Empress of the World

…because I yearn for the days when thrift stores weren’t trying to “reposition the nature of the merchandise.” But this Washington Post article profiling the DC area Goodwill’s various marketing strategies also links to the marketing manager’s blog, DC Goodwill Fashionista, which I really like, possibly in part because she looks like a shorter-haired Katrina with glasses.

What do you think about thrift stores selling themselves as vintage boutiques?

When you go to an estate sale, you don’t expect to find CDs from the Pixies and The Primitives, but we did: Bossanova and Pure. It was a bit disconcerting.

This person had apparently been a commercial photographer, mostly of weddings. There were a few heavy albums documenting the glossy, wholesome-looking nuptials of the well-heeled. At the bottom of a box mostly full of individual shots in a similar slick style, I found two black-and-white photos, one of a stark, rocky landscape and a sky full of ominous clouds, and the other of two cows very close to a barbed wire fence, looking at the photographer/viewer with an expression that it was not hard to anthropomorphize into a sad but resigned awareness of their confinement. It made me wonder if that was a different photographer’s work, or if it represented the style the person would’ve preferred to work in, if not for the need to pay the bills.

P.S. Many thanks to all for your insightful comments on the Kindergoth bag. Inevitably, in the interval between my post and my next trip to Ross, it was snapped up by someone else, and there was only one.