The Frankie & Ruby Fashion Shoot 2014

At Frankie & Ruby we firmly believe that once you know the rules of what to wear in terms of colour, shape and style, then you can shop anywhere – and shop with confidence. If you know what you’re looking for, there’s nothing to stop you from buying from charity shops and dress agencies. And that’s what we specialise in. We help our clients work through their rules, and clear out all those unwanted clothes which we then sell on their behalf. The bit we love is then taking our clients to charity shops and recycling centres to find things that are perfect for them. It’s what we love to do every day. But can you shop in this way and still remain ‘on trend’?

As stylists at Frankie & Ruby, Jo and I recently asked ourselves this very question. What if we could style a series of fashion images showing the trends for Autumn/ Winter 2014 – but using clothes from second hand sources? We realised it would be great if we had a set of images that showed that you can shop second hand and still look up to date and amazing! This would be particularly great to show people who have never shopped this way before. Because we love a challenge, we decided to find out – by doing it!

We put together three key trends for this season with clothes that we’d either bought in charity shops, had in our dress agency, or were raided from our models wardrobes. The results are amazing – helped by beautiful make up thanks to MUA Anna Dora, and simply stunning photography from Shannon Robinson of SLR Photography.

Our beautiful models are not professional models, but they are all gorgeous ladies, inside and out, they did an amazing job and carry off each of the looks so easily. Our surroundings were also a source of inspiration as we were able to shoot at Pineapple Palace near Newbury, which is a beautiful shop, cafe and arts centre.

The three trends we chose are; 60’s Mod, Fairytale and Folk. It wasn’t hard to put the outfits together – for some looks we ended up having to pick our favourites as we had a number of outfits to choose from! After scouring the charity shops of Newbury, I found that the ladies in Helen and Douglas House charity shop really helped us by picking out things for us that they’d found in the shop that might work. We got the most amazing vintage coat in there, as well as plenty of other things that were just right for our shoot. We are absolutely delighted with the final pictures and hope that they encourage more people to consider trying second hand shopping.

For more information FrankieandRuby