Thrifting and vintage shopping have been growing faster than the broader retail industry, with few signs of slowing down. There’s the sustainability element of it, sure, but shopping secondhand for clothing is also a way to experiment with personal style and find items that are unique to you.
To see what that looks like in practice (and to learn how to do it well), we asked two of Wirecutter’s style writers, Alexander Aciman and Frances Solá-Santiago, to put together a work-appropriate outfit of three secondhand items — a sweater, a pair of jeans, and a workbag — for $250 each. They were more than up for the challenge.
Alex is a self-proclaimed outfit repeater who has written extensively about jeans, T-shirts, and other menswear basics, so he went out looking for items that would complement his existing wardrobe. “I want each item to be slightly beyond basic, a teensy bit of a reach for me. Secondhand shopping allows me to do that, because weirder items tend to show up on the secondhand market, and those items are cheaper than they would be at retail.”
Frances has been writing about style for the better part of a decade (including authoring two books in the Little Books of Fashion series, focusing on Bottega Veneta and Celine), and she admits to preferring vintage shopping or thrifting over buying new. “This is especially true when it comes to vintage designer fashion, which I’ve started collecting slowly,” she says. But embarking on this journey, she was a bit cautious. “The budget is tight, especially because jeans, sweaters, and handbags are some of the priciest categories out there. Even secondhand!”
Lisa Fischer and Katie Quinn/NYT Wirecutter
Here’s what they ended up buying, along with some in-depth advice to help you build out your own wardrobe with pieces you’ll treasure for years to come.
It can be hard to maintain friendships as an adult. People move to new cities, start families, and experience all sorts of other life events that make it difficult to keep in touch. Sometimes, you end up losing all of your friends because you can't stop writing pro-genocide propaganda for Bari Weiss's stupid website.
That last circumstance is the one in which Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold currently finds herself, which we know because she won't stop tweeting about it. Reingold, who joined the Free Press in 2022, started giving updates about the disintegration of her personal life shortly after publishing a big "investigation" that clumsily attempted to downplay the starvation of Gaza's children by observing that some of them were also suffering other ailments. Shortly after having her name attached to one of the most evil pieces of journalism ever produced, Reingold started losing friends.
"Over the past few days, I've received thousands of hate comments, death threats, oh and my childhood best friend broke up with me due to my 'morals,'" Reingold wrote in a tweet published on Aug. 20.
Less than a month later, Reingold was back with another update: A different childhood best friend had just disinvited Reingold from her wedding:
Just yesterday, my oldest friend broke up with me. A different one. I’m now down to three or four friends from before 2022, when I shocked my liberal circle by joining The Free Press.
It wasn’t lost on me that this happened within hours of the news of Charlie Kirk's murder. If there was ever a time for coming together, it was now. And yet here she was, telling me that she didn't want to associate with me anymore because of who I am.
When we discussed certain issues like Israel, she realized we actually weren't that far apart. We both believe in a two state solution and want the war to end. And yet, she couldn't knock her overwhelming suspicion that I was bad.
She said it as kindly as possible but uninvited me from her wedding.
Yesterday, buried in a self-pitying rant about how nobody outside of her workplace has reached out to see how she's dealing with the "trauma [of] covering these past two years," Reingold revealed that her network of friends and former colleagues has continued to dwindle:
A few reporters I completed Report for America with have become my biggest harassers.
Just yesterday, an NPR host I once interned for sent me a message intended to break my spirit.
I caught a former friend from Columbia—a girl who comes from media royalty—liking negative tweets about me.
"Dude, is this why you haven't been responding to my texts asking to hang out?" I immediately texted her.
"Dude, is this why you haven't been responding to my texts asking to hang out?" is perhaps the most heartbreaking message that an adult American woman with no real problems can possibly compose. This person's life is grim as hell!
You would hope that a person confronted with social ostracization this intense would engage in some self-reflection and reconsider some of her professional and personal choices, but Reingold seems happy to continue down the path she's on. "I don't need the committees to protect the so-and-so's or the friends at the fancy papers. I have a mission—and that's to tell the truth, wherever it may lead," she wrote at the end of her latest tweet. Big talk from someone whose idea of journalism is putting on a hijab to go "undercover" and pretend her life is in danger at a pro-Palestine convention in Chicago.
One day very soon, Reingold is going to wake up and have to confront the fact that one of the few friends she has left in the world is an elderly colleague who is really excited about AI actresses because they will allow him to finally "see a virgin on-screen." That's tough.
Man, I do not envy the actual journalists who remain at CBS news:
Bari Weiss introduced herself to CBS News staff today on the network's 9AM call, saying she wants to "win," which requires restoring trust to CBS. She also said she was excited for staff to get to know the Free Press, and ended her remarks by saying: "Let's do the fucking news."
Managing sucks! It sucks even when you like the people you’re managing and it’s a low-stress position! And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you: running CBS News is not a low-stress position. You are going to get blamed by everyone above you for decisions that are made by people below you, and you are going to get blamed by people below you for the decisions that are made by people above you. You’re also going to get blamed for your own decisions, just for kicks. You have elected to take a job where the primary purpose is for you to eat shit and own the death of broadcast TV news, a thing that is going to die no matter what you do. Nice work!
This is the glass cliff to end all glass cliffs. You’re Marissa Mayer at Yahoo without the Googler street cred. You’re Nancy Dubuc at Vice without the string of hit TV shows. You’re Linda Yaccarino at Twitter without the advertiser relationships. You have been hired as a sop to a Trump administration that is actively hostile to the actual free press, and you will be made to oversee wave after wave of layoffs until you quit or get fired and the entire news division is shut down in a final spasm of cost-cutting after the next inescapable media merger.
[…]
It’s actually even worse than that. You also have to manage Talent. Famous TV Talent, the people your audience actually knows and likes, and who will eat you alive if they think you’ve screwed them over. In order for that to work, you actually need to completely disappear and let the Talent be the face of the network, and quite frankly nothing about your history suggests you’re capable of that. And one of the main problems with Talent, especially Famous TV Talent, is that they are egomaniacal monsters who love getting paid and throwing hissy fits, and hate being told what to do. You think you had a bad time at The New York Times? Baby, you have no idea what a bad time is. You’ll find out when you try to tell Norah O’Donnell anything at all about her reporting. If you’re lucky, she’ll just shake her Emmys at you when she tells you to fuck off. You think Gayle King or David Martin are going to sit through a lecture from you? Like for real? Come on. Jane Pauley has already caused one media firestorm by changing jobs. Are you ready for this?
Managing requires certain kinds of soft skills, ones I am not confident you possess. They weren’t necessary in your cushy Wall Street Journal op-ed job, or your cushier New York Times op-ed job. They were barely required at the publication you invented, The Free Press. So now you’re the head honcho at CBS News. Let’s say you decide to skip levels to directly edit a 60 Minutes story. It doesn’t even have to be a controversial story to make all hell break loose — because you have neither the credibility nor the relationships required to take this kind of work on. And what’s more, you’ve got a news division composed exclusively of ambitious piranhas below you — not your handpicked cronies, like Tyler “I wish to see Hollywood virgins” Cowen. These people have decades in television, and you have a newsletter and a history of throwing your colleagues under the bus.
There’a a fundamental assumption that being able to run a mediocre group blog makes you qualified to run a major news organization, and while I would like this to be true, I do not think it is very plausible.
As a coda, here’s the actual story of her accidentally-like-a-martyr routine at the Times:
Nice. If I may add 2 cents: The real reason BW quit the Times was that as soon as Katie Kingsbury took over from James Bennet, she told her she could no longer commission and edit articles. She could only write. But commissioning articles was key to her grift. I mean literally …
She promoted herself among certain circles as the key to getting into the Times. Which is one reason why I and others blocked so many of her commissioned pieces (one reason: they were also terrible). She said it was our deep ideological bias against conservatives…
However this ends, it’s still one of the most profitable grifts of all time. Being able to kiss ass is often more important than having any skill with respect to your nominal profession.
September 26th, 2025: This comic was inspired by the robots in my life!! There are many, especially if you are generous with your definition of "robot"! For example, my toasting robot is sadly inconsistent on one side of the bread.
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