We bitches on a budget are always searching for our favorite designers at sale prices.(After all, we only buy pricey labels on sale.) Shop It To Me is one of the many tools in our arsenal when we search  for great merch. Sign up, name your favorite brands and sizes, and they’ll troll the web on your behalf. Then they’ll send you an email when they find that perfect Theory dress or Burberry coat on sale at on-line retailers like Bloomie’s and Bluefly.

Are you a mama on a budget? Or in that phase of life where your friends’ kids are breeding like flies and you’re forced to send a baby gift every, like, thirty seconds?

Check out Mama Bargains—just one item a day at deep, deep discount. Bibs, clothes, hats, toys, diaper bags, nursing bras, the whole shebang. Get it while it’s hot, because tomorrow something else shows up. (Word of warning: unless a product is defective, they DO NOT accept returns.) “You snooze, you lose,” they say on their site. (What? Snooze? We’re not sure which mamas they’re talking about.) Take a look—you’ll be cooing with pleasure.

We just got an email from Bloomie’s saying they’re “mad for plaid,” which of course made us recall a twitter post we sent last month about plaid being hot, hot, hot. We’ve been meaning to fill you in with more than 140 characters of details.

For those of you who missed our tweet: “Stay on the fashion grid with plaid. Pass on pricy lines go straight to the source look like a real lumberjack check out Woolrich.”

Listen up girls. This is a mulit-part lesson (for the price of one post).

Part I.

Go for it. Be fashionable and pick up a plaid piece to layer into your wardrobe. (You may only wear one plaid garment at a time, though.) Plaid is a classic and was around long before those guys started wearing skirts in the Highlands. In fact, like all things tasty, tartan (just another word for plaid) is most likely a derivative of the French word tiretaine, which was a ‘linsey-woolsey’ fabrication with a plaid pattern (we’ll save the full history lesson for another post).

We prefer our plaid on shirts, outerwear, and underwear (you are allowed to wear two pieces of plaid if one is kept private). Skirts? Uh, not really—too many horizontal stripes. And if that isn’t unflattering enough, we’ve often observed that once a designer gets a plaid into their little hand they tend to get all kilty-cute and put pleats in all the wrong places. Scarves? Okay, but kind of boring—too often a timid girl’s nod to fashion. What we’re saying is we like the outdoorsy, lumberjacky, trotting-on-a-horse-through-the-moors, peaty, smoky-smelling feeling a plaid/tartan can evoke.

Part II.

This brings us to the second point of our post, and it’s the key to being a true bitch on a budget: never, ever look like a bitch on a budget. How you ask?

Honey, like everything in life, it’s all in the details.

A mark of a cheap garment is weird seams. Some  manufacturers don’t take the time, or chintz out on the extra material needed to make sure the pattern lines up. Make sure that the plaid pattern matches at the seam! This is child’s play.

So we’re natural-born suckers for red plaid.  Just us, we love red plaids, and last week while shopping with a friend we spied the most flirty little red plaid three-quarter-length coat with a faux fur collar. We were so excited we felt a little pulse you know where. Then when we opened it up and saw that it was made with a Woolrich fabric, we were ecstatic. OMG. We were so in. (And we felt so smug and prescient to have talked about that American classic plaid purveyor—so on trend).

Then we saw the price tag it was like someone threw cold water on our little party.  $570.00.  Just not happening.

Part III.

Wait.

Here’s our third point for staying fresh and on trend with an old look on a bitch’s budget. Be flexible (yes, we know that’s hard for you).

We were so, so frustrated but soldiered on. To our great delight (and dismay cause the place had been there for 15 years and we never wandered in before, shame on us) we stumbled into the coolest second hand, used, recycled, whatever, clothing store we had ever been into in our life. And directly in front of us was a full rack of old Woolrich red plaid jackets. A gift from the heavens.

We paraded out in a brand new, very old little jacket for under $50 bucks. Perfect condition. And in full frontal disclosure, it wasn’t red and it wasn’t Woolrich, but an original Bemidji Woolen Jacket in the most sophisticated grey and green.

We were even happier than if we had been able to buy that flirty number at ten times the price (at least, that is what we keep telling ourselves).