FINDING MYSELF in a VINTAGE SHOP

The novelist Ottessa Moshfegh has always used vintage clothing to shape her identity. Now she considers how garments from the past can help us make sense of where we’re going.

For me, as a writer, vintage clothing holds special value: There are stories embedded in the seams, memories stuffed in the lining, caught between the pleats, and hidden in the hems. Sometimes the previous owner has left evidence: a shopping list in the pocket, a coffee stain or a rip from an ecstatic night out dancing. An imperfection is an indelible detail of a secondhand garment’s charm. A tear or missing button might tell the story of the item’s provenance, and sometimes an imperfection explains how the item found its way to you, who will mend it and love it again. It’s true about people, too—our marks and scars tell the stories of where we have been, where we fell, and how we’ve healed.

For thousands of years, people wore one another’s hand-me-downs, and bought and sold clothing secondhand because it was so costly to purchase things new. My grandmother sewed the dresses my mother wore to school, and then my aunt wore them, and then they were passed down to a cousin. But at some point this hand-me-down tradition stopped being so common. Buying new outfits was a way to present as having self-respect; the only people who wore vintage clothing were either poor or weird or both.