The drift to thrift

Sarah Gray Miller is a woman on a mission. Her motto 'Spend smart, live rich' is the strap line under the title of her new magazine Budget Living, launched in New York this week. Her timing could not be better. 'The economy is not in great shape,' she says, although the magazine, published independently by the same company that publishes Frommer's budget travel guides, was conceived before 9/11. On both sides of the Atlantic, people are watching their savings dissolve. And ostentatious spending - unless you are P Diddy planning to invite your pals to a £1.5m birthday party - is off the agenda. Even if you have the money, it's really not something you boast about. Nothing gives Miller greater satisfaction than being complimented on an item of clothing she bought for a few dollars from a charity shop. 'It's not about being cheap - it's not about clipping coupons,' she says. 'It's about being a smart consumer. If I bought a sofa for $8,000, I wouldn't be able to take a vacation. It's about getting more for your money - a high aesthetic level with a low price point.'

Sarah Gray Miller is her reader. She's 31, obsessed with living stylishly, but a little too bright to be kidded into thinking something is good because it has a high price tag or a designer label attached. She knows how to be chic on the cheap, and she has identified a whole bunch of readers - potentially 420,000 of them if the first print run is successful - who want to share her secret. They are the generation aged 25 to 40, who are design-obsessed and grew up on a diet of MTV. Their incomes - around $40,000 (£25,000) per household - often don't live up to their aspirations, however.

'The magazine very much reflects my lifestyle,' she says. 'I can't believe I am actually being paid to go out and bargain hunt. We all live this way,' she says of her editorial team. Even the magazine's offices have been furnished on a budget. Instead of the usual office supplies, $2,000 bought chairs from Ikea, desks from junk shops, and a table found abandoned on a street in Brooklyn. And when the thrift stores and garage sales were closed, Miller shopped at the online auction house, eBay. 'I typed in the words "cheap" and "bargain" and got loads of fun things,' she says. 'Some people can sing, dance or draw. My talent is bargain hunting.'

What is interesting is that Miller's nose for a bargain is being tapped by the mainstream. The trend for no-brand, no-hype, value-for-money goods that are also well-designed, has been growing in the UK ever since the Japanese company Muji opened in the 90s. We now fly no-frills economy airlines as a matter of course; online purchasing has made us much more aware of the possibilities of shopping around to find value for money. There is a strange kind of inverted snobbery about being in the know about brands that deliver good design at affordable prices. We are still as consumerist as we ever were. We just don't want it to be rammed down our throats so much. We like to think that we are a bit more canny about what we buy.

The thrift pioneers, Kira Jolliffe and Bay Garnett, who launched the cult underground fanzine Cheap Date in London in 1997, are altogether more anti-consumerist in their approach. Bay Garnett may be the best-dressed thrifter on the planet (she has featured in Harper's Bazaar's best-dressed list), but Jolliffe confesses to hating shopping ('You're being controlled; we're like slaves to it. There isn't enough time to do stuff like that. It's so time-consuming.') Cheap Date is more about not buying into the mainstream lifestyle. It is about not buying into anything at all. 'Style has nothing to do with budget,' says Jolliffe, who also says she is just 'totally scruffy'.

Cheap Date has a loyal circulation of 7,000, and a team of contributors that includes models Karen Elson and Sophie Dahl, and actress Anita Pallenberg. The latest issue features the posh and distinctly unthrifty Hilton sisters, modelling second-hand charity-shop finds. While the very idea of an Ikea sofa might be anathema to Cheap Date readers, who would prefer to find a ripped up old Chesterfield on a skip, for Miller's Budget Living it is a smart buy.

So while she scours the thrift stores, she also taps into the growing shift in America for high style at low prices, be it a flight with the economy airline Jet Blue, or the 'everything store' Target, which is packed with affordable, good design, boasting products by designers such as Karim Rashid and Philippe Starck (chairs for under $40), and clothes by the New York fashion designer, Stephen Sprouse. Some consumers think it is so up-market, they have taken to pronouncing it 'Tar-jay', as though it were some chichi French designer brand.

'The logo-mania of the late 90s is over now,' says Miller. There is something vaguely obscene - and not a little dumb - about spending hundreds of pounds on a designer handbag that everybody thinks is a fake from your local street market anyway. The word 'luxury' has become so overused it has become completely meaningless. For the intelligent consumer it simply means overpriced and overhyped. The new trend towards thrifty shopping is as much about being ahead of the curve as it is about saving money. The cheaper holiday destination might be the one the rest of the planet hasn't quite discovered yet; that old 70s leather handbag you spotted at Oxfam might be the one that a researcher for a big fashion house might snap up if you don't.

It's a down shift that sportswear company Puma is well aware of. It launched its 'Top Winner Thrift' trainer in September at a gallery in London's Brick Lane. Posters pasted up and down the street - itself home to one of the thriftiest, junkiest markets in London every Sunday - showed a pair of old leather boots or a threadbare jacket, and led anyone curious enough to follow them to an exhibition of 500 pairs of trainers, put together from recycled clothes.

The raw material came from a thrift store in Boston, Massachusetts, called A Buck a Pound. It took 600lb of old coats, bags, boots, corduroy trousers and shirts to make the trainers, and the project was the bright idea of Tony Bertone, Puma's global director of brand management. The finished products, each put together painstakingly by hand and numbered, will of course cost more than a dollar a pair. They will retail at around £170. But that's not the point. What is important is that a trainer company has foregone the hi-tech, hi-performance approach in favour of a very old-fashioned notion of making something out of nothing. Thrift - whether you are in trainers, publishing or simply reeling from your own bank balance - is the buzz word of the moment.

The idea behind the Top Winner Thrift trainer is more than simply finding a way of recycling old clothes. To some, of course, it is a cynical marketing ploy. Kira Jolliffe isn't impressed. These are not the shoes to wear on a cheap date. 'Marketing people have to be a step ahead of the zeitgeist,' she shrugs. 'If they are trying to appeal to a more homely, down-to-earth kind of consumer, it's probably what they think people want at the moment. But it doesn't mean anything.' According to Bertone, however, this is a trainer that has a personality, a soul. It comes with a photograph of the shirt, leather boots and old pyjama top that went into producing it. It comes with its own history. And every owner will be given a password to a website where they can register their particular pair of trainers, chat to other owners and become part of the Thrift community. Puma want people to form an emotional bond with their trainers. It could be argued they would get the same bond by finding a pair of 50p cast-offs at a jumble sale, but the Top Winner Thrift trainer has the advantage that it doesn't smell.

Like Bertone, most fashion designers nowadays are more familiar with their local thrift or charity stores than they are with Harvey Nichols or Harrods. For the London-based fashion designer Tanya Ling, her local Red Cross charity shop is a far more rewarding place to shop for clothes - for both her own personal use as well as for research for her collections - than the average chain store. 'I hate shopping on the high street,' she says. 'I hate seeing the end product being marketed and flogged to you.' She prefers to use her own imagination than have her choices processed and made for her. 'It's the same as a child having to improvise rather than simply being given loads of toys to play with. It pushes your senses, makes you use your imagination.'

The east London designer Peter Jensen, uses his nearest branch of Oxfam to source what he calls 'granny dresses' from the 40s, packed with ideas and techniques for his own designs. He's also particularly proud of the Burberry mac he found for £1 and his Carpenters LP for £2.

'It's very rare that I buy new things,' he says. 'I can't be bothered to go into the shops. I tend to wear old things.' He likes the way old things look, the way they are worn-in and have a history. It's a trend that stretches from Jensen's studio to the highest echelons of the fashion business. Designers such as Marc Jacobs in New York and Consuelo Castiglioni of Italian fashion house Marni, are setting out to make their own designs look as well-loved and worn-in as the thrift store originals that inspired them. It's almost cooler to pretend the designer jacket that cost you a fortune came from a bring and buy sale, than show off the expensive label inside it. Jacobs has even chosen this tactic for his own advertising campaign, using a picture of Jarvis Cocker mowing his lawn. And instead of wearing the designer's clothes, he looks as though he really is wearing his own bring-and-buy sale bargains.

The whole idea of thrift has become more an attitude than just a way of budgeting. For Simon Watkins and Rachel Wythe-Moran, it's about 'simple things'. They opened their shop Labour and Wait, on Cheshire Street, just off London's Brick Lane, in May 2001. 'Why redesign?' they asked. 'Why not find things that aren't about fashion.' Their idea was to open a shop that bore some resemblance to an old-fashioned hardware store, selling sturdy brushes, wooden clothes pegs, Thermos flasks and balls of twine. 'These are things that have stood the test of time,' says Watkins. 'Our policy is we want everything to be useful, to be things you will have a long time.' The response has been phenomenal. They are inundated with calls for certain items, including one particularly useful and basic kitchen utensil which I am not even allowed to mention in print because they have sold out, and already have a waiting list of 200 and rising. 'People come in and say, "It's great to find real things again." There are wall-mounted metal bottle openers for £6; an old-fashioned Sheila Maid clothes rack to be hoisted above the Aga; bags of runner bean seeds for £2; wooden knitting needles for £3. Even the carrier bags are simple brown paper and string. All of these things are conducive to a simpler, more down-to-earth, frugal lifestyle, a return to real values, and a move away from design and fashion just for the sake of it. It's a very particular, self-consciously pure kind of thrift for people who have money and taste, (the sort who actually care what their dustpan and brush look like) but who also have a yearning for a simpler life, knitting scarves by the fire, or saving on the costs of supermarket herbs by planting their own.

Despite gloom and doom on the stock market, we're still spending. We're simply taking a bit more care about what we spend our money on. Just don't believe it when your friend tells you her new coat was a bargain from Sue Ryder. Chances are, it came from Harvey Nicks.