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"As you guys well know, I love a good designer bargain...but even more than that, I love a good designer bargain huntress! Lilliana Vazquez, the blogger behind The Cheap Chica&amp;#x27;s Guide to Style, knows a thing or two about looking cute and saving cash. STF catches up with the blogging babe, after the jump! STF: What are some of your favorite secrets for looking great on a budget? How should we alter our shopping habits in this crappy economy? Lilliana Vazquez: Accessorize, Accessorize, Accessorize. This is the cheapest way to get the most bang for your buck. You can transform jeans and a white tee from basic to WOW by adding just the right mix of jewelry or a standout pair of shoes! Shop early&amp;amp;#133;for the next year. The end of the season is the best time to shop because of the aggressive markdowns. You might have to store those bikinis until next summer, but you&amp;amp;#8217;ll save tons of money in the process. And keep your nails neatly polished. A bottle of polish only costs $1.49 at Wal-Mart and this will finish off your entire look. STF: Where do you suggest women shop for great cheap and chic finds outside of the obvious (Target, H&amp;amp;M)? LV: I&amp;amp;#8217;m a huge fan of shopping at thrift stores and Salvation Army/Goodwill stores. You&amp;amp;#8217;d be totally surprised at what people will just throw away! You have to be really patient and in the mood to sort through all the bad stuff, but there&amp;amp;#8217;s so many great finds if you just take the time to look! I never skip the clearance rack at any store&amp;amp;#133;especially department stores like Macy&amp;amp;#8217;s. While the clothing might look picked over and totally disheveled, these larger stores have much more freedom to take aggressive markdowns than the smaller stores, so their loss is your gain. And my ultimate cheap chic shopping secret is a wholesale website from Hong Kong called Causeway Mall. I find a friend that&amp;amp;#8217;s my size (they require you to buy at least two of everything) and we order tons of jackets, shirts and dresses from their site. They have the best selection of clothes are everything cost less than $15! And since the store is in Hong Kong, no one here has any of the clothes and everything feels unique and one of a kind! STF: If you dont have the means to shop right now, how else can you reinvent your wardrobe? LV: Shop your own closet&amp;amp;#133;and maybe your Mom&amp;amp;#8217;s too! Whenever I feel the need to shop but I just can&amp;amp;#8217;t afford it, I have an edit day where I go through all of my favorite pieces and find new ways to wear them and new ideas for mixing them with items that I already own. If you challenge yourself to come up with three new ways to wear a favorite, you&amp;amp;#8217;ll feel like you&amp;amp;#8217;ve shopped for new clothes without spending any money! I also recommend you go through your Mom&amp;amp;#8217;s or BFF&amp;amp;#8217;s closet and &amp;amp;#8220;borrow&amp;amp;#8221; some items so you&amp;amp;#8217;re able to inject some newness as well! STF: The word &amp;quot;cheap&amp;quot; often has negative connotations&amp;amp;#8212;how/why have you embraced it instead? Do you consider yourself cheap in all aspects of life or just with fashion? LV: The word cheap gets a bad rap because everyone assumes that cheap people only buy based on price. While this is often true, there are those of us who don&amp;amp;#8217;t buy everything in the 99-cent bin and who have a real knowledge of fashion and strong sense of personal style. We use that know-how to shop on a budget and you can&amp;amp;#8217;t forgo fashion/style as a qualifying factor just because something is 75% off! I embrace my cheap-ness because it allows me to show other people that you don&amp;amp;#8217;t have to spend money to look good. As long as you carry whatever you&amp;amp;#8217;re wearing with genuine confidence and style it to reflect who you are, you really can&amp;amp;#8217;t go wrong! I&amp;amp;#8217;m very frugal when it comes to everything, but I don&amp;amp;#8217;t mind spending money for excellent service, great food, or an unforgettable experience. STF: Why did you choose blogging as your format for the cheap and chic? How do you think blogging has changed the fashion world? LV: For me, it started as a simple way to put down my thoughts on fashion and chronicle my budget finds. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve never been much of a journal person, but blogging seemed like an easy way to write and a fun way to express my creativity through graphics and pictures. I think blogging creates a fashion world with no boundaries. My Mom in Texas can keep up with me while a university student in Paris can ask me what she should wear on her next date. One of my favorite things to do is look through foreign fashion magazines to see what people were wearing and how the were wearing it. It not only inspires me, but it gives me with a broader, more global perspective on fashion. The wonderful thing about the Internet is that now I can do that on-line by visiting fashion blogs from all over the world. I also think people really like the accessibility that you have to these blogger&amp;amp;#8217;s lives and that makes the experience more personal and insightful&amp;amp;#133;I can&amp;amp;#8217;t just email Marc Jacobs and ask him what he thinks of my new rain boots, but I can email Jane Aldridge from Sea of Shoes and see what she thinks! STF: What&amp;amp;#8217;s the best bargain you&amp;amp;#8217;ve ever scored? LV: A Christian Dior vintage blazer for $3.99 at Thrift Town in Cherry Hill, NJ. Now that&amp;#x27;s a bargain! What do you guys think of Lilliana&amp;#x27;s tips? Read even more about her at cheapchicas.com... Catch up with even more Blogging Babes now--the Gofugyourself girls, Natalie from Fashionista.com, and the one and only Susie Bubble!"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/fashion/blogs/dressed/2008/12/blogging-babes-lilliana-vazque>