Let it be said that this post is motivated ninety-three percent by personal interest–because at Mirror Fashion I found the cheapest denim jackets I’ve seen in thrift stores in Tokyo, hands down, including this pornographic flannel-lined Levi’s specimen.

Be mine. | Photo by Mine Serizawa

All jackets are priced at 1,480yen (compare that to the 14,000-42,000yen range you’re looking at to buy them new), and all of them “brand-name” and in good condition.

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Since it’s by no means a massive store, I would recommend going to Mirror Fashion only with a specific kind of purchase in mind. The store’s organizational tack is to charge across-the-board prices for groups of clothing, regardless of brand, size, style, or what-have-you: a colorful but fairly nondescript T-shirt selection is hung on 500yen and 300yen racks, or rolled up in 190yen rummage bins. However, Boy Scout shirts, much coveted by fashionable twenty-somethings who tend to not actually be Scouts (first of all, they’re twenty-something), cost around 1,000yen; I’ve spotted these at other used clothing stores for upwards of 2,000yen. Jeans, too, are all 1,480yen, and like the jackets present a truly good deal.

On your way out, paw through the well-worn belts and ties, and congratulate yourself for resisting the impulse purchase of those workman’s coveralls even though they only cost 1,500yen and would probably be useful in an emergency, such as if you had to recover a dropped phone from the sewer or rescue a small child from a mineshaft or were called upon to repair a stalled train on the JR Line.

Map & infos
On Meiji-Dori, within a block of Meiji-jingumae Station.

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