Fashion or whatever: _Thrifting the new pasttime for vintage fashion seekers_

When people say that whatever they are wearing is “vintage,” they make that particular item sound a lot more romantic than, say, they got it from Forever 21.

It’s the whole notion of individual style or whatever that makes it sound way cooler to wear vintage, especially if it was thrifted. Thrifting has become the “cool” pastime for the stylishly inclined, ranging from fashion bloggers such as Karla Deras of Karla’s Closet to celebrities, such as Alexa Chung, who is filming a thrifting show with PBS titled “Thrift America.”

For someone so embarrassingly frugal, it was a surprise to find that I was not very preternaturally gifted at thrifting. This is what I found out at the infamous $1 Sunday sales at the vintage store Jet Rag on La Brea Avenue.

Every Sunday, the store’s parking lot is converted into a flea market of sorts with mounds of vintage clothing for the grabbing. And there is a lot of grabbing.

The sun was beating down on such thrift enthusiasts this past Sunday, when I decided to check out what was so fanatically amazing about these sales. Fashion blogs and online vintage emporium Nasty Gal Vintage all swear by these Sunday sales, so me being a cheap opportunist, this sale seemed ideal.

I arrived right at opening time, as the bags of clothes came rolling out. Customers started puncturing the bags and clawing through the clothes like they were, well, a dollar. I expected this to be jungle fever, so I was surprised no one used their teeth to gnaw the bags off.

The scores of thrift mongers varied from families to children to the hipster. And there were a lot of hipsters there.

The clothes were, as expected, dusty. It was a flotsam and jetsam of old letterman jackets, dresses from the ’80s and ’70s, and surprisingly a lot of stuff that looked like it was inspired by “Little House on the Prairie” or the HBO show, “Big Love.”

Bianca Segura, a freelance fashion intern from Los Angeles, said she regularly comes out of these sales with a garbage bag of clothing that she said she would dry clean and tailor for fashion shoots. The rest, she said, she would sell on eBay, where vintage is prime real estate for selling.

“If you dig hard enough, you can find some really good pieces. I think my best find was a vintage Valentino dress and of course, it was only a dollar,” Segura said.

It’s common knowledge amongst Jet Rag shoppers to not touch anyone else’s piles of clothing alongside the store, unless one wants to get into a physical fight. I sure didn’t touch any piles, but I did have one of those “Lady and the Tramp” spaghetti scene moments with a hipster over a pair of pants, except it was way less dreamy and more like a game of tug-of-war, which I lost miserably.

While I couldn’t bring myself to roll around in the clothes like some girl was strangely doing (not even looking, just rolling), I actually did come out with a great bolt of floral fabric that would serve well as a curtain for my future apartment.

Although I didn’t come out with vintage Valentino or anything, at least I know that it’s possible to find such a thrill for $1. However, for every Valentino dress found, there seems to be 10 feisty hipsters willing to snatch it clean from under you.

Ever find something good while thrifting or have you been thwarted by stylish hipsters with vintage bloodlust in their eyes? E-mail Jue at [email protected].

“Fashion or Whatever” runs every Wednesday.