HARDCORE PICKERS - Point #15 EXAPANDED!

Ok, point #15 in my last post was that:  Our clothing is more than likely mostly second hand, or in the least, bought at a discount type of outlet for drastically lower than retail prices. 

Well, here is the long winded explanation:

 Why second hand and/or discount outlet sourced? It is partly because we are, frankly, a thrifty bunch. Plus, our time is limited and our work days are long, thus we may well buy some of our wardrobe at the assorted thrift shops, garage sales, yard sales, rummage sales (etc) that make up parts of some of our picking day to day travels.

 Plus, frankly, we really get annoyed with all that new, boring, cheaply made crap in shopping malls. If we want or need to buy cheap crap why pay more than a couple bucks?

 Also, we tend to destroy our clothing while on many of our picking adventures.

Now, you really don't want to spill oil, smear rancid lard, 70 year old grease with encased insect carcasses, and assorted other substances on a designer T-shirt...that is, if you actually paid more than a $1 for it....I have ripped, torn, stained and shredded more Tommy Hilfiger brand shirts than I can count. Not one cost me more than $2.  I realize they are far from a super high end designer brand, but they are not exactly low end, Dollar Store type quality T-shirts, either.


 We also simply do not tend to wear high end, collectible, nor expensive vintage clothing on picks.

 That is correct, when we knock on your door, you will not open it to see us in some vintage Armani suit, nor will be wearing a valuable, historic, vintage hand painted pin-up emblazoned, horsehide leather, WW2 pilot's jacket worth $2000.

You'll be lucky if see us in an unstained denim work jacket. But you can bet the wear on it is actually from real work, and the stains legitimately obtained during said work.

We don't pay 3 figure sums for "designer" blue jeans that have been "given character" in a factory's production line by workers armed with sandpaper, razor blades, bleach while in the background the din of washers and dryers loaded with jeans and chunks of limestone bang about, quickly achieving a "fade" and "wear" effect.

  OUR jeans are made that way from our work.  They are torn, sliced and shredded by shards of tin, rusty steel, crooked nails. They are smeared and streaked by leaning and brushing against powdery house paint; 90 years oxidized in the sun on a lonely farmhouse's clapboards.

Our jeans sport spots and elliptical dots of varying shades of grey/black, painted with oily residue of unknown origins, possibly acquired from shifting & carrying pails. buckets, tins, crates and other assorted containers languishing for years in maintenance rooms of old warehouses and farm sheds.

They are whitened in polka-dot fashion by the hydrogen peroxide that we had splashed on them when our hand jerked a bit, and gritted teeth together,as a knee jerk reaction to the bubbling disinfectant's action in the fresh and thankfully-not-as-deep-as-we-initially-thought slice in our flesh from that damn, fly-speck covered, jagged piece of glass remaining in the dry rotted window pane.

 Our pants may also be white streaked, and rotted through in spots, by diluted battery acid, bleach, and other substances spilled from unstable containers, many of which we tried to carefully move to gain access to other items on the shelves of the musty basement storage room.  Other containers no longer had any notation of their hazardous nature, having likely given up any paper or written note of their contents to the team of time, humidity & gravity.

So, Fashion TV, when will you feature REAL picker clothing on YOUR runways?