January is the month when the lights turn out and the city seems to stop an instant, take a great breath, and then resume with its incessant rhythm. It is the month of good intentions, in which you make an account of the year just past and you decide what you want to hold and what you need to let go. In New York this idea is not just about people, but also clothes.
After the break of the holidays, January comes as a strong wind, silent but sharp, which invites us to look inside really, without delay to tomorrow, to ask us what we want to change. It is the month of the essential selection. As the Christmas decorations stand, you try to make order even in life… and in the closet. We look at the habits that accompany us for a long time and wonder what are still useful and what, instead, are only huge weights inherited from the past, of which we have not managed to free ourselves for years, just like our clothes. Letting go is never easy: requires so much courage, because it means accepting that something has done its time. But it is a necessary, vital, almost natural gesture, how to prune a tree so that it can flourish.
How many times have we thought “I don’t put this sweater anymore, I don’t fit well, it doesn’t value me, it doesn’t make me feel comfortable, but I can’t just put it away because I’m sorry”. So we end up accumulating, accumulating and accumulating things that we don’t like, which don’t make us feel good, because maybe we never find the strength to let go. In this month the still empty agendas seem to offer a promise, to start over. But this year more than again, the key word I want to give to 2026 is “reborn”. A total rebirth, which often starts from making space, as well as in our lives, in our closets and for this New York is the perfect city.
I was on Long Island last week when I entered my first thrift store in the United States, full of clothes, shoes, bags and jewelry ready to reborn, to have a new life. These shops are real archives of stories lived, each garment brings with it traces of the past, of those who wore it before, but at the same time it is a starting point, which offers endless possibilities to those who wear it. Like people, clothes also arrive in this great city with a story and the possibility to write another, better, more beautiful, but above all happier.
Rebirth means above all reconnecting with the true essence of self, eliminating all the expectations or pressures of others, and then starting a more authentic life and the first phase of this process often happens precisely from our clothes. Open the closet can then become a gesture of awareness. Carefully choose leaders who tell who we are really is an act of listening and respect for themselves, the engine of our rebirth, both external and internal. To resume what we said last month, that fashion has the power to create connections, the second key word that I want to give to this new year is “empathy”, the ability to “get in the shoes” of others, only in this way there is the possibility to create real bonds. In this sense the thrift store perfectly embodies the concept. In fact, the revenues of what is sold finance support programs for people in economic, health problems, looking for a home or a hot meal. Thus circular fashion, in addition to avoiding waste and pollution, amplifies its connective power, becoming an ever more solid bridge, able to bring in contact even totally different individuals, but united by the fact of being all part of the same world and creating connections based on shared values and responsibilities. Thus consumption ceases to be a superficial and individual act, to become a conscious gesture, able to strengthen the sense of community and to promote a more inclusive, ethical and attentive lifestyle to the future of the planet.
And while the city slowly resumes its pace, we too can do it: one step at a time, with less noise and more attention, bringing with us only what really is worth and reborn, as well as the clothes of the thrift store, starting from those we wear every day and which should value us at the best, making us feel good with ourselves.
So January becomes the time of the necessary choice, the one that suggests changes closer to our authenticity. And it is from here that you can start a lasting revival: from a more essential but more consistent closet. Happy New Year and Good Rebirth!
L’articolo January: the month of rebirth among the thrift stores in New York proviene da IlNewyorkese.
