Macy Eleni's Second Chances Will Convince the Most Ardent Fast Fashion Shopper to Thrift

Courtesy of Macy Eleni

For content creator Macy Eleni, thrifting isn't just a hobby, it's a way of life. She has over 500K followers on TikTok where she posts exciting videos of her regular “thrift hauls,” stopping by estate sales and large secondhand shops often scoring unbelievable pieces. She spots the latest trends and shows people how to find them secondhand. In a world with so many (too many) clothes, Eleni wants to make it fun and easy for people to find beloved pieces without shopping new.

Now she's turned her world of thrifting into a book that not only shows readers how to thrift but emphasizes the importance of personal style. It also traces her journey of using thrifting to be a part of the fashion world that felt so far from her in the Ohio town where she grew up.

Below read an exclusive excerpt from the introduction to Second Chances: The Ultimate Guide to Thrifting, Sustainable Style, and Expressing Your Most Authentic Self. The book is available for preorder here. You can also preorder at this link to be entered into a sweepstakes with prizes including a secondhand Louis Vuitton bag.

Secondhand shopping has never been more popular. For me, that spark was ignited well over a decade ago. In my world, fashion has always involved thrifting. I was raised by the truest of superheroes—a single mom in Dayton, Ohio—and spent every Wednesday and countless weekends at my local Salvation Army. I’d roll through the aisles, comb through each rack, and go home to throw my finds in the wash and play endless hours of dress-up. I was captivated by the idea that one store could make all my fashion dreams come to life. And the best part? I could afford it! I’d found my home away from home, a place that transported me from a far-less-than-sparkly reality to another world. A world where, for a few minutes or, most of the time, hours, it was just me, my imagination, and the clothes. There was no judgment, there were no rules. Experimentation and exploration were more than encouraged—they were necessary! For a really long time, the clothes were what kept me going. Never did I think that, more than ten years later, my love for digging out true fashion diamonds among the rough would lead me to my dream career with an audience of millions cheering me on virtually, as opposed to my mom and sister applauding my finds in the basement of our suburban home.

Over the past few years, interest in the secondhand shopping world has grown an insane amount. Thrifting, or the purchasing of used goods, is making its way to the forefront of daily dressing for many. As costs rise on literally everything and the concept of sustainability becomes a much larger part of the global conversation, giving new life to pieces tossed away by others is becoming much more the norm. And I am so excited for the secondhand fashion movement to finally have its shining moment. Growing up in Ohio, I felt incredibly removed from the world of fashion. It was this shimmery universe in a faraway land that I only saw depicted in the glossy pages of my cherished childhood magazines. This lack of access prompted me to dive headfirst into research in the nascent days of Google. On a typically gray Ohio day, there on my computer screen, I found Tavi Gevinson on BlogSpot.com. Tavi, who was just a few years younger than I, was uploading her daily outfits (groundbreaking, I know, but, TBH, in 2010, it was!) to her blog, Style Rookie. She donned “granny” floral prints layered upon crazy vintage knits, topped with a massive bow adding feet to her tiny preteen stature. She was one of the OG fashion maximalists before there was a hashtag for it. Even though our personal styles were vastly different, her use of clothing as a vessel for storytelling and self-expression was mesmerizing. I had been looking for something, anything, that allowed me to dream outside the constraints of my hometown, and Tavi felt like my own little secret.

Actually, at the time, the whole internet felt like my little secret, as no one at my high school ever knew what I was going on about. As I stumbled upon the first wave of YouTube fashion vloggers, I realized that there were others out there who, themselves, were craving that same connection and space to share their love for style just as much as I was. If I knew anything, it was that I loved the camera, I loved storytelling, and I loved clothes. At that very moment, I decided to create my first-ever YouTube channel under the name “fashionoutsider09”—remember, this was a time when we didn’t yet know if it was safe to put our real names on the internet. This is when I realized that, with the click of a button, I could be transported from my bedroom in Ohio to a place that felt so much more like home.

I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety at a pretty young age, and therefore spent a lot of my adolescent days down in le dumps. I was battling demons that presented themselves as an ongoing internal dialogue, convincing me I was never good enough. When I think back to my teen years in the mid-2000s, I see a little lost me, with far too much hair spray and a shit ton of eyeliner, sitting on my bed in the basement of my mother’s house, walls covered from floor to ceiling with spreads ripped from the pages of countless issues of Teen Vogue, Seventeen, and Nylon. At that time, so many aspects of my life stripped me of joy, but the few hours a week I could spend at my local thrift store, re-creating the looks from the pages covering my walls, gave me an escape. When I walked through those squeaky red Salvation Army doors, it was like everything else went quiet and I was able to just be me. Free of judgment from the not-so-kind girls at school who thought used clothing was gross and made sure I knew it, or my extremely narcissistic father, who had me questioning my worth daily. The thrift store gave me the power to make my own magic and I wanted to harness it forever.

This excerpt originally appeared in Second Chances: The Ultimate Guide to Thrifting, Sustainable Style, and Expressing Your Most Authentic Self. Published by Simon Element. Reprinted here with permission.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue