Hella Cheapspensive

  This is my entry for the How I Wear My series, November edition! It's a monthly event run by Adrienne of The Rich Life (on a budget) and Jill of Everything Just So and you should check it out, because November is jeans! I am also linking up to Judith of Style Crone's Hat Attack!, a monthly linkup dedicated to that fabulous head accessory.

  I was out for August (I own literally nothing neon) and for September (the closest I had to animal print was a duck) but jeans, jeans I can do.

Navy fedora: Stacy Adams

Faux leather trim scarf: Nordstrom (online here)

Embroidered butterfly top: Karen Millen (eBay)

Hoodie: Sanctuary clothing (thrifted)

Jeans: Denim for Immortality (thrifted)

Rhinestone locket: Express (v. old)

It was windy that day

  My favorite San Francisco thrifting game is "Is this brand expensive, or hella cheap?"

  You can usually tell by construction, detailing, or material quality if something is a nicer brand or a throwaway item. And either way, I go with buying what I like over pre-thrift price. Usually it's quality of material that sells me, though I do have a favorite burnout shirt that had several small holes in it already when I thrifted it, and has continued dissolving as I have continued patching it, until one day I will have a magical garment constructed entirely from my own sewing thread.

  But sometimes, there's that intersection of lowest-bidder fabric and pre-worn soft expensive stuff that you can feel slowly disintegrating from the roughness of your plebeian fingers, and you can't quite tell which one it is. Cheap brands copy naming conventions of expensive brands, just as people name their children after the children of people with more money, so the names are going to sound the same. And that's where the game comes in. Feel free to play with your friends, especially if at least one smartphone is present* so you can look brands up. Winner should buy something the loser has to wear.

  So it was with these jeans. There were crystals on them, for one. The material was thin and stretchy. And with signage like this:

  You have to figure this would either be some expensive jeans, or something you'd see on the reality show Unstable Loud People You Feel Superior To. The crystals were subtle for well, being crystals on your ass, and I needed jeans because I shrank out of half my clothes this summer, so I bought 'em. My hunch was on fancy instead of trashy jeans.

  Check out this button! It looks like Perseus' shield! It's copper and has the head of Medusa preserved in it and everything.

  Yes, it turned out they were fancy pants. They also turned out to be extremely comfortable! And that is How I Like My: Jeans.

* This spellchecker knows 'smartphone' but not 'thrifted.' How's that for bourgeois?