I bought another coat last week. I feel like I should have been more upset about that, because I don't really have the money to be clothes shopping. But I'm also incredibly tired of figuring out how to work around not having things I need, so I just went to fucking Goodwill and gave them $30 to solve that problem.

I actually own two nice winter coats. One of them is ten years old and the other one is about fifteen. This strikes me as a pretty good record, considering I don't buy utility coats -- anoraks and parkas make me feel like I'm walking around awkwardly embedded in the center of a pillow. I buy fashion coats, and I wear the hell out of them. The younger coat is a winter white skirted pea coat I got at Macy's when I first moved to Boston, and the elder is a black brocade sack coat with a giant faux fur collar I got at Target when I worked there. They both need repair work. The black one is unwearable at the moment, as it's missing too many important buttons. The white one is technically intact but starting to show wear, and if I let it go until something actually breaks it'll be a pain in the ass to patch it back together. I can handle all the repairs myself, but Mother Nature has a juvenile sense of humor, and I know full well that it will start to snow the moment I take my heavy coats to bits for maintenance.

The white coat is the bigger job of the two, by a lot. It's largely intact and looks pretty good, but it's accumulated some grungy spots on the hem and cuffs, and the surface of the fabric is getting noticeably worn on the side where I carry my bag. The solution is to apply some patches, cleverly disguised as decoration. I almost went with blackwork flowers in an art nouveau style, but I already have a black coat, and the white one is generally what I wear with outfits based on brown/navy where the black might clash. (Yes, I care about whether my overcoat goes with my outfit. Don't @ me. There's a reason random strangers ask me for fashion advice.) Inspiration eventually struck and I decided to trim it in gold upholstery satin, because if there's anything that'll last another ten years before I have to tear it off and redo it, it's the stuff meant for covering your sofa.

Step one of coat maintenance is laundry. In an attempt to care for this one like a real grown-up, I've been getting it dry cleaned, which I am starting to think is a colossal waste of time and money. I don't actually know what it's made of, since I've worn it so much the care tag is nigh-illegible The laundry icons suggest it's some sort of wool/poly blend, particularly the one that claims that my daily winter coat -- the one I wear in the rain, in the snow, in the sleet, and worst of all, in the subway -- is a delicate flower that requires hand washing in a tub of gentle soap. HA HA HA HA HA HA no. It went into the machine with cold water, regular detergent, and half a cup of hydrogen peroxide, which was the laziest possible concession to the icon that said "non-chlorine bleach only".

[The reason they say this on wool and wool blends, incidentally, is that wool is hair, and does best when you treat it as such. You don't use Clorox to lighten your hair, don't use it to lighten sheep hair either. You can buy a jug of Clorox2 or other "non-chlorine" bleach in the laundry aisle, or you can just dump drugstore peroxide into the wash water when the tub is filled. You can use hair bleach if you have it around -- 10 vol developer is abut 3% H2O2 -- but it's more expensive than either laundry bleach or the stuff you find in the first aid aisle. And as with hair bleach, don't use it on dyed wool if you don't want to leach dye out.

In any case, I ended up sending it through again, with regular bleach for good measure. The coat is back to its original color, and now I wonder what in the actual fuck the dry cleaners have been doing all this time. I pay like $20 for them to dunk the thing in a vat of perc and it never comes back this clean.]

I was absolutely right about the snow. I started work Friday night. Saturday it clouded over and dumped sky water in various phases. If you live in Boston, sorry about the weather.

I'm great at going on lengthy shopping trips with other people to advise and carry things, but when it's for me I'm quick. I'm almost always looking for A Very Specific Thing. It's either there or its not. If it's there, I grab it and march it up to the register. If it's not there, I go home empty-handed. The Goodwill coat, which is perfectly wearable as-is, is a black and white herringbone swing coat with roll collar, in a wool blend. The buttons are actually tied on with little snippets of 1/8" satin ribbon. It took me seven minutes to pick out. I timed it. 

I also Googled it when I got home. Perhaps surprisingly, I don't keep track of clothing labels. They don't matter as much as you'd think. Just because it's designer doesn't mean it's not crap that will disintegrate if you look at it wrong. (And, conversely, some of the best winter tights I've found are dirt cheap at Primark.) Looking up the brands for mystery thrift store clothing does sometimes fill in missing info like fiber content, or the age of a vintage piece, and I have a history of yanking really nice stuff off the rack at Goodwill. I went to replace my black heeled walking boots this past October and paid $9 for a pair of pleather go-go boots that originally retailed for about $180.

The Target coat is Mossimo black label, and the Macy's coat is a department store brand called XOXO; I bought them both on clearance, but they were marked down from an original retail price of $100-120 or so, which is a pretty decent price for a winter coat. A cut above Wal-Mart at the very least. The herringbone swing coat is 1. Madison Luxe Outerwear, which is also technically a department store brand, but a higher end one that sells through Nordstrom's and Lord & Taylor. The clearance coats on the manufacturer website start at $199. MSPR is $599 for the wool coats without any fur trim. My record lives on.

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