Drag and the art of the circular wardrobe

For Saff, a Wollongong-based drag performer, getting dressed in the morning isn’t just about putting on clothes. It’s a daily sensory experience of weather-checking, scent-matching and mood-setting, and it's an exercise in radical sustainability. Roughly 90 per cent of Saff’s wardrobe comes from op shops.

In a world driven by fast fashion and instant gratification, Saff takes a slower, more deliberate approach to style. Thrifting across the Illawarra requires patience. But the payoff is an eclectic, deeply personal wardrobe that serves as an accessible costume department for everyday life.

“You can’t control how other people see you,” Saff says, “but you can use clothing to express on the outside what’s inside.”

This philosophy is at the heart of Saff’s style, bridging their everyday outfits and their fluorescent, otherworldly drag alter ego, Seaflower. While Saff describes everyday dressing as fluid and responsive, drag is, for them, highly intentional, structured and opinionated. When Saff steps out as Seaflower, they become “an alien who landed on Earth in '80s neon”.

Creating an intergalactic, neon-soaked persona could easily demand expensive, high end and custom-made costumes. But for Saff, op shops provide everything needed to build an alter ego. Rejecting the elitism of the mainstream fashion industry, Saff proves that self-fashioning can be frugal, ethical and spectacular.

For young, queer, and gender-diverse people, op shops offer much more than just a bargain. They act as low-cost, low-risk testing grounds for identity.

In a second-hand store, the strictness of commercial fashion falls away. While the racks might still be divided into "mens" and "womens" sections, Saff notes a softness to these borders in op shops. Mens and womens racks become categories you can playfully blend, cross or ignore altogether.

In place of a pristine "brand story”, clothes are styled on mannequins in unique and playful ways. Garments are fragments ready to be reassembled, allowing people to privately try on new versions of themselves without the pressure or expense of buying new.

Saff’s eye for second-hand is rooted in a lifelong goth sensibility. 

“Being goth isn’t just about wearing black – it's a way of looking at the world, and an attraction to layering, collecting, and finding beauty in darkness and excess, and discarded things. Thrifting is totally goth."

Saff explains how goth has origins in the punk ethos of remixing what society has cast aside.

This deep appreciation for what’s been discarded reframes the way we can think about the circular economy here in the Illawarra. Sustainability is often framed as a moral duty. Saff approaches it with delight and fun, taking joy and pride in being an "outfit repeater". It’s an approach that pushes back against the endless fashion demand for novelty and newness, finding power in returning to beloved garments again and again.

There is a rather radical acceptance in wearing clothes with past lives. Instead of feeling squeamish about the unknown bodies that previously occupied a garment, op shoppers are open to a kind of intimacy with their community’s history. Every frayed Wollongong knee or crinkled Dapto jacket carries the memory of another life and body.

Saff is a deep-thinking, imaginative young artist with interests in performance, sewing and puppetry. Thrifting remains a source of materials and a creative anchor. The Illawarra op shop circuit is a green initiative and a waste diversion strategy, but also a vital, informal creative infrastructure for self-making and an accessible theatre of the evolving self.