In a digital world of perfectly polished content creators, slicked-back buns and The Row ballet flats, Macy Eleni is a breath of fresh air. 

Widely known as ‘The Thrift Queen of TikTok,’ Los Angeles-based Macy has not only championed secondhand shopping since day dot, but cultivated a whole community united by their love for the sartorial sport. 

A brief flick through Macy’s social media will tell you all you need to know about her effervescent character. Self-shot reels amidst the jumbled rails at Goodwill and Savers saturate her feed, in which she spotlights tongue-in-cheek Y2K finds from Betsey Johnson nightwear to Prada wedges, slogan tees and much more. 

When she’s not rummaging through California’s cavernous charity shops in search of cut-price treasures (the US thrift scene really does put its British cousin to shame), you’ll likely find Macy elbow-deep at a SoCal estate sale, unearthing Cavalli, Juicy Couture and the every other early Aughts holy grail up for grabs.

Self-professed to have been ‘blessed by the thrift Gods at birth,’ Macy lives for the adrenaline rush of scoring one-off gems - from candy-coloured Guess knits to rare Balenciaga Le City bags. Naturally, she shares these spine-tingling spoils with her 525,000 TikTok followers, lovingly dubbed her ‘Hottie Beans.’

As a long-time devotee of her irreverent fashion wisdom, I crossed every finger that Macy would be just as electric in real life as she is onscreen. After an hour of yapping about 2nd Street hauls, Moschino’s Cheap & Chic archive and Drew Barrymore’s Charlie’s Angels era later, I can confirm: she’s even better IRL.

Delightfully chaotic and unabashedly herself, the Ohio-born vintage maven is all energy and honesty. Even when touching on mental health lows or her chronic illness, she manages to radiate a buoyant spirit - though she’ll be the first to tell you, it doesn’t always come easy.

Explore how that refreshingly candid outlook manifests in her technicolour, thrift-spun wardrobe below.

The pillar words of my style are silly, comfy and hot. I love for my clothing to not be so serious. I'm usually wearing a tee with a little slogan. I need to be comfortable because most of the time I’m either sitting at my desk having an endometriosis flare up editing with my heating pad or I'm at an estate sale getting down and dirty, so I need to be able to be comfortable. But I also like my outfits to be a little bit hot too - a little bit sexy, a little bit fun.

My favourite brand is always vintage Juicy Couture. I am such a Juicy Couture girl. I’m obsessed. Cavalli too - I love vintage Cavalli. If you're out there thrifting and you want to find Cavalli, but you can't afford Cavalli, Cache is an old Y2K brand that's incredible. All of their pieces look like Cavalli. I love vintage Gucci and right now I'm really into the Galliano for Dior era  but specifically newspaper print vibes. 

Usually when people think about Galliano or the newspaper print they think, ‘oh, the Carrie Bradshaw dress,’ and I'm like no - a baby tee. I have a Galliano newspaper print bikini. I have flip flops that I found at Thriftcon. I didn't even know there were Galliano for Dior newspaper print flip flops.

I’m really obsessed with 90s Y2K Marc Jacobs. There’s also classic ‘vintage’ vintage - I love all mall brands from back then. Even if it's just vintage Express, BCBG, Forever 21, or H&M. Twenty years ago these brands, that are now very fast fashion, were making pieces from silk. I found a skirt that was originally from Target over twenty years ago and it was 100 per cent silk. I love Y2K mall brands. 

I love finding casual things made by designers, like a tee or a flip flop. One of my favourite pieces is this oversized Versace Sport tee from the Nineties that has holes in it. My collection is a mix of designer and Y2K logo baby tees. To me, they are these kind of unsung hero pieces that were made back in the day and people don't really focus on them as much as they do a runway collection. I find a lot of beauty in comfortable, silly clothing.

It depends as the feeling is all the same but it's a different reaction if I'm alone versus if I'm with a friend or my sister. If I'm alone, I get full body chills and I stand there and look up at the thrift gods thinking ‘You and me, you and me - you put this here for me and I know it.’ I put it in my cart very, very quickly and scoot away. Sometimes I will literally fall to the ground. I found a Juicy Couture puffer jacket, I made a video about it back in December, that I truly had manifested that day at the thrift store. I was with my best friend in the car and I was showing her on Depop how many times I had liked this damn puffer jacket. Regina George wore it in Mean Girls in pink, but I found it in green. I said that I would love to find this, but it was $100-$200 on Depop. 

Then we walked into one of our favourite thrift stores, and it was just there on the rack for me that day. I quite literally fell to the ground. My knees buckled out like someone that's seeing the love of their life for the first time. It was love at first sight. I know I was kissed by the thrift gods at birth, but sometimes I even freak myself out and that jacket was one of those times.

Yes, I don't really think about it very much. I know my staple pieces, my outfit uniform equation, if you will. I've figured out over my 32 years on this planet that when I try to wear something that isn't me and isn't comfortable, it doesn't matter how cool or on-trend the piece is, I'm not going to shine from the inside out. I don't know about other people, but for me, I have to be shining from the inside out to feel authentic and confident. So, I have my go-to pieces and then I just like to mix and match. My wardrobe isn't really made up of trends at all, it’s made up of a lot of the same thing.

I obviously thrift a lot of kooky crazy fun pieces that I'll archive away, but for the most part, I try to keep that as the 10 per cent of my wardrobe. The other 90 per cent of my wardrobe is a mix of graphic logo tees and cool, hot, fun sweatpants. People don't even understand how fun sweatpants can be. I've had endometriosis since I was 16 and it can put me in a lot of debilitating pain, which a lot of chronic illness girls know. So I love going on a journey of ‘what are the sexiest sweatpants I can find.’ Vintage Lucky brand arethe best vintage sweatpants. Vintage Juicy too. I have this Lucky brand pair that says ‘Hottie’ on the butt with a hot girl on a pole in a firefighter outfit. I always think ‘these are so sexy why is this not the same equivalent of fancy as wearing a pair of slacks?’ To me it is.

Getting dressed is a thing that's intertwined in my intuition and now I know what I feel best in. A lot of people battle with their personal style, such as younger girls, and I get DMs about it everyday asking ‘how do I dress to suit me?’ The more trial and error, the more you figure out that this is ‘me’ and this is my lane, these are the pieces I gravitate towards that you can play around with. Accessories are where I feel like I really get to play around. 

As for quiet luxury? I could never. Quiet - never been me. Luxury, I guess, but it’s all used and secondhand. To me, fashion has never existed without the thrift store. I found fashion through the thrift store and the need to buy things cheaply  because that's what I could afford. It forced me to truly, truly get to know what I really like to wear outside of the constraints of what's being pushed to me on social media.

If I want to feel ‘hot, hot,’ I'm wearing a pair of low-waisted jeans that I love. I have this one pair of vintage Cavalli jeans that I got from Magma Vintage here in LA. I will never get rid of them -  they're so sexy, they're so perfect, they're so fabulous. Then I’ll add a fitted logo baby tee with a leather jacket and probably a vintage designer kitten heel. I love a shield sunny. The accessories are always vintage designer shield sunnies, usually Dior, and a vintage designer bag and shoes.

My accessories are the thing I really get to go crazy with. That's what I'm always digging for on the RealReal. My clothing comes from the Goodwill bins or racks and then my accessories are what I scavenge the online designer world for. Designer sunnies are probably the most important thing in my whole entire wardrobe. If I don't have a pair of sunnies, I do not feel like myself. I think it's because it was the first thing when I started getting into designer pieces when I was a teenager that I could access.

Bags are expensive, shoes are more expensive, but in college I could afford designer sunnies and I figured out that I could literally buy whatever designer sunnies I wanted. They weren't in good condition, but for under $30, they made me feel so cool, so powerful, so fun, and I have never stopped searching for them.

Clothes are conversation starters and I’m blessed because I get to have conversations 24/7. Anytime I go thrifting or go to an estate sale anywhere in LA I always meet my followers and we bond over clothes.

It was always my dream to have my own massive closet room one day because I grew up raised by a single mum in Ohio and it was a lot of me and her and my sister in small apartments - I was always dreaming of this sparkly life in entertainment and fashion that I would have in LA one day.

Anytime anyone comments online and they say ‘oh, so sad, so much consumerism, all she cares about is stuff etc,’ I think you don't even get it. It's not about the stuff, it's about the journey. It's about the hunt. It's about the community and it's about what this stuff has given me. Going to the Salvation Army in high school, that was like my home away from home. It meant so much more to me than clicking buy on something online. It was about finding these pieces that I could actually afford and going somewhere that helped me through my depression and anxiety and gave me a safe space.

The community around thrifting is so beautiful. I love my followers. The coolest thing is that every time I meet anyone that follows me, at different ages, different walks of life, different income brackets, different personal styles, and I love that. I love that everyone just wants to find their own style and express themselves in their own way. I hope to be someone who can build people up in the process of that. I feel like I was put on this earth to be a vessel for all these finds and vibes, to lift all of my girls up. I feel very grateful for it every day.

If you work in fashion, you’re probably a really passionate person who wants to be doing something so badly but you’re often told that you're not good enough, you don't have enough money, you’re not skinny enough - all this stuff. I am very positive now, but I'm not a naturally positive person. If I saw myself now when I was younger, I wouldn't even believe it. I wouldn't believe how kind I am to myself and that I truly do believe in positivity as a practice. When I post every day on my Instagram stories, that's one of my favourite parts of my whole job. My Instagram stories are for me and my Beans, and I post exactly what I need to hear which I often feel is what my Beans need to hear too. It’s the place where I can talk about more than just fashion, because for me, secondhand is so much more than simply the clothes. It really is about people first, fashion second.

Honestly, no. I really do feel like I was put on the planet to do what I'm doing. By nature, I love to share. I don't feel embarrassed to share. I spent a lot of time alone growing up in my room solely surrounded by fashion magazines, TV, and film. A lot of those people I watched and read about gave me so much energy and it pushed me in the direction of believing that entertaining people is something I was supposed to do. I love to make people laugh. I love to make people happy.

My biggest inspirations are movies, specifically Night at the Roxbury and Romy and Michele's High School Reunion. My love for movies isn't even necessarily about the clothes, although the clothes are amazing. It's about the attitude and the vibe. The characters in each of those movies are themselves to the max, that no matter what they're wearing. They're convincing you it's cool because they feel good in it and that’s what I relate to.

I have so many Pinterest folders which are full of old Y2K paparazzi shots. I'm obsessed with old 90s and Y2K paparazzi shots because it's people just living their lives. These days, everything is so staged, everything is so branded. So, it's really cool to look back on the paparazzi shots from that period because people weren't posting for Instagram. Style was taken less seriously, it was more silly and fun.

I love everything that Victoria Beckham, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan wore. The Olsen twins too. Jessica Alba and Elizabeth Hurley, very underrated fashion icons. I love looking back and seeing they were wearing to the grocery store on a random Wednesday in 2002.

It’s about the grit and the glamour. I’m a real person so I'm never going to be 100 per cent polished and in ‘influencing’ I had to get used to that because there are so many people in my sphere that are so put together and give such 'clean girl' vibes. I'm a Virgo, which means I get stuff done, but I have ADHD so everything's a mess. But it’s my mess. I think that does come through in my style.

Especially in high school and college, I felt the need to dress a certain way to be accepted and succeed in fashion. But it's a lot more fun when you pave your own way and everyone does just catch up. Everyone that was talking sh*t about my clothing are now in my DMs asking me how I’m doing and how I went about writing my book. You have to be you until people start listening .

For classic thrifting, Hope of the Valley is an incredible thrift chain here in LA. All of the profits go towards those experiencing homelessness in LA. The one in Santa Clarita is huge. I also love Squaresville Vintage in Silverlake. Amazing designer pieces. It’s not a hidden gem, but no one talks about it enough. Also there is a specific 2nd Street in Sherman Oaks on Ventura Boulevard. It’s magical.  

I love the Silverlake flea, there are always so many incredible vendors. The Pomona Antique Mall is where I found this amazing Balenciaga Le City Bag clutch sitting on top of two Raggedy Ann dolls for $38. I collect Le City bags and already have a pink one which I found in 2nd Street. Now I have Romy and Michele. 

My biggest recommendation if you're in LA is to leave LA. If you go literally 30 miles in any direction outside of LA, you will hit some good thrift stores.

I'm always going to be more of a pants girl. I’d want to wear a hot pair of jeans, probably my Cavalli jeans, but I love a going out top. I have quite a collection of sexy black tops from the Nineties of early 2000s. It’s all about a Y2K hot top for me with a high heel. I’d do a kitten heel during the day, but then I'm going to do a larger Dior pump moment. I do gravitate a lot towards black, especially at night. All black with studded accents. I’ll often wear my favourite pair of Manolos, which literally look like they have an ankle monitor strap like Lindsay Lohan's. I found them on Poshmark for $40. Also, I'm wearing sunnies, even at night. I was raised in the church of Rachel Zoe when I was younger so I need to be wearing sunnies all the time.