Sports Coats: $5.25

In The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin reports on his adventures in the world of thrift shops:

Men’s shirts or women’s blouses are three dollars. Evening gowns are nine dollars. A sports coat is five twenty-five. If it is an orange sports coat with a stain on the lapel, it is five twenty-five. If it is what appears to be a brand-new Ralph Lauren sports coat, it is five twenty-five. Sports coats are five twenty-five.

I am not averse to wearing a sports coat that costs five twenty-five. My basic position on clothing was formed in high school, in Kansas City, where my male classmates and I considered an intense interest in expensive clothing to be not exactly frivolous—after all, most of what we did was frivolous—but, well, sort of la-di-da. I suppose we also considered it unmanly; we took a broad view of what was unmanly.