I found this white lace skirt in Southland for $5 on Thursday and couldn’t wait to show you.
It was hanging on a $5 rack in Cotton On. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: don’t be shy to scrounge through the sales racks, girls. I’ve seen similar skirts for around $40 or more in other shops.
How to shop a sale rack properly
Most people approach the clearance rack the same way they approach the full-price ones, which is why they walk away with nothing. It is a different job and it wants a different method.
Start at one end and touch everything. Sale racks are packed so tightly you cannot see what is on them. Anything you judge by eye alone, you will miss. Ten seconds of running your hand along the rail tells you more than two minutes of looking.
Feel for the fabric, not the colour. Good fabric announces itself through your fingers. This is the single most useful sale-rack skill and it takes about three shopping trips to learn.
Ignore the size on the tag. Sale racks are where the odd sizes live, and vanity sizing means the number was always fiction. Hold it against yourself.
Know why it is there. Wrong season, wrong size run, a colour that did not sell, or a fault. The first three are your gain. The fourth needs checking, and if the fault is a seam or a button, it is still your gain.
Go at the end of a season, and go again three weeks later. The second markdown is where the $40 skirt becomes a $5 skirt.
Never buy it because it is cheap. This is the rule that saves you money. If you would not want it at $30, you do not want it at $5, and a wardrobe of cheap mistakes is more expensive than a few good things.
That last one is what separates bargain hunting from hoarding, and it is the only part that takes discipline.
Wearing white lace without looking bridal
The black lace top with the ruffle is an oldie from Valleygirl, and the singlet underneath is also an oldie from Supre. The black tie-up wedges were an op-shop find for under $5.
White lace has one obvious hazard, and the fix here is the black. Lace plus white plus more white is a wedding. Lace plus black is an outfit.
I said at the time that I wanted to show you some different outfit options with the skirt, but we had to rush off to a five-year-old’s hip-hop dance party. So, belatedly, here are the four I would actually use.
With black on top, as here. The most reliable. Any black top at all. The contrast does the work and the lace becomes a texture rather than a statement.
With denim. A chambray shirt or a fitted denim jacket over the top. This is the one that makes a lace skirt wearable on a Saturday rather than only at an event.
With a chunky knit in winter. Heavy wool over delicate lace is a lovely contrast, and with opaque tights and boots a lace skirt runs happily through the cold months.
With a leather jacket. The toughest version, and my favourite. Delicate skirt, hard jacket, and nobody thinks of weddings at all.
The thread through all four is the same: put one substantial thing with it. Lace is fragile-looking by nature, and it needs weight beside it or the whole outfit floats.
One practical note. Check the lining, or the lack of one. A $5 lace skirt is often unlined, which is fine in black and a genuine problem in white. A plain slip underneath solves it, and it is worth checking in the shop rather than in daylight later.
Why Cotton On is worth a look
There is a certain snobbery about the cheap chains and I have never had much time for it.
The useful thing about a shop like Cotton On is not the average quality, which is exactly what you would expect for the price. It is the variance. Among a hundred forgettable things there will be two or three cut properly in a decent fabric, usually because they were designed to sit alongside a more expensive range and the sampling worked out.
Those two or three are what you are there for. Everything else you walk past.
This is also why the sale rack is the right place to start rather than the new stock. Anything that survives to a $5 rack has been rejected by hundreds of people for reasons that are usually about size or colour rather than quality, and the fabric test in your hand tells you which is which in about a second.
The anniversary watch
The gold watch is a special new addition, an anniversary pressie from hubby!
We celebrated last night at a lovely restaurant called The Boathouse. The scallops were divine and the snapper delicious, although they do it better at Sandringham Yacht Club.
There is a nice symmetry in an outfit like this, and it is one of my favourite things about dressing on a budget. A $5 skirt, $5 wedges, old tops from Valleygirl and Supre, and one genuinely special piece that means something. Nobody looking at it could tell you which parts cost what, and the watch is not lifted by the price of anything else in the outfit. It is lifted by being lovely.
That is the whole argument for spending carefully on a few things and cheerfully on everything else.
White cuff from Forever New; earrings and bracelets from Diva; Guess handbag; Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses.
(From November 2012. That particular $5 rack is a distant memory, though Southland is still there and still worth a look.)
If you are good at finding things but less sure what to build around them, that is exactly what a shopping day sorts out.
And now you’re Looking Good Girls!
“Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.” Proverbs 16:3.