So many things, all at once, Value Village is a secondhand clothing chain with locations sprinkled throughout the greater Seattle region. Though it has charity alliances, it's privately owned, and the business profits from your donations. And for those held captive by a startlingly inadequate budget, Value Village is the launching site to a fashion identity.

Thickening its glamour, our favorite designers shop there, including last year's charmingly freaky Stranger fashion show participant Alex Hancock. His line Decomposure involved tattering, blackness, and drippy clumps of hide, with antler accessories and faces streamed by charred tears. Much of its fabric Alex repurposed from Value Village finds, including a cheap leather jacket and a vintage duster. (Alex wisely chose a sheer and frilly version, as the quilted ones can only evoke specific mid-century trends: highballs, vinyl perm bonnets, Lysol douches.) When he's in the Capitol Hill store, he heads to the Women's Ethnic section. There are always loads of drawstring harem pants, and they're stylish and shockingly comfortable, Alex says. There's also a treasure of gowns crusted with shiny plots of sequins, embroidery, and beads, which Alex cuts out and piles together, stitching them like patches onto new designs. And dipping from more sections, he's recently created a lace dress of unusual beauty, pieced together from an old wedding veil and some antique tablecloths.

Moving on to another local designer, Camille Goodman's garments churn with giganticness and boiling intensity and feature leg-of-mutton sleeves, tulle-stuffed peplums, and hoop-skirted polka-dot ball gowns. The latter involved muslin-draft sleeve renderings and carefully documented failed tries: "It was okay, but I wanted it to be more of a rounder shape, not that of a hot dog." (She reworked it; it looks great.) She's currently developing "a fitted mini pencil skirt, to look like a grown-ass business lady."

She shops at the Ballard Value Village. ("The Capitol Hill one is usually so raped.") On the same lucky day, she once harvested two pantsuits. One with sequined chevrons and "double-pleated crotch action." And the other? "Sometimes I don't wear it if I'm trying to be attractive to the male sex. Or pretty much anybody." Camille draws inspiration from "kooky aunts, rhinestones, shoulder pads," and in the home decor section, a wall of plastic bags stuffed with mystery knickknacks that can double as millinery props (scrunchies, plastic grapes, banana clips, beaded fruit: $2). She imagines a hat she'd like to create from "a cluster of baby-doll heads, their hair braided together and lit on fire." recommended

Send fashion information to marti@thestranger.com.