I heart charity shops!

 

If you know me then you know I can’t resist a charity shop. Well you never know what is sitting in there, waiting for you, do you, and it is all for a good cause, isn’t it. Today it was new territory, somewhere where I have never set foot in a charity shop before, New Malden, Surrey, just outside Kingston-upon-Thames.

Every now and again I have to satisfy My Little Darling’s craving for foreign lands. Wait a minute! I thought she said New Malden. Yes, that’s right, New Malden complete with the largest Korean population outside Korea. When you venture into one of their mini-supermarkets you are venturing into a foreign land. Not only is everything in a foreign language it is in a foreign script as well. It’s very geometric and looks a bit like drawings of little stick people and their TVs. So without a few tiny bits of English written on the edge of shelves you have absolutely no idea what anything is. As far as i can make out the Koreans survive on a diet of soy. Everything has soy in it in one form or another. At least half of each shop we go into must be full of brightly coloured rectangular tubs of variously flavoured soy paste. Oh yes and you can also but “Hello Kitty” crisps and sweets. Apart from that there are huge bags of rice and powdered acorns, indian millet, dried pumpkin slices and pickled radish, the big giant white mooli type, rather than the miniscule red English type.

 

Once we had filled our big shopping till MLD could no longer walk upright with it on her shoulder we made a start on the three charity shops. Just look what I came up with ….

 

 

Obviously someone in this area has been studying fashion recently though I have to admit I think they more or less just bought the books and glanced at them. They are hardly read, let alone read and re-read. no I’m not a dedicated follower of fashion but I have always had an interest in costume and textiles and wider design issues and I couldn’t bear to live this little set of four books to be split up. They need to live together on a shelf.

Fashion as Communication by Malcolm Barnard, 1996, Routledge

The Face of Fashion – Cultural Studies in Fashion by Jennifer Craik, 1994, Routledge

Fashion Theory – The Journal of dress, Body & Culture Vol 1 Issue 1, March 1997, Berg

Dress and Ethnicity (Ethnicity and Identity Series) edited by Joanne B. Eicher, 1995, Berg

I know they are all at least ten years old but even in the academic world they can’t be completely out of date. I’ve already found something that will serve as a useful starting point for a discussion amongst one group of my friends. I consider that I have had excellent value for money with my purchases. Each book cost me £2 and when new the slimmest, cheapest of them was £9.55 with the most expensive being £14.95