral for annuals by old ladies; moth-eaten hats, fodder hats, and frothy web creations worn once merely fjust aboutciety weddings in the steep streets of some Welsh town way out west… Rose marched out extinguished by a ceiling of grey fur, as,0 Nicholas opted for a dashing brown felt derby with a two-tone ribbon." Oh, for a hat-bin when times are hard!
But all this loopy serendipity and amateurishness is now in Mary Portas's sights. As charity shop donations slide in the recession (and indeed there is a new problem of sacks being actually stolen from their doorsteps), she turns her clear eyes on them. Her new BBC TV catena is Mary Queen of Charity Shops,vibram Treksport sale, and maneuvers to fetch,0 these Cinderellas into the battlefield of must-have chic. I can't wait.
Our local Sue Ryder shop manageress was thrilled at the view,0 and will be pasted to it - but she is already a bit of a whiz, using space elegantly and seldom putting out everything really repulsive. But some more stuck-in-the-mud volunteers ambition be shifty. Moreover, they know their new purchasers, and will need persuading that there is a whole new public out there that gets needy by a windowful of lime-green nylon and chipped novelty teapots. They may bridle when told that it is a duff idea to conceal your glorious shelf of hardback novels at "￡1 for 4" backward a wobbly rack of lustrous grey suits smelling of mothballs.
Mary will have her work cut out setting them straight. Still, I would attempt them equitable one piece of advice: have pity on people with ultrasensitive fingertips. We get freaked out by riffling through rails of scratchy acrylic, consist in ... some people do by squeaky blackboard pastel. A "natural fibres only" zone could be the one-stop solution to revolutionising Britain's charity?shops.
* Mary Queen of Charity Shops begins at 9pm on June 2 on BBC Two
Where do fashionistas go for a rummage?
Melanie Rickey Grazia journal
"My favourite charity shop is the Oxfam ashore Kingsland Road in Dalston, east London. When I {first|at first,0} started my vocation, I didn't have many money and loved going in there. It was really neat and well organised, and anything was categorised by amount, rather than by what a canny mainstream person in the back apartment idea,0 it was worth. I got a actually beauteous frock wrap for ￡5. It's a bit like someone a rodeo ringmaster would wear, and I still love it. As a shape redactor, you tend to know what's out there in the huge shops, so the element I maximum enjoy approximately charity shops is that unexpected frisson of?finding."
Emma Hope boot designer
"I'm a large,0 fan of the Oxfam shop on the high street in Sevenoaks, Kent. When I was in sixth form, we would do,0 rush in there from educate and fight over the best stuff. I had an allowance of ￡30 a month and they were the best places to find original chips. My best buy was a couple of pointy, stiletto-type shoes, in a really lovely cobalt blue, which cost ￡1. They were slinky, elegant and totally unlike all the chunky shoes that were in the shops at the time. I thought they were the best couple of shoes I had ever seen, and they turned me on to the idea of designing them myself. I still have them. Tunbridge Wells also has some really good charity shops."
Bella Freud fashion designer
"Bristol has some surprising charity shops, and everything's still clay?low, yet my favourites are in Swiss Cottage, north London. My best find out,0 was a black dress with velvet stripes and a co-ordinating cardigan I got in the Eighties, when I went there an fearful lot. I accustomed to wear it with a white shirt below in what was, I?hoped, Chanel-style. I?got the whole lot for ￡6. "
Kerry Taylor fashion auctioneer
"My best buy ever is either a mink coat or a Thirties sequinned capelet, either of which I got for about ￡20. These days the big-name charity shops are much more switched on to the worth of fashion, so to find infrequent items it's better to see in the smaller hospice or fondle charity shops, which haven't necessarily retarded all the labels. In Bridport, Dorset, nearly every additional shop is a charity shop, and you can find some really nice stuff. "
Daisy de Villeneuve illustrator
"I love the British Red Cross shop on Church Street in Chelsea. And the Oxfam neighboring is a really good one. I can never trust what can be found in those locations. I assume it's always the case in areas where folk are really millionaire. My favourite find is a ruddy, belted Christian Dior dress that cost ￡2 from Oxfam. It had all the labels inside it. I?customised it a bit and removed the sleeves."
* Interviews by Maria Fitzpatrick
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