‘I think it’s so sexy to get dressed for a fiver,” says Miquita Oliver. She looks like a million dollars in an off-the-shoulder ivory bustier top with a cappuccino-froth of feathers below the neckline, and blue jeans that sit perfectly on her hips and graze the top of her kitten heels. It is note-perfect supermodel-at-an-afterparty cosplay – “my 90s Kate Moss look”, she calls it – but until two days ago, these clothes were buried among the mountains of cast-offs at Oxfam’s Yorkshire warehouse.
Oliver – television presenter, fashion week front-row fixture and now Oxfam ambassador – is a new kind of style icon, one who believes that secondhand clothes are not just better for the planet (although they are) or more affordable (ditto) but cooler – and sexier – than new clothes. Not second best for being secondhand, but more joyful for being pre-loved. So strongly does she believe this, in fact, that today she has taken up the challenge of styling her mum, TV chef Andi Oliver, and her 84-year-old grandmother, Maria, in clothes she found during a rummage through the Oxfam warehouse in Batley, to prove that secondhand is for everyone.
