Who among us hasn't watched a TikTok creator display their haul of vintage denim and unique, thrifted tops and thought: I could do that.
After talking to Grace Brinkly, I don't think I could anymore.
Sure, I like L Train Vintage just as much as any other nonbinary femme that lives in Bushwick. But I cannot search like Brinkly. I don't have it in me — the drive to find something singular; the ability to spend hours in one second-hand store; my interest in fashion and design just cannot bubble over to form hours of real-life work. And that's what vintage shopping is for some of the most dedicated: work. Work they love, but work all the same.
"I hate thrifting with people," Brinkly told me. "I'll do it, but I feel like it's torture for you to go with me every time. I'm in a trance. You cannot get through to me. I need to go through everything in that store because I'm gonna miss something if I don't. I have to go through every rack."
SEE ALSO: TikTok announces a new way to pay its creatorsBrinkley starts in one section and will "go through like every single aisle back and forth" until she feels confident that she has seen "every item." Then, she does what we all do, and separates her picks into a yes pile, a no pile, and a maybe pile. It takes a very long time — and she does it multiple times a month to source clothes for her eBay shop and, of course, for herself.
Brinkly sat down with me over Zoom right before she jetted off to Europe with her now ex-boyfriend. We talked about thrifting, the fear of existing so publicly online, where she gets her inspiration, and the future of her influencing career.
Mashable: Where do you find your fashion inspiration? In thrift stores, on social media, on Pinterest?
Grace Brinkly: No, I don't use Pinterest really at all. I feel like my number one advice for people trying to find their style is to get off Pinterest, honestly.
Really?
It just all convolutes. You see something and it's like, OK, I like that. But when you're in a thrift store, it's random. You have to see something and know that you like it, and it's not because of any external factors, you know? Like, how can I make this work? Why do I like this? And it's not because I'm trying to recreate something else. I truly do like this piece. And when you bring them all together, they come together in their own way. That's the best way to create a personal style.
So you're not going into a thrift store, saying, "I need a floral-print maxi skirt and black boots."
I've never approached it with a wishlist or anything. I'll have things that I'd like to find. If it finds me, it finds me. But for the most part, I go in and I look through everything, and I'm like, what I need will find me. What I like I will see, you know?
Manifestation.
Yeah, exactly. What's meant for you will find you.
Do you try anything on at the thrift store?
No. Most of the change rooms have been closed since COVID. Since I've been thrifting everything I own since I was 15, I've gotten so familiar with what things that fit me look like. I'm very good at eyeballing it because I don't even know my size in real life. I don't even look at the tags.
Since you were 15? Have you noticed a trend in thrifting over the past decade?
I can't even explain to you how good thrift stores were in 2014, 2015. Anything you wanted, and it was $2. Everything was $2. But on the other hand, I'm so glad that people are popularizing it and thrifting more. I grew up so poor. That's why I did it. I always loved fashion. I was so disgustingly obsessed with clothes and had no money. So I was like, I'm just gonna start thrifting. And it was a little bit embarrassing at that time, especially where I'm from. It's cool that it's popular now. It has affected things, but overall it's fine.
You grew up in a small town, obsessed with fashion. Were you interested in trends or were you just interested in having clothes? I'm imagining that monologue that Stanley Tucci gives in The Devil Wears Prada about hiding away with his fashion magazines. Was it that?
I consumed whatever I could get my hands on fashion-wise, but I didn't know anything and I wasn't in a lot of spaces — even online — regarding fashion. It all started the first time I [went] thrifting. My grandma was really into yard sales. I'm just so obsessed with hunting. I love to hunt. I was thrifting, and I noticed I was gravitating towards vintage without even knowing what vintage was or how to identify vintage.
I became obsessed with vintage denim. That's how it started. I was like, this is so much better than the denim now. Why aren't people wearing this? This is so different from what's being sold now. I started collecting it with no intention to sell it. There wasn't a single vintage store in my hometown at the time, so [selling vintage] wasn't a thing. I was just collecting it to have it because I admired it so much. Even things that weren't my size, I collected and kept. Eventually, people were like, "Where'd you get those?" And I'd be like, "Oh my God, they're vintage. I have this whole collection if you wanna come look at my house." And people would come to dig through a duffel bag in my trunk.
It all started with loving vintage and loving true quality clothing. Because I had never experienced vintage outside of a thrift store or [any] nice clothing. I was so unfamiliar with designers and things like that.
Was your interest in designers and vintage part of the reason you decided to move to LA?
No, I think it started before that. It started when I got into vintage shopping online, like [on] eBay. Because the more I looked, the more I would start to notice who was making these clothes and who the designers were. And I started consuming a lot of content on TikTok when I became a part of the fashion space, [like] Old Loser in Brooklyn. Her content was inspiring to me. As I moved into the TikTok space, [shopping] designer became a lot more interesting to me.
So why LA? Why the move?
I hate that Idaho food, for one. And I hate the cold. I hate it. So I visited [LA] a few times before deciding to move. On my last visit, I had come by myself and met up with a lot of people, which is really outside of my comfort zone. Everything went well and felt aligned. I'm very big on listening to the universe, and I was like, "I think this is the right thing for me to do. I'm having a good time here. I like it. I feel good here." So I convinced my best friend Morgan to move with me because I was like, "I have to get out."
People online hated that you moved.
That's why I kept it a secret. I wouldn't tell anyone. Because I was like, "I'm not listening to you guys." I know what's best for me, but I knew everyone would weigh in.
How do you respond to feedback, specifically negative feedback, that seems like people don't want you to do what feels very right to you?
I hated my life. If you were relating [to me] in that way, I'm sorry that I came out of it. Maybe you should just be inspired and leave your hometown. A lot of people feel that way, and they'll be like, "She was so snippy, and it was so much more endearing when she lived in a small town. Now she's just like everyone else in LA." I'm the exact same person I was when I was in Idaho. I don't think anything's changed. I don't take it too seriously.
I had to learn this was the hardest part about being an influencer. I didn't even mean to be an influencer, truly, but [the hardest part about it is] people making assumptions about you without all the information. You want to correct everyone. But I could spend my whole day correcting assumptions about myself, and I was like, "Who cares? These people don't know me."
You have to allow yourself to know that who you are and how other people view you are like two separate people.
Yeah. I'm up for interpretation, and that's the reality of being in the public eye.
And you can sit with that?
No. I mean, I have to, but I hate it.
I used to be so snarky about it. Every opportunity I got to correct people I would take it. But I'm OK with it now. I'm a lot more secure in myself than I was at the start of this. That's helped a lot, just knowing who I am, because I didn't know who I was at the start.
Do you still have a lot of those kinds of fearful anxieties about content online?
Sometimes I wake up, and I'm just like, "Hmm, I want to delete everything." My whole life's online. This is so insane and strange. I have a lot of thoughts about it all the time. I don't think it'll ever feel normal to me. So I don't know. I'm trying to navigate how I want to pivot my content now because I don't like filming my day to day. When I am filming my day to day, when I stop, I feel I'm not working when I'm just enjoying time with my friends and stuff. But I don't want to be filming this. I also don't want to feel like I'm not working. It's just like this constant imbalance.
Could you see yourself doing anything else right now?
My end goal is to hopefully own my own vintage store or start designing or something more tangible in fashion. I would love to be a stylist. But the thing is there's so much more money in this than there is in being a stylist. At some point I'm sure I'll break it off and be like, I'm done. I'm doing this now, but for now I'm gonna save up some money and use it.
Do you feel like you have to have those other avenues because influencing is such a new career?
I'm not riding on it lasting as a career at all. I still sell vintage. I've done five sales in the past two weeks. Again, that's still my main hustle. Even if I'm not selling, I'm still collecting, and that's my insurance.
You've spoken before about some guilt that you have related to influencing and the way that, as a leftist and as someone who considers themselves to be class-conscious, it feels like a Catch-22.
Telling you the ups and downs of my career, I'm like, I should not even be complaining in the slightest about what I do because I come from actual poverty, and I worked my whole life up until this point. And my life now compared to my life two years ago, I think she would hate me. She would be like, "Are you kidding me?" The way I view money, large amounts of money, not that I'm like even financially that well off — I'm paying off [my] Camry right now — it's not insane amounts of money. But I see the potential for insane amounts of money.
I see people in my space with so much money. I've never been able to connect with people who have a lot of money. I feel like coming from that, I've felt so disconnected. And the potential of me becoming someone with a lot of money or even being financially safe — because that was never something I saw for myself — makes me feel guilty. Especially for the work I'm doing. What I get paid now for a video would've been life-changing money for me when I was 19. And thinking about that is so crazy. To make one video, I'm getting paid $3,000 to $10,000 and prior to that I would have $0 in my account regularly. It's just a lot to take in.
I have to ask about that Jubilee video.
That was such an experience. I found out about that the day before [we recorded it]. I was in LA visiting, and the producer reached out and was like, "Hey, we're doing this video, do you wanna come?" And I was like, "Sure, I'll do it." I had no idea what I was getting myself into and definitely didn't expect it to end up on TikTok the way it did. That was not a good experience.
Even though everyone seemed to like you in the video?
That one girl, I will say, and she knows this and I've told her this, she did piss me off during that interview. She was annoying me. But so much fatphobia came out of it towards her. People were trying to pit me against this girl. I felt associated with those videos, and it felt gross. I've never been on that part of the internet. It was so different.
And you opened yourself up to a new audience?
Yeah. Scary men.
What is your audience like?
[It's] 98 percent women. We love it. It's great.
Do you interact with your audience a lot?
Not as much as I should, to be honest with you. You gotta have boundaries. It's so hard to navigate because there's no training for it. I'm just a girl with all these people reaching out and looking up to me and having these perceptions of me, and I'm just like, what do I do with this? What do I say to you?
There's two sides to it. It's super fun, and I love these people and I appreciate them. On the other hand, I don't know these people and they'll turn on me when they get the chance.
The art of detachment is really important to me. If I were to lose it all tomorrow, and I say this to myself, I'm not attached to it. That would be fine. If I woke up and my TikTok was deleted, I would take a new avenue, and I would just listen to the universe.
The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
