Two reasons to shop cheap

I was looking at alloy.com (don't judge me too harshly) to see if I could find any cheap, girly tops that a person with any degree of style would actually wear so that I could write an entry with the heading "Cheap frills" (actually, I might still use that title sometime) when I stumbled across this GEM of a blouson top! Not only is it cheapcheapcheap ($22), it's actually subtle and wearable and not cringingly teenybopper-ish like everything else in catalogs geared toward teens tends to be! I love the color, I think the shape looks nice, and surprisingly, it doesn't look nearly as cheap as it is. I'm pleasantly shocked by this discovery! And I've used an embarrassing amount of exclamation points to say so!

Alloy's other redeeming feature (and the reason that I didn't stop getting the catalog after seventh grade), is that they offer a really wide selection of jeans and pants in 35" and 37" inseams. For those of us who are somewhat thin, but don't always (though I'm certainly not saying never) want to pay $160 for a single pair of jeans (because designer jeans usually come in longer inseams), this is a GODSEND. Embarrassingly, I actually own two pairs of Alloy jeans. And I actually wear them. And I actually think that they're cute. I mean, since it's a catalog geared toward 14 year-olds, they obviously have the normal slew of jeans with rhinestones in odd places and camoflague tube tops. But if you can look past the vomit-inducing selection of acrylic knitwear, you really might find something worth wearing, and the prices are low enough that you can easily buy at least two of their wearable items.