Hip and Ready for a Second Close-Up

A chorus line of women -- mostly young or passably young -- sit on folding chairs in a Melrose Avenue store, resigned to a long wait, looking a lot like actresses at a Hollywood cattle call.

Lia Tamparong picks up a clipboard and scans the list of names. “Kristina?” she calls out.

Kristina Mirazic smiles gamely and totes seven shopping bags and a suitcase to the counter.

“You’re going to love these shoes,” Kristina says, showing off a pair of ruby patent leather Charles David pumps. They are in pristine condition. Kristina wore them only once.

“Oh, yes, they’re great,” Tamparong says. She affixes a price tag -- $32.50 -- and starts a tab on a calculator. Mirazic beams.

The unlikely stars of this open audition are used clothes.

Would-be sellers drag packed suitcases, plastic storage bins, trash bags, even paper bags to Crossroads Trading Co. seven days a week. Store buyers decide what to take and what to turn away. Savvy clotheshorses leave with money, store credit or new purchases. The rest repack their rejects and trudge back to their cars.

Paying money upfront and being willing to take Gap along with Gucci has helped spawn dozens of trendy resale stores in California. They have become the blood bank and bargain basement of the chic, a place where fashion and compulsion cross paths.

Wracked with guilt over the Prada bag you bought because you were happy? Or the Christian Lacroix sundress you bought when you were sad? Or the Manolo Blahniks you absolutely needed to dress like a movie star one night?

Sell them.

Looking for something hip but not willing to spend $500 on it? Buy used. Fashion long ago tossed away its rules, so anyone can mix design house with Old Navy, 2004 with 1999, retail with resale.

Sellers generally are shoppers who love clothes, spend too much on them and have so many they can’t wear them all. “If you’re not using it, you might as well sell it,” says Brenda Parson on her way out of Crossroads. “Purge.”

In the last five years, resale stores have steadily grown in popularity with fashionable shoppers, says Diana Eden, a costume designer for the daytime TV soap “Passions” and co-author of “Retro Chic.”

‘It Became OK’

“People used to think of them as used clothing,” she says. “Now it’s a different mind-set. It’s recycled. It’s fun.”

The change was propelled by movie stars’ fascination with vintage couture clothing. “The moment the A-list celebrities started walking the red carpet saying, ‘My dress is vintage Valentino’ was the moment it became OK to wear second-hand clothes,” Eden says.

The Crossroads wish list of designers include Diesel, Habitual and True Religion -- makers of $100-plus jeans -- Chloe -- $600 pants and $1,100 peasant blouses -- and anything by Marc Jacobs or anything that looks like Marc Jacobs.

Labels aside, the goods must be trendy, close fitting and near new. Forget about those pleated pants from 1994. Store buyers can be ruthless about the second-hand clothes brought in by cash-hungry customers.

“We’re not here to pay their rent,” Tamparong says, “or feed their children. We’re here to sell things.”

She has heard every pitch, every plea, every hard luck story. Tamparong tries to explain every “no” to customers: their clothes are out of style, out of season or just out of the loop for the store’s clientele.

“They have an emotional attachment to the clothes,” Tamparong says. “If people are saying, ‘Why, why, why?’ we say, ‘We’re not rejecting you. We’re rejecting your clothes.’ ”

Crossroads opened 13 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area and now operates 15 stores, three in the Los Angeles area. And the competition is everywhere, even across the street. The Melrose Avenue store sits catty-corner to Wasteland, another trendy resale shop. There’s an outpost of Buffalo Exchange -- a 30-year-old resale operation with two-dozen stores across the West -- about a mile east on La Brea Avenue.

Crossroads is packed this weekday afternoon as Mirazic plunks down sandals, pumps and heels.

“I’m concerned about the shape of the heel,” Tamparong says, gently pushing back a pair of block heels. “We’re looking for more of a stiletto or wedge.”

Mirazic is undaunted. She’s got wedges. She pulls more shoes, as well as tops and bottoms from her bags.

Tamparong rapidly sorts Mirazic’s clothes into “yes” and “no” piles. A black-and-white mock turtleneck -- no. Two print skirts -- yes and yes. A slinky sleeveless dress. “It’s great,” Tamparong says. Yes, then? Alas, no. “We just have a lot of dresses at this time,” she adds gently.

The pink handbag is a definite keeper. “It kind of looks like Marc Jacobs,” Tamparong says. A Polo Jeans Co. gray-and white-striped seersucker jacket gets a yes for being “in touch with the whole preppy look,” Tamparong says.

Tamparong taps out the last items on a calculator. After deciding what price the store will try to get for each item, she offers sellers two choices: 35% of that figure in cash or 50% in trade. “We bought 23 items at $495,” she tells Mirazic, ripping a long ribbon of tape from the calculator, “which gives you $173.25 in cash or $247.50 in trade.”

“I’ll take the cash,” says Mirazic, packing up the rejected items.

“I needed money,” Mirazic says later. At 28 she is an assistant account executive at a public relations company, “and when you have so many clothes and shoes that aren’t in style or when you’re dying to get the new stuff, what are you going to do? Thank God there’s a place you can go and sell your stuff for a decent price.”

Tamparong, 32, has been working in retail establishments half her life, including eight years at Crossroads. She is clad head to toe in resale acquisitions, from her snug Moschino top to her Chanel two-tone shoes.

She says some Crossroads customers shop Barneys and Neiman Marcus, even if they don’t appear to.

And they don’t. They’re edgier. They wear tube dresses with jeans. Their shoes are scruffy. Their tops are wrinkled.

Shoppers browsing the racks are some of the same people who just finished selling. One slender 34-year-old woman is selling her Lucky Brand jeans. “That’s another thing. When you start shopping here, you know what they’ll buy from you.”

Usually Tamparong spends about 10 minutes with a seller. But when she doesn’t like what she sees, she tries to be mercifully quick.

On a recent weekday, Carol Ann Yerby, 47, unzips a huge suitcase. “I’m like 180 pounds now,” she confides, clutching a sprig of flowers in one hand and unpacking her clothes with the other. “I’m just too heavy.”

That’s no sin at the resale shop. Yerby’s transgression is that her clothes are relics -- out of fashion by decades.

A flash of panic flickers across Tamparong’s face as she begins pawing through them. She picks up a denim skirt with embroidery on the back pockets. She shows it to another buyer and then returns the skirt to the top of the suitcase.

“You know what, Carol Ann,” Tamparong begins, “I cannot do it. We’re really not selling ‘60s and ‘70s. But thank you for bringing your things in.”

She adds, “And your flowers are lovely.”

Yerby and a friend pack up.

“I didn’t want to waste her time,” Tamparong says later. “I do this all day long. I know what I’m looking for. With a situation like this, you want to be honest.”

After amassing an oversized wardrobe of jeans, boutique clothes, and vintage clothing, Megan Jordan, 23, began selling to Crossroads and other resale shops a year ago.

“I was a shopaholic,” Jordan confesses. She also had just quit her job as a hairdresser’s assistant.

“There were times when I was down and out and I needed $100 for the end of my rent, and I would totally rely on selling my clothes,” she says. Jordan sold so many clothes to one store in Costa Mesa that she would peruse the racks, and “I would say to a friend, ‘Oh, this is cute.’ My friend would say, ‘That’s yours,’ ” she recalls.

Reverse Sticker Shock

But used clothing is hardly coastal real estate. Sellers often suffer reverse sticker shock when the resale value is a small fraction of the original price.

“One day I tried to sell a pair of Dolce & Gabbana clogs that I bought for $400,” Jordan says. “They said they were going to sell them for $72.” Her share would have been $25.50; she kept the shoes.

Jordan now has a job as a hairdresser, and she doesn’t need to sell as much. That’s fortuitous, she says, because “my name brand stuff is gone.”

Tamparong brightens when the next name on her clipboard is a man’s. “We need more men’s stuff,” she says, noting that men tend to buy less and keep their clothes longer.

The 32-year-old administrative staffer at Cedars-Sinai wears his long dark hair in a neat ponytail. He pulls out a black-and-white pinstriped shirt and a yellow-and-white striped Club Monaco shirt.

“This is fun; this is great,” Tamparong says, delighted. She pulls colorful ties out of his bag -- Zegna, Fendi, Gene Meyer. The man grabs a maroon tie back.

“I was looking for this tie,” he says, taking it off the pile. “I need this tie.”