l!a very old matador sleeve, cut up and used like  wedding dress designers a collage on her.takes a village of costume specialists called ager-dyers, also known as breakdown artists.At one point the department's chief breakdown artist John Cowell led a team of 15 people whose full-time job was authentically aging every piece of wardrobe.They did amazing things, like sand down every single costume.Put grease on it, paint on top of it, put dirt, used blowtorches.Gavroche's faded jacket is a good example.You try to reproduce what happens in real life.Because of sunlight over time you get less colour on the shoulder, wear in the elbows and much more black on the bottom.They also put the costumes through chemical processes like bleaching, others that make them look wrinkled.You try to reproduce what would happen to your costumes if you wore them for years and years in a week.Holiday shopping: Do it till you stopMy brother Jonathan lives in Toronto, and because of this, seems to visit a craft fair every weekend.Toronto loves craft.like you are supporting the arts.Or, at least, supporting the ironic hipster crafts.is something I can get with, especially now, where I find myself doing anything I can to keep from needing to go downtown to do Christmas gifts.I have had the thought: Can I just get everything at the magazine store on the corner?to be frivolousIt's strange to even be writing this, because I used to be a champion shopper.Really, I would find any excuse.and I could drop everything in order to get myself into some dense and cacophonous warren of shops.There, the deadlines I was shirking, the bills I was ignoring, the fights I was in and pretty much every other unpleasantness on roster would spin away.You push the revolving door at Holt Renfrew, and you are energized by your new, simplified identity: a customer, in the right.you can't have depths without surfaces.Can I do a digression on Linda Grant for one moment?I don't know why she, the author of the 2008 Booker-shortlisted The Clothes on their Backs, isn't better read on this side of the Atlantic.I sometimes get an almost crazy feeling of consensus when reading her.Like I  discount wedding dresses could not possibly agree more.Like Grant, I have always thought that the best way to see a foreign place while on a trip is to go to the markets and stores, even plain ones, because then you are truly mingling with the sights and the sounds and the tastes of the people who live there.You will never see a Greek person just whiling away a day at the Acropolis unless they work there.But in the shoe choices of the average Osakan, you can see all of Japan.So how did I fall out of love with hardcore shopping?as some kind of reality TV substitution for true style or glamour; or maybe one too many nights awake spent doing labyrinthine math involving rent and paycheques and thousand-dollar Gucci trousers bought on a whim.I can pinpoint the actual day the real change happened.It was the week before my wedding, in 2007.My best friend took me to Holt's to get some of the finishing touches for my outfit: underwear, nail polish.My wedding was special in its own way because I had been ill in the years preceding it.And while illness did absolutely nothing to strip me of my desire to be stylish, it did cut into ability for a while.Nobody wants to go to Holt Renfrew with two giant, pneumatic jogging sneakers on the foot rests of a wheelchair.So I had not been to Holt Renfrew in a while.I have always thought that the best way to see a foreign place while on a trip is to go to the markets and stores, even plain onesBut in the years I'd been gone, the place had changed.Or maybe I had changed.tipping point had been reached.Suddenly stores needed to be very exciting, full of spectacle, like being inside a nightclub, or a video game.To me, it felt over-pressurizing.Holt's now felt fashionista, but not like a place to put together a beautiful or smart outfit.It didn't feel beautiful or smart.And while of course I am still a person who buys things, I never really recovered the feeling of wanting to make a day of it,  elegant wedding dresses going from store to store to store.I am a bad match for so many of today's shops: I do not have the constitution for H M, which feels like walking into the end of the universe to me, or any of the Apple stores, with all that reflective, headachey white.that of makeup and cosmetics.I have figured out ways to shop more minimally and serenely.I have my favourite things made by this Italian seamstress who is almost part of my family at this point.Once every couple of months, I walk to a store down the street from my house, owned by a woman named Sharyn, that sells what is these days known as designer resale.Sharyn's lair feels to me a magical place, a kind of museum with many curators, and many stories.Why did that person buy that gauze-like Dior dress and clearly never wear it?s riding britches ever know a horse?nine times out of ten, my hand extends towards her things.I have her McQueen skirt, her Lanvin dress.I don't know who she is, but in the funniest way I feel like I do.And by the cut of her clothes, I know I like her.RelatedGift Guide: What to get her this holiday seasonHappy Hour: Drinkable gifts, Vol.Happy Hour: Drinkable gifts, Vol.Barbara Mutch is the author of the recently-released novel The Housemaid s Daughter.Born and raised in South Africa, she currently lives near London.She will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.Can you imagine being engaged for five years and separated by at least five thousand miles all that time?That is what happened to my grandparents in the early 1900s.She remained behind in Ireland while he travelled to Cradock, a remote town in rural South Africa, to work and save for their joint future abroad.Eventually, once the engagement had been suitably observed, and a house bought and furnished in Cradock, my grandmother took a Union Castle liner to South Africa to join him.Presumably it wasn t considered wise to allow a young woman the chance to change her mind on