Hi, I'm Fia Quinn. I'm 29, I'm from Ireland, and I live in Manchester — a two-bed above a café that smells of coffee every morning, which I share with Rachel. I don't mind the coffee. She does, some mornings.
I write about fashion — specifically about building a wardrobe you actually love without it costing very much. I thrift. I use Vinted a lot. I occasionally buy something from COS in the sale and refuse to feel bad about it. The rest of the time I'm in the charity shops on Oxford Road or wandering around the Northern Quarter pretending I'm just browsing.
I graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2023 with a degree in Fashion Communication & Promotion, and I now work part-time as a social media manager for a small sustainable brand in the Northern Quarter. The rest of my time goes on the blog, on styling projects, and on trying to convince Rachel that her wardrobe doesn't need as many black turtlenecks as she thinks it does. (It does.)
I didn't come here at eighteen. I left school, stayed in Roscommon and worked — a drapery, a supermarket, a hotel reception desk — for five years, saving. I arrived in Manchester in September 2020, twenty-three years old and a mature student, having spent most of my life looking at clothes online that I couldn't afford. When I found my first charity shop here, something clicked. Years of looking before you can touch turns out to be quite good training for knowing what's worth picking up.
Rachel, and the van
Nearly every photograph on this site was taken by Rachel. We met in first year at MMU, we've lived together since 2023, and at some point she picked up a camera and decided I was the thing she was going to point it at. She's got properly good. She edits them too, which means I regularly find out what I'd look like with lighter hair without having to go anywhere near a salon.
Last winter we bought a van between us and converted it in a friend's yard. It is not a nice van. The curtains are wrong and the burner takes an age to boil. But it means that on a Saturday we can drive to Hebden Bridge or Whitby or somewhere neither of us has been, walk into a charity shop nobody in Manchester has picked over, and come home with things that don't exist here. That's the whole reason it exists.
The plan, insofar as there is one, is to do that full time eventually. Neither of us is under any illusions about how far off that is.
This blog started because Rachel told me I was wasting my knowledge on other people's brands. She was right, as usual. If you've ended up here, I hope something you find is useful — or at least makes you feel better about the £40 you spent at the Oxfam on Oxford Road last Saturday.
New pieces go up when I've got something worth saying, which is more often lately than it was. You can reach me at fia@fiaquinn.co.uk.